You here again? What are you doing here bro? To film me What have I done? Something amazing Do you know where we are actually? We are in Kumase Do you know that this place is the culture city of Ghana? No, I didn't know that Oh really? This people sit on gold Everywhere in this place there is gold Exactly where I am Definitely if you dig deep down Definitely for gold man I am going to go and buy sugar The king in here sits on gold man I can't wait to meet him and shake his hand Should I shoot my shot? Shoot your shot please Your Excellency My name is Wadamaya I am the one and only annoying village boy from Ghana Who is on a journey to change the narratives of Africa By celebrating African excellence Utumfo I am not from Kumase But I would love to see you and shake your hands Thank you I hope my request will be honored Thank you Amen I love shooting my shot these days man But hey I mean such a beautiful estates man It's actually raining today But the rain will not stop us from being what we are supposed to do today You guys saw the previous episode in Kauu We handed over the $10,000 that we all came together to I mean contribute To support the man Who decided to transform a refuse dam Into a beautiful park Just to help him develop the park Last December I filmed the video About an African American woman Who moved to Kumase Here in Ghana To help less privileged kids Put them in school And when she told me That he really touched me So a lot of them weren't going to school Because their parents didn't have money to buy a uniform Or didn't have money to send them A transportation Or something Embarrassed because their uniforms were dirty Whatever And so that's what we support And after hearing this story I decided to be part of the change So I asked my subscribers Can we all do something You know I really want to be transparent I really want people to know that I just don't talk But I walk my talk right So yeah I promise to take care of For 100 So I am taking 10 And I want my beloved subscribers to take what 90 So what are we going to do today I'm going to hand over the 10 The 10 people that I decided to sponsor I'm going to give her the money But also want to know if indeed My subscribers reach out to her I mean let's go because We don't have enough time even though it's raining But I mean I'm retired He's behind the camera today See the way I'm shot I don't like moving around in this guy So yeah let's go Yo are you going to I'm not entering this train What sin have I committed Because I love what I do I have to pass through this train Because of you guys To cross the gates again No way Yo boss You look different man Who picked me the last time No I mean This one is not all about donation But it's something personal to me I was once like that I'm not saying my family did not have But once upon a time I was going to school without uniform Once upon a time I was going to school without I mean having food to eat and all of that I think even my uniform that I graduated primary school with Was given to me by a friend Wow I used to hear I used to go to school with a torn uniform I remember the first time I won an award in school My school uniform was torn They called me to come in front And everybody was laughing at me To the extent that I went to the stage and the teacher said We're not going to give you the I'm telling you So doing something like this It's personal to me And I also feel like I'm fulfilling my father's dream You know when things got better for my dad My dad was taking care of a lot of people You know I mean Things were not good before But when things got better I think my dad had so many people that he was taking care of And even when he died I had to take over So apart from these people I have like other people that They're not even going to schools like this They're going to international schools Where they pay extra fees And I'm doing all of that just to honor my dad So this is something I mean personal to me bro This is so inspiring bro We are here to inspire Motivate And get a lot of people to get involved We are not here to show off But tell people that it's possible For each and every African to get involved Africa belongs to us man You sponsored 10 students I sponsored 10 students bro 10 students I'm going to join that by sponsoring 5 That would be amazing You can do 50 bro I know you can do 50 How many of you think Thai needs to do 50 Okay anyway This is first 5 Let me start with 5 bro It's a very great mission bro It's a very big mission That's what we need to do I mean we need to use the platform The people that we built Let them know that you all Have to be part of the change That we're looking for on the continent It's not about we trying to show off But we trying to let you know that You can do it too That's what we're doing this on camera If not YouTube I would never do this on camera But this is my life now And we can't keep waiting for the government Exactly We have to do it whether they like it or not I mean no one can stop me now Because I have something that I've decided Long ago I have to continue Thai will be following the school Are you good? Yeah I'm good This is a typical Ganyan school setting Yeah man Longest time Thai This is the woman that I'll tell you about Good morning And the teachers of the school So I mean Some people don't know who you are I'm Don Sutherland My African name is Ajua And I've been Here now going on into my Year 7 And one of the things That I've done since I've been here Is helping children To go to school And stay in school So far how many kids Have you taken care of? We have now 296 children Most of them in Ashanti region This school The reason why I told you to meet me here today Was because of the School indirectly in my neighborhood We have six schools that we Adopt and sponsor And through your effort In December We now have 96 additional Students 96 So 96 of your Supporters And fans Sponsored a child And what am I telling Your fans are not easy They are They want to make sure That you weren't lying And that I was real Five of them Some of them are wife and husband Mother and daughter Have come to visit When they come to Ghana We have about ten That's coming this year From England, from Jamaica From the US Who want to see exactly what we've done Last two Sundays Came to see the two children That he sponsored Thank God we're real Because they actually came here To see me And they're surprised Because first they thought It was not real Whatever That my house was a school And I'm like no, I helped children To stay in school with my circle of friends And what you wanted to do Was help your children So one of the things I wanted you to show today Is that this is a school That we actually have most of the children That your sponsors come We have about We sponsored about 86 children In her school And about 58 of them Through your sponsorship Will I be able to see some of them today Yeah, you'll see some of them today So definitely Thank you so much for all that you have done To support the children Of Kumasi Of Ghana Of Ashanti region Because 96 of your supporters Have donated $100 To support the children And Reverend sister here Will tell you We have to buy uniforms for them It's not school is free But the children parents Can't afford to send them to school So they can't afford their Books They can't afford food So sometimes we have to give them lunch We run a breakfast program here So the children can eat Because if you come to school hungry You can't eat If the children need shoes We give them shoes Whatever they need sometimes We provide for them And so today I wanted you to actually See one of the schools That we have done So you can show your supporters Like they were asking me I promised to take care of 10 students That I do that So I had to come here And I'll give you the money for the 10 people That I also promised So I am taking 10 They took 96 So together it's 106 So it's been good So the final video I would love to see some of the kids To put in school So I'll almost break So I can't tell Jennifer to get out the children That wouldn't mind support And the other thing is Jennifer Who you met Jennifer is in university Studying to be a teacher So her national service Is at this school So you'll see her in a minute So we'll take her to our classroom This is Jennifer's class That's Jennifer That's Jennifer That's Jennifer That's Jennifer How are you? Yeah Hello Good morning It's 12 o'clock Good afternoon How are you all doing? I'm fine See You're now a teacher You look like you're about to teach them Hi nice to meet you This is a classroom teacher Jennifer is her assistant Because she's a national service student So this is Something that We have helped Because she's helping other children That's amazing I think people don't even know who Jennifer is Jennifer tell them something How are you? Hi Jennifer is here again Hello I think you have limited time I'm here with Mr.Gana Exactly I'm so excited to meet him again The whole Wadamaya It's good to see you Now you're a national service teacher Very soon You'll be a photo Okay Here alone we have about 12 That we sponsor Plus 3A And then all Maya school Let's see you Okay where are my students I want to see my students You wait Oh okay The list The list So your school Let's start with the Maya Wadamaya My goodness My name is present Wadamaya Wow Wow All these are Wadamayas I don't know what to say right now But I'm too emotional It's alright I just want to say thank you On behalf Of my mom and I Thank you for everything I think we can even do better So if you know The previous episode you couldn't watch it I think this is a chance for you to Do the necessary I'm here again it's real the kids are in school You can see like Can you believe it like 96 kids in school just because of one video So I think the second video We need to make it a thousand students in school So please This time around we want a thousand students In school So you know what you're going to do for me I need a thousand students In school do me a favor A hundred dollars I took ten but I'm promising again I'm taking a hundred The first time I took ten I'm taking hundred Together it's going to be hundred and ten right So which means I need Nine hundred extra Thank you I don't know what to say I just want to say thank you so much For watching thank you so much For liking the video I'm going to see you in the next one I mean this is so beautiful Twenty five I don't know what to say And thank you to all the Maya Subscribers and fans Thank you so much And to people through the video All these people you've been sponsoring Through the video that's why we indicate with the Maya Thank you so much Whoever you are they don't believe the story It's real I am real And they are Thank you so much I am blown away man I'm blown away Like you know When you have a plan And you eventually put the plan out And the plan actually becomes reality It's like singing a song And you know The plan actually becomes reality It's like seeing the faces of those kids in class You've just sort of given them a chance At education If we didn't have the education we have now We wouldn't even know anything about YouTube and everything So education can go so far in a child's life Especially for people who don't have access to it Over hundred students That's hundred students lives that have changed And I'm planning to make it a thousand by the end of this year When it's coming from a lot of people It's very small, hundred dollars Can change the life of a child That's so crazy man See all the kids, see how they are happy Just running around, just feeling really good They are in class If not for stuff like this Maybe some of them might be in some other places that they are not meant to be So it's really amazing man Shout out to you I'm crying for you Guys let's buy fan eyes You know your fan eyes right? Of course I know fan eyes bro Fan eyes This is bringing me memories of when I was younger This is one of the toilets And borehole that we built We are building this fence Because the children are running on the street And getting in trouble Playing football soccer And then football go on the street So we are building this fence here And these are the kind of things That we do for the schools that we support Because if you start supporting the children Going to school Then give them a good education So that their money won't go to waste And the children continue to come to school So this is One of the kindergarten blocks Now this is a breakfast program We provide breakfast every morning For the KG children Here they come and Eat their breakfast there They eat breakfast They smile at the children And you know of course What doesn't happen without A good head teacher Who supports and makes sure What happens to one of the children That we sponsor Whether it's Woodermaya or Circle of Friends That if they need uniform we do Now this is a library That we also did for them The library So we did this library for them When was that Two years ago now Reverend Cecilia Two and a half, two years ago This is a librarian So the children have a place to come To study and do homework And even during the pandemic They were able to come and borrow books And keep again Because one of the things Woodermaya That you talk about is If every African One in ten of your viewers Will just support a village Doesn't have to be gone Wherever they see fit Wherever they feel their motherland is Wherever they feel their spirit lead them If they support just one something Africa to help a poor child We can get rid of poverty ourselves We can do what the Ghana President says Ghana without aid, Africa without aid Because we can do it as a diaspora And you have shown that people are doing it But sometimes they don't believe it And they don't think they can do it And that's one of the things that you have showcased Which brought tears to my eyes A lot of times when people are calling me It says, oh Jennifer it's not real I'm not real, I said well come You can come and see the tangible things that we do And when they come Then they feel it and then they are doing more And they are telling someone else We have some people that sponsored ten children We have at least five people that sponsored At least three children each We have two that sponsored ten We have some that sponsored six So they are telling each other And they can do it So we can make the change Because if we can build a library And help to educate the people who don't have it Because there are people who don't have it And they just don't That's why they sell water on the street Et cetera But if one of us would come here And help wherever you want Doesn't have to be what I do It could be just what they do Or someone else do Africa definitely can change Hello people of the world Full of life I can finally define what your happiness is I haven't arrived I haven't arrived I haven't pushed it to be me Comfortable in the skin I wear that Yes Full of life truly And we can finally define what your happiness is We haven't arrived And we don't think we will ever will Because in this world we are all learning Learning is a process And we thank God for all these wonderful people Come into our lives To help us to learn something new And we are still learning In order to get to the extent Of what we need in life We want to say thank you to the Maya Mr. Gana Baby We say thank you so much And even to the True Maya fans We thank you love for everything you've been doing And supporting us here Through Maya we've been shown to the world And people are reaching out here To help our mom in order to help these children We thank you all so much And we thank our mother and to all the BCC Board members Thank you very much Say bye to all the people watching Bye bye


Looks like perhaps a lot of whiskey's in pints last night, so the room's a little bit empty today. How many of you went for a jog this morning? OK, I went for a jog, but not on purpose. I had to jog back to the hotel. But all good. Good morning, everyone. This is day two of Hyperledger Global Forum. I see some new faces. So for those of you who are new, welcome to the Global Forum of 2022. We have an exciting, very exciting line up today, and I'm really happy to be here. First, I want to once again thank our sponsors, our diamond sponsor, Accenture, and our platinum sponsor, Siemens, as well as our gold, silver, and bronze sponsors. They're going to be all up in the third floor. Please make sure during the breaks you go over, have a discussion with them, find out what they're building with Hyperledger Technologies. There's some really great solutions being showcased up there. We also have the community fair up there. So please do go look at the special interest groups and the regional chapters. You'll also find our community partners in that area, and our community partners include INATVA and the Trust Over IP Foundation, which is a sister project at the Linux Foundation to Hyperledger. So once again, thank you for all the sponsors, and please do go visit them. Just a quick reminder about our event code of conduct. All attendees, and we take this very serious, should feel comfortable. If you see anything or feel anything, please go and speak to an event staff. We take these things very seriously, as I said. And just a friendly reminder for those of you who weren't here yesterday, please do keep your mask on. And you can, of course, when you're eating and drinking, not have to wear a mask, but be respectful of others. And specifically staff, because they've been told to make sure that we are following the guidelines. Before we get started today, I want to thank the people that make this happen. It's not me. I'm the lucky one. I get up here and get to wave my arms around and smile and make everybody look good, I guess. But these are the people that make us look good. So I want to thank the Hyperledger staff. These are the folks. If you see them walking around, shake their hands or give them an elbow bump. And thank them for all they do for the community and all they do for you and your communities as well. So thank you to the staff. And a big thank you, of course, to the LF Foundation Events team. They make this event what it is. So thank you for everyone and for making sure you can keep me on track. So thank you. Couple of things. As we think about what a community is this morning, and as I mentioned, we have the community fair upstairs. There's people in this room that make the Hyperledger Foundation special. And those people are everybody in this room. So we want to make sure that we have a welcoming by regions, by different communities that we have. So please do go up to the community fair. And today I want to recognize a specific regional chapter that over the last year in 2022 has really brought forward what it means to be a community, to grow a community, to extend the community beyond their own region into a global perspective. So the India region chapter not only has a very large amount of members. They're up to close to 15,000 members within the meetup community itself. But they also have been contributing. And we've been helping them and working with them to make sure that they continue to contribute. They have 20 plus maintainers out of that regional chapter, over 100 contributors. And it's great to see that the community support obviously comes back into the developer community. So I want to thank the India regional chapter. For those of you in India that are watching the virtual live stream or the recording, thank you so much. For those of you in the room, is anybody in the room this morning from the India regional chapter or any of our regional India members? There's one right there. There's a few. All right, cool. Thank you. Thank you so much. You makes the Hyperledger Foundation special. This morning, we put out some news. We put out some project news. We put out some member news. There's some great stories from our members of products and releases that they have put out as well. Yesterday, during the technical steering committee, we did announce Cactus. The Cactus project is merging with Weaver, with the Weaver Lab. And it is going to be known as Hyperledger Cacti. What's really important to understand about this, this is the first time that the Hyperledger community is doing this, is bringing together a project and a lab, is that it just points to the maturing of the foundation, the maturing of these projects, and really highlights that collaboration and working together for the greater good of the community works out already. So I want to thank IBM for their contributions of the Weaver Lab that happened last June and continue throughout the year. And for Hyperledger Cactus, the main maintainers of Accenture and Fujitsu. And we're really looking forward to a great story with lots of cacti in the marketplace, and hopefully not a lot of prickly movements going forward. Another announcement that we made is Hyperledger Firefly, which is one of our projects. Version 1.1 was announced yesterday as well. This releasing introduces new features to allow developers to access both private and public chains with the tools that the enterprise needs, of course. This release actually introduced something called the Web3 gateway mode. And I recommend if you haven't been to any of the sessions, there's some sessions today on the agenda. And there's also a half-day workshop on Hyperledger Firefly tomorrow over at the Gibson. Please do go check that out. And all the maintainers for Firefly in the room, any of the folks there, hands raised, go talk to them, great community builders. And we're very happy to have Firefly in the project as well. A couple other things. I'm also pleased to announce that in partnership with the Linux Foundation Training, we are just launching today a new Getting Started with Self-Sovereign Identity course. This is going to be a free course. Many of you remember the Enterprise Blockchain course that we released in 2017? Over 200,000 people have been educated by that Enterprise Blockchain course. And we do update it pretty much every year. We just updated it in the spring. So we want to make sure that when we talk about SSI and digital identity, that we are educating the market with what our community has been working on. So pre-eromement is now open and the course is going to be available starting October 5th.


If you think destinations and destination marketing organizations aren't business as usual in 2020, you'd only partially be right. My experience has been to witness a ton of creativity and ingenuity when it comes to destinations reaching out to their clients and connecting them in a time where it's not safe to do so in person. In this week's video, we're hearing from three industry leaders from across Canada share their stories of how their destinations have gone above and beyond to connect with their clients. Miranda G with Business Events Victoria in Victoria, BC. Tammy LeBlanc with Discover Halifax. And Trina McLeod with Meetings and Conventions Prince Edward Island. Come join me, folks. We're going on a trip. Hi, I'm Miranda G with Business Events Victoria. I'm going to talk about how we've been engaging our clients during this time and what we've been doing here is look at doing virtual events such as a virtual cooking show. We've partnered with our local chef, Chef Dan Hayes from the London Chef Cooking School, where he has changed his format of his cooking classes before he used to have classes where he would cook and demonstrate in his kitchen. And since COVID, he's been demonstrating through virtual events and engaging with people online to create these wonderful dishes. So along with our hotel partners, we partner with Chef Dan and hosted a series of cooking events with our clients across the country. And the purpose of this was really just to engage with our clients to update them on what's happening in Victoria. And to be honest, who doesn't want to connect through food and drink. So it was a series of events where we're learning about some of our local recipes, learning about the ingredients we have in Victoria, and using those along with our local chef to create these amazing dishes that we can then enjoy together. And the reason why we decided to do this was really we recognized that during this time, people still want to connect. It's so important to connect and have fun and communicate with each other still. And although we weren't able to do these events in person, as we are used to doing, we can still do this virtually. And for myself, this was really motivating to keep me going because part of the passion and love I have for our meetings in the street and events and what we do is the people that we get to meet and talk with. So having these events to see our friends again and to connect with them and enjoy an activity together really has kept things positive and filled up my hopes and dreams of one day that we will do this again in person. So something I wanted to share with everybody is a motivational tip that I've kind of thought about and it's kind of kept me going during this time. It's a quote from Buddha and I'm going to read this out to you. The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, nor to anticipate troubles. But to live the present moment wisely and earnestly. Thank you. Hello, my name is Trina McLeod and I'm a business development manager with meetings and conventions Prince Edward Island. Since March of 2020, we've been reaching out to clients and prospective clients with what we have been calling a PEI Pick Me Up. It's a little package of PEI goodies with an written note and we've shipped out quite a few to date and we also have another shipment going up before the holiday season. The importance of doing this during this time is we feel is that it's important to connect with clients and potential clients as well as showing our love and support and compassion for the industry and that we're all in this together and we will get through it. And who doesn't love a little pick me up in the mail. Any motivational tips I can offer during this time would be to take a chance, take a leap of faith, things you're doing things that you've never done before that you never would have seen yourself doing before. But we are doing them. They've become our reality and what we have to do moving forward. And what I have found that when I'm doing these little leaps of faith and things that I've never done before is a feeling of success. When I have achieved them, sometimes they're not perfect. Like this video is not perfect, but you learn from everything that you do and it gives you a little feeling of a little pep. Hi everyone, I'm Tammy O'Blanc with Discover Halifax based in Ottawa. I truly appreciate Leanne recognizing the creative efforts of many in our industry this year and let's face it it's been a doozy. We've been busy at Discover Halifax focusing on projects and initiatives to keep Halifax top of mind when we can't meet face to face with our clients. Our leadership team has given us the freedom and the encouragement to try new ideas. And a few of these projects include a new Discover Halifax website that will be launched in Q1 of 2021. It will include virtual 3D tours of our venues and hotels. The first time in Canada that such a comprehensive and complete series of venue and partner tours have been captured and shared. And we also had a multi-touchpoint project launch in October called Hosted in Halifax. It targets a Canadian association in corporate markets. And it combines a web-based approach through the creation of Hosted in Halifax.com, a uniquely Nova Scotian gift package, and invitations to have a virtual coffee for those who receive the gift. We partnered with our members to create content that features our hotels, off-site venues, and of course the Halifax Convention Centre. Last new properties that have come on board, like the five-star Sutton Place Hotel, which opened in September, and the upcoming opening of the Mirror and Autograph Collection by Marriott in 2021. The site also includes up-to-date best practices and safety protocols, as well as a planner's toolkit. Our members created personal videos for the site. And make sure you check out the bloopers because they're pretty funny. We felt it was important at this time to do so because it brought us all together with our local members and eventually with our clients. It's added a personal touch on both fronts during a time when many were feeling isolated and it also helped us focus on the future. We all know this pandemic will end. And when our clients are ready to start planning face-to-face events again, they can feel comfortable knowing that they have partners in Halifax. It's been fun and motivating to work on this project. And our client feedback has been encouraging. Plus, we've gotten some new leads and does that ever make me happy? If you're feeling stuck, my suggestion is to go back to what's important in our industry. To me, it's creating and maintaining those relationships in your own unique way. Thank you.


Hello, and welcome to NewsClick's International Round. It's almost a truism that the relations between countries across the world are to a large extent mediated by oil. From the U.S. intervention in Iran in the 50s to the Gulf War in the 90s and even the politics with Iran today, oil has played a considerable role. To talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Purukayastha, founding editor of NewsClick. Hello, Prabir. Prabir, as you know, the first round of U.S. sanctions has kicked in against Iran. The second round is going to kick in in November. And it is this round which actually focuses on oil. So how would you analyze these sanctions and the global geopolitics around it considering oil supply rules? I think it's important to understand that the role of oil, particularly in the region, because Saudi Arabia is another big producer, United Arab Emirates is a big producer, Qatar is a big producer, and of course Iraq and Iran were the two other producers. Iraq at the moment is a bit out of the equation under partial U.S. and Iran hegemony. So it makes Iraq a little more complicated, the rest. For a part of the time, Qatar was firmly in the under U.S. domination. It still has a major U.S. base in the region. But with the kind of sanctions that Saudis have imposed on Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar is a bit of an outlier at the moment. In fact, it shares one of the gas fields with Iran. So there is a shared, shall we say, stake also that it has with Iran. So it's not really completely on the Saudi United Arab Emirates and the U.S. side. If we take these three countries, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and of course Saudis, the bigger producer, then you will see the states of Hormuz becomes a very important part of the equation. You have the biggest choke point of transit in the world is the states of Hormuz, which has roughly 19 million barrels per day that passes through it. If you see also the total amount of oil that is transported, you will see that two-thirds of it is through seas. And I think it's roughly about 60 to 63% of the total that passes through seas. And a very significant part of it is passing through states of Hormuz. If that is taken out of the equation, that means if there is a war with Iran, very chance, states of Hormuz will get closed. And if it does, the world economy will take a huge hit, because this is the main supply route to both India, China, Japan and Korea. So we have a huge stake in this part of the world. So US basically at the moment wants to take Iran out of the equation without getting into war, that means the states of Hormuz does not close. But Iran's contribution to the global energy basket actually dries up. And this is the attempt that it is doing by now imposing sanctions, as you said, on oil, which means that it will be very difficult for countries like India and China to get to dollar oil. So essentially if they want to buy Iran oil, they have to both get out of the dollar economy, particularly with oil transactions. And we'll also have to look at bottoms, which do, that means tankers, which are not under, shall we say, the control of the West, in terms of the basic insurance premium that has to be given. You see, earlier also India had a problem, not because of only transactions that it had to make in rupees, or for a time it made in Turkish lira also, but also because their ability to buy oil and transfer it to India through tankers became a problem, because tankers would not get insurance, because insurance companies would come under US sanctions. So this is the complex issue that we have to see in terms of Iranian sanctions. And the US attempt is really to drive Iran out of the market by imposing sanctions. The question is, what will India do? China has indicated it will use Iranian tankers, its own tankers, and it is going to work out alternate payments and not use the dollar. So they seem to be pretty clear which way they want to go. Turkey has also announced that it is not going to suspend the oil ship and so on, we'll have to see what it really does. India at the moment seems to be dithering. It's not very clear what it will do. Does it give in to the US and accept that it will not buy oil? And the current indications are it will not reduce buying oil from Iran, but will not increase it. Will it seek special dispensation from the United States as a partner and various other things it does, because Modi has indicated at least on the issue of China that it is willing to play ball, at least on the Asian containment of China policy. That's something that we have to see whether they will actually agree or not. If we don't, then of course we are okay, we'll have some problems, how to import, how to pay and so on. But if we do agree to what the Americans are asking us to do, there's a huge problem because the price of oil in the international market which is non-Iranian oil will immediately probably jump for us from 15 to 20% because this is close to us. The prices that Iranians are giving are cheaper. It's oil which our refineries have been accepting, they won't have to tinker with that. So it's going to have economic consequences. And with the current balance of payments, low growth rates, all that we are seeing today, I think it will be very economically very dangerous for India to do so. Second choke point and that's another interesting issue is the states of Malacca. And if you see the states of Malacca, this is also where India's, shall we say, naval exercises in the United States and with Australia and Japan have been held. So this is the second choke point and again this is primarily oil shipments to China. And obviously this has strategic importance for China. And this is one of the reasons that the economic corridor that China is trying to work out in Pakistan and develop into the Ghadar port is really for this because then Iranian oil or Iranian natural gas can come to Ghadar and then be pumped to China through Pakistan and of course parts of Afghanistan into China. So this is the other part of the equation. We won't understand the geostrategic importance for the economic corridor that China is trying to build through Pakistan unless we understand that all these naval exercises of the states of Malacca is also aimed at the second choke point in the world. These are the biggest choke points, states of Hormuz and Malacca far beyond the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal. So these choke points are very, very critical for both India and China. And therefore Chinese are trying to prevent this from happening. The states of Malacca getting closed and they're getting impacted and that's why the Ghadar-Gwadar port for them has become important. This would be an alternative way to get Iranian oil and gas unless they can build the pipelines to Central Asia which is some distance away. And talking about pipelines actually if you look at US policy statements and US research documents on this issue, a lot of their emphasis actually has been on how do you find alternatives to the states of Hormuz. I mean they have considered certain Saudi pipelines as an option of course but still their capacity is very limited. So do you see that as a possibility that might actually say help make up in case, at least as far as the Saudi Arabians or the Americans are concerned, make up the shortage in oil? No, I don't think there is any way they can do it because Saudi Arabia whatever they have tried to build and the most they have, suppose it is 3.9 million barrels per day that they can transfer, which could be considered as spare capacity. But at the moment even that's very, very doubtful. The figure itself is very, very doubtful. If you look at 19 million barrels and 3.9 million barrels very clear that there's a huge shortfall that hit the global market if this happens. And states of Hormuz is crucial for both Saudi Arabia and for Iran. So it's not just Iran that we are talking about, it's also for Saudi Arabia, it's also true for United Arab Emirates, it's also important for other countries in the littoral states as it were of the states of Hormuz. So I think this is going to be one of the major reasons why US military really doesn't want to attack Iran because they understand that closing states of Hormuz is relatively easy if any war takes place. And therefore I think they are very reluctant, understanding the geo-strategic importance as you said, oil being one of the important elements of geo-strategic in the world. And the US military has been very reluctant to get involved in Iran. Apart from the fact they are already in Afghanistan for the more than 10 years, have not been able to successfully handle it. Iraq has been a disaster for them. Libya is still a big disaster. So given all of this, I think a military misadventure is the last thing they want. And therefore the Trump policy, can he do it painlessly? What risk the Trump policy carries of course to the dollar itself? Because oil is the new gold in terms of the, shall we say the foreign exchange issue. And begging dollar to oil means that all transfers of money between nations for buying oil or natural gas takes place to the dollar. And if that de-linking takes place, then US hegemony over the financial system would actually weaken. So I think the fact that they cannot find alternatives and that therefore people will be forced to buy oil from Iran and natural gas from Iran is also they're risking their underpinning of their dollar which is really the oil economy which most of the oil sales in the world are denominated in dollars. And looking at out of the angle here, I mean we've also, if you look at the supply maps we see that say other key producers include for instance Russia or for that matter Venezuela and there are also certain choke points there. So how does the US policy regarding its own possible reserves in terms of say, shall actually figure factor into this whole equation? Is there also politics going on there? Well I think one of the arguments that Trump is making while he's trying to say I would like to normalize relations with Russia but the question of Western Europe has been very clear that Western Europe should pay for NATO, it's one part of it. The second part of it, why are they accepting the pipeline from Russia and greater hydrocarbon dependence on Russia? Instead they should buy our shale oil and buy our natural gas which we can liquefy and send to them. So there's a clear underpinning of hydrocarbons in their Russia and West Europe policy itself and it seems to be dichotomy that why would he threaten friends like Western Europe and also make all these noises about Russia being, you know, why are you buying Royal and gas to Russia? At the same time say we need to make friends with Russia. So there seems to be a dichotomy in this but it is not once you see where Trump is coming from essentially increase geopolitically the hydrocarbon shall be say quantum that United States can bring to the market. United States has been a big player. In fact it bought a lot of oil and gas but compared to what it produces that was not such a big amount and therefore with shale oil, shale gas coming into the market they have been able to overcome even that little bit of dependence that they had on West Asia, it must be understood that their dependence on West Asia was not the issue. Controlling West Asia hydrocarbon means you control the world's geostrategic very important resource and you also control in that sense the exchange rate of the dollar. So this is the reason that they wanted to control that the West Asia region also not purely for import into United States and that also explains that if they take Venezuela and Russia out to the market the debt caterer of course will be Saudi Arabia but also the United States which could bring then its own hydrocarbon reserves particularly with shale oil and shale gas into the market. How long and how viable the shale gas, shale oil option is we have to see because that's at the moment there are a lot of hype and claims about it but I'm not sure how it really is going to transform the hydrocarbon scenario as many people are saying but it is clear that their enmity towards Venezuela if you look at Venezuela, you look at Iran, you look at Qatar, you look at the choke points all of it gives you a different picture of the way the world is going. Then if you just look at that Russia is a friend of Trump trying to destabilize American elections that America does not like lack of democracy as Venezuela has never stopped them from supporting dictators anywhere in the world that suddenly they've discovered that Maduro who's held elections is not somebody who they can actually tolerate. This all shows that there is a completely different set of equations that plays in this game and it's a matter more of geo-strategies of hydrocarbons that also underpins US foreign policy. Thank you, Prabir. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching.


You want to come down? Come on. Good boy. Very good. Kutra, come in boy. Now we'll turn him horizontally. Usually monkeys are happy either way. Now we go downstairs for the scanner. So here is the boy. Now he's in this chair because we need to transport him downstairs We want him to come out with his hat because we're going to scan him very soon. He's happy to come because he knows he will get his peanuts. Good boy. Very good. Need to remove this cap. We use the head post in order to keep him still during the scan because the image quality obviously would be much better if the monkey doesn't move. And now we are ready to go in. All right, so here we have the monkey. We have a CCTV camera that can see how he's going inside the scanner. So in the face of him there is a computer screen and below him there are two hand sensors that can detect hand movement so he will sort of respond with his hands left to right. His head is fixed because we cannot acquire fmi images if he's moving. And he has these coils on the left and right that basically allow to receive this signal that is produced by brain activity. Every two seconds we get an image, a complete image of the brain. What we can measure there are slight differences, slight changes. We can determine which brain areas are more active in certain time points when the monkeys make certain decisions. So you see changes every two seconds roughly but they're very very subtle changes. The signal that we pick up is very very small so therefore you have to scan them for say half an hour. See for example this is an image that we acquired while the animal was asleep. So anesthetized and there we can zoom through the brain completely. Here below you can see his hand when they move so usually he keeps them next to the body like he sits as a cat would sit. And he receives quite a bit of juice so you don't actually see but through this tube that goes to his mouth. Cranberry I think or black currant that monkeys like a lot. So they learn that for example when the square is blue this is more valuable they will drink more and when it's green they will drink less and at the same time there are dots. So these dots represent the probability so they do not always drink juice but only a certain percentage of the time. And so we train them for months to learn independently about the color and the probability that is the magnitude and the number of dots that is the probability. And now in the scanner we want to see when they see this new stimuli if they are able to sort of anticipate what is going to happen. So this task is relatively easy because they just need to press when they see a stimulus they don't really need to make a choice but we want to see what happens in their brain when they make this movement because they can anticipate the likely outcome even if this is not certain but is probabilistic. So what we actually want to see is not his behavior by itself but what happens in the brain so what expectation he has and this is something you don't do in humans because usually humans can participate in an experiment but they just come once and they do one hour but these animals can be trained and so follow through time so we can see their learning pattern and see how their brain activity changes through this learning.


Okay, so with that, how about we get started for today? I'm going to talk to you about pigments and colors and dyes, oh my, some of the chemistry behind the colors we see. I've got some photographs I've taken and then photographs I've rated from various places on the internet. This particular slide, I've got some daisies and a rose of Sharon from my own backyard. I had the flu last week, so I still got a bit of bronchitis this week. I apologize for coughing occasionally, but it's all for the best, believe me. Okay, so humans like art, we've been drawn graffiti in various places for thousands and thousands of years. Here's a lovely example. This is a bison drawn in red ochre from the famous Altamira Caves in Spain. It dates to about, oh, close to 18,000 years ago. And it's done mostly in red ochre, which is hematite or iron oxide, the regular old orange iron oxide, rust. And this image is public domain from Wikipedia, hopefully public domain. So we also have been doing pottery for a long time. One of the distinct types of pottery from ancient times are the black figure vases and the red figure vases from ancient Greece. And there's some wonderful chemistry associated with these pots. The red is essentially the same red that made up the bison in the last slide, iron oxide. The black is a slightly different iron oxide. It's an FE-304, which is the composition of magnetite. It's, you know, in FE-203 you got a pair of iron 3 pluses. In FE-304 you have a pair of iron 3 pluses and an iron 2. And the amalgamation of all of those ends up changing the color absorption profile. So it absorbs all the light instead of just the light that allows you to see red color. And these pots are wonderful. They basically show a very sophisticated knowledge of firing, basically taking the clay and baking it so that it chemically changes into a different state. So essentially, you know, to make one of these, first you have to make a clay pot. And then you have paint. I mean, I've got paint and quotes there. Figures on it with a slip. A slip is a dilute clay. It's got a larger particle size. It may be a different clay. It may have different pigment sand. For the black figure vases, there's a lot of scratching of details into the figures. And first what they do is they fire the pot in an oxygen-rich atmosphere at 800 degrees. That makes the entire pot bright red. You can't see any of the figures on it. And then they raise the temperature and throw in green wood. This makes carbon monoxide. And the entire pot turns black with the formation, the transformation of the rust iron 2 oxide into this magnetite. And I say almost smelting here because CO and carbon and low oxygen at these sorts of temperatures are very reminiscent of modern smelting techniques. So this is the knowledge that goes into them. Finally, they let the kiln that the stuff is done in cool back down. The thing about the 950 degrees Celsius is that the slip basically turns into a glass and it protects the black color from interacting with air. Whereas everywhere else on the pot, if it turns black, it reoxidizes to the red form. So this is very sophisticated stuff and here's this particular objects in the British Museum. Another example, it's called the siren vase. It's also in the British Museum. It's a more advanced technique but it's still the same sort of three-stage firing process. Notice how the figures here are red and have a little more fine detail. Why am I showing you pottery when this is a chemistry talk? Well, so far I think I convinced you that the potteries just developing the colors on these does involve a lot of knowledge of materials. In 2004-2005, I used to have a class, chemistry and art, that I taught to our honors students. It was a great class. The unfortunate thing is that I lost most of my content for that class when I had a high drive die on me. So this is an attempt to bring back a lot of the content that I used to have. So continuing, hey, let's get the question out of the way first. What is a pigment?  Well, they're both colored compounds and usually what people say is the difference is solubility. Does one dissolve, does another dissolve? Pigments are the ones that are generally not soluble, at least in water. Dyes are generally soluble, but they need to be anchored to whatever is being dyed, the cloth or whatever, through the use of additives. And these are called mordents often. I'm not really going to talk about the dyeing process in this particular talk. There's so much content for chemistry and art that I'm planning a series of talks in the next coming months for this. So here's some photos. This is from the St. Louis Art Museum in 2003. They had a lovely display of pigments from their Renaissance. And so I've got a few pigments. I think my laser pointer is showing up. That's actual silver. That little one is actual copper. I've got matter, coca chanel, carmine, gum, arabic, and indigo. We'll talk about indigo a little bit later in the talk. So, during the Renaissance, we had a variety of both organic dyes and pigments and inorganic dyes and pigments. The inorganic ones tend to be a bit more robust and might survive being put on pottery, for example, and firing up to 900 degrees Celsius. I don't think indigo would survive that. It would basically turn into carbon dioxide and water. I've got speed bumps. Here's some photos from my lab. This is cyclopentadienyl bistrofenolphosphine ruthenium chloride. Look at the beautiful orange crystals. Yeah, okay, it's a speed bump. So let's talk, and the speed bumps mark transitions in my talk. So one of the things that if we're going to talk about color, we have to talk about light. So light is just one form of electromagnetic radiation. And one way of quantifying the electromagnetic radiation is just to look at the wavelength of the photons. And photons can be emitted with wavelengths, radio waves. There's like 10 to the third meters. That's like a kilometer long. I don't know if any radio stations actually use that sort of wavelength, but it exists. Microwaves are like seven meters long. Infrared are several microns long. Now the visible light is about half a micron, half a micron or so. If we use nanometers as our measuring unit, so a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. So there are 10 to the 9 nanometers in a meter. Well, 400 nanometers to 800 nanometers is what's visible light. So this little region down in here where you can see the familiar Lloyd G. Biv of the visible spectrum. So shorter than that we have ultraviolet, and there's a couple of different flavors of ultraviolet. UVA, UVB, UVC. Shorter than that we have x-rays and gamma rays. And interestingly, all of these frequencies can give you some chemical information. Okay, so Sysigie is telling me that radio waves in the AM band are 200 to 600 meters long. Awesome. So, okay, I circled down here. I circled down here where the visible region is, kind of in the middle of all of this electromagnetic radiation. If you could see in the UV, like bees do, flowers would look very much different. So essentially, everything you see is just in this tiny little region over here. 400 nanometers is the violet end of the spectrum. 800 nanometers is the red end of the spectrum. And many of the familiar primary colors you know are in the middle here. Okay, but that's not every color we actually can see. So, one thing to remember about color is that your perception of color is constructed within your brain. Okay, so there's a little bit of physics involved. The eyes focus an image on a retina. So, the retina is your detection device. Just like the diode array device, charge transfer device, I guess, in the cameras in your phone are, you know, what a lens focuses an image on. You know, that part of the physics is pretty similar. There's cells in the retina that react to light. They actually have dyes. Lodopsin is one dye and there's a variation on the theme of Lodopsin. What Lodopsin does is it changes shape when light interacts with it and eventually it changes back. The shape change causes the specialized cells to send signals to nerve cells. So eventually the photons falling on your retina cause nerve cells to fire. That transmits information to the brain and your visual centers process the image to perception. So, you know, besides just the physics of the outside world, your perception of color is individual to you and constructed within your brain. I know there's a lot of philosophical debate about whether what I see as red means the same sort of thing that you see as red to you. I usually sidestep that and say, well, you know, we're kind of constructed the same, so hopefully my red and your red are similar. Unless, of course, like my partner, you have red-green color blindness and then my red and my green might look the same to you. Okay, so color is constructed in your brain. Here's more of a view. Notice in all of these slides I've tried to be good about making attributions. If the text is too small to see easily, it's probably attribution text. You don't need to see it right now. I'll make a PDF of this available when my chat is over. I forgot to do that this week. So light falls on, let's see, light actually falls on the retina and the retina is constructed so that the light sensitive cells are contained in these rods and cones. And the light actually has to go through a set of nerve cells before it falls on the rods and cones and then the nerves take the signals to the main optic nerve. That surprised me. I would have thought it would have been easier to have the rods and cones on the outside. Yes, I agree with tagline here. So here's the thing with playing with your brain.  This is a freshman psychology experiment. If you could look at these words and name the colors. Do not read the words out. So the first one in the list is not red, it's green. There's a bit of a cognitive distortion that happens because the word red is screaming in your brain as you try to say green. So when I say green, purple, blue, brown, yellow, red and blue, that's fine as fast as I can do it even though I practice because it's screaming in my brain. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pink, brown. So the brain can be fooled. Perceptions of colors are something that we can play with. Yeah, it would help to be illiterate with this one. This is actually something I do for my freshman chemistry class when I'm trying to get them comfortable with maybe not knowing something or maybe not being able to find the right word.  All right, moving on, moving on. Hey, the perception of colors constructed in your brain, but it has certain elements to it. The rods are sensitive to light, but they don't give so much wavelength information. They are very good for low level, low levels of light, and they give you kind of black and white information. There's three types of cone and each is sensitive to a different wavelength profile. And that's what I've shown here. So we've got on the x-axis of this graph, 400 to 800-ish, and the different profiles of the cones are shown. There's one that's very sensitive to the blue end, and there's two that have a surprising amount of overlap. So I think, you know, if you have anything long with either one of those, then it becomes difficult to distinguish between the red and green end of the spectrum. And, well, so I'm a chemist.  I think this would be a wonderful talk for someone who actually knows what they're talking about. So, let's see, looking at the nearby chat, Susagee, I guess that the rods and cones are at the back to retina because those cells are sensitive to pressure. So it makes sense to protect them by not having, yes, okay, cool. My understanding of physiology and how things are put together in the body is, I mean, I can grind someone up and tell you what they're made of, you know, how all the bits are put together. That's beyond me. So, attributions for the psychology section. I'm trying to be very good about making sure that, you know, I have no plagiarism here. I actually read the Creative Commons attribution licenses, and so authors and where it is, and the actual link that will be in the PDF, you can click on it when you get it. Here's another speed bump, some photos I've taken. The tree on the left is in my front yard. It's a maple tree. It turns this glorious red, orange, yellow, and green at times in the fall. Another orange speed bump, that's Seth, where my little laser pointer, he's asleep next to me. We made some elephant. This is something from my lab. One of my students made this stuff. It's something stirring around in ethanol. We filtered it off. Beautiful orange color. Here's some more orange stuff. The only stuff I'm making in my lab is orange and red. I really like it when I get a blue sometime. So I'm going to talk about blue stuff later in the talk. And again, the Daisy's Black Eyed Susan, I guess, is what we call them. That's from a backyard. So how do we get colors? Okay, so we can get colors from both more physical techniques or more chemical properties, physical properties of molecules. And I'll talk just a little bit about dispersion and interference. I do want to note there's a lovely video of how soap films give you rainbow colors by Paul Doherty. Paul was a giant here at Science Circle and we all miss him. So I've got two. Maybe I can hunt those down and put them in. Yes, got them. Okay, I'm hunting down the links and I'm going to copy them, put them in local chat so you can see them at your leisure. Moving on with the first thing I was going to talk about, dispersion. These are related to refractions, butterfly wings and other feathers and many other biological samples rely on dispersion to give you colors. Colloidal solutions can give you colors. So I was going to put the Pink Floyd album here, Dark Side of the Moon. And if you're lucky, I won't sing any of it for you. But I was also worried about copyright infringement and stuff like that.  So here's one that's reminiscent. It's basically white light going through a prism being split into the different colors. Essentially each wavelength reacts a little bit differently to going from air to glass slows down and they're a little bit differently. And the angle that it gets deflected by is slightly different. So what comes out is the colors all spread together, spread apart rather than together. Dispersion can do some wonderful things. This is the Lysodris Cup. These are images from the British Museum site. And in fact I can copy those into local chat. So if you're interested, you can just grab the local chat later, enter. And the thing about the Lysodris Cup is that it looks different depending on where you put the lamp. So by reflected light, it looks like a greenish cup. So this cup was actually carved from a single block of glass. And it's got a couple of wonderful things about it. The colors are wonderful. Thus the craftsmanship in this carving because you can see the snakes on the side are almost completely detached. You can see it clearly on the right hand image. They're almost completely detached. But this was all carved from one single piece of glass. It wasn't, those snakes weren't attached later on. So that's a wonderful thing about this. It is worth a visit in real life. I'm hoping to get to the British Museum at some point. Iron dissolved in glass would make greenish glass. That's why I assume the reflected light looks greenish. The transmitted light looking red. Well, the light is dispersed by nanoparticles of silver and gold that are dispersed throughout this glass. I don't think that the Romans in the fourth century AD knew that they were making nanoparticles of silver and gold. However, the manufacturing process of this particular glass ended up giving us tiny, tiny particles that disperse light. And the least dispersed light I think is the red. And that ends up coming through. It ends up being exactly the same mechanism that results in sunsets being red. Very similar to why the sky is usually blue. Why the sky on Mars is red. You know, basically sort of Rayleigh scattering, I guess that's all. Beautiful example. One of the prime examples that I use in my class. Let's see where are we next slide. Okay, so that was dispersion. Dispersion can give us colors. Interference can give us colors. So this is the soap bubble type thing. You know, essentially, if we look at my little diagram on the left, we can see a light beam coming into an object. And say the object is a transparent film of some thickness. Some of the light can be reflected off of the surface. Some can penetrate, go through and then be reflected off the inner surface. Now, those two light beams have traveled different distances. They started off in phase. They started off with all the peaks of their photons and all the valleys of the photons in phase, especially if it was a laser. But after the reflections, one of these light beams has traveled a different distance. There's no guarantee that they'll be in phase anymore. So if it happens that their peaks and valleys still line up, they'll have what's called constructive interference. And you'll be able to see some light there. If they've traveled so that a peak of one light ray overlaps with the trough of another, then they will essentially destroy each other you won't be able to see. So we'll see a pattern of constructive interference and destructive interference.  Yeah, this diagram is on Wikipedia actually. There's some really good stuff there. I was not so keen on Wikipedia in the early days, but I think there's been enough scientists going through the various pages to give very accurate stuff. So yes, it's not the distance, it's also the refractive index. So the angle that, the various angles that the light gets refracted at or comes out at, as well as the different distances plays a role in what you see. So butterflies take example or take advantage of this effect. Many of the colors that you see in butterflies are not dyes or pigments or anything that they've kind of had to biochemically synthesize to give them a color. They can use nanostructures. So take the butterfly and you keep looking at it under more and more expansion, more and more magnification, until eventually you need a scanning electron microscope. At the highest magnification you can see it's essentially a diffraction grating. This butterfly has grown scales on its wings that have the properties of diffraction gratings that give it the colors that you see. So this ends up being a mechanism by which we can see some really wonderful colors. And it doesn't really have a biochemical cost and the, well it does, I mean they have to grow the wings, but to change their colors all they have to do is change the spacing in the diffraction grating, which is a lot easier to do than coming up with a biochemical pathway to synthesize a different coloring agent. So from what I see here if I were to make a guess I would say that it would be fairly easy for generations of butterflies to be able to change their colors. And I think we've seen that in nature before, especially for moths. Hey a speed bump, here's some things I made in my lab. My students have made these wonderful little crystals. This is a, let's see, what is it? If you take ethylene diamine and salicylaldehyde and boil them up in ethanol and then let the solution cool, you get this lovely, it's called saline. We use it as scaffolding for our ruthenium compounds. And here's some of the final compounds. When you shove the ruthenium in there they turn dark blue and purple. In the middle, of course, there's my cat. Well, he passed away a few years ago, but it's a nice picture of him inside the planet glass set box. Okay, so dispersion and interference, physical ways of getting color. A more chemical way, or at least a way that involves the physical properties of actual molecules, is to look at things we call electronic transitions. Okay, I'm not going to try and scare anyone with this stuff. We're going to start simple. So hydrogen. You've got two hydrogen atoms, they share electrons to make a molecule. Essentially, you've got hydrogen, nucleus, two electrons kind of hanging out usually between the two nuclei and the other nuclei. And essentially, what electrons can do, where they can go in the molecule, that stuff's all quantized. When you get to very small objects, most of their properties end up being able to only take specific values. So for hydrogen, there's actually only two allowed spaces and energies that electrons can occupy. And when two hydrogen atoms get together, they make a bond, we basically have a shape that I've outlined here on the right that looks kind of like an egg. It has two full chi in it. Those are the actual nuclei. Most of the time, the electrons would hang out in between the nuclei and cause the plus charges of the nuclei to be attracted to them to keep the whole thing together as a unit. We call this thing an orbital. And in fact, this is not meant to be offensive, it's the highest occupied molecular orbital. Chemistry is a hurtful subject sometimes. The highest occupied molecular orbital is where the electrons are that have the highest energy in the molecule. In this case, there's only two orbitals. This other guy, lowest unoccupied molecular orbital. The lowest unoccupied molecular orbital has this shape. If electrons happen to be in this orbital, the nuclei can kind of see each other a bit better. The electrons, if they're out on either side, repel each other, this thing is destabilizing. If we think about where electrons can go, the probability of finding them as having wave properties, constructive interference and destructive interference end up being something important in the construction of these orbitals. Okay, that's where the orbitals come from, but why am I telling you this? Most of my students ask me that question at some point during lecture. Electronic transition is when an electron in one of these orbitals can absorb a photon and it can basically go up in energy to the higher orbital. So essentially what happens is that you get the electrons arranged like they are here, not in the same orbital anymore. This is a electronic transition. It's responsible for why things absorb energy. For hydrogen that happens in UV light, you cannot see 111 nanometers. So where do we go from now? Well, there's different molecules. Here's butadiene. Butadiene's got some orbitals. It's got lots of orbitals. It's got these things called p-orbitals. Each carbon has one. And we can put these atomic p-orbitals together. They are simply sitting in the molecule side by side. And we can basically look at four ways of putting them together. We can put them together with all the shading. This is phase information, all the shading happening on top of the molecule, all the unshading happen on the bottom of the molecule. And it turns out as you go up in energy, you get more of these nodal planes where the shading is on the top. Then the shading ends up going to the bottom. That's one nodal plane. This one, two nodal planes. And then finally three nodal planes. If we count them. You're allowed two electrons per orbital. So you start off with four because each carbon has one. One, two, three, four. You've got bonding happening up here. The word anti-bonding is not meant to be scary. It's meant to be, hey, this is in the shape of where electrons can go. But if you put electrons in, you get repulsive forces. This would be our highest occupied down here, our lowest unoccupied. The gap is only 258 nanometers now. Hydrogen was 111. This, oh, I'm sorry, this guy is, oh, I forget where it is. I think it's about 220. If you put another double bond, now you're at 258. The longer you make where the electrons can go. The longer you make the series of double bonds, the smaller that gap becomes. Or if you put a different type of atom in there. So notice how there's an oxygen in this molecule taking the place of this CH2 essentially if you're just looking at how the double bonds are going. The oxygen has electrons and they actually sit in the gap between what would otherwise be the HOMO and the LUMO. That makes the gap a little bit smaller. This guy is 314 nanometers. That is still in the UV, but it's starting to get to the 400 zone where we can see. So a summary slide, there's different types of orbitals. Here's one type that's supposed to be one of the pi star anti-bonding orbitals. I made that model up in Second Life. The little thing there is actually a moon. The different types of orbitals, there's bonding ones where the bonding happens and the electrons are shared kind of head on between atoms. The pi is where you have sideways sharing of reasons of electron density between atoms and are when atoms are not actually sharing electrons, they just have a pair of electrons hanging out. And then you have these weird anti-bondings, these empty levels where electrons can go after they've absorbed a photon. The beautiful thing about organic compounds, the two transitions on the left in the blue end to pi star, pi to pi star. For just pure organic compounds, that's your colors. Because these purple lines, the four on the right, end to sigma star, all the way over to sigma to sigma star. The energies of those are just way too high for you to be able to see those wavelengths. Yay! So, as you make these molecules bigger and bigger with more double bonds, look at the pattern here. You've got a double bond, single bond. My pointer is acting up a bit. You've got double bond, single bond. Double bond, single bond. And that pattern goes all the way to the other end of the molecule. Essentially that pattern, double bond, single bond, double bond, gives electrons some mobility and ends up increasing the wavelength. Beta carotene is responsible for the orange color of carrots and basically has absorption in the visible. You have to have fairly large molecules with lots of, when you use the science word conjugation, which essentially means double bond, then single bond, then double bond, to be able to see colors. So how do we study color? I'll show you a UV-Vis spectrometer. Again, from Wikimedia, actually this one's from Libra Text. They're actually very good too. You have a source, some lamp. There's a slit or a shutter that some light goes through. The light beam goes through a sample. And then the light beam can hit some sort of grating, like the butterfly's wing. A grating, a diffraction grating, can take your colors and send them in different directions. And then the light, after it's hit the grating, all the different colors are separated and then they can hit an array of detectors, like a diode array detector, or something that's very much like the light sensing element of the camera in your cell phone. And then this information can be sent to a computer. There's some very nice, almost do-it-yourself spectrometers that are available these days that simply take advantage of diffraction gratings that you can get quite easily, 3D printing, and using your actual camera as the detector. And they do a pretty nice job actually of dispersing the color and giving graphs. And so essentially what we can do is, here's two graphs. We can look at which wavelengths get absorbed and which wavelengths get transmitted. So the top is a nickel solution just dissolved in water. The bottom one is a nickel solution with dissolved in water but with lots of ammonia around. And you can see similarities. There's three peaks. The peaks are where light is absorbed, so you don't actually see the light at the wavelengths that are associated with these peaks. What you see coming through the solution, what gives you the actual colors you see, are these troughs. Because the troughs are where those specific wavelengths can just make it through the solution to your eye. So if you have a solution that absorbs blue light, then the green and red light are going to make it through the solution and then you'll see whatever mixture of green and red, whatever your brain does to that. Interesting part here, going from water to ammonia ends up moving all of these transitions to slightly higher energy. And there's a reason for that and I'll get to that in a little bit. So here's some copper solutions. We have a lab where my students make, they start off with hexapaquo-copper. That's copper with six water molecules attached. That's not hard to do, you just dissolve copper in water and there you go, you've got your six water molecules attached. I haven't shown it because it's so pale that you don't actually see it. The leftmost going to the right, we've added progressively more ammonia to the solutions. So we've got a solution where essentially the major species has one ammonia on it. That's the leftmost, the rightmost. Essentially there's five ammonias attached if the students made up these solutions correctly. What's going on here? Well, I'll show you in a second. Hey, these are my cats. Cats through the ages, 30 years worth of cats. Let's see. This is Ishtar. She's on the left. She's two years old. This is Seth. He's actually sitting in exactly the same spot right now looking at me exactly the same way. He's five years old. The other cats are Tori, Sim, Burt, Manitoba, and Willow, and they've actually passed away. Burt passed away in December. He was 18 years old. So our cats tend to last. We tend to take good care of them, but they get old to get cancer, things like that. So we've got our two right now, asleep and not threatening the keyboard in any way. I'll stop talking about them in case they do. Here's another speed bump. Some more photos. These are actually all from my backyard. We've got dragonflies with colors from dispersion gradings. We've got tiger lilies of different sorts. There's a bee. I have no idea why bees are colored the way they are, but they are. That one is in a redbud tree. That's a tree that's local to the Midwest region in Illinois. The buds actually come. They erupt out of the bark of the main trunk. It's kind of a cool thing, and that's the same dragonfly. So I'll get back to why copper is colored the way it is at the end of my talk here, but do some show and tell. This is my blue period. All of these little round dots are supposed to be the RGB colors of these various dyes. All of these various pigments and indigos are dye. Starting off, we've known about blue for a long time. This is an example of a shabti. It's a small figurine that would be put in a tomb. Evidently, the small figurines were supposed to come to life and do chores that were necessary instead of having your dead loved one doing chores in the afterlife. So this little guy would go and harvest crops or something, having Fethi the first to harvest the crops. Fence, that's the type of ceramic that this is usually called. And this is an example of Egyptian blue. It's thought to be the first synthetic pigment. Its formula would be calcium, copper, tetra-silicate. Pretty much sand is silica, and the recipe apparently they used in later times bronze, which is a mixture of copper and tin to make their Egyptian blue. Interestingly, in Roman times, the recipe fell out of favor and was lost for a long time. And in modern times, it has been rediscovered. This is supposed to be the RGB look of the Egyptian blue. But I think from this particular object it looks a little lighter. I've tried to make the titles of these slides reflect which blue it is. Keep in mind that what your monitor is made of may or may not be able to reproduce colors accurately. So there may be some colors that when you see them in person are subtly different from anything you can see on a monitor. You've probably seen this before. A Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. There's two blues here. One of them is Prussian blue. And hey, Prussian blue is... Prussian blue has this structure as it's, and I'm going to bring down this model I've been using a few times. Well, maybe I'll just bring it down there. That's Prussian blue. Hopefully I haven't crushed anyone under it. It's iron cyanide. It's got iron 3 pluses. It's got iron 2 pluses. Let's see. All of the iron 2 pluses are attached to the carbon ends of the CN that makes the cyanide. All of the iron 3 pluses are attached to the nitrogen ends. And here the nitrogen ends are these grey areas on this representation. Let me move that back out of the way. Up we go. I'll move my camera so I can see what I'm doing. So Prussian blue is one. Cerulean blue is a cobalt stanate. So it's actually a cobalt 2 with a tin oxide The Prussian blue is a little darker than the Cerulean blue. Cobalt has a bad reputation for being toxic. It's well deserved. Prussian blue, even though it's called all the cyanide and it's not particularly toxic. And I've got some more pictures. There you go. There's the Prussian blue skeleton. And in fact in the lower left and the lower left I've got a more faithful representation. Inside each of the boxes there should be a water molecule. I've deleted that from the second life version of it because it's not totally necessary to have it. But you know essentially it's a very cubic looking structure and you can see that the cyanides are very strong. The cyanides are very strongly bound in the structure. They can't get out. So in fact a Prussian blue itself is non-toxic and there have been some research done with making magnetic nanoparticles of Prussian blue onto which you can graft drugs and hopefully use magnetism to concentrate the drug after it's been given to somebody in a particular area in the body. I don't think those are gone to anything clinical yet but it was an idea that was very popular for a while. There's the water molecule stabilized a lot. I actually think it does. For a lot of these lattices when you look at different metals like chromium and cobalt versions of these you have to adjust charge and sometimes you have potassium ions that take the place of waters to stabilize the charge. Otherwise it's a big void and as you know nature abhors the vacuum. If there isn't something in the void those may just collapse. Another famous painting here's a Renoir. He used cobalt blue and that's a cobalt aluminate and again cobalt is kind of toxic. It's nicer to go with things like Prussian blue. One of the things I noticed when I was visiting my colleagues in their art building before they had a new art building with safety built in was that they were doing many of the same things that my colleagues and I in chemistry were doing except with let's say less safety going on. So yeah that scared me. So I'd be worried about just using really really toxic chemicals as pigments. Things that are much less toxic are much nicer. Oh here's one of the cross-eyed stereograms of the cobalt blue crystal structure. Again when you look at the PDF of this you bust your eyes right now and see if you can get the images to overlap. Some people can do this, some people can't. It's a fairly complicated structure. The pink is either cobalt or aluminum. They randomly substitute for each other. The red are oxygen atoms. The thing about how the oxygen atoms are arranged each cobalt is attached to six in an octahedral fashion. Testing of artists for metal toxicity. I don't know if anyone's done it but I'm pretty sure that especially in the older days when safety seemed to be less of a concern that there are a lot of people whose lives were shortened. Yeah especially the yellow pigments would be chromium based a lot. Lead based, chromium based yes. So everything I've talked about so far that's blue has been pretty inorganic. Here's a indigo example. This is a kimono. It was made in Japan around 1820. This particular kimono is an example of some fabulous dyeing of silk in the 1820s. The indigo has been used in traditional cultures for many, many hundreds of years if not thousands of years. Let's see. I'm going to cut and paste some things soon so I'll get that ready. Quick. Okay. So what's indigo? Well it's actually a naturally occurring organic dye. We make it artificially today because it's in blue jeans. I mean essentially we use so much indigo that rowing it is unfeasible. Okay. I'm going to cut and paste these links into nearby chat. There's some beautiful traditional processing of indigo. From a site in India that is on Google Arts and Culture. If you haven't played with Google Arts and Culture I suggest that you do so. It's a great way of spending an afternoon. Essentially what these photos show is indigo leaves of the plant. Indigo tinctoria. I'm sorry. Indigo for tinctoria. This comes from Uttarakhand, India. Basically the leaves are put in a pot in the earth. They are allowed to ferment and this allows the indigo to come out of the leaves into the solution. The fermentation gives you a reducing environment. So one in which electrons are available gives you a basic environment. Under those conditions the indigo can be dissolved in its colorless form. Even though it looks blue there's a lot of the colorless form dissolved. And then you can soak cloth in there. Once you take the cloth out the next photo here. Once you take the cloth out and just hang it to dry the air can oxidize the indigo into a totally insoluble form that is color fast and stays in the fabric. So I've given you the structure of indigo here. There's a lot of this conjugation I mentioned earlier. The nitrogens have their own pairs of electrons. The blue form is what is on the left in this diagram. This is known as a redox dye. If you give this thing two more electrons those electrons end up hanging out on the oxygen. This disrupts the conjugation a little bit and just changes the properties of the molecule so that it's no longer blue. The charge allows it to dissolve in water. You have to make sure that the pH is right otherwise if hydrogen is attached to those oxygens it will be colorless but also not soluble. And the little equation at the bottom shows what happens with oxygen. Essentially you get back to the blue form. Firmantation is wonderful. We're actually getting a bioprocessing specialization in our chemistry program happening soon. At least I hope we've got the paperwork and it's going through the system. It'll basically a whole set of fermentation classes and quality control of fermentation classes that are going through now. How does the UV light affect the dye chemically? This particular one is more stable to UV. There are orange dyes called azodies that have two nitrogen atoms attached to each other. And essentially what can happen there is that nitrogen-nitrogen bond can end up getting cleaved. And when that happens your molecule falls apart and your orange color goes away. Azodies, reds, oranges, this is kind of why many of the orange dyes in the mid-20th century were not so color fast. I wonder how this was discovered. So in the UK in hundreds of years ago the plant that's called Wode-W-O-A-D also has indigo in it. So I actually think that it's fairly obvious when walking leaves of these plants are all around. I think that you actually do see the blue color and that would have attracted some attention because blue is very hard to get. So here's our newest blue, the Yin-Ming Blue discovered 2008-2009 by Maz Subramian at Oregon State University as part of NSF-sponsored research. They were looking for materials with high reflectivity in the near-infrared region. That's actually a little longer than the visible region, 900 to 2,000 nanometers. This color has been commercialized. It's close to cobalt blue. It's going to be a lot less toxic, I think. It says non-toxic but I'm going to keep that with a grain of salt. I don't know what yitrim indigo and manganese would do to you. I think I tried getting some examples but the examples seem to be copyrighted. So in lieu of examples, here's a crystal structure. I believe the yitrim atoms form layers separated from layers of manganese by the red oxygen atom. So this is the nice layered type structure. And again, this is a cross-eyed 3D sort of model. Look. And inorganic pigments for stained glass. This is at the end of my talk here, I think, rather than going on for another five hours about orbital structure for the orbitals and the like. Basically, I'll wrap up in the next few minutes. This is actually a stained glass piece that's in the church in my hometown. That's Cowinsville, Quebec, in Canada. And it's a memorial to a World War I soldier. Stained glass is a whole topic that really interests me and I think I'll probably try and do a whole talk on it in the future so I can learn more about it. Yellow colors and gray colors end up being well suited for using things like silver sulfide. You'd apply a paste of silver sulfide to glass. You'd heat the glass up. Some of the silver and sulfide ions would penetrate into the glass depending on what else is in the glass. You might get a yellow color or shades of gray. So finally, I'm going to actually just talk about orbitals just a tiny, tiny bit. Where do the inorganic colors come from? Well, they come from transitions in d-orbitals. So d-orbitals are these four leaf clover looking things. And this is a view of one of the landscapes I made in unity. Why would d-orbitals do this? I've got a little animation I've made in Second Life. I'll bring it forward. Essentially, if you've got six things attached to a d-orbital, or I'm sorry, six things attached to a metal, it's in an octahedral arrangement. What does that mean? You've got a metal that dates in at the origin of a XYZ Cartesian coordinate system. So there would be a... If it's octahedral, you'd have something on top, on bottom, to the left, to the right, in front and in back. But essentially, if you look at the left mo... I'm sorry, the rightmost little orbital I've got here, there's a box around it. And the little wooden spheres on the box correspond to places where an atom could be if it were in an octahedral coordination environment. There's two types of d-orbitals if you're considering left, right, top, bottom, front, back. There's the d-orbitals that point directly at those sites, and then there's the d-orbitals that point in between the sites. If you point at the sites, electrons in those d-orbitals are going to be raised in energy because they'll experience more repulsion. So this box is going to grab any d-orbital that has... that points directly at those left, right, front, back, top, bottom objects, and then is going to raise it in energy. So let's see if it actually does so. Oh, yes! The two of them go up, and then the rest are left alone. And this just loops over and over again. So essentially we get two sets of orbitals, one at lower energy, one at higher energy, and the blue colors, the nice colors we see for transition metal compounds, arise from different energies, or I'm sorry, from the promotion of electrons from the lower set to the upper set. So I have a question here. Will dye contributing to ADHD? I don't know. I kind of doubt it, but then I have no idea. And then I'm not sure which blue was used in the Federal Union. So sorry for not getting to that just a little earlier. So I think that's a good place to stop for now. I'm going to continue this kind of chemistry and arts sort of talk for probably a few talks in the future. So right now I'll throw it open to questions. I see some are violent in blue dyes, more sensitive to oxidation. It depends. Blue, like the blue pigments I showed you that are inorganic, they're pretty robust. Like the Egyptian blue is something that can survive being in a fire. Organic dyes, they tend to be more subject to oxidation. So yes, I'd say the organic ones are. Modern dyes, the ones that have been developed recently would be one of the things we've looked for are oxidation stability. So if something was developed in the early 20th century, it's probably going to be sensitive. If it's developed like last year then it's probably going to be less sensitive. One wonders how artificial dyes might affect epigenetic markers and genetic expression. Yeah, the dyes are organic compounds and we know that there's lots of organic compounds in our modern conveniences. I mean, when you look at the plasticizers in plastics a lot of them, like BPA apparently have hormonal activity or mimicry. Or mimic hormone activity. So yeah, there's a possibility that epigenetic markers can be affected. I'd say with the azo dyes and things that are a little more sensitive and might give you more radicals and the like, when they react with light you could even get genetic damage. My mother used to keep some dark blue black paper in with some antique fabrics to protect them from oxidation. Yes, I have that stuff too. What is it? I don't even know what that stuff is but I think it's essentially I got some metal particles in it that absorb sulfur because it's not so much you couldn't really have so much that it would affect oxidation from air but oxidation by sulfur leads to tarnishing. So in fact I have some of that stuff in with my silver. Let's see, does the mordant use to set the dye influence to color? Yes, it does. So essentially you can have an organic molecule that's soluble and it is it gets like permanently attached to maybe a transition metal ion or more commonly an aluminum 3 plus ion that's sitting attached to a fabric and when the organic molecule wraps itself around the metal there are changes in the energies of the orbitals and that does change the color. And how does the mordant affect the life and deterioration of the pigment? Well it varies if the mordant is anchored really well to the fabric then the pigment will be set really well but the pigment, the organic part of it has to remain attached to the metal. Now factors that influence whether it's attached are you know when you wash this fabric what sort of pH does your water have is H plus competing with the dye that's attached to the transition metal or aluminum ion that's anchored to the fabric. So yeah I mean basically what we've tried to develop is dyes and mordants that stay in a fabric like forever but it's there's always fading. No, pigments in paint since you don't wash paintings so much or at least I hope no one's taking like a power sprayer to their local art gallery those issues are a little less intense so pigments in paints for paintings usually you have to worry about oxidation from air and exposure to UV light. The inorganic pigments are usually very stable sometimes when you mix two pigments together and you might have some electron transfer happening one is an oxidant and one is a reductant that may mean that there's some pigments that are incompatible with each other or they might make some fabulous new shade that can't get any other way. But also worrying about organic pigments with oxidation and UV if you make the molecules and break them up into smaller trunks they're not so conjugated and you don't see their colors anymore. One should not restore paintings with cats around. Oh my god, yeah, oh yeah. I try to keep anything of value like in my office at work because I know my cats if there's anything of value that they can destroy they will destroy it. I think that's a corollary to Murphy's law. I think Murphy had cats. Let's see, did I miss any questions? I like the fermentation reference because those are a very cool area of chemistry these days. I think I got everyone's questions. Okay, who buys Sizzigie? Excellent. Well with that I think I'll call it quits then. I am going to continue using the art world as an inspiration for some of these chemistry talks that I give from now on. Yay, thank you Shantel. Excellent, well very pleased to be here. Thank you all for your time and attention. I should probably also zoom through some slides blah blah blah. Here's what I haven't shown you but I should get to the acknowledgement slides somewhere where we have NSF thanked. Yes, somewhere NSF has been thanked. Okay. Well I would still like to thank NSF for their support and all of my colleagues and SIUE for its support as well. Thank you all for coming. I'm going to sign off soon. Okay, going radio silent. Click.