 Hi everybody. I'm Ed Platt. I work here at MIT at the Center for Civic Media. And earlier this year I read an article about a guy who appeared to be drunk all the time, but the weird thing was he didn't actually drink. So doctors kind of looked at him, tried to figure it out. It turned out he had a colony of yeast living in his stomach fermenting his food into alcohol. So that was really interesting. But that's not the most interesting thing I learned this year. I like to make things. So I decided I should make something with yeast. You can make bread, you can make alcohol. I decided to make bread. That's how I roll. Yeah, thank you. Bread is really old. It's been around at least as long as ancient Egypt. The Tomb of Ramesses III has bread making depicted. And the oldest type of bread is sourdough, which has, in addition to the yeast, lactic acid bacteria. It's the same stuff in yogurt. So it's a symbiotic colony. And if you mix those two together, so here just a cup of flour and a half cup of water will culture a group of lactic acid bacteria and yeast that will continue living and surviving as long as you feed it. So when you mix it together, this is what you actually get. You just get some goo. So what do you do with the goo if you want to make bread? Well, you just leave it out. So that's pretty easy, actually. And after you leave it out for a while, if you leave it at the right temperature, it'll start to activate the microbes. Well, some of us know here in Massachusetts, it doesn't always get up to 70 degrees all times of the year. So some people leave their starters by a heater or something like that. I naturally saw an engineering problem and realized that aquarium supply stores have lots of things for promoting conditions for life. And I bought an aquarium heater to build a bath to keep this at the perfect temperature. So after about 24 hours, what you get is you start to get some bubbles. That's gas being released from all these microbes in the flour. And what you do is you have to keep feeding it. So what you want to do is empty almost all of it out, just keep a little, and then add another cup of flour, half a cup of water, stir it up. And now that it's getting active, you wait only, say, 12 hours. And after about 12 hours, it'll rise. The gas will start to get trapped, and it'll expand. So you keep doing that in cycles of 12 hours, and eventually it'll double in 12 hours. And then you know it's ready to make bread. So you get your ingredients. You need gluten and carbohydrates. So you can't buy that at the store unless you're a scientist. So I went to Market Basket and got flour, which has all of these. You mix that with some water, salt, and sugar. It's amazing how little you need to make bread. You just mix it all together into a dough ball like this. And again, you just sit it out, maybe throw a wet towel over it to keep it from getting dry. And after about eight hours, say, after you're sleeping or going to work, you take off the towel, and it's like magic. It doubles in size. I still haven't gotten used to this yet. And this is the best part. This is my favorite part. You then get to pretend it's something you don't like, like the patriarchy or a sports team you don't like. You punch it down. And there's a full-length version of this on my Twitter that I couldn't put in the Excel or the PowerPoint. And then you knead it, and kneading it is really neat on a microscopic level I learned. What's actually happening is there's the gluten, and they're sticking to each other and forming these long chains that make it springy and elastic and help the bread be soft. So after that, you throw it in a pan. And it looks like it's ready to bake, but not quite. You have to let it rise again. So you form it, put it in the pan, and you let it rise for a couple hours, and then you bake it for about 30 minutes, and you get bread. And it's actually really simple. It takes a while, but it doesn't take a lot of work. And there's one more step that's really important when you're making bread, which is, of course, you have to cut it up and share it with your friends and enjoy the bread. So that's really the most important thing that I learned, or the most interesting thing I learned this year was how to make bread. And I'd like to, in this spirit, encourage you to share the things that you make with your friends.