 Okay, we're back. We're live four o'clock rock. I'm Jay Fidel here on Think Tech and we're celebrating Think Tech Tech Talks. You know, probably the last one in this year, 2016, with a very special guest who is related to another very special guest. This is Melody Lindsay, Hawaii girl who is off in Montana but back for Christmas. Am I right? Yes. Welcome to the show. Grand total of a week. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. So, and your younger brother, Christopher Lindsay, was here like two weeks ago, maybe a week ago, and he talked about all his stuff. Now we're gonna talk about your stuff. It's my turn, I guess. So, Elani in 2009. Yes, yeah, graduated from high school in 2009. Were you committed to science at that time? I was very interested in science but I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do, which is why I then went to a broader liberal arts college. Well, Princeton. Yeah, I went to Princeton. Best college in the country, I think. Yes, we're number one for a good a good couple years now. The only thing about Princeton is once you go to Princeton, you're always a Princetonian forever and ever. Always. You can never get away from that school. Yes, you have to go back to reunions every year, although I do not. And write checks too. They are quite possessive. They pursue you. Good for you though. What did you study in Princeton? So, my major at Princeton was ecology and evolutionary biology, and I also minored in music performance, and so we can't double major at Princeton, but I did try my best. Ecology and music. Maybe there's an ecology of music. There's no reason why you can't do it all, Melody. I think you're going through the book doing it all. Yeah, as long as you work hard, you can't have it all. So, after Princeton, you decided to take a PhD in science. Talk about it. Yes, so right after I graduated from Princeton in 2013, I went straight into grad school pretty much a week later at Montana State University. What the hell do you love? Yeah, I mean, if you know what you want, you might as well go and do it. Yeah, I had a week vacation and then I started field work for my PhD program at Montana State University, which is in Bozeman, Montana. Right out of college. Yeah. You started your field work for your PhD right out of college. Yeah. There's something unusual about that, isn't there? Yeah, I think, well, a lot of people do take time off, but the program that my advisor had was really attractive, and I really was interested in the work that he was doing, and so I was gung-ho about it, and I said, yeah, come on. Yeah, why not? You know, it was July. It was great. It was great. I graduated in June. Yeah. Fabulous. So, talk about your research. Talk about your PhD project. Yeah, so I work with a professor at Montana State University named Dr. Eric Boyd, and he studies a lot of extrema-file microbiology, so small organisms that live in extreme environments. At least to us humans, we think that they are extreme environments in, you know, a hundred-degree boiling water, or up, or living in the frozen tundra of the north, or in Antarctica. Well, you say extreme, you mean it's an extreme. The extreme can exist all the time. Yes. It doesn't go from this extreme to that extreme. It's always one extreme. It's always pretty extreme, or they live in really high salt, like 30%. And what's the underlying point about organisms that live in extreme environments? They must be tough, like nails, yeah? Yeah, well, they seem tough, but if they live in these extreme environments and you brought them into what we like to live in, which is about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, moderate humidity, low salt conditions, a lot of oxygen, they don't like it. They would die. In fact, many of the organisms that I study, and that Eric's lab studies, are called anaerobes, and so they don't like oxygen at all. They cannot survive where there's oxygen. Yeah. But you'll find them in these extreme environments, such as the boiling pools of Yellowstone, because there is very little oxygen there, so they really love it. What can we learn from that? Yeah. So the reason why we do a lot of this research is to not only understand how life works on Earth, how these extreme microorganisms and this extreme life exists and inhabits Earth, but we eventually want to look for it in an astrobiological context. So in astrobiology, in a non-Earth environment, because we currently have a sample size of one for life in the universe and it's Earth, when we look for life on other moons, other planets, extra solar system life, then those are the kind of environments that we're expecting to see. And we can already see those type of environments, such as the subsurface ocean on Europa or on Solitus, the moons, and then also on Mars, when you have these ice at the polar regions of Mars and also the water that was recently found kind of coating the Martian landscape. So now you're into space, HIGP, Hawaii Institute of Geophysical and Planetology kind of stuff here. Yeah. So it's important for scientists such as myself and my advisor, Eric Boyd, the kind of extremophile microbiologist to work with other people, to collaborate with other scientists looking for these types of environments, these types of exoplanets, or astronomy research in general. Your brother Chris discovered an exoplanet, I guess you heard about that. Yes, oh yeah. I'm so proud. But yeah, I mean, if that's exactly where this field is going and why it's important that we all collaborate within... How do you collaborate from Montana? It's kind of remote, isn't it? It's a little remote. We're more accessible than one might think though. We can drive, we can fly places, but sometimes if the snow doesn't get to us. But we do a lot of Skype calls, a lot of video chatting, so it's very easy to use that these days to collaborate. So in your PhD, what are you seeking in your PhD? I mean, if we were together at the science fair, and I'm sure you were involved in a science fair, why do I feel... I was for the next week. My brother is there. Oh, your brother, okay. But for you, life is a science fair. That's right. Every day. If we were involved in a science fair discussion, I would ask you, you know, what is the nature of your research? What is your hypothesis? What is it for your PhD? Yeah, so for my PhD, this is getting pretty specific, but in general, I look at the adaptations that allow life to flourish in the environments on hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, as well as in Great Salt Lake in Utah. So I'm looking at thermophiles, so the heat-loving microbes, and also the halophiles, so the salt-loving microbes. And for the Yellowstone work, I have several different projects out of each environment for the Yellowstone. All related to your PhD? Yes. Wow. They're very broad-based, diverse subjects for your PhD. Yeah, so my thesis work is actually out of Yellowstone, which we have this wonderful background, which is so cool. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Yeah, but so I'm investigating the influence that geological hydrogen has on the microorganisms that can eat this hydrogen. So are these microorganisms powered by hydrogen, and how do they use it? And so that's what I'm interested in. We don't know the answer yet. You have to find out. Exactly, yeah. I'm looking primarily at their distribution and how they differ across the hot springs in Yellowstone. So just for guys like me who, you know, I didn't study science much, but I'm studying it now, is what is geological hydrogen? What is that exactly? So there are several sources of geological hydrogen. So hydrogen, when you think of hydrogen, you're going to think of something that may have been, or that we use as fuel, for example, these days in this new generation. But it's the same stuff, really. But we're looking at the hydrogen that is produced from the Earth. And so that can come about in several ways. And Yellowstone is a really great place to look at geological hydrogen because of all the thermal activity. And what that allows is for the water that's in the subsurface that is feeding all these beautiful pools and geysers that you see in Yellowstone that can interact with the rocks that are present in Yellowstone to produce hydrogen. So you're in a perfect place for that whole conversation. Montana, Yellowstone, it's all together. And two hour drive. So let's look at our background picture. And you can tell me, that's Yellowstone. So what is that? What's going on in that picture? But yeah, so that one, I can probably tell you the approximate temperature and pH of that just by looking at it. That's going to be a fairly, I think that's morning glory pool, actually. I could be wrong. But that's going to be fairly hot, probably around 70 to 80 degrees. Right now. I mean, if you were to go in there, it would be hot. You don't want to swim in that. No, definitely not. And is the water that you assume this water down below the line of the photograph? Yes, for sure. Yeah, so the pool will have will be almost a circle likely. And so that water we see is probably a pH of around seven 7.5 ish and pretty high and pretty high 70 and 80. And yet there's microbes living. The green the green. Yes, all the colors that you see in that hot spring are microbes. That's what provides these beautiful colors in these hot springs. They love living in there. So interesting, but you wouldn't find them anywhere else because you need the extreme temperature for them to live. Yeah, they will have a specific some microorganisms have a wider range that they are capable of living at. But these guys can you grow them outside? Can you go in the laboratory? Yes. How do you do that? My advisors lab with a skillet. Yeah, pretty much we have these ovens, these giant ovens that we set at temperatures like 90 degrees Celsius and 80 degrees Celsius. That's hot. We put them in little bottles and we feed them some food and they do fine. They do fine. Yeah. Wow. I think you'll look at them in the microscope. Yes, you can see them under the microscope. You do a biochemical analysis of what's going on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can measure their activities. You can see how much they're growing. You can feed them something and tell if they're eating it. So for for my for my work, I will feed them hydrogen. And if the hydrogen in the environment goes down and we can measure the amount of gaseous hydrogen is there, then I can say, okay, they're eating it at this rate or they're producing it at this rate. So you probably get in the idea that Melody is a devoted scientist. Oh yeah, I love it. She's not fooling around. We got some pictures. We got some pictures of her work and some journals. So why don't we play them? And by the way, footnote to all of this is that Melody is also a super duper photographer. Oh, okay. She won awards on photography. And she's also a harpist. And I you know, I'm trying to sort of develop a kind of solar system of science, microbiology, microbiology, and then harp. And then it all connects. I know. I mean, I it's all things that I love to do. And when I need a break from one, I'll go spend some time with another one. We should all have that. We should all have that. Okay, what about what about a photograph? What is that? Okay, so this is an exhibit in the Natural History Museum of Utah, which is in Salt Lake City. And this is of not my thesis work, but actually of some of the projects that I've got or an Eric has got going on in his lab, that are looking at the microbial lights, which are my if you dissect the word microbial light, it's a micro plus light, which is rock. So it's a rock that's built by microbes. And so they might kind of look like toadstools or little mudpats of some sort. But they're actually this calcium carbonate rock that is built by these certain species of microbes living in the Great Salt Lake. Yeah, we talked about that before the show began, I'm really fascinated with it. So the microbes give their lives to build the rock. I mean, they're microbes left after the rock is built. Yes, so that's a theory that is kind of it's one of the theories in geobiology. It's like this builders versus tenants. And a bunch of other people have come up with this theory. But it's what we're trying to investigate with these rocks is who actually built the structure versus who's living in there now, because there are microbes that live there now. And we're just in the rock here. Like, okay, we came in because there happened to be a rock here. That's great. And where's is the microbes that actually physically built and precipitated the rock? But so you're sure that microbes still did build the rock? We're fairly certain. Yes, how do you know that? I mean, what kind of analysis is there? So in the Great Salt Lake, well, there's several kinds of analysis. And we've got some ongoing to really have the smoking gun for for that theory for this hypothesis. I love this kind of conversation melody. So we're working on those right now, actually. But for this, for this, for the initial study that we did out of this microbialite environment, the Great Salt Lake is a very interesting environment. If you've ever flown over the Great Salt Lake, you'll see that it's divided into two. There's a north part and a south part. And the north part is frequently pink. It's a very interesting color, whereas the south part is, you know, a typical, that's not pollution. That's the natural condition of Salt Lake. Well, it's not totally natural, but it is natural biology that is causing that color. So what they did is they built a railroad causeway smack in the middle, somewhere in the middle of Great Salt Lake, back in the 50s. And so what that did was it cut off the north part of the lake from all of the freshwater input coming in from the south. And so that caused this artificial raising of the salinity. So it's about 30% salt in that environment. Great experiment. Yeah, so it's this experiment that was laid out since the 50s. They actually just recently reopened the causeway, which is kind of interesting, and we'll have to see where that goes. But for the purposes of the first study, which there is going to be another picture regarding that, but we were able to look at the microbial communities from both the north and the south arm microbialites. So those structures and they're very different. Wow. Wow. And in particular, there were the absence of these cyanobacterial photosynthetic species. So, you know, like plant will photosynthesize these guys photosynthesize. And they weren't present in that super salty part and they were present in the other part. And the other part is the place that we think the these photosynthesizers are actively building these rocks because they're known to do that these photosynthesize. So can I get a can I get some microbes together to build my house? If you had the right ones, and then the right condition, it just might take 10,000 years. It would take a really long time. Yeah. You wouldn't be able to build a wall with that. Well, speaking of time, where we have a break now, okay, so hold that thought will be right back with Melody Lindsay when we talk more about her incredible science will be right back. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of likeable science on Think Tech Hawaii. I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2pm to discover what is likeable about science. We bring on scientists of all, astronomers, physicists, chemists, biologists, ecologists, and they talk about their work. And more importantly, they talk about why you should talk about their work, why you should think about their work, why you should like their work. I help them bring out why their work is understandable, why it's meaningful, why people should care about it, why people should support science. We have a good time. We talk about current events of interest. We talk about historical events sometimes. We dig deep into their research, why they do, what the joys and delights and frustrations of their work are, and in all, we show a real world of science, a real world of likeable science. I hope you'll join us every Friday at 2pm. Bingo, we're back. And the first question on the test is what show is this? The answer is Think Tech. And I'm Jay Fidel, that's Melody Lindsey. We're talking about science in the pure sense in Montana about Yellowstone. Let's look at more pictures. Okay, what is that? Yeah, so this is the cover of the journal Geobiology, which is an online journal, but they have, they still covers, which is really great. And this is a picture of, as the title says, modern microbialites in Great Salt Lake, which is the focus of, one of the focuses of my advisor's lab, and we study these rock-like kind of gooey rocks that are in Great Salt Lake. That's not water, is it? Oh, that is water. It's hot water. No, it's fairly ambient, but so this one is hot. But in the previous picture, that's just really salty. Okay, and this is now, this is Yellowstone. Yes, this is Yellowstone. This is one of my favorite spots in Yellowstone. And you can see that there's this wonderful hot spring, which is the focus of my studies. Then you have them dotted across the landscape there, and then you've got a whole bunch of bison, which frequently pose an issue for... Oh, perfect. And then you've got colors, the colors in the, in the, in the ground there. That's got to be microbes, you know? Yeah, so the colors that you will frequently see in a hot spring are, a lot of the times, are microbes in that kind of yellowish stuff that you can see in the outflow channel, though those are microbes. And what I think is fascinating about hot springs usually is if you take a little, if you've ever been to Yellowstone, you'll, you know, there's bison, there's elk, there's some moose sometimes, wolves. There's more diversity present in that hot spring, which seems so inhabitable. More diversity of organisms living there than all of the macrofauna, or all of those large animals and plants that you can see so easily. This is great for an ecology person like yourself. Yeah. Try to figure out what that ecology is like and how the parts relate. Exactly. Okay, next picture. Is that you? Oh, so we're, yeah, well this is back. This is back in Great Salt Lake. This is me after a day of fieldwork now. I'm super excited to be providing the scale for this microbe light, which is a pretty hefty microbe light. It's huge. It's 10, 10 feet in diameter. It's one of the largest I'd ever seen, so I decided to lay down on it and take a picture. Good. We always have to have something for scale. Beautiful pictures you have here. Yeah, I know. It's a phenomenal place to work. Oh, this one too. What is this? This is not a site that we sample at per se, but it is pretty much known as the flagship hot spring of Yellow Stone National Park, and so this is Grand Prismatic Spring. I'm standing on a boardwalk right now, and you can see these, so the different colors that you can see here, you go from kind of bluish in the center of the hot spring, where all the steam is, to green, to the yellow again, and then to orange. Those are all of the microbes that are living in the hot springs, and you get to this brown, which is kind of this more photosynthetic stuff that lives on the edge. How delicate is that ecology? If I put a pair of hiking boots on and I walked across it, would you be offended in some way? Oh, yeah. I mean, yes, but mostly the park service would be, but no, they are treasures. These hot springs are so unique. They're irreplaceable, and there is a lot of damage that does get done to them. There was recently a crazy group of people that went out and stomped all over that spring, which is, yeah. And it does damage. It's not that this does not recover so quickly. This has been there for a long time in exactly that configuration. Exactly, yeah. It's been there for a while, especially when you see kind of the silica that builds up or something. That took a long time to accumulate and to form that environment and that particular structure. That's our last picture, and I want to go now to your travels. You've been at your very young age. You've been to a lot of places in the world. Can't talk about it? Yeah, I'm very fortunate, and actually the first one I guess I'll talk about is one of the reasons why I got into the PhD program and the research that I'm currently doing now with Dr. Eric Boyd at Montana State University, and the way I met Eric and the way I got started with this PhD program is we met at the American Geophysical Union Conference, which is in San Francisco. It just happened two weeks ago, yeah. I didn't make it this far. We had a couple of shows. You have to look at our ThinkTech shows. Okay, yeah, I'll check them out for sure. I love AGU. I just didn't make it this year. They haven't really abstracted that. But I met my advisor at one of these conferences for the work that I was doing as an undergrad at Princeton with Dr. Tullis Anstot, who works with, he has many different sites and many different projects, but the project that I was working on was on the microorganisms that inhabit the deep subsurface biosphere that is accessible through the mines of South Africa. So the gold, diamond, platinum mines that are down. So you went there. Yeah, so I was really fortunate to get funding to go there and I got to go into the mines and do some sampling and help out with their sampling. Was it dangerous? It's a little hard to say no to that because, well, the first thing that comes to mind is when we would go down fairly early in the morning and we'd do all our work and then we'd get a warning from the mine personnel who were saying you got to get out of here because we're about to blow up the tunnel. So that was... You don't want to be in the tunnel. No, we got out of there. And then at the time, I'm not sure if this is the case now, but there were there was some definitely some tension between the mine workers and the police force in South Africa, so. Was Leonardo there? DiCaprio? No. Blood diamonds, wasn't that his movie? Oh, I'm going to have to check that out. It's a good thing I didn't watch it. Where else have you been? Yeah, so like I said, my field work takes me to Yellowstone and to Great Salt Lake, which are fairly accessible from Bozeman, Montana. You just throw everything in the car and you drive there. It's so outdoors what you do. It's always outdoors. Yeah, no, it's really great, especially in the summer, although my favorite time is in the winter. It's no tourists and it's pristine and beautiful and it's white snow everywhere. You're looking forward to getting back. Yeah, I think the snow a lot, although I'm from here as well. Yeah, and so I've also been to Alaska for a little bit of work, although that where research is very much still ongoing, but the main site there. It's cold there too. Yeah, I haven't ever been there in the winter. So what's your ultimate plan on this? I mean, you've got a lot of things going, you know, from the photography to the harp, to the ecology, to the research now of this PhD and within the PhD it's a very diverse set of topics. What's your plan in life? I mean, I really like what I'm doing now, but a PhD program can't last forever. Unfortunately. You're going to hurt it here on Think Tech. You're hurting me. That's how it works. All good things have to come to an end. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, one door closes, another one opens. So what I'd really like to do is to stay in academia. I really love the research that I'm doing. So that is the ultimate goal, is to keep doing this type of research and to keep answering the questions that I have about the natural world. So are you going to teach or just do research? I really love teaching. I had a year of being a TA. I don't need to TA anymore, but I really love teaching. So, and I mentor a lot of undergrads and that's also very fulfilling. So, are you tough? I would say yes. Oh, as a teacher. I gave them a lot of tough love, but deep down they all did really well. I didn't have to be too tough. I think they did well. Yeah. I want to talk about science in this country. Yeah. You've had plenty of contact with it. You're involved in it. Yeah. You're digging deep in it, literally maybe in some ways. And I'd like to know, you know, what your feeling is about the scientific community, you know, coast to coast, including Hawaii. I'd like to know how you feel about the way in which scientists collaborate, the way in which they train, the way in which they relate to their schools, and the funding. So, talk to me about the scientific community in this country. Yeah. So, I think that, especially with the eve of technology, and like we discussed before, the ability to collaborate over long distances and with whoever you want via Skype or other technologies is really important and it's really going to aid now and in the future for scientific endeavors because all of like astrobiology and microbiology, especially environmental microbiology, is a very collaborative process. You need to have experts from all different sides. You have to have the geologists, you have to have the microbiologists, you have to have the chemists, and so in order to do work like what I do and what the lab that I'm in does, you have to be able to collaborate in this interdisciplinary way, and I think we're really, it's taken off. And the interdisciplinary will be across the miles. You're not going to find the people you're collaborating with right next door. They might be on the other side of the country. Exactly, and I mean, especially in a place like maybe Montana, you know, you'll have somebody who does one thing here, but then you're going to need somebody who's got a machine over in California or something like that, or they can do this work. So, how do you collaborate that way? Pick up the phone, email, text them, what do you do? A lot of email, a lot of email, that's pretty much what we do. I do a lot of video conferencing as well, so that's helpful. Gotta stay in touch, gotta have these connections we can collaborate on papers and research in general, and then those interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary things really important. Yeah, and conferences are great for that as well. Strikes me though that what you learn, you know, about the environment, about microbiology in the environment, has got a, it's got an effect beyond just the environment. You're learning about life, right? Yeah. These things are teaching us about everything that's alive in this world. Yeah, no, and a lot of facets of science are going to do that as well. If you learn this one specific metabolism that may, or about this one specific microbe, that could have implications for a whole bunch of things, especially in a field like astrobiology. You never know, like, how important that's going to be, or you do know how important that's going to be, and then that's that's good. We have to know these things. Yes. Well, you told me before that you can't not know. You have to know. You wake up with questions every day. Yeah, no, it's great because my advisor says this as well. You come into work and you're the first person to know what you just found out. That's kind of cool. Then you have to write it up and publish it. So you think you're going to get rich? Now you had a Davidson award when you got out of Ilani, and that helped you for a while. Yeah, no, the Davidson and Pella Laureate award really helped in my initial education. I got in in harp performance, but I still play the harp, which is great, but of course I do both now. I do both science and music. So how are you going to support yourself going forward? Hopefully I'll keep getting grant money. Getting grants in the scholarships now. Yeah, I was fortunate this year to get a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. They were very generous, and that's one year, but perhaps renewable up to three years. And this program is associated with NASA that you're working on. So the next question I want to put to you is, you know, we have a new president-elect here, and we have a new government coming soon, and they have ideas that are different than previous administrations, and they're going to shovel it up a little bit and change things around. And if I were a scientist, I would be worried about future funding. Are you worried about future funding? I mean, right now I'm very fortunate to have funding, but in the future, in the next four years, perhaps up to eight years, it could be, it's not, it's not the best prognosis, I would think, especially for climate research, especially for Earth Sciences. And that is what scares me the most, because we're kind of at a tipping point in our society and on this planet. And in order, and I know from the president-elect, I said, oh, we're going to, you know, go back to these space missions, but in order to do stuff like that, we first need to understand what we need to know about, we need to know more about our sample size of one that we have of life so far, and we need to study the earth, and we need to keep track of that, not just for climate, but just for earth science in general. You know, he's watching. He's watching on camera one over there, and you have the opportunity to talk to him. I already have my fund. Melody Lindsey would like to address the president-elect Donald J. Trump. What would you tell him about science in this country in his administration? What's your advice to the president-elect? You cannot delude yourself into thinking that this research is unimportant and that the problems that we're facing do not exist, because they do exist. You know, you need to go and read the papers that have been peer reviewed and are in repeatable journals, and not just read, you know, all this, I forget what it's called, but this bad, this bad news has been popping up. And maybe, maybe you do realize that that it's, you know, real, and you're just trying to not have that for your, for your voters. But you're about to be president. You're going to be a president. You can, you can do whatever, you know, whatever you want, but you can do, you can help the situation. You don't have to keep the act going, I guess, is what I should say. I don't know if he knows that, but okay, I'm sure he, I'm sure he's listening and maybe they'll answer the tweet, but luckily I'm not on Twitter. Okay, but you know, let me, let me say, we've learned today that Melody Lindsey can do anything she wants, whatever turns her on, whatever the inquiry might be, and you solve that one, go to the next one, and maybe somewhere along the way, Melody, you'll go into politics. What do you think? Maybe, I mean, if you go high in a, high up enough in NASA, you could, you could be a science advisor or something. I was, you know, I'll tell them what I really feel. If I were science advisor, I would, I would say exactly what I just said, perhaps with a little more finesse. Melody, you're fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on this show. It's been a pleasure. I hope I do get an angry tweet. No, no, no. That would be great. Thank you, Melody.