 Welcome, everyone. We have a good topic for us to enjoy today, a little bit of a change of pace. This is something that Chantal and I had been discussing for a while. We wanted to bring with us on the panel today experts in three different areas of study and have them talk a little bit about what they think are the most interesting or challenging questions or problems in their field. And so today with us we have Mike Shaw, who is educator and scientist, teaches chemistry. He's a professor of inorganic chemistry at Southern Illinois University. And he will be addressing the question of how do we provide energy to everyone in an environmentally responsible way? And probably with a focus on solar power. We also have with us Steven Geyser, who is a biologist currently at DuPont, who he does education and research in molecular biology. And Steven will talk to us about the origins of life. And then hopefully we will also have Alex Hastings with us today. He's having technical issues with second life, but hopefully he can join us later. And Alex is a paleontologist and will talk to us about some of the interesting work going on in the field of paleontology if he can join us. And with that I would like to turn over our, let's, I'd like to begin with Mike, I think, to talk about providing us, providing clean energy for the future. With that, Mike, please introduce yourself and let's tell us about your thoughts on energy. Okay. Well, you did a great job of introducing me already. But if I repeat, then that's the risk we take. Mike Shaw, I'm a professor of inorganic chemistry at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. I'm just outside of St. Louis in Illinois in the USA. A lovely day here. We haven't had any tornadoes yet. But there's always, there's always the rest of the weekend. So with that, you know, I kind of wanted to talk about what some of the big questions in chemistry are. I just have like 13 slides or something. I'm recording this in Zoom, so my recording of course will have me fiddling with the screen and doing all sorts of things. Right, I think that, that almost doesn't get it in the middle. And I actually think it's got the right angle. All right, so let's escape out of that. Okay, so some big questions in chemistry. You know, when the topic came up, the immediate thing that came to mind, what are, you know, the big answer questions in science, to me is how do we provide a good standard of living on for everyone on the planet. And for our society, that means we have to be able to give people access to energy. And over the years, I've seen some lovely talks and articles, especially by Dan Nosira, who is a professor at MIT on this very question. And in fact, a couple of days ago, I encountered this on my screen here. I've got a tiny little pointer that's moving around. That's the front cover of an Accounts of Chemical Research. That's a journal. And this particular issue from March 21, 2017 was all about the holy grails in chemistry. It's basically a bunch of 45 articles by professors who are doing research in chemistry. About 10 of them are having to do with energy. Okay, so here's some of the titles. The holy grail, chemistry enabling an economically viable CO2 capture utilization and storage strategy. To remember that our energy use is also tied up with the emission of greenhouse gases, given our reliance on fossil fuels for energy production. So anything we can do to produce energy while minimizing CO2 or capturing CO2 is important. Cyborgian material design for solar fuel production. This is having microorganisms on electrodes, essentially, and having these hybrid designs for having the microorganisms make fuels or make things that we can use using solar energy. I talked about perovskite solar cells very recently. I'll talk a little bit about them today as well. Future porous materials. I hope you don't mind I'm saying a few words about each of these. The porous materials may seem like a strange one when we're talking about energy, but I think some of you have heard of the hydrogen economy. If we're trying to use hydrogen as an energy carrier, I'm not going to say fuel because there's no hydrogen mines on this planet. The problem with hydrogen is that it's a gas and you have to store it. It's very efficient to store it under high pressure, but if you want to use hydrogen for the general consumer, you don't really want everybody to have a high pressure tank of hydrogen. Shades of the Hindenburg. Oh, the humanities. It's terrible. Porous materials are, and one application would be to help with the storage safely of vast amounts of hydrogen at low pressure. Okay, heterogeneous catalysis. That's again tied up with taking energy, solar energy, making compounds out of it that could be fuels. Semiconductor surface chemistry. Again, for the catalysis photovoltaics, taking light and using it. This next one is about batteries, inorganic ionic matrices. There's not that much lithium on earth, so there's probably not enough lithium to provide everybody with lithium battery storage for solar energy, even though right now that seems to be a very promising way to store energy. There's some problems with it. If there's not enough lithium, then it's not going to be fair to everyone, so alternatives have to be found, right? Yeah, I think the only source for lithium on the planet, or the vast majority, is like from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is quite fraught. Exactly, exactly. All of these issues of fairness and science really have to be looked at in a political context as well, right? And my last three here are self-repairing energy materials. Well, did you know that chlorophyll? Chlorophyll wasn't last very long. I think it actually has like a half-life of like 15 minutes or so, when it's actually for the synthesizing. There are various repair mechanisms that fix it back up after it's done its job. But if you want like a solar ray on your roof, you want something that's going to last 20 odd years or more and not just kind of go away 50 minutes after you put it together. So, you know, and in fact, if there's some small damaged cracks or hail or something like that, having a material that can repair itself is a great advantage. Finally, last two, one of them here for polymer electrolytes. That again is for rechargeable batteries, lithium batteries in this case. Finally, getting back to Dan Nociara, solar fuels and solar chemicals. I'm actually going to go and talk about this last one a little bit more because it aligns exactly with what I want to talk about. So, the problem is that there's a lot of solar energy available on the planet. Sun's in the sky. Even on cloudy days, you can get some solar energy. But there's things like, oh, night. Night is a problem if you run on solar energy. You can have to have some storage. Here's a little graph. I do promise I'll talk about the little graph rather than saying, hey, here's a little graph. Blue line. The blue line is basically like the utility load on, let's see, I think it's in Arizona. That's basically high power demand during the day, low at night. The black line is one solar power station's output over a day. I think it's sampled every couple of minutes. And you can see that there's a general sort of line that goes up, right, and then down. But there's clouds. You can see the power comes off with clouds, but still. And there's also different scales. Remember the scales here. One is like for the whole state. One is just for one power station. If you had a thousand power stations like this, you could, or 2000, you could probably match some of the daily load. But the main problem here that I'm trying to draw your attention to is that it's, there's power during the day, but there's none at night from solar. So how do you move out the peaks and the valleys? Yes, hydrogen, hydrogen is more of an energy carrier. If we can make hydrogen somehow, we can use it and burn it somewhere else. And that'd be responsible. We'd make the hydrogen from water and we'd burn it and get water back. That'd be a very nice, responsible way that would not contribute to greenhouse gases. But it's not like methane or coal or something. In fact, most hydrogen industrially is actually made from hydrocarbons. The water gas shift reaction basically takes like methane and water and turns it into, I think, something like carbon dioxide and hydrogen. So that's terrible. So I do want to say there's old school ways of solar power. There's a plant in California that, a $2 billion plant, I think, that uses solar power basically focuses mirrors onto one central location. It's a bit of a death ray because migratory birds fly into the beam and literally catch fire and die. So it's estimated between 25,000 and 100,000 a year die like that. So that may not be the best design. It may be the best design for Morocco, but they're simply taking smaller mirrors and focusing them onto pipes of, I'll call it coolant. That coolant is basically used to charge up a heat sink, make it very hot, and that heat sink, again, can run, you know, heat some water or something like that and run a generator to provide a lot of power. So this is a lovely old school design. Fascinating. I actually wasn't aware that there were some installations that used the focusing of the solar power. So that seems quite encouraging to me. Once upon a time, I heard, and I can't remember, and I haven't been able to find this, but I heard that in the 1800s there was a scheme to basically focus sunlight in the Sahara on a boiler and essentially use the boiler to run a generator. And that seemed to make a lot of sense to me, but I actually think politics got in the way of the construction of the plant that was supposed to make this happen. So again, politics. So responsible use of solar energy. What are the parts of the problem? Well, how do we harvest the energy? And there's lots of different ways. So we could use biofuels, and that's a whole other talk. Solar cells is kind of what I'm focusing on here. The old school, this is the link to the information about the California project. Parts of the problem include how to harvest the energy, and then how to get it back, how to store it and retrieve it. Rechargeable batteries sound good, but they've got some limitations. You have to have really light batteries, because otherwise if you're lugging around a big heavy battery, the energy you have harvested might not be enough to actually move the battery. That's okay if you're heating your house or running your house, but for a mobile platform like a solar powered car or something, you're going to need really light energy storage, right? How do we store it? So while I'm thinking of it before I forget, I just wanted to mention a year or two ago, there was a reporter from the New Yorker Magazine who did a profile of an Exxon executive, and I heard the reporter interviewed on Fresh Air, but I don't remember his name, but he made a comment that has always stuck with me, which is he said that Exxon in its long term strategic planning considers battery technology to be its biggest threat, its biggest competitor down the road. And I'm just curious to see if that has the ring of truth to you. And I think it makes this discussion of battery and the storage of solar power that much more important. Yeah, it does. We have free energy flying at us from the sky every day, and there is a lot of energy in sunlight. I don't have figures on me right now, but you know, approximately if you take what on the equator, if you take a square meter of space and integrate the sunlight it receives over a day, it's kind of on par with the same amount of energy that it might receive in a millisecond from a ground-zero atomic blast. There's a lot of energy. If we can harvest it right now, our efficiencies are very low, like 25% or so of efficiency of solar cells is really good right now. I mean, if we can efficiently harvest more of this energy and store it, then we're in good shape. Yeah, basically Exxon is going to be very threatened by the idea that energy from the sky gets stored and they don't get a cut. Unless of course they take the business model and get into the maintenance and supply of some of these storage facilities. And there's also fuel production and old school stuff. So this is just a graphic that shows you some of the time scales. You can see this is like the logarithmic scale minutes. So, you know, if you're using solar directly, then it's available on a fairly generous time scale. If you're just storing in capacitors, for example, then that's a short time scale. But, you know, we have old school ways like flywheels or rechargeable batteries. But this fuel thing. And I consider hydrogen H2 to be a fuel, an example of a fuel. If we can turn solar energy to split water efficiently into hydrogen and move the hydrogen around, it can deliver power in the short term. But it can also be stored for years and deliver power in the long term. If I could, it's just interject for a second too, while your thoughts. I wanted to draw attention to a comment from tagline regarding Exxon and their early intention to become a diversified energy company and how they basically betrayed us with respect to that by denying global warming and so forth. But it just made me think of an anecdote I'd like to share kind of related to that. My late wife, her father, my father-in-law, was a very high executive with Gulf oil before it was subsumed into Chevron. But this would have been, I guess, in the 80s. He lived in Houston then. And, you know, I remember talking to him about whether, you know, about, you know, about the oil companies diversifying their portfolio. And, you know, and I was prompted by that because I noticed that Exxon owned a lot of real estate around Houston and in fact owned entire subdivision, housing subdivisions that kind of circle Houston. Some of those are actually owned by Exxon. And so I was kind of wondering, you know, well, you know, does that really contribute to their bottom line and so forth? And my father-in-law looked at me and said, nothing makes money like oil. You know, and he went on to say that we're not an energy company, we're an oil company. So pretty much closing the door on any notion that oil companies are interested in really diversifying, getting into they consider themselves oil companies. Yeah. So one of the closing statements that Nasir has in his most recent article is that it's going to be very, very difficult for alternative energy sources to compete with the entrenched fossil fuel production and distribution industry. The infrastructure for that distribution of that energy is just so entrenched now that it's going to be very difficult for us to switch to other ways unless people demand change. So, yeah. So, getting into some science here, I thought I'd just kind of give you a couple of definitions, right? So different sorts of cells or electrical cells would be involved in this process of taking solar energy and turning it into fuels or storing it electrically, right? So one of them, the first one would be the solar cells were been discussing and there's questions there. Silicon versus the new perovskites that have been found and have been researched in depth in the last 10 years. The electrolysis cells, how to make fuels, right? And what fuel do we make? Do we stick with hydrogen because that's possible or is it possible to make a different sort of fuel? Methanol or something like that that could be stored as liquid and doesn't have the explosion hazards, right? If you're making a fuel, then to turn it back into electricity, you need a fuel cell. So again, research into fuel cells to burn whatever fuel efficiently is important because making the fuels and breaking bonds and using the fuels is not always trivial. Finally, the batteries, which can do direct storage and retrieval. Let's see, a quick definition of primary batteries like one of your Duracell things. It's not going to be a rechargeable one. A secondary battery is the term used for a rechargeable battery. Things you have to worry about are, because how happy the battery is, right? Let's see, tagline has a comment. Yes, tagline makes a comment that the oil companies have the, I'll say resources to compete with practically with small nations and things like that. Exactly. Exactly. There's a lot of money and a lot of infrastructure. So it just means that there's a lot of, in inertia, that's inertia in how we use energy today. And honestly, some of it is quite unfair because where the infrastructure doesn't reach people like in developing nations, they do not have access to energy. Solar fuels are local. Basically, if having a solar array on the top of your house that drives some sort of fuel production and storage that can be local with your house, that takes you off of that. And allows you to have a standard of living higher than you might otherwise have if you wait for the infrastructure, big infrastructure to get you. Yes. Yes. So this is just a graphic from Dan. Let me move on a little bit here. I'm talking a bit too much, sorry. In the last 10 years, people have been looking at electrodes there's an old paradigm where one material was supposed to make hydrogen and oxygen. That's been replaced by a new paradigm where you have different materials. And this paradigm has allowed for much better hydrogen production to happen. But there's still a lot of work to be done. You know, in the payoff, of course, if one can use the hydrogen that one generates to feed the bacteria and have these cyborg type of cells, then you could make fuels, materials, starches, fertilizer. We did not have enough agriculture ability without resorting to fertilizer to feed everyone on the planet. So this is an important issue. How many more slides do you have? I got two, I'm sorry. Let's try to get through them. I was just going to mention the perovskites, but I've mentioned them before. I did a whole talk on those. So if you're interested in the perovskites, there's the structure of them. I won't bore you with that. You can look at the YouTube video of my previous video of my previous talk. And we've been summarizing as we've gone along. There's been a lot of progress in the last 10 years. I've actually mentioned this particular statement and this particular statement. So with that, I'm ready to move on and, you know, allow other people to talk. Sorry about that. No problem at all. I thought that was quite interesting. But I think we do need to move along here. I'd like to welcome Alex Hastings to our panel. I'm not sure I can pronounce his second life name. It's a little bit loud actually, but I think you'll be fine. Alex, I think if you're ready, I was going to suggest maybe you go next in case, you know, in case for some reason, your technology fails before the end of our allotted time. Maybe we should get you in while we can. Yeah, so Alex is a paleontologist. You've probably seen him talk here before. He holds the Fitzpatrick chair of paleontology paleontology at the Science Museum of Minnesota. And he is here to talk to us about some of the current issues in paleontology. So take it away. Cool. So thanks. I actually am not able to see the screen right now. So I'm just going to assume it's up there. And I think I have like a title slide there. So the question in paleontology that I was choosing was just the connection between life and climate change and trying to understand that. And it's something that we've learned a lot about, but there's still a good lot more that we can learn from from the past in order to help kind of start to understand or anticipate trends for the future. So let me at least try and spin around here a little bit so I can maybe see the screen. Barry, maybe do you mind switching to the second slide? I don't see the slide board either. Oh, that's not just me then. No. So I think Alex had a slide or rather... Acheron to super. Yeah. Mike had a slide. There we go. There it is. Hey, there's somebody's slide. I think that's Mike's slide screen. Yeah. And let's see if we can get your slides loaded up into it. Great. Bear with us here, folks. We're doing this by the shape of our pants. And I think the dog wants us to get on with it. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Just kidding. Mike can kind of fill things in a little bit here. So in terms of kind of the different connections that climate has had along kind of shaping evolution throughout the many millions of years has been kind of first of all kind of a reduction in survival. So that's kind of looking across the, you know, 38, more than three and a half billion years of life and seeing kind of where these major climate shifts have happened often are tied in with major die offs for huge groups of life potentially, you know, at times even exceeding 90% of life on earth. Even fairly, what may seem like minor changes in climate can have very dramatic effects on life. And that has really shaped evolution for a large, it has these big sweeping turnovers as a result of climate shifts. And I do have whenever we can get up, but got a slide highlighting the big five mass extinctions. They're kind of five major key points in the history of life on earth, where we've gone through these massive, massive shifts that have resulted in huge die offs and large whole lines of evolution dying out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Alex, can you, oh, there we go. There's some slides. Do you are just going to say if you can give me your slides, then I think I can work the projector. There's a way you can pass those to me. Instant message or something. So I had sent it in an email. Do you need something different from that? Well, I was just looking in the emails to see if I could, I showed that somehow I don't, I can't locate your attachments. Oh, sorry about that. Sorry about that. Here we go. Nope, that's chemistry. It's the most exhilarating discussion we can have. Steve to go and then maybe. Yeah. I could throw them up. Okay. So let's go to me, Alex. Okay. I'll email both of you. But yeah, go ahead on to the next segment. Sorry, everybody. That's okay. It was a trial run. We'll get back on track. All right. So our, we'll move on to our topic of biology. As I mentioned, we have a Steven Gager here who is going to talk to us a little bit about the origins of life. All right. Thank you. And it's a pleasure to come to this group and talk about the big question in biology. I think biology is at an exciting time right now with a lot of the chemistry technology that has enabled new things. So, but what I'm actually going to do and the big question that's really still in the field is I think the oldest question, which is where did we come from? How did we get here? How is all the life on the planet? Where did it come from? So just to give you a little bit of background on myself, right now I'm in the genome editing group at, well, what will soon be Corteva Agro Sciences, it's going to spin off June 1st. And I'm in the genome editing group. And again, I don't represent the company. So nothing I said should be taken as. And while CRISPR and Cas9 genome editing has been this very exciting new thing that has made a lot of headlines on people very excited about biotechnology and things we do. I think that a lot of the synthetic biology is kind of the future idea where we will, where a lot of interesting stuff will be. And the basis in biology and the academic science and research that goes on really does come down to understanding the basics of how things work. So we're not going to be able to do synthetic biology unless we really have a very good clear understanding of the basics of how biology works. So again, if you have any questions while I'm talking, one thing I do like about these panel structures is I try to limit myself to fewer slides. I make a little bit more general and not get too detailed in some of the aspects of it. So what I have up on the slide on the top left are the basic cell structures of eukaryotic cells. And we ourselves are eukaryotes, although we are multi-cellular and prokaryotes. And when we think about the basics of what represents life on the planet, it has to do with things that live in cells. While there are these elements called viruses that in general we think about life as being these cellular components. And even though you look at these, at prokaryotes versus eukaryotes, they look actually quite different and more complex, that a lot of all of life as we know it right now is explained largely by the central dogma of molecular biology. And this is something that James Watson came up with and popularized I think about a decade after the discovery of a structured DNA. And so the basic idea of this is that there's DNA or deoxyribonucleic acids, which are these long strings of information. And those can be copied to make more DNA, and that's the basis of genetic information. And then also those can be used as a template to make ribonucleic acids, so long strings of a very similar code. And then these RNA molecules can be used to translate into proteins. And proteins are the things you are probably mostly familiar with in terms of looking at our body. If you were to look down at your hands right now, you would look at a lot of keratin, skin, the surface coating of them. Other than the cell membranes that are represented there, you have things like your fingernails are made out of protein. And so the central dogma reflects kind of what we understand about how all life on the planet operates. And it's something that we would love to know how this first started coming about. Because one thing when you think about the origin of life on the planet, it couldn't be all of these altogether work at the same time. You can't have the central dogma at the very beginning of life because that would be incredibly impossible for them to all be working in concert in this way. Anonymous entity mentions in local chat that when we think about the origins of life on the planet, and I wasn't going to go too much into the timing and paleontology of early Earth, but that it does seem like these are archaeological evidence suggests as well as genetic clock evidence suggests that life started within about a billion years when the planet was about cool enough to really sustain life as we know it. So it's very fascinating how quickly it came from apparently nothing. So I do want to introduce one topic though, and this is something that in my previous life as a biology educator that was very frustrating is that textbooks would frequently have an opening chapter called the definition of life. Now they wouldn't actually offer a definition of life. They would actually talk about the characteristics of life and how things that follow these characteristics are what we can consider life. And so energy metabolism, structure, repeating patterns, inheritance, these are things that people talk about characteristics. But I have this definition of life that I came up with to teach and that's on a lower left-hand corner. And I consider life to be a discreet and localized set of ongoing chemical reactions and structural molecules that contain the blueprint for their ongoing chemistry and their holistic replication. Not that you just make more of the same molecules, but you actually take the whole density that we're discussing as life and can make descendants. So, and that's something that I want to come back to when we think about how is it possible to have very early origins of life that can represent the simplest molecules that can do all these things. And Mike says he likes the definition because it doesn't limit it to carbon. And I think, yeah, one thing if you look at this definition as an electric-track fan or science fiction fan, you can actually replace chemical reactions with energy patterns or energy fields. And that would be something that you could have used in other life that followed the definition. So, let me go on to the next slide. And before I get into the very basic chemistry of the origin of life, to me there's always been one other very big question, that people to some degree aren't pursuing with the same degree of vigor. But this is my honorable mention big question, why did eukaryotes come around? And when you look on the top left-hand corner, this is a little bit more of a blow-up of a prokaryotic cell. And you look at it, and it looks very complicated from a first look. It's got a membrane. It's got internal components. It's got some very complex DNA and chromosomes for its genetic instructions. It's got structures that help it move or perhaps help defend itself from other things. But, and this is how, again, that you look at the clodistic tree on the bottom, that represents bacteria. And this is what we know of as the simplest life forms, cellular life forms on the planet. And there's a large branch of also single-celled organisms known as the archaea. And they basically have quite distinct chemistry and in terms of how they do a lot of the basic aspects of life from prokaryotes. But their cell structure is largely very similar. And so we know that branch, and then that represented the majority of life on the planet for billions of years. Then eukaryotes came around where they have much larger cells, internal components, internal membranes. And this complexity, there's actually some degree of thought and some of this is known for some organelles, but these internal structures or organelles are likely invading prokaryotes that end up taking residence and then became adapted to a function inside the larger eukaryote. And so this is something known as biogenesis, and this is true for mitochondria, this is true for chloroplasts. People haven't found an explanation for all of the organelles and all the structures inside eukaryotes to explain it. So I don't think that's actually the most complicated part of what makes a prokaryote distinct from eukaryote. What's actually more interesting is how the chromosome metabolism works. And what I have here on the top left-hand corner is a picture of a karyotype and the idea that a cartoon of a chromosome representing a linear structure and prokaryotes in archaea have circular chromosomes. And so this adaption from a circular chromosome to a linear chromosome, there's a lot of DNA metabolism that has to occur to help you keep that working correctly. Then not only to keep it working correctly when you replicate it and transcribe off of it, but also when you go through cell divisions, you have to basically take these different entities and move them to two different sides of that replicating cell. And then what also is crazy, and this is represented in the lower right-hand corner, we think about meiosis. And meiosis is this process whereby we make gametes. We take our two copies of all of our chromosomes and then we make gametes like sperm and egg cells that have only one copy of our genomes. And then what's powerful about this is that when gametes combine to make a new organism, you have lots of genetic recombination. And that's what's represented in the lower left-hand corner is the idea that chromosomes can come together, they can recombine, you move them apart, use your chromosome content, and you get lots of recombination. So the idea that eukaryotes are so successful in the planet probably comes down to the fact that we have more genetic variability we can work with that's inherent with every generation. However, the components to doing this as compared to replicating and moving one copy of a circular chromosome from one cell to your appendix is an amazing amount of complex machinery. And I don't think all that's been worked out, but I think from my perspective, that is, I think, an important honorable mention about the origins of life. Okay, so back to the original question. And when we think about origins of life, and again, this is, remember, a lot of biology is chemistry. So you're getting a double dose of at least of chemistry today. That we have to think of ways that you can spontaneously generate the key components of a cell from just a chemical mixture. And so what I have up here on the top left-hand side is what's probably the most well-known and popularized origins experiment, the Miller-Urie experiment, where they basically combined water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen, and they heated it up into a gaseous form, so it made the steam that went through and got it with the equivalent of light. So, yeah, a big input of energy that allows for chemical bonds to break and get reformed and then condense in a way that can give you something that might reflect a prebiotic soup, something that, at least in their thinking at the time, would represent the beginning chemistry of the ancient Earth, and then what sort of energy inputs you might have in order to make that come together. And this worked. In fact, what they ultimately did was they published that they found 11 of the 20 known amino acids in human biology. And what's been interesting is over the decades, people have actually gone back and used more sensitive methods and gone back to this original equipment. His former grad and postdoc students have done this. They've actually found over 20 different amino acids represented in this reaction. Again, not all the ones that are used in biology, but there was actually a lot more complicated stuff and I should also say that since the 1950s, people have recreated this experiment using slightly different conditions. Some people have added catalytic metals and they found a large diversity of amino acids. Again, the building blocks of proteins, I realize I just forgot to mention amino acids are the building blocks of proteins that are present from these spontaneous reactions. Now, the other source has also been discovered once we had the opportunity to be able to go and see to spectrally analyze comets, is that comets contain a wealth of amino acids as well. I think up to 300 different types of amino acids have been found in comets, where again, you have this input of solar energy, methane, ammonia, all available to actually create those. So it's possible that a lot of your early amino acids on the planet comets impact. So the next component, when we think about cell membranes, these are lipid bilayers and lipid bilayers are basically the idea of soap and that when you have soap aligned in the right way, where a lot of people picture these as balloons, so if you imagine a bunch of balloons that have all been let go and are on the ceiling, all the heads of the balloons are lined up on the ceiling and then the strings are coming down. So imagine that those strings like to interact with each other and that's basically a mono layer of these types of fatty acids that form layers and if you actually have the tails face into each other, you can do this. You basically take soaps in solutions, you agitate them and you can make these things known as protocells or micelles that spontaneously form. These have been known for some time, just within say kitchen sinks or within lab environments. It's kind of just they thermodynamically erase themselves. Fatty cells like this have a cool property which is that they're polar at the head and non-polar at the tail. So they just naturally when they're in a water environment, they just naturally align themselves in this juncture so that the non-polar tails are sequestered away from the water. So they just naturally arrange themselves like this. Yeah, and these natural arrangements allow you to, one, create barriers that you can say this is the outside of a cell versus the inside. And then the inner chemistry can be independent of that membrane. You can basically have some basically self-contained aqueous compartment inside. Yeah, so Tagline mentioned something about clays. I will be getting to that in the next talk in just a second. And so the thing that people have been so these have been known for some time to be able to form, at least since the late 1800s, people scientifically made these. And the question has always been how would these form in the early Earth and then interact? And that is, of course, the big challenge is that basic uninterrupted fatty acid membranes are impermeable to a lot of stuff that can serve life. So you also have to have this step at which you can make them permeable and regulated in order to actually be a cell, right? You can't just have them all be inside. Otherwise, it's not just normal. It's a function. And be able to react to its environment. So let me get to the last one. This is the most interesting one. But one thing to point out is that when we think about lipids, we think about DNA, we think about amino acids, they don't really have much capacity to code information. And so what has been the leading hypothesis for several decades now is the idea that RNA as a singular molecule must have been able to perform catalysis, be a structural chemical and then also be able to replicate. And so in the 1960s, there were a lot of experiments. Joan Oro is the most well-known one where they would react in test tubes, sugars with cyanide-based compounds. So what I'm showing here is 5-methylcytidine. So you see the loop, the circular molecule on the top right there has nitrogens in it and that's where nitrogen, the cyanides contribute to other different from amino acids that spontaneously form. And so that is, again, some basic chemistry where we can understand the building blocks of RNA. But how would these form into long monomers, right? RNA and DNA are these long strings of these all put together. And so yeah, and I think Tadline mentioned something that in the early 1900s, people were convinced that proteins, amino acids were coding functions that just turned out to be completely wrong. And there is a basis for why they thought that. And so what's been what was then later shown in the later 60s and we're working in the 70s, is that different clay compounds can actually help RNA spontaneously form polymers, up to about 50 nucleotides. And so these Montimore-Lenites have a lot of work from the Ferris Lab showing that it's possible to spontaneously get these long strings of these. And once you have these spontaneous long strings, can they actually do the functions that we need to represent life? And so one of the more well-hailed and well-known experiments was back Shostack in 1993, where they took combinatorial libraries of RNA and asked, can they perform specific catalytic functions of putting RNA molecules together? Well, I should say, let me back up that RNA, well, a lot of times we think of proteins as being the main enzymes and catalytic functions in cells. RNA has been shown to catalyze RNA splicing, so it can chop other RNA molecules apart. And it's also involved in protein synthesis. And so these are aspects where we know there's catalytic function that RNA can do. And so the fact that Shostack was able to show that you can basically ligate, an RNA molecule can ligate other RNAs together was actually quite a move forward in the future. One thing that has not yet been demonstrated is the ability of RNA to take another RNA molecule and make a basic complementary copy of it to then yield this idea of replicating your genetic blueprint. So that's, I would say, right now probably the Holy Grail of the field that allows, that would say really confirm the RNA world. Now some of the advances in the idea, so we talk about RNA as this ribonucleotide, there actually are other backbones and other sugars that may allow, so arabinose is another variant. There's also fructalose which is a 5 carbon sugar, not a 6 carbon sugar. And the idea that there may have been slightly different sugar compounds that were the initial RNA molecules can be very attractive because some of their chemical properties are a little bit more amenable to replication. And Mike Shaw has something, says something local text that is a little bit a little bit over my head for me as a biochemist. Oh, okay, I see. So he's mentioned the idea that there are ideas that maybe DNA could have still been an important molecule both as a catalysis, maybe an earlier form of it. And yeah, no need to apologize, I just had to pause to read it, so as many people know I was pausing to read it. The RNA world is the leading hypothesis but you're mentioning the other one that maybe DNA still could have been a catalytic molecule in a slightly different or more probably different form. And so I think we don't want to dismiss other possibilities and that's a really good. All right, so let me get to um, so I think to summarize here what we really have is this idea that we have a lot of understanding of the basic chemistry that can give us the building blocks that lead to life. Now we're still missing, and this is why I think this is a big unanswered question, how these things can actually come together in a way that then leads to a functional replicating cellular life. And I think that's where it's a big question and I think it's a really hard question something that we may never be able to fully answer exactly how it happened, but otherwise be satisfied with models in which we understand how it could have happened. So we'll see how the next 20 years go. But there's been a lot of advances in biochemistry that allow us and the ability to do combinatorial synthesis of molecules like RNA and DNA that may allow us to answer these. And so that was my segue and it's the last topic I want to talk about, which is the idea that we can synthesize RNA and DNA molecules chemically. I was just going to ask you about that. And this is amazing stuff. So let me talk about one of the pioneers in the field, Peg Venter, who actually was a private scientist. He had his own company that they made the goal of sequencing the human genome and that's what his company was most well known for was that he led an independent non-government, non-economic effort to sequence the human genome. In fact, they did, in essence, co-publish with the human genome project. But he's been very interested in very basic synthetic biology. And so some landmark stuff that he and his group have done is in 1995 they sequenced the genome of mycoplasmic genitalium. Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like. And they found that and they knew this was a very small slow growing independent organism, although again parasitic. And it had only 470 genes and they could actually inactivate a bunch of them. So they had a working living organism that was only 375 genes, right? So this basic idea of given the life that we have on the planet now, how can we find this minimal set of genes that really make it work? And so I think this could reflect what are something that you have and what are the basic biochemical needs and genetic needs you have for that very basic early organism. Now in 2008 they synthesized a copy of that. So again a whole de novo synthesis of the nucleotides in order to make that organism. And they discarded that one because it was very slow growing and hard to work with. So they moved to mycoplasmic mycodes, which is a million base pairs and they again also synthesized de novo a version of its genome. And then through a bunch of basically reductionist types of properties they basically said sorry, what's shown here on the lower left hand side is in-culture individual cells of that synthesized mycoplasma and so they called it JVCI version 1. And through a bunch of reductionist type of practices taking this segment of DNA is it necessary or not? This segment of DNA is it necessary or not? They eventually came up with the reduced size that's half a megabase in terms of the sequence available. It has a total of 473 genes and they published that in 2016 as JVCI version 3. And so this is a hallmark in terms of this is a minimal organism that was also completely synthesized. Now again, they synthesized the DNA and they hijacked an existing mycoplasma's cell in order to get it to jumpstart in terms of being cellular life. But this is the idea that we can basically synthesize minimal organisms from scratch and this is something that from a technological standpoint, you can start thinking about what genes you may or may not want to add but I think also Vector is still very interested in what is just the basic minimal. So my last slide. Go ahead. Well, if I just kind of interject here. So I'm a little bit so you can synthesize the genome for these minimal organisms and then do those genes get expressed and create all of the cellular machinery it needs to sort of be alive? Does that really works? That is correct. You can use machines to synthesize DNA. Now you have to do some special work. You can't synthesize in a machine really long segments of DNA but what you do is you synthesize a bunch of them and get them to connect together in special ways and I won't go through the biology of that. But to these minimal cells do they have organelles mitochondria or ribosomes or anything like that? Yeah, so the mycoplasma that they strip them of DNA and these are existing cells in a cell culture they strip their DNA out and so all the ribosomes, proteins are all pre-existing that can then start replicating the DNA that then gets injected into it. Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to clarify that, thank you. Now I will say there are things known as cell lysate systems where you can have, you can put DNA into it and it will make protein, it will make RNA although there's no membrane structures in that and that's something that's used in biology, industrial biology. But in terms of what the vendor was trying to do, they needed it was easiest to take some pre-existing cell packet in order. Yeah, sure that makes sense. I actually, one of my colleagues at Quartet of Agro Sciences, he's well known and published he actually synthesized the first yeast artificial chromosomes so we're at the point now where we can synthesize and recombine together simple one-celled eukaryotic chromosomes so I think that's pretty fascinating. Alright, so my last slide, last two slides my last topic, is the idea of what we can do when it comes to the ability to synthesize genomes from scratch and I want to remind people that when we talk about the central dogma we go from RNA, which are the strings of A, G's, C's and U, so T is replaced by U in RNA and that when you take three of these at a time you can basically have a total of 64 different what are called codons or triplets triplets and you can use these to specify on a one-to-one basis that this one codon means this one amino acid and we actually have multiple codons that can code for the same amino acid. So on the left hand side is something very similar to what I actually have on my desk there's a codon table that says this string of letters, codes for in groups of three code for this particular amino acid and then there are also three stop codons and what the code for life how this actually works is that there are in the cell what are known as amino acetyl tRNA synthetases these are proteins that take a particular amino acid and bind to a particular tRNA and then the tRNA is what is the adapter for when translation is occurring to say oh this codon means this and so this is how this whole basically rosetta zone of life is set up and the thing is we can change this now, we can do a lot and this is what was just published a month ago this is landmark up-to-date hot off the presses type of stuff going on synthetic biology that the published in Nature what this group did in England, I'm blanking on where they basically recoded the entire genome and they did have some false starts or some things that don't work but they basically got rid of two codons for syring and that's what I have yellowed out in a bar up left hand they also got rid of one of the stop codons there are three codons that say oh stop making proteins here well you only need really one codon in the cell represent this and so they basically have recoded and have living organisms where they've been recoded for life and what's amazing about this like the future possibilities for this is that and one of the early applications is that if you have your own unique code or you're missing the ability to use have certain codons represent a protein then you can be resistant to viruses right viruses can't replicate inside of you so then viruses can't make more protein and you are resistant to that type of pathogen and the other thing is that if you have these if you're freeing up the genetic code where you can put in more stuff and make new you know amino acid or tRNA synthetases that put on new amino acids we can start coming up with proteins that don't exist in here and people have done this synthetically but once you can start making organisms and evolve organisms with new amino acids and potentially new completely novel proteins then we can start doing some pretty amazing new stuff that again origins of life that have helped lead us to the ability to I think redesign and couple types of life there's a question from tagline which is would not the epigenetic aspects of a synthesized cell be hit or miss and epigenetics this concept where just because you have DNA it doesn't mean things get expressed you can have extra chemistry on them that says the gene will not be expressed or maybe is expressed more highly and that's what epigenetics is called well bacterial chromosomes don't really do epigenetics there's not something where you have to worry about that in terms of the histone modifications and expression patterns in basic prokaryotes so this really kind of not a question for this type of synthetic biology but it's a very good question if we were to think about trying to use synthetic DNA for eukaryotic gene therapy but that basically ends my talk and I think this is where I was really leading to well let me just tell you the real unanswered question is not necessarily the origin of life but what does the future hold to design life fantastic I think there was I just recently heard about a recent report of novel proteins being produced by these synthetic cellular systems so that's very cutting edge that has been done on a limited basis but I think it's really hard to do that there was a group that had on an an additional vector some codons and some different amino acids oh no I'm sorry you're thinking of a group that used a four codon code I think so yes that sounds right I was listening to a report about that I've read about that I'm not as familiar with it but it's the same type of idea that we can start recoding things and start doing amazing stuff with the synthesis of the building blocks of life absolutely thanks very much Stephen that was fantastic Alex can you do a voice check and see if you're still live here maybe we can bring your slide screen over there we go I think the day has your slide screen over alright let's hope we can okay Alex can you do a little mic check for us to make sure your voice is working and it looks like we have a screen for your slide set up back there is that me and my audio cut out yes there we go I think maybe your mic was off so now we can hear you thank you okay so let's see so again quickly connections between climate and life over time and I feel like this is where kind of paleontology has the ability to kind of give us some clues into what to anticipate for the future and better understanding this relationship between climate and evolution and by really delving into the fossil record understanding what those nuances are and hopefully kind of have better clues those saying before they've been kind of five recognized big extinction events and each of these have been tied in one way or another to dramatic shifts in climate now it's not exclusively warming it can be cooling in one case is a lot of kind of acid build up in the atmosphere but these have all been kind of tied one way or another into big big shifts in climate through time and my screen refreshing okay and by kind of studying this relationship we can get a better sense of kind of where we are with things let's see and please feel free to kind of interject as you like around so if you got questions and stuff I'll train keep up with the chat board here um let's see we'll go to the next slide okay and we're loading I'm working on like a very old laptop as well so this is all extra clunky but we are going to get this happening it's still loading um I'm trying to pull it up on my own laptop I am so sorry everybody this has been a trial here okay we should be looking at diversity yes we are excellent okay um so one of the major aspects in which climate can affect evolution on a broader scheme of things is looking at the concentrations of life in different parts of the world so what we are looking at here is was actually a study of vulnerable species and where these are most concentrated so things that will be most dramatically affected by future climate change and this is also where we tend to see our highest concentrations of diversity just in general um so when we are looking at parts of the world we typically find um kind of the the tropical areas is where we have our highest areas of diversity and that's also kind of where the most potential for issues are going to be moving forward and when we move into the fossil record we do see a lot of these kinds of similarities um so when you've got um places that are world warm and tropical you also tend to see kind of um heightened levels of different kinds of animals doing different kinds of things so in general as we kind of increase uh areas that are both wet and are humid and warm tend to create more opportunities for diversity to increase however um that our regional area has shifted over time so places like um you know what are now very very arid africa have in the past been very warm and wet places or even very cold places um and kind of keeping in mind as we move forward is one of the major factors in understanding this connection between um life and climate through time and um so if we can go to the next slide um um that connects with uh body size um so this is another huge huge uh factor in uh how climate uh affects evolution over time and that's how big animals can get now when um kind of in the earlier studies looking at this over time was uh tied in with bergman's rule if you're not familiar with uh bergman uh basically it's this idea that uh larger animals um will exist at higher latitudes or cooler climates than smaller versions of the same thing so what we're looking at on the slide is a neat study that was done on moose um across sweden we had kind of a large shift in latitude and finding that larger body size was um occurring in that same kind of moose population at northern latitudes versus southern latitudes and there's a bunch of other good examples um of other kinds of animals especially like bears we have much smaller bears in southern climates and much bigger bears in northern climates um there's a big caveat to that and that's um with anything that's not warm-blooded um where it's actually the exact opposite of that and I totally should have thrown in because I have the personal connection to um uh titanibola which is a great example of that um so titanibola is a massive giant snake that existed after the time of the dinosaurs and it lived in uh northern south american a place that was very very tropical and in that warm tropical environment you could actually get a much much larger snake than you can today because it was much warmer even than today um so you get this massive 42 foot snake um because the climate was much warmer now if you look at mammals or any other warm-blooded animal though that relationship is the exact opposites that you have um your smaller versions of the same kinds of animals in tropical environments and um bigger versions in um cooler climates so this is one of the reasons why during like the last ice age we see huge mammals across large parts of the world including these you know mammoths and mastodons and giant ground sloths and other big big mammals um whereas we don't really see much in the way of cold-blooded animals um and this is one of the really big takeaways for me at least um when we're starting to look into the warming climate in the future in that that is less favorable to these kind of larger-bodied um warm-blooded creatures but more favorable to ectothermic or cold-blooded animals um so as we kind of move into a warmer future this is actually not at least kind of based on our you know paleo-history less favorable to warm-blooded creatures and more favorable for cold-blooded creatures at least in terms of larger body sizes um let's see but why were there giant kangaroos and llamas in the past while the modern versions are small um so that's actually because it was in the times of giant kangaroos and llamas these big camels and stuff that we had here in North America it was actually much cooler back then than it is now and then ultimately we actually like our camels in North America died out giant kangaroos died out and uh oh right Adrian brought up oxygen levels had to do with it it does um but that definitely affects some organisms more than others um so things like insects um are also limited based on oxygen uh so one of the factors is temperature there of course quote kind of cold-blooded really ectothermic meaning they're getting a certain amount of energy from their surrounding environment um well when you go to um a certain body size even for a warm environment you need a certain level of oxygen to be able to get enough oxygen into their exoskeleton um so when you look at times when insects and other kind of exoskeletal uh ectotherms were around um it was when it was both warm and you had incredibly high oxygen levels and that was mostly in a time before the dinosaurs when you got relative of the centipede that was feet long massive massive thing or you got um you know spiders the the size of like uh you know bigger even than a basketball like these massive massive things so oxygen can be one of the factors in that as well um let me try and catch up a bit here what's that uh large mammals would be better to retain body heat absolutely yes so kind of having that um lower surface area to the mass is much better in the cooler climates for some of the reasons why you see um things like mammoths uh in these cold climates and we don't have those anymore um humidity uh canon db factors as well especially for um things like amphibians or things that are really dependent on on water so obviously just raising the temperature isn't enough for all things um so that's that's another kind of compounding factor another reason why it's important to understand all these different aspects of climate and the relationships to evolution and not just one factor uh let's go to the next slide here so get to this is just a general concept of oh yes spiders bigger than basketball so that's absolutely kind of uh horrifying maybe a little bit it's all right uh they're all long dead don't worry about it um so abundance is another major factor in um kind of how climate shapes things over time that's basically just how uh many of a kind of organism you can have um sustained within an environment so the example here is uh just a school of sardine where you can get you know billions or at least thousands if not you know up into millions of these living within one single population there um so that these uh animals can uh they're getting enough food they're getting enough energy from the environment that you can not only kind of keep these sardines alive but you can keep them alive in enormous numbers and that of course has huge effects across the entire ecosystem where you can have whole um communities existing because of uh these highly highly abundant uh animals so you're having things eating them as well as things eating their byproducts as well so they're kind of forming a part of the backbone of the ecosystem there because of their abundance if you were to drop their numbers in half that would have catastrophic effects across the ecosystem so that abundance is a key factor in kind of you know whole extinction level events could be driven from the abundances of certain species uh and those are very largely driven by um kind of the sustainability of the environment which is driven by climate driven by things like temperature um particularly in marine environments like this um as well as uh levels of sunlight which drives kind of photosynthesis in the the base of those populations um so that ends up being a major driving factor in whole large scale evolutionary changes uh let's go to the next one um and that is going to be about funnel dynamics um funnel dynamics basically just means the uh differences within the population different kinds of fauna so this can tie in a bit with abundance but it's a little bit different in that you can have shifts in the different kinds of animals within an environment um so something in this case I've got uh just examples between browsers versus grazers um so these are uh in the case of like uh land mammals uh that are both herbivores you can have things like deer that are browsers that are living in uh typically more foresty environments are typically eating things like uh leaves and shrubs um whereas grazers are living in more open environments so I've got a picture of a bison there um they're eating a lot of grasses and those different kinds of fauna can have other kinds of effects on uh the other animals around them but the reason that you're getting these shifts in fauna is often driven by climate shifts so in the case of getting less deer in more bison is usually a case where you're getting less humidity meaning that you're getting more of those grasses coming in and as a result you're going to have more grazers eating the grasses versus um kind of a more humid environment that might uh sustain a um forested population which then gives you more uh things that are going to eat those forest environments so even if you for um whatever reason needed to depend exclusively on the animal fossil record and not the plant fossil record for an area which canon does happen because fossilization is a very fickle kind of thing uh you can actually see cues in those environmental aspects that are driven by climate change by the different kinds of fauna that you get there and that of course has you know all these bigger effects on um the kinds of animals that eat those animals as well so this is um kind of one of the the major components that can be directly affected by climate um and it's another thing to keep in mind as we change uh our future climate we can absolutely expect these fauna dynamics to shift and those dynamics could shift favorably or they could shift very unfavorably for our kind of system as we get a very hotter environment we can also get a drier environment that affects things like crops and the livestock and other kinds of things that we depend on so this is another major major key component to understanding um what to anticipate for the future and that's where the fossil record can really help us understand those dynamics uh let's go to the next slide someone allowed for a little bit more discussion um this is a little bit different from final dynamics this is population dynamics now what this is is kind of your relative proportions of different life stages within the ecosystems there so this is where you have um say you've got like a lot of babies but not a lot of grown-ups or a lot of grown-ups and not a lot of babies um that has big shifts as well in um kind of how we interpret stuff actually I should read this bit on the sea drought and wildfires affecting the food sources for browsers and grazers but seem to play a role as well yes absolutely so drought kind of oridity it's a major climate factor which then also leads to wildfires which can change the ecosystem as well um these are large drivers from climate as well absolutely um and by Nova thanks for joining us um let's see so back to the population dynamics um so on the slide here what I've got is just a picture of tadpoles um these are amphibians are actually a really good example of population dynamics because they have such dramatically different life stages that you can really understand kind of how they're affecting differently so you can imagine tadpoles that are strictly aquatic um are feeding in a different environment for the most part um and in doing different kinds of things and having different diets versus frogs they're kind of adult stage there and having different proportions of those will also have ripple effects across the rest of the ecosystem but because for a lot of organisms like amphibians like reptiles temperatures are a large part in how they kind of shift to different life stages especially um in these kinds of amphibious or kind of multiple discrete life stage organisms um that also is largely connected to things like temperature and humidity so that can have yet another kind of effect on an ecosystem that you can then scale up across a lot of things especially when certain kinds of animals will even depend on certain life stages of different organisms for their diet used to be a popular thing in American plants razors were created by Native Americans who deforested central plants I don't know if that theory still holds that one's kind of a little younger for um what I tend to study um it is definitely an interesting point there and it's um something to keep in mind as well that kind of how different sorts of organisms are changing their own environment um so things like bison um and elephants and of course people have been able to actually shape the environments themselves like beavers are good um kind of climate uh engineers in a way um so that's kind of a another layer to how we kind of understand uh shifts in climate through time as well as kind of as we move forward so kind of keeping in mind the ability to change those habitats can then kind of affect not only the animals there um but it can affect kind of surrounding areas as well all kind of part of the fun complexity of life and climate um let's go to the next slide um so I wanted to throw in a couple of these um that kind of have a little bit more to do with how we understand the fossil record and how we really get at those issues because um particularly when we're thinking about things like diversity in the past it's very tricky to understand um when we're trying to compare it to modern ecosystems and one of those uh is just literally understanding what makes the species in the fossil record because how we define that has to be different from how we define it in biological systems today so largely we go by the um kind of biological species concept of uh being able to create a viable offspring right obviously that's a real problem to understand in the fossil record so instead we have to go with um things that you can recognize as being sort of distinct ways to identify them based on morphology based on the anatomy right so what I brought up here is a slide of sparrows um this is from a field guide for uh many different species of sparrows now if you're not familiar sparrows there are a lot of different species and they look really really similar to each other and a lot of the ways that you distinguish those species is based on very subtle markings of the feathers or even their calls which are features that are completely indistinguishable within the fossil record if you look at these skeletons of these species of sparrows they look absolutely identical um and there's no good uh skeletal and not anatomical differences between them but if you're at that level where kind of our standard for species in the modern record is on things that we can't even see in the uh osteological record that kind of sets you at a different standard there um so you kind of have to understand uh kind of species level differences differently in the fossil record versus the modern record now that doesn't mean you can't make those comparisons it's just one of the major factors that you need to keep in mind as you're kind of moving forward that does help when you're looking at the fossil record you're doing a little bit more apples to apples so you are looking at kind of if you're looking 100 million years ago and 50 million years ago um the same kinds of constraints for how we define a species are applying to those the real difference is when you're looking much more recently in how we define those different species there so when you look at something like the you know thousands thousands of species of birds that we have alive today and we look in the past we're not seeing nearly as many a large part of that is because of that um just because of the nature of the record that we're working from so it's not nearly as complete in that uh are they genetically distinct modern I realize we can't right so we can't test genetics of the fossil species except in very rare circumstances for much more recent things um and there are some kind of more recent studies that have started to group together some of these modern populations but there's also been a lot of work to split those modern populations so genetics are helping kind of us better understand the modern diversity to a certain extent but uh that's a very limiting factor because DNA typically only lasts for about 50,000 years um so that very limits you when you're looking at a fossil record that goes back even billions of years so you're only looking you're only able to use that tool for much more recent um alright let's go to uh I just have one more slide um and uh we'll go to the last slide here because I want to put this last concept out there and that's also just the the bias of the fossil record itself um so this is just a general diagram of the fossilization process um where you go from uh in this case an example of a dinosaur uh usually all the soft tissue is completely uh decayed out and eaten by uh microorganisms or bugs or even other big dinosaurs and stuff like that um things typically get uh buried in sediments uh that then gets overlaid by uh usually lots of rock over time uh the bone or whatever original biological materials then replaced by minerals uh and then you have to have all that rock overhead uh eroded out in order to expose enough to actually find some of the fossil remains there that's typically how we uh even know about these ancient organisms now there's a lot of things that have to happen before you actually go out and find your fossils now typically also the further back in time you go the more kind of things might have happened to that rock that has caused it to be lost entirely so you end up having this really bias kind of view point into the past where you're not getting a holistic view of everything that was alive you're getting the view of whatever managed to get through all these filters and make its way all the way to the present and be found by a person who can then recognize what it is that's not to say that we don't know anything we certainly know a lot of things we just know that what we're seeing is uh you know a select subset of what existed in the past and this is another major factor for us to try and understand these larger scale evolutionary changes as they relate to climate realizing that we're seeing this kind of select group and we don't necessarily get as much of a broad view as we would like how common is it to find fossils exposed on the surface versus excavating them I would say almost all fossils a very very large proportion of them are found because at least part of them were exposed at the surface and that keyed you into that exact spot now it doesn't mean that there aren't that you don't run into other fossils because you saw maybe one sticking out and then you can find more buried in there are other cases where um something like a shale deposit where you can get lots and lots of stuff deposited in one area can be like alright okay we've seen one at the surface now we're going to really dig into this spot and that can lead to many many many more fossils inside so there are some but I still say the vast majority of fossils are recognized because at least part of them were exposed at the surface even today pioneers in North Carolina often came across huge fossils in creek beds they knew they were not representative of anything yeah no even in the early days the science of paleontology goes back to the late 1700s before we even really before we knew evolution was even as a concept there were already people kind of getting keyed into the idea of this stuff just doesn't match anything that's alive today and it ended up tying in deeply with um kind of religious viewpoints of kind of the um kind of concept that species couldn't possibly go extinct and then kind of coming to terms with this idea and kind of trying to understand um that the earth is a lot older than we thought at first we just didn't know yeah it was yes and absolutely fossils were key to understanding geology in this time starting to understand just how much time is represented by these rock records and the fossils inside have really been helpful for understanding uh it's back to earlier paleontology often defined species based on biostrategraphically or even in honor of themselves yes absolutely um so uh yeah kind of tying into that rock record there understanding species can often help you understand deep time as well as those climatic shifts there um so often fossils are even a better uh or even more fine tuned way of understanding the past climate than the rock itself um so obviously if you're finding a lot of um you know clams and stuff like that you're probably not looking at a desert environment you're looking at like a lake or a seashore area um so understanding the fossil record can really give us a broader sense of in a richer sense of the um climate through time then okay okay fantastic alex that was great um we're just at about 130 now i guess it's uh 11 30 slt time so i'm afraid i think we really should wrap it up here um right just in the just in the interest of time if nothing else even though this is a blast and we could keep on talking about this stuff all day i'm sure great well thank you okay all right well thank you so much i'm glad you persevered to uh to be here to give us your presentation it was totally worth it um i also want to thank my other panelists uh steven and um and mike um thank you for having us and with that i will uh gavel our uh panel discussion to a close and thank all the students for attending also and of course thanks to shantal and jess for um uh sponsoring all and good night