I'm Isis. And we're going to talk to you about implementing pure REST elliptic curves. So for my day job, I work at the Torr project. I write C. This work is done in my spare time. So this isn't actually work that I'm doing for my normal day job. This talk is for people who are lightly familiar with REST. I'm not expecting that any of your advanced REST programmers are REST is actually not that advanced. Most of the time, we're not even doing lifetimes or memory allocations or anything like that. This talk also isn't aimed at cryptographers. I'm not expecting that you have any advanced knowledge of cryptography or actually any knowledge of cryptography at all. We're also not expecting you to really know any math. Just a basic level of high school algebra. And you're going to be fine. Even if you're not fine, we're happy to answer any questions that you might have after the talk. You can also email us or talk to us on Twitter or whatever. OK, so what is curve 2 by 5, 1, 9, dollar? And then we're going to be talking about, well, Harry's going to talk about implementing low-level arithmetic, field arithmetic in REST. And then we're going to talk about some things about REST that we found really nice and some things that we think could be better. And then we're going to go over some of the other crypto that we've implemented using our library. So what is curve 2 by 5, 1, 9, dollar? In order to talk about our library, it's necessary to situate it within the stack, essentially, that it's sitting in. And so you have your application at the top. And your application is using some sort of cryptographic protocol. That could be, for example, like a signature or a key exchange or a zero-knowledge proof. Underneath that, you have an abstraction layer called a group. Normally in cryptography, you want a prime order group, which we'll touch upon that later. But it's just a group of elements or things which has a prime number of things in the set, basically. You can think of a group essentially like a REST in that it's concretely implemented by an elliptic curve. So the things in the group, in this case, are a set of points satisfying a certain curve equation defined over a finite field. Usually, and in this case, we're talking about the field of integers modulo of prime p. So our implementation was originally based off of Adam Langley's ed25519go implementation, which itself was based off of the reference ref10 implementation, just to give credit where credits do. In order to talk about what curve 25519dollic is and why we made it, it's important to talk about a little bit of the history of other elliptic curve libraries, their designs, and some common problems. Other elliptic curve libraries tend to have really no separation between the protocol that they're implementing and their implementation of the field, the curve, and the group. And so this ends up with a lot of problems. You end up with idiosyncrasies, sometimes in the lower level pieces of the code, that carry over to the higher level protocol implementations. So things like accidentally flipping a sign and then the protocol comes out being implemented correctly because the protocol is accidentally also flipping the sign in the reverse direction. And you end up with the right output, but for underlying the wrong reasons. There's also problems with assumptions about how these lower level pieces are supposed to behave. And those aren't necessarily correct if you try to use the field or the group implementations to implement a different protocol. This also results in super excessive copy pasta. So cryptographers have this thing where they tend to literally copy paste each other's code around. They also, this is exacerbated by a lot of cryptographers somehow think it's appropriate to have a tar ball of their code unsigned inside another tar ball of a benchmarking library. And that's how you're actually supposed to get it as an end user. It's mind boggling to me. So anyway, this leads to large monolithic code bases, which are idiosyncratic. They're incompatible with one another in really hard to debug ways. And they're often highly specialized to perform only the single protocol that they're implementing, which is often signatures or key exchange. And there's just no consideration that there's this whole rest of the field of cryptography and you might want to do something other than these two protocols. And there's worse. Some of the bugs I've personally seen in major widely used cryptographic libraries, which are not going to name any names, but using C pointer arithmetic to index an array. So in C, just like a recap, array indexing works both ways. So taking the six element of the array A is the same thing as saying like five bracket A.  This is equal to A plus P bracket five and five bracket A plus P. And there's just so many ways that that could go wrong that I've seen overflowing sign integers in C and expecting the behavior to be the same or similar across different platforms. Like this is like canonical undefined behavior. Like you just don't do this. And I've seen using basically untyped integer arrays. So in RASP, it would be like an array of 32 U8s. And taking this without using any type system or anything like that, just saying that this is the canonical representation of multiple things in the library and multiple things which are mathematically, fundamentally incompatible. So when you have an elliptic curve point, you can compress it usually to 32 bytes by just taking either the X or the Y coordinate. So that could be an array of 32 bytes, also a scalar, like a number could be 32 bytes. And these are things that are not mathematically compatible. They shouldn't be switched. And your type system should be protecting you against making errors like this. I've also seen using pointer arithmetic to determine both the size and the location of write buffer. And there's still more bugs I can keep going with like a lot of horror stories of things that I've seen. So we didn't wanna do this in C, obviously. So we started working in Rust. And the design goals of our library were that it should be usable for other cryptographers to implement their protocols. It should be fast to write. It should be essentially the same as like writing a Sage script. It should be versatile. So you shouldn't only be able to write a signature scheme or a key exchange, but you should be able to write almost any type of cryptographic protocol. It should be safe. And by that we mean like multiple kinds of safe. It should be memory safe, type safe. There, I mean, Rust has extra nice things if you build in debug mode. There's underflow and overflow protections. It should be readable, which is like a huge thing because if you're copy pasting around all these like assembly files and each cryptographer is making all these tiny tweaks and changes and there are tar balls and there's no git history and there's no way to know why someone changed something. You just have this like blob of unreadable code that takes forever. And it's not very explicit. And readability also implies that it should be auditable, which is a huge thing for security critical code. All of these things are things that we would get from a higher level memory safe strongly typed polymorphic programming language, aka Rust. So with that I'm gonna turn it over to Harry, who will start to explain some of the low level field arithmetic in Rust. Hi. Okay, so as you saw in one of the previous slides there's like this table of the different pieces and since that's like kind of large, as an example we're just gonna go through like one thing that we do. So we're gonna look at how, so as part of this we have to implement field arithmetic for integers mod p where p is this two to the 255 minus 19. And just as like a worked example, let's see how that works. So we're trying to do this only using the operations that we have available on our CPU. So in order to figure out how we're gonna do this you need to answer two questions. First, what are our actual primitive operations? And also, what does the multiplication look like? So when you do a multiplication you're using a fixed size primitive type but when you multiply numbers or integers they will get bigger. So how does that get handled? Basically there's four possibilities. One possibility that you can do is you can do error if there's an overflow. So in this case if you did, I'm using U8 just so it's small numbers, 8 times 40 will give you a panic. And that's what Rust does in a debug build. There's also wrapping arithmetic where you would reduce mod, how big you can fit into that type. That's what Rust does in release mode. There's also for some things you might want saturating arithmetic where if you get too big it just clamps to the highest thing. And then the fourth thing that you could do is widening arithmetic where the result of the multiplication is gonna be the next biggest type. And so in Rust you have intrinsics for one, two, and three. So if you explicitly want one of those you can pick it. I'm not aware of an intrinsic for the fourth one but you can just write it like this. And so now you might wanna know like, okay what does this actually turn into? So let's suppose that we're on x8664. There's a really cool tool that you can see, Godbolt's compiler explorer. So in the top window, I've just put an example of a thing that does a widening multiplication of two u64s to produce a u128 output. And then in the bottom, it's produced what the actual assembly that this will do. And there's two windows because you can see that LLVM will give you a nicer instruction on newer processors. So on the older processors, there's this mull instruction where the inputs and outputs go into like fixed predetermined registers. So you'd have to do a bunch of like moving things around and then on newer things you can pick where they go. But the point is that you can just sanity check that this really does turn into something reasonable. So suppose that we have this ability to do multiplication of two 64-bit numbers into a 128-bit product, how are we gonna implement multiplication? So if you look at the original paper, they suggest using a radix two to the 51 representation. So what does that mean? It means that you're gonna write numbers where the, in base two to the 51. So you're gonna get five coefficients. You might wonder where does the 51 come from? Where does the five come from? So these things are gonna be basically 256-bits wide. And so you could break it up into four times 64, but if you think about the discussion in the previous talk about instructions per clock and out of order execution, it's actually much better if not all of the operations depend on each other. If you have things that are full width, then every time that you do an operation, there'll be a dependency between them and it'll be slower. So that's why you would pick the next biggest one. So we could write this in Rust as a tuple struct and you can use this multiplication to do it. So how would we actually do that? Well, you could just write out the coefficients of do your naive school book multiplication. If we start by writing out what the coefficients of this product are in the low term, we'll just get x naught times y naught, and then we get x naught y one plus x one y naught, and we continue in this way. So I'm writing the coefficients of the output on the left-hand column, the actual digits on the right, and you get this sort of nice triangular structure. Okay, so now you'll notice that our numbers got bigger when we multiplied them, but we're supposed to be working mod p, and so we would like to reduce this back to the original size of the inputs. So how do we do that? Notice that this prime has a special form. Since it's two to the 255 minus 19, you know that two to the 255 is 19 mod p. The reason is that mod p, p is zero, so zero equals two to the 255 minus 19, and you bring the 19 over. And so why is this useful? If you write out this product that we've just computed, then you can see that, for instance, this z5 term has a two to the 255. You can replace that two to the 255 by a 19. Similarly for this 306 term, you can write it as two to the 51 times 19, and that simplifies into this nice thing. So you can get basically a pretty fast inline reduction. And when you combine that with the formulas on the previous slide, you get this where the triangle below is gonna get moved up into the upper part. So this technique for doing really fast reduction mod p, actually you can trace the lineage of this all the way back to the 15th century. If you're curious, it coincides with like the development of early capitalism in Venice. So unfortunately we've now moved on to late capitalism and things are not looking up, but why don't we just write this in Rust? So I put some Rust code on the slide. We're implementing mul. There's some weird lifetime stuff. That's one of the things that we'll get to later, so just disregard that for now. I just put it in because it's the real code.  It's inline always, so it will just disappear.  And it's better instead of trying to do 128 bit multiplication, you could just do a multiplication by 19 beforehand. And then you just write down that formula. Now we have this problem, which is that these CIs that we're getting are 128 bits wide. They're U128s and not U64s. And remember that our original goal is to try to get to back to like U64, five. So we have to then sort of reduce these CIs. And we can do that, so I've written this formula, but basically the idea is that you take this 128 bit value, you take the low 51 bits, you keep them, you take the high part, and you add it to the next biggest coefficient. So you're just carrying the value up into the next biggest thing. And you can write that in Rust in the following way. You can construct a mask and do this carrying. You can also, because a nice thing with Rust is that you can rebind the same names. And so here these C, there's a rebinding happening where we're notifying the compiler that now that we've done this reduction, all of these CIs are now gonna fit into 64 bits. So do whatever you want with that information. And once we've done this first pass, we've now fixed all of the CIs to lie in the, into U64s, but now they're not maybe as small as we'd like. So we can just do another carry pass. And that's what that field element 64 reduce function does. It does essentially the same thing, but it's less complicated because you don't have to change types. And it also will get inlined. So actually that's our implementation. It's not the simplest thing, but it's not that complicated. In our actual code, there's a bunch of debug assertions to make sure that all the things that are right size, that there's no possibility that we're violating some preconditions, that none of the intermediate things can overflow, whatever, but that's the actual code that we have. And we kind of just like throw LLVM at it and see what happens. So you might be wondering, like, how does that compare? Like I heard, you had to do a lot of work to get things to be fast. Well, turns out it's actually really, really, really fast. So N25519 Donut is an implementation. It's optimized assembly. It's what Tor currently uses by default. And as you can see here in the red, our performance is comparable to Donna, slightly better for things like verification, and then also just throw in a general, like so that you understand what the numbers are kind of supposed to be. Ring is also a Rust library for it's a higher level library than ours. So implementing protocols. And Ring does that by wrapping boring SSLs implementations, which are assembly implementations and wrapping that in Rust. So it's pretty, pretty fast. So now to talk about some things about Rust that we really like and other things that we think could be a little bit better. So as, obviously, Rust's code generation is done by LLVM, as I just showed, it's really good at generating code. It's not just good at generating fast code, it's good at generating safe code. So historically there's a worry that an optimizer code in theory break constant time properties of an implementation. So what does this mean? People have essentially in the past said that you can't use compilers to write cryptography. You have to write handwritten assembly because that's the only way to control what a chipset is going to do. Not only is that not entirely true, there are chipsets that do weird things which I'll get into later. That's just, this is just all kinds of insane. So what does it mean to say that code is constant time? So there are these things called side channels. And the side channel is essentially a mechanism by which an adversary can learn some sort of internal program state. For cryptography, this is especially insidious because learning a few bits of a secret can often lead to full key recovery attacks. A concrete example of a side channel attack is I make a static string and I just hold the A key for five minutes and make this really huge string and I load it in your CPU's cache and some of the caches are shared with other programs that are running. So the other program that you want to do a side channel analysis of, let's say it has an if then statement where it's branching on a bit of your key, whether that bit is a zero or a one.  And as you saw in the previous talk, hitting different layers of the cache and hitting memory instead results in different timings. So that's a timing side channel. There are other side channels you can do. You can do differential power analysis where you build up profiles of a different device through a different chip and how much power it draws as it's doing certain operations. But basically this is all bad. You want to write code that does exactly the same thing with respect to secrets all the time. So to prevent this, we have put a lot of effort into, as you saw, propagating the carries in Harry's code. There's all these crazy bit shifting operators everywhere and crypto code just tends to look weirder because of this. For LLVM's optimizer, it turns out that it's not breaking our code as far as we can tell for x86 and we've sat there and geeked out on this assembly for hours and hours and hours and way longer than I would like to. In the future, we're hoping that there would be some way that we could do an LLVM pass with a sanitizer where we can statically analyze the output assembly. There's a trick for Valgrind that Adam Langley made where you just mark secret data and then it gets uninitialized and then if you ever try to index over the data or branch on it, the whole thing just poops its pants and you know that you've done something wrong. Are you talking about Alpha Phi? Okay. So REST is capable of targeting a lot of platforms and targeting extremely constrained environments using no standard. So for example, so Dalek uses no standard. So if you write your protocol and tell Dalek to use no standard, you can present a foreign function interface that can be used in a lot of weird places. So Tony Arcieri, who's somewhere around here, got Ed25519 Dalek, which is my signature implementation on top of Curve25519 Dalek, running on an embedded PowerPC chip inside of a hardware security module and is working on getting it running under in an SGX on play. As a side note, to go back to the constant time thing, I can't guarantee anything if you're running something on PowerPC because PowerPC is one of these weird chips that I mentioned. For example, it's mole operator will return early if you're multiplying something by zero. So I actually just can't guarantee that crypto works at all on your ancient MacBook. Don't do that. So Filippo Valsordem had a recent blog post which was really interesting. I think it made the top Reddit of both the Golang one and the Rust one. So he has a thing where he is calling Rust from Go with minimal overhead and he used Dalek as an example. Interestingly, this is three times faster than calling the Curve25519 library that's in PureGo that is in Golang's standard library. So there's some things we don't like. One of them is what I've been calling the I of Sauron and it's this like thing that we have. Looks like this. This is not very ergonomic.  I don't really like being like in like print. Like it's not, this results because Rust operator traits take arguments of type T, not type borrow T. So in order to avoid, so if you want or you need a copy for your types, which we do because we have like a lot of constants that are just like various things in the Curve that get used all over the place in different protocols. Like for example, the base point of the Curve which is kind of just like a point that you pick and it's special. We have like a constant file, whatever. So we need copy. So we have to implement our operations on type like anti and then you end up with code that looks like this where you keep putting parentheses around things as you have this like expression of like multiplying or adding things together. It gets messy pretty quickly. I'm not a compiler dev, but it might be possible to perhaps do like auto borrow for copy types or some other special marker where we can say like, hey, I like, I said the type but I really meant like borrow the type, don't actually copy it. Another thing which would be really cool and which we know is coming and we're really excited about is const generics. So we've already thought of really cool ways to abuse or use const generics to optimize the field arithmetic. So the basic idea would be to statically track the sizes of the intermediate values of these like field elements and do you specialization to insert reductions when necessary. So it would automatically detect like, oh, hey, you have like three bits of carry space and you've done like two ads already. Let's like do a reduction now instead of like forcing users to know when to do it by hand. So next, Harry's gonna talk about some of the crypto we've implemented with Dalek. So just like a brief overview of some of the stuff that we've done. One thing you might wanna do is some zero knowledge proofs. So the idea is to prove that you have some statements about some secret values without really revealing anything. One example that people seem to want to do is called like discrete log equality where you have say four points and you wanna prove that a equals g times x and b equals h times x simultaneously without revealing your secret value. So implementing these proofs are for like people who care their schnor style proofs. So there's a lot of boilerplate for when your expressions get more complicated. So we made a crate that has an experimental zero knowledge proof compiler implemented in Rust macros, not procedural macros just like ordinary macros because it's worse that way. And as a user it's kinda nice cause you just write this and that corresponds to that example above and what does that expand into? It turns into a DLEQ module with all the code for creating, verifying these proof objects and he uses CERDI to derive a parser into wire format and back. So that's pretty cool. And another thing that we did that I just couldn't talk about. Sure, and so there's other types of zero knowledge proof statements that you wanna make. And one is like in a lot of applications you wanna like prove, so before there was proving inequality you might wanna prove an inequality. Like you might wanna say I know an x and it's bigger than y. The problem is that if we're working in a cyclic group x being bigger than y is the same thing as x being smaller than y if it wraps around the group. So you have to do what's called a range proof which is saying like I know an x and it's between like y and z. And there's ways to do this in zero knowledge without giving away any information about x other than it lies in the correct range. These are often used in confidential transaction systems and we're also using it in a future ANSI censorship system that we designed for Tor which uses a micropayment scheme that we made that's embedded inside of anonymous credential and we use this micropayment scheme essentially to like store proof of good user behavior which you can spend like sort of spend later as a way to like filter out bad actors from a system without knowing anything about the users or like being able to track the users. So the basic idea is you wanna prove x is in the range zero to b to the n and you write x in base b such that it's the summation from zero to n minus one of xi times b to the ith power and you prove that each digit is in the range x is between like zero and b. So traditionally the way to do this is like as due to a cryptographer named Shinmacher and you just write the number in binary and then b in this case is two. So you just prove that each digit in the number is zero or one and then you can derive various statements about the range of the number. So verification essentially amounts to checking a ring signature on each digit's proof and if each digit is in the correct range the whole number is in the range. We implemented like there's a recent construction due to back end Maxwell which determined that if you do Baromian ring signatures over a ternary system that you can share data between the digits and this off like this ends up being a lot more efficient. The name Baromian ring signatures actually like a pretty cool name. Baromian rings are like if you imagine like the sign for the Olympics it's this mathematical like thing where you have three rings and they're interconnected and if you cut one the whole thing falls apart. So the signature scheme is named after these like interconnected rings and that's because like each of these rings has some of the data of the other ones or is dependent on the other ones. Computers don't really like ternary systems. So also human brains don't really like ternary systems. It turns out to be like really not nice to implement but just so you can see an example of what it looks like to use curve 25519 dollar. This is using rayon. So each of the digits, the computation of the ring signature for each of the digits can be done in parallel and this is from like the inner loop of the verification of one of these groups. So you can see that like the laser kind of shows up. Okay, so you can see that like we can subtract two points. Should we just go faster? I mean this is the last slide so yeah. All right, well anyway. This is an example of like what it looks like and this isn't like the cleanest code but it turns out to be really really fast and it's not the worst to write. Like we wrote it in an afternoon. It still looks about as messy as the actual paper and that's all and thanks.


In theory, this should be pretty straightforward. I had woodwork in high school, but I never had attention in school. Hey guys, what's up? We're at Bunnings right now. I'm gonna build a kicker amp today.  Hope you enjoy the video. Alright guys, I got a list here of some of the stuff I need to get. I'm gonna start with the small stuff first, then we're gonna move on to the bigger items needed for this build. So yeah, we're gonna start off with getting some drill bits and some wood screws. Masonry, is that wood? No, masonry's rock. Masonry's rock. Yeah, wood must do. That'll do us, I think. Just the cheap stuff. What else do we need to get? Screws. Great selection. Jesus. There a bit. Oh, there's a hex, Philips. Do you reckon town will be enough? Onto the next piece of the puzzle. So that will be the width of the kicker. That'll be the width. I'm gonna work with.  We're gonna go with steel.  This is the first time I've ever built anything. I'm not really a bloke, so shout out to all the tradesmen out there. Now a couple of shippies. Who do men call their flat? Some of them warped because they're left outside. So the width is gonna be 600mm. We might have to buy two. We have leftovers and we have leftovers, I guess. Use it for another project. How did we say it was in a bit? 60? 60? Yeah, that's all we need. Masonry, we've got everything. We've got everything on the list that we needed. In theory this should be pretty straightforward, but I've never built anything. I had woodwork in high school, but I never had attention in school. $1,600, you get yourself a wood-fired pizza. From what I've heard from my colleague here, we don't have good pizza in this country, so if you want good pizza, you've got to go to the east coast of America. North east. This barbecue is burnt. I should see what this is doing to my interior. We've got this park over here, guys. I'm Koshigai Park. Campbelltown is actually a sister city with a town in Japan called Koshigai. So that means somewhere in Japan there's a park called Campbelltown Park, believe it or not. Alright, so we have all our supply here. We've got the plywood. We've got the masonite. We've got the steel section. We've got the 2x4s. We've lined out, if you can see, you can see that red pencil. We've lined out the sides. We've done it in a way where you don't really need to know much mathematics. We didn't need to use Pythagoras theory. Theorem theory? Pythagoras theorem? There's a website. I'll put the link in the description below. Kind of gives you a rough idea of how to make it. Kind of just looked at it, and then we've done our own thing with this, so yeah. Done it in a way you don't really need to use Pythagoras theorem. So I'm going to be using a circular saw today to cut this wood.  If you're using a circular saw, there's a notch right there. You can see this one. That's where your cut is going to be. So you can measure the distance between this notch and the edge, and you can put a bit of 2x4 here, but make sure it's weighed down by either a clamp. We don't have clamps, so we're going to use some bricks. Put the bricks on top or put your clamp on, so it kind of runs straight. That's going to ensure that you get a straight cut all the way through. It's very important to wear your safety goggles. I just didn't chuck them on. But yeah, if you guys are going to do this at home, make sure you wear the correct PPE. Personal protective equipment. Okay, so right now we have our side templates cut out. The middle section's here. So we're going to drill the wood first, and then we're going to screw it in. There it is, guys. We have the basic structure of this kicker. We just got to do the top sheet, masonite, and then the bit of metal. And then I think she's good to go. Cheap drill bit. As you can see, guys, we've got the masonite all cut out. It just needs to be screwed in. Yeah, it just needs to screw in this bit of metal here and we're all done. Not bad for a Sunday evening of a couple of blokes on the tools, you know. All right, there it is, guys. Not bad. Not bad. Yeah, it's dark now, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow and then shred this thing. But check it out, guys. Very nice. Not bad for my first time ever building something of worth. So it's dark now, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow to skate this thing, guys. Shout out to Harris for hooking me up with this drill and some other assorted tools I needed for the job. Who's up? You're sure right now, guys? She's come loose. Excellent.  Yeah, right. Shop fitter, this boy. Yeah. Out of 10, what do you think? My solid five? Solid eight. Solid eight. Okay, yeah, sick. That's not bad. All right, there it is, guys. The DIY instructional kicker video. Kind of instructional. Kind of not. I don't know. Hopefully you guys learned something from today's video. Comment down below what you guys want to see me build next. I'm going to do a few of these DIY videos of me building different features and stuff. I want to hear what you guys think I should build. I have a few cool ideas in mind, but yeah. It's just really going off my skill level with woodworking and all that. It ended up costing around $150 to buy other material for this video. I got a bunch of leftovers though, so I could have probably bought less, but I just kind of bought more to be safe. If you're new to this channel, be sure to subscribe. Check out the rest of my videos. I'm from Australia, like skateboarding. Trying to make the most out of my skateboarding journey here in the land down under. Shout out to everyone that got in on the session at the park on the kicker. Shout out to Mr. G for filming. Shout out to Harris for hooking me up with the power tools. Yeah, I think that's all the shout outs. But yeah, guys, I hope you guys enjoyed the video and learned something. Until next time, I will catch you all in the next video.


What's going on everyone Sam here with late in sports guards. We're ripping 22 panini absolute football six box half case break number 18 Pick your team style. Let me grab the box My bad everybody, then I'll read off your list of teams and names All right, so we've got a sham's Patriots Adam K Jets Anthony P with the Bucks Anthony G's got the bills Antoine D Raiders Austin K Chargers of Ben L with the Packers Billy B Vikings Brian P Seahawks Devon T Jax Diego I Niners Donald C. Dolphins Dustin G Broncos Edgar B football team Evan J Cardinals Gary a Giants Gregory M Panthers Texans. Thank you here Harper B or a great Harper B with the Bears and bangles Jacob T with the Steelers Jason W falcons Justin H Colts Kyle L Browns Lenny G Cowboys Moe M. Cheeps Nathaniel V Ravens Patrick H. Lyons Scott T Saints Scott Oh Titans a Y a S with the Rams and the Eagles Good luck everybody. Let's do it. Probably. I mean, I don't want to we didn't have a kaboom in the last half case Or a or a glass or an explosive. So hopefully we've got one in this case Guess we'll have to see but Hopefully we do That would be cash money We cool. All right, we've got a Kenny Pickett's rookie introductions 49 out of 100 good start there for the Steelers Next up base base. There's Dax and Hill to 275 the bangles and Zemir White Rookie Premier Jersey Ball Jersey 289 out of 399 going to the Raiders Good start good start good start Green Devontae Wyatt 10 out of 25 awesome color match for the pack packers Grats on that green Bay. It's actually pretty cool Base and base coming up for Diego Trey Lance 18 out of 99 a ball Jersey glove Tools of the trade triple Jersey or triple relic I should say one there and David Bell 37 out of 50 on the color match for the Browns nice orange David Bell rookie auto Congrats. Congrats Thanks everybody for hanging out to Yeah You're gonna have to talk to Donna's much, right? Who's that guy definitely don't want to talk to Sam all the Markies Brown 56 out of 100 color match the Cardinals. I wouldn't either. Can we honest buddy? base and base Got going to the Ravens Kyle Hamilton on the jumbo patch three or four color. That's awesome 26 out of 49. Oh, that's really cool, man I'm jealous of that Like if I had the Ravens like being a Ravens fan, and I had bought the PYT Yeah, and I hit this I'd be content. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm fine with that if I hit nothing else I'd be like I'm cool. That's awesome. Congrats Ravens and Nice one here tools of the trade Mack Jones eight out of 49 on the second year a little bit of a couple dinged corners We'll send an empty box and wrapper with the pass Sorry about that a shams Cool second-year max up Yeah Yeah, there's usually get like one or two of those jumbo patches of case They're so far. I want to see one of one of that so bad. It's got to be like the full night. He swoosh Or team logo team logo something man. That would be a cool team logo, right? Like how about the Eagles one with like half the look like the from the chest plate shield maybe in there Those are nasty Like usually it's a whole complaint like oh game war and it's not great, but that's Green Sam how rookie introductions 13 out of 25 Commanders one off Jersey number In Hutchinson to 275. Oh, we can make any. Oh, I don't doubt that Let's not think and going back to Diego Tyrion Davis price 260 out of 399. There you go, buddy Congrats We're gonna come here triple Jersey ball Jersey Not that I know of they got a lot of running backs out there. I know a lot of run they always have a ton of running backs Nick Benito blue kind of a color match 30 out of 50 cool in there We've got Brandon cooks down and cook base base Nick Chubb absolute heroes 21 out of 99 Nice one there for the Browns and Nice one here going to Tampa. How about a Rashad white 32 out of 50 on the rookie auto I don't see a whole lot of him which is good So nice one there for Tampa pretty much their starter now. I would say yeah I always say that because you have for that. Yeah Oh, I thought you meant fancy. No, I mean like hard lies. Yeah, I'm good. I'll get He might get released that this year, he doesn't seem like he's been like a I know running backs Don't take priority in hobby, but like he hasn't seen like Like he holds up never really has to be honest 2017 which I thought because he was like he's like he got injured but he's still really good true Well, this is cool. Kennedy Brooks for the Eagles 20 out of 25 color match. That's awesome They still like one of the biggest playmakers in Tampa right now. Oh, yeah, that was just like Prices don't fluctuate Matt Ryan Josh Jacobs a lot of times It's tough with running backs like you have to be the best of the best. Yeah, Gary Henry. Yeah Next one here, we've got 22 out of 49 three color patch ball Darnell Mooney going to the Bears. He's He's really good He's really good and we've got Don's boy AJ Brown. Hey on the base auto It's not a boom, but I would take it if it was my spot. Absolutely put that with Kennedy Brooks, dude Yeah, there you go color match not bad Eagle spot doing well as Wyatt asks congrats Wyatt Why are you looking? Don is one of our regular fans Don and Bryson. Yeah, never seem to get along on anything. No, we don't like Eagles fans Like we can't go we like he can't accept the fact that Jalen hurts is good. It upsets me I Think he's good.  Like if you could get 2,000 yards on the ground, why not Justin Ross the 275 And nice one here go to Tennessee Malik Willis 23 out of 199 rookie Premier Jersey ball Jersey congrats Tennessee There we go Titans is That is Scott. Oh congrats. Go get that into a map for a minute I think Bryson would almost rather have Jimmy Garoppolo Asking that next time you guys are working please ask him. I think you would say you would rather have Jimmy Garoppolo I really want I want to flame him if that's his answer. It feels like that at least that's the Marvin Lee out For the Steelers to 100. Please ask it. Oh, I want nothing more. I'm asking that I can tell you right now. He would he would definitely take Calibri Calibri That's gonna be brown hogs Terrell Davis 13 out of 99 nice TD for the Broncos and Absolute legends going to commander 68 out of 75 Jonathan Allen There you go. Congrats on that. I also think he says those things just to get on the right to get a little bit probably Yeah, just to get me like fired up about it. Are you going? Yeah That's like people do that all the time like Sean will try to get me going but like Alvin Kamara 7 out of 25 nice one there for the Saints It's like everybody says like there Derek Jeter's overrated That's like the biggest like arguments people have which I think is the most ludicrous argument in the world Jared golf Derek Henry There's oh got points coming up nine nine hundred. That's actually not bad That'll be a random to everybody at the end and Jalen Tolbert on the two-color patch number 22 out of 49 stop James Yeah, the Derek Jeter is overrated argument Because the number one argument people have to that is if he wasn't on the Yankees He wouldn't be as good and it's like well He wasn't like what do we want to go back and let me go back in time Tell the New York Yankee scout to not draft him and then we'll see like that sounds realistic.   Oh, yeah, I mean Yeah, so it's like you make that argument anybody like off Jordan was on the bowls The Colby didn't have shack like you can say the same thing about anybody. Yeah, so it's it's a useless argument There's John matchy to a hundred. I mean break. There's Kirk Cousins and Jerry Judy There's David Bell 40 out of 49 Nice one there for the Browns. Well, he wasn't on the pack There's eight out of 25 nice one there for the Lions eight and Hutchinson on the orange auto and grads Lions after this Selective or is that I might be I don't know if it's like no, I think it's Oh I'm pretty sure that's what it is. Oh Orange Jeremy Ruckert rookie to 75 base and base Chase Claypool Nice one there 21 out of 99 K Von Timidow 9 out of 50 going to the Giants Nice one there. I actually did not watch the series burn.  Yeah No, no, no, it was just like about his career But somebody made like we were having this argument because Blake was here and Blake's obviously huge Red Sox fan He was egging it on a little bit Cuz I started getting like fired up and like started getting mad at it and like What was I gonna say? Someone made a really good point that Jeter is only overrated if you're a fan You put him in like the Mount Rushmore of baseball like the top four, right, which that's not true George Pickens 15 out of 25 one-off Jersey number green for the Steelers Terry kill Michael Thomas. I don't know about that James. I wouldn't go that far There's Eli Mitchell 43 out of 199 It's kind of the same argument though people call Tom Brady system quarterback and Chris Olava 14 of 15 going to Saints nice one there Saints Grats New Orleans. All right two boxes to go guys Systems quarterbacks only good like supposed to be good in like one type of thing, right?  I mean, I would I mean I still think Tom Brady is the best player of all time I think it's very hard to argue against that There's Quinn and Williams and sauce gardener. That's kind of nasty for the Jets Kyler Gordon 69 out of 100 Caleb I want to get his input on it too. There's last call of Dustin Hopkins the 75 is Chris Olava it to 275 Nothing super huge. I pulled yet yesterday morning. I pulled a Drake London. That was kind of cool Wanda Robinson 26 out of 99 rookie premier jumbo Jersey auto That for us obviously pulled a couple of it pulled a gold Brady Kaboom. He pulls a one-on-one burrow green I pulled a burrow Wasn't very happy about it, but yeah, it's still a big part purple Arnold up a quite four or five Five of five just getting going to the Falcons. Yeah, I pulled a gold explosive a delving cook last break last half case Or no in a mixer pulled in the two of the six bucks mixer. I think the explosive Base and base. Yeah, that was a big figure. There's Jalen Hertz 32 out of 49 two-color patch a nice one there Really and Legend James Harrison auto 47 out of 50 cool one there for the Steelers grad Steelers It's a ton of James Harrison stuff. So that's always fun McCaffrey to 99 or to 50 excuse me for the Panthers even better base and base How'd you get 99 makes up? I don't know turn on the 1 99 on the tools of the trade and Kyle Hamilton 47 out of 100 for the Ravens nice one there As pure strong juniors 75 not necessarily Donald just because like it's I they say they put on average And everything you know what I mean, it's okay. We're not moving Carson ones It's kind of the same situation if you get two autos on average. You only get one. You know what I mean? Yeah, unfortunately not Two out of 99 is Zach Earth's tree McBride Because I mean it averages out to a case hit technically we've had cases I've had a bunch of cases that had nothing in it for case hits and then like forest had one case that three Kabooms in it. You know what I mean? Yeah It's unfortunate. I mean there's nothing Yeah, no way, but yeah And we've got iconic ink Jake Plummer 17 out of 25 Jake the snake Stop please Until the hobby boycotts Yeah, I know and see you legend pack the break guys. Good luck Got by storm breeze hall to 100 7 of 100 Jets base base in Hutchinson the 275 go on the lines and Ries hall 97 out of 199 on the quad rookie premier Jersey auto that'll do it for the break guys We get this random setup really quick for 900 points Getting legend status It's like if they put Trent Dilfer in weapon status, yeah, I'm sorry Donald it just sucks dude It's just like it's what happens with panini with case hits It's just because you're not you're not theoretically guaranteed one Even though sometimes I say guaranteed on the box. Yeah Then you gotta read the fine for it Gonna take you guys over the range Gonna roll the dice whatever team is on top after nine times. We'll get these 900 points. Good luck everybody one two three four five six seven eight nine Go to the dolphins. There you go, Donald At least you got some points my man. Oops. Oops. Oops. Oops.  Yeah Cardinals dual Darnell Mooney bears Jalen Hertz Eagles Jets dual Niners dual or not Eli Mitchell Chase Claypool Steelers. That's David Bell Browns Jalen Tolbert Cowboys throughout Davis Broncos Darnell Mooney bears Nick Chubb Browns Kyle Hamilton Ravens and Trey Lance Niners We've got Breeze Hall Jets Jake Plummer Cardinals Kyle Hamilton Ravens James Harrison Steelers Wanda Robinson Giants Kyler Gordon Bears Chris Olave Saints K Von Tividow Giants Aidan Hutchinson Lyons Jonathan Allen Commanders AJ Brown Eagles Rashad White Bucks Tyrion Davis Price Niners Mac Jones Patriots David Bell Browns Zemir White Raiders and then we've got Lake Willis on the rookie premier jersey auto going to Titans Congrats Titans. I'll do it for the break guys Thanks again for the fill and next up. We've got origins tiered


238 years ago, America was in its infancy, struggling for its independence from Britain. This conflict, known as the American Revolutionary War, called for a united fighting force. General George Washington rallied local militia from all 13 colonies, and on June 14th, 1775, what would become known as the United States Army was born. On the Army's 238th birthday, we remember all those who came before us and fought so bravely, and we commend the Army of today and the soldiers that proudly serve and who continue to be the strength of our nation.


A preliminary hearing has opened in Rome for four high-ranking members of Egypt's security forces who are under investigation for general-ledged roles in the torture and killing of Italian student Gilles Reggiani. The killing took place in Cairo in 2016. Italian prosecutors asked the judge and Thasti to have the four senior members of Egypt's security services send for trial over their suspected role in the disappearance and murder of Reggiani. The four Egyptians were being tried in Rome in absentia. The Rome prosecutors accused the four officials of the aggravated kidnapping of Reggiani and in addition say one of them, Major Marc D. Chari from General Intelligence should be charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated murder.


So we're going to talk a little bit about the diversity of organisms that you have in the soil and what some of these organisms can do for you. So we've got, you know, a large scale of different types of organisms from the macroscopic organisms to the microscopic organisms that we have in our soil. And again, there's a huge diverse array. I can't put up pictures of all of these different organisms that are in the soil, but the big rules to think about, just like for us, for these organisms, they are all starving and homeless. And so what we need to do to get these organisms in our soil and to build the diversity of those organisms, when there's a diversity of these organisms, that's a really important thing to be able to build that resilience. That diversity is going to build the resilience that you have in the system. Oftentimes, if you have, people will ask me as a microbiologist, they'll say, well, you know, how do I get rid of all of the bad organisms and enhance all of the good? And I'm like, there is no such thing as bad and good. Everything, again, is eating and reproducing. Doesn't care about being bad or good. This is the way that we think. This is not the way that the systems are performing. This is not the way that the organisms are performing. Every organism has the potential to do things that can have negative ramifications on us. Oftentimes, the pest and disease issues that we see, especially when they're pest and disease issues that are caused by bacteria or fungi, are pest and disease issues caused by organisms that actually aren't disease-causing organisms. Initially, most of the organisms that cause, there are some that are strict pathogens, but most of the organisms have a saprophytic phase.  And think about it.  Cause it's dead.  What ends up happening is that we design systems in which the way that we are growing our crops, when we have too little diversity in our production, we have monoculture or biculture types of systems, we are only getting certain organisms to grow. We're only feeding them. When we only feed them, their population gets higher and higher, their population starts to build up to a level that all of the sudden they cause a disease issue because they now run out of food, all of the dead food, and they have to go out and attack living food. You want to have soybean cyst nematode is not a bad organism by itself. It plays a very important role in the system as a whole. But it causes an issue when it's one of the only nematode populations that's actually able to grow and reproduce. We are the masters of our own disasters. Let's quit making a disaster out of the system. You don't want to have a PhD in disaster creation. Not even a bachelor's degree. Let's not go there anymore. So we need to have this diverse array of organisms. We need to be feeding them and we need to make sure that their homes that they actually build, those aggregates that Lee showed us, those are their homes. That's the habitat for bacteria and fungi. Creating an environment in which those habitats are going to be built, stabilized, and stay there and not be destroyed. So what I want you to do, and we'll talk about as we look at the different organisms, we'll talk about their food and their habitats and how they're being built and those types of things. But what I want you to do as we're talking about this is I want you to think about how you can design your system to be able to be feeding them or maintaining their habitat as much as possible. Now, you're in the process of growing food, hopefully, we'll get there right now like I said, most of us are growing in the United States and Canada, but primarily in the United States, most of us are growing low quality feed and industrial products, but hopefully we'll get to the point where we're really growing food. And in the process of doing that, we are growing food for humans, organisms, that have outlived, have outgrown the carrying capacity of their environment. Most organisms grow at a log mythic rate, according to food and habitat, and then when the food is depleted or the habitat is no longer good for them to grow in, their populations decline. We have outlived, we have outgrown that. We have outgrown our carrying capacity for this environment. But what we can do is, again, we can modify our environment in what it is that we're growing. So that's that intensification again. We're not looking at doing things like a natural environment would with the natural carrying capacity. We're looking at putting energy and resources, putting our own resources as far as growing more plants that aren't always gonna be harvested for food as far as putting and intensifying the system, managing grazing, managing the resources in a way in which we can intensify things to outperform the natural carrying capacity. That's what it is that we wanna do is outperform the natural carrying capacity. That's that doing more rather than less, getting more out of the system rather than less. So when you look at designing your system in this way, the reason I bring that up is there are some times in which you may be negatively impacting the food or the habitat of the microorganisms because you're not doing things in designing a system that's always going to be positive for just those organisms. What you wanna do then is figure out ways in which you can, if you make a choice, it's like moving, we always wanna have forward momentum. So you're gonna take steps backward. There may be times in which you're gonna do some things that may be destructive to the habitats. Tillage is a practice that's destructive to the habitats. Soil disturbance destroys their habitats. That may happen. There are gonna be times in which, again, not all of the, and not just times, but all of the time when you're growing a crop, you're not putting all of that plant biomass that's being produced back onto that soil, that carbon back into that soil. So that may be a little bit of a step backwards. But what we want is forward momentum, keep moving forward as much as possible. And that's where, again, part of making up for the fact that we are gonna harvest a crop is that we need to plant cover crops or other plants that aren't always gonna be harvested. We need to be looking at how we're gonna make up for what it is that we're taking out of the system. So we have a huge diversity of organisms in the soil. This is a diagram of the tree of life.  So we're not even on the tree as individuals. We're in a huge grouping that's there. In the soil environment, there are representatives from almost every branch that's there. And the reason that that's important is, again, this builds the resilience. No matter what conditions exist in the environment, there's going to be somebody that's going to be able to perform. Today, I know that there are soil organisms out in the soil that's probably even under the concrete that's in the parking lot. And today are growing. I know for sure that there are organisms that are in any grass strip that's out there. Or around any tree that's out there in the parking lot area. In your crop fields, today, there are organisms that are growing that are taking and consuming carbon today. Which is why, again, the amount of carbon that's needed is astronomical. And we know that this is true because we've done studies at a colleague who did research in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in crop fields and went out there in January, in Grand Forks, in subzero temperatures, to make sure that we knew that there were organisms that were growing. Took samples from those fields and were able to measure the gases that would come off by the functioning of microorganisms. So we know that even though you say your soils are dead right now, they're not. How is it that we can guarantee the continuation of functioning for soil health? That's part of the definition, is continuation of functioning. The continued capacity to function. This is how we do it. This diversity. You have halo files that can grow in very salty conditions. You have thermo files that can grow at higher temperatures. You have psychrophiles that can grow at very low temperatures. All of these different organisms, they're gonna be functioning. And again, when you think about them from a size component, they're very, very small, but the largest organism in the world is a microscopic fungus. The largest organism in the world is microscopic. Yes, I didn't just take drugs over lunch. It is true. The individual threads of its body are microscopic, but those threads have been growing for almost 3,000 years. This organism is in the Pacific Northwest, working its way into Northern California. It's a mushroom producing fungus. The way they found it was through aerial photography. The impact that it had on the trees in the forest, they could see, if anybody's ever heard about the fairy ring mushrooms, and they'll have sort of an impact that you can sometimes see that's these rings that will start from a center. What they did was they saw that impact on the trees going out in these concentric circles, away from a center. And then they took samples and they found out that it was the same organism that had been growing. So again, these very tiny things can affect things on a very large scale. And it's important for us to make sure that they are fed and that we maintain their habitats as much as possible. Because what they do, even though we don't understand everything about how they work, they work in these very complex consortia. Multiple organisms working together, trading off resources. It's a very interactive carbon economy. This is how every, again, every organism, including us, performs. We used to work for food. On some level, we still do, we just decided to put paper and ink on the stuff that we traded for food. But we still work for food. Every organism works for food. Food is carbon. It's this interactive carbon economy. This is how the entire world works is a carbon-based economy. Organisms trading resources for food. Work for food. You have bacteria and fungi that will go out there in the soil, produce enzymes to break down minerals so that they can release micronutrients and phosphorus and sulfur, things that normally are not readily available to the plant. You have organisms that are able to, as I said before, to fix nitrogen. They will take atmospheric nitrogen and to gas and convert it into nitrogen that the plant can use. And they do that and give that to the plant not because they're good or bad. They do that because the plant then gives them carbon, feeds them. Everybody's got a job. Things that they're doing in the system. You have nematodes. Most nematodes are not harmful. Most nematodes do not have pathogenic capability. But we will go out there when we have an issue with soybean cyst nematode and kill them all. You have organisms like protozoa and nematodes that will eat bacteria and fungi. They get signals from the plant that says, I need nitrogen. Those signals will go out into the soil environment and then you'll get organisms that will respond to that. Some of them are fixing nitrogen. Some of them, like the protozoa and nematodes, actually eat bacteria and fungi. And when they eat, they poop or they throw up and they expel waste. And that waste, just like all waste, just like we was talking about manure, all waste is planned available nutrients. Bacteria and fungi in this case are kind of like time-release fertilizer pellets. They got eaten and pelletized and expelled. The plant, again, gives off a signal to the soil that says, I need this. It's the same as if I were to, as I'm walking around, stub my toe or trip, like I just did. There's a biochemical signal, a carbon-based signal that gets released that says, you did this, catch yourself before you fall flat on your face. Says, you know, move what you need to move. If you're hurt, say, ouch. Your body responds to that. You'll get signals that will release blood to flow to that region to provide the micronutrients and the enzymes that are needed to help to withstand whatever wound that happens. All of this happens without me thinking about it. All of this happens without me doing anything, but it's all biochemical carbon-based signals. The plant does the same thing. It releases food in a particular form. It's a particular way of carbon-based signal that says to particular organisms, give me copper today, give me iron, give me boron, give me molybdenum, whatever it is the plant needs, it can tell, it has this language. It's a carbon-based language. You'll have then those organisms that will respond to that because they got fed. That carbon-based language is food to those organisms. That's how they know to respond. You have other organisms, the microarthropods, that are important, they're the shredders. They are, we are the microarthropods, you just ate lunch, so you are now a microarthropod of the macroscopic world.   If you chew your food well, your gut microbiome will be happy because you chewed it into little, beady pieces that the bacteria and fungi and protozoa in your guts will be able to now attach themselves to and produce enzymes and break down.  So, you know, thank you for the lunch, but really, what's in you is poop. You just ate poop. You chewed food and ate poop. That's how we all function. I love to talk to kids, they love that. It's like the best thing, you know?  I can tell mom! Doctor told me today that I ate poop, and it was good for me. Again, this is what it is that we're doing. We need to have these organisms. If you don't have them, the web, the system collapses. If you didn't chew your food, if you were not a good microarthropod of the macroscopic world, your gut microbiome is not happy. It will tell you it's not happy, and you will probably be visiting one of the restrooms. Because that's what they do when they're not happy. That's how they respond to those conditions. We apply, because we have a particular pest issue, we apply an insecticide to kill the pest insect that kills all of the insects, including the microarthropods. Arthropods is the name for insects. That's their family name, is Arthropod.  Now, the bacteria that are in there don't have good access to food, so they can't grow to a high enough level.  There aren't any of them around here. We are the masters of our own disasters. Let's quit having a PhD in it. These are soil aggregates. Lee showed us some of the soil aggregates that you have. You have soil aggregates. This, Lee was talking about soil aggregates that can be made from sandy soils. The microorganisms will and can engineer soil aggregates from pure sand. They will actually even do it from glass beads. You do this in research. We're really mean to the microorganisms. We have them engineer things from glass beads. There's nothing they can get from them, but we want to see if they can engineer. So this is a sandy loam soil mixed one to one with sand, with coarse sand. It's not a soil that would be found in nature. It's too sandy. That aggregate was made in less than three months. This is a millet root that is part of a cover crop mixture that was planted in North Dakota on a sandy loam soil after the harvest of a forage pea crop that was harvested on July 1st. The cover crop mixture was planted on July 7th. I collected that root on August 30th. Less than 60 days. And look at all of those aggregates. Look at what they can engineer. The habitats that they'll create if the system is designed right for them to do so. Now this picture up here in the green, this is where in the lab we used a stain to be able to see, we put it under blue light and the stain causes a molecule that is produced by fungi to glow green. So this shows a molecule that is produced by the fungi to help to stabilize the aggregates. So it's not just enough to use carbon to build the house. This is like the Three Little Pigs. You know the story in The Three Little Pigs? So you got the first pig, it built the house of straw. And the wolf came along and it hopped and it popped and it blew the house down. You had the second little pig, it built the house of sticks. You had the wolf that came along and it hopped and it hopped and it hopped and it blew the house down.  That biomolecule is the bricks on the outside of the house. It is stabilizing the aggregate. So it isn't just enough to use carbon to build the house, to provide the frame and the structure to create the aggregates, but they also have to use carbon to create the molecules that are going to be the bricks on the outside of the house. The bricks are really important to have on the outside of the house, because when you have stabilized aggregates that are formed, those aggregates can stay together when water gets into the soil. And we better hope that water gets into the soil, right? Because otherwise you wouldn't have water for your plants. You need water to get into the soil, but you want the aggregates to stay together. Now these were aggregates that were collected. All I did to collect those aggregates was I passed the soil through a series of screens. One screen was sort of a two millimeter screen.  Be two sizes, you can see the openings in the screen. You want them to be two different sizes, one smaller than the other. Pass the soil through the screen that has the larger openings. Collect the soil that went through that screen, and then pass that through the screen that has the smaller opening. Collect the soil that stayed on the screen for the smaller opening. So it went through the large opening and got collected on the small opening. Basically what I did, those were the aggregates that were there. I put them in glass dishes, and I added water. Now I didn't add the water right on top of the aggregates. I added it on the edge so that the water would flow in like it does in the soil. So this is kind of simulating aggregates that would be just below the surface of the soil, so they're not gonna get the full impact of raindrops. But they're gonna get the water moving in by capillary action. It's moving in to the soil through the openings, through the pore space. Now these are soils from North Dakota. The soils are separated by about a half mile, a little less. Two of these soils, these first two soils are actually in plots that were side by side. This was a half mile away. This soil was from a conventionally tilled spring wheat fallow system. So there's a crop growing once every other year, and it was spring wheat. This was a no-till spring wheat winter wheat sunflower system. And then you had a moderately grazed pasture. Now this number here is basically just a percentage of the aggregates that stay together. But you can visually see what happens. Take those aggregates that you got from passing them through those screens, put them in water, and see what happens. It's like the cloud test, the big clouds that you have. But this is on a small habitat level. So this really shows the cloud is containing a whole bunch of aggregates. And clouds are sometimes also made not just by aggregates and not just by engineering, but also by mechanical and physical processes. So on this, it's really the organisms. So this gives you an idea of the organism impact that you have there. So what we've got here is in this moderately grazed pasture, the aggregates stay together. So in the middle one, we reduce the amount of soil disturbance, which can be an important element to this. Again, the destruction of the aggregates. But we didn't allow for enough photosynthetic time. We didn't allow for something to be growing 280 days. It was only during the crop season. So in the moderately grazed pasture, it's a huge difference between what happens because we have carbon going in. Enough carbon resources to lay the bricks on the outside of the house. That's what the bricks do. That's what it is that we need to have happen. Not just enough for the organisms themselves to live and reproduce, but also to make these biomolecules. What happens in the conventionally tilled system, the reason that that number is so low, are two things here. One is it only had a crop, spring wheat, that was growing, and I talked about vegetative growth time. Vegetative growth time in spring wheat is roughly about four to five weeks. Maximum. That's it. In a spring wheat phallus system, that's 104 weeks in which there's only about four to five weeks of growth. How much carbon does that put into the system? Think about what you're growing in the same way. I know that that's extreme. 104 weeks, four weeks of carbon, 100 weeks off, isn't going to be enough carbon to do much anything. But think about what you're growing. How many weeks of carbon does that put in a 52-week year? 280 days, and you're wondering why people are like, well, that's only 85 days off. I'm like, seriously, we've got to figure out how to break that 85 days down even smaller. This is not what it is that we're looking for. This is how we could be able to do that. That moderately grazed pasture is getting that to happen. So the tillage system here, the difference with the tillage, is that the engineers, part of the big engineers in making aggregates are mycorrhizal fungi. When you do tillage, you can tear apart their hyphae, their bodies, their threads, their bodies or threads. So you basically rip their arms and legs off when you do tillage. And they can live without their arms and legs. Part of their body will still live. The main part of their body will still be alive without their arms and legs. It won't function very well. And every year, it has to regrow its arms and legs. Every time you till, it has to regrow its arms and legs. The carbon, instead of being utilized to make the bricks, the carbon then is utilized to regrow arms and legs. How many aggregates and how many stable aggregates do you think you're going to build? If all the time, you're just putting energy into regrowing arms and legs. And you're supposed to take your arms and legs, use them as the frame for the house, and then make another biomolecule that you make bricks out of. There's no way that you can do that. Think about what you're doing with the system. And if you do tillage, how do you make up for that? How do you intensify and add more carbon into it? How do you get them to faster, to more quickly put on new arms and legs, and then have the resources to get bricks? How do you get this to function? If you do this, this is some of the potential that you can get. So some of you have probably seen this. This is from Gay Brown's farm. Many of you probably know Gay Brown. We all want to be Gay Brown, right? How many people want to be Gay Brown? All want to have this type of a system. And this really is, whether you want to be Gay Brown for his economics or what he does or how much work he does, or traveling or speaking or whatever, I don't care. What you want to be Gay Brown for is this. Because what he has here is a system in which, in 2009, we had a rainfall event. When he was talking about some of the rainfall events you can get in North Dakota, and I know there's some of those rainfall events you can get in South Dakota and Minnesota, because I've been in them before. We had a rainfall event. This was one I had never been in before, though, until this happened. It was six inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period. At one point in time, it was falling down at about eight inches an hour. Skies opened up. It was like a tropical rainstorm, just... and dumped. You could hear it in your basement. It was just tremendous. This is his field the next day. How many of us could say that? That you could take in 13.6 inches of rainfall and not only take it in, but take it in so fast, there's hardly any residue movement in that field. There's hardly any wash. It's not completely flat. There's a slope to it. There's no wash, or very little wash. Gabe will tell you there's a lot of wash there, but it's all relative in how we view things. He's taken his infiltration rate from a half an inch an hour to eight inches an hour. Infiltration rate is defined by porosity. You increase the porosity in your soil by 45%. You can increase the infiltration rate of the first inch of water by 167%, and the second inch of water by 650%. How fast you could get it in? It's not just that you can take it in, but how fast you can take it in. Porosity defines this. What you have between the aggregates and aggregates create porosity. What you have between the aggregates is the aggregates, these little balls, can't fit tightly together in the soil. So there's space between the balls. That space, when you have well-aggregated soil, there's so many of those balls that there's a lot of space in there, but that space actually curves and bends and moves around the balls. It's not a straight column of space. It's bending and curving and moving. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If you have a curvy road, it takes you longer to get home than if you had a straight road home, right? The more distance that is there, just like on a road that curves, the more water you could hold. The faster it could get in because there's more space. Things are moving out of the way and you have more space there for them to move in in a column of soil. The other advantage of this was this was the rainfall for that growing season. That was it. It didn't rain again in 2009. He still had a harvested crop because he was able to hold that water. As the water bends and curves and moves around the aggregates, what happens is it's harder for the sun. The sun is constantly using evaporative forces, solar radiation, the heat to pull the water out, to evaporate water out of the soil. Constantly pulling water out of the soil. Gravity is constantly pulling the water down away from the soil profile, which is the reason that we're always cursing the fact that not only does it rain, not rain enough, but it doesn't rain at the right times. This is time neutral because if you can keep, as it bends and curves, it will stay in the soil profile. This is similar to if you had a straw that had a kink in it. Have you ever tried and drink from a straw that somebody bent a little bit?  Because it's harder, that sucking is energy, your energy trying to pull that liquid out. It's the same as the evaporative forces trying to pull the water out and gravity trying to pull the water down. If you can neutralize or make it so that it takes more energy or a longer period of time of those forces pulling for the water to be able to be moved out of the profile, you're able to keep the water. Resilience. It doesn't matter when it rains or how much it rains. That's the system that you want. And it only is created if you have the organisms in there to make the aggregates and stabilize those aggregates. We cannot design anything to work as well. Yes. Yes. You could get that down a lot less. There was a lot of learning time. That was Gabe when he started on his farm. He had the first about probably five years he would tell you was failure. He had several failures in the first four years with his crop and it was a lot of learning time in that because he had prop failures and he was doing things in a traditional manner. He had two major hailstorms that took out his crops and then he was trying to figure out there was monoculture system. It was a regular system. It was a monoculture. It was or a biculture I should say. According to soybean rotation high input type of a system all of those things were in place for about the first ten years they were having an effect. The first five years he didn't know to do anything different and then figured out to do some things differently but didn't know all of the steps that he could put into place. In the principles that exist looking at things reducing soil disturbance keeping a living plant growing all of those things that you're doing are going to have an effect. The more that you can layer those effects and the faster that you can implement those things the faster that this can happen. There are systems in which depending on how you look at implementing it you could do this I think probably get close to something like that in maybe five to seven years. To get that big of a change in infiltration rate but along the way you're going to see some pretty big changes. So what we want to do in these systems is really figure out how we can implement some of the tools that the organisms have to be able to improve our water use efficiency. Now the other thing that I want to point out here is that part of water use efficiency is also fertility. There is no scientist on earth who knows exactly how much water a plant needs to grow. There are papers out there there's research and there's data that says that this is what they say that is not the amount of water that the plant needs it's the amount of water that the system needs in a degraded soil because our soils are all degraded. If we were to change the system and change the soil that would change the amount of water that the plant needed. And part of this is based on this Albrecht study it was republished in 2000 in Acres Magazine the article was but the study was conducted in the 1950s at the University of Missouri by Dr. William Albrecht and what he found and this is the basis because this was done in the 1950s this is the major basis for the fertilizer industry saying you need to add this much fertility because what he found was that in a fertilized field it took far less water and you got a higher yield than in an unfertilized field. The point with this is why does that fertility have to exclusively come from synthetic fertilizers? We know that the nutrient use efficiency of synthetic nutrients the amount of nutrients that you add that ends up in that crop plant that you're growing in the year in which you apply those nutrients is 50% or less it's always been the way it's been but the rest of that 50% ends up polluting the environment some of it ends up in the bodies of organisms there's a lot of places in which that 50% is utilized but only 50% or less ends up in that same year in that crop plant that you're growing we've always known that what this curve tells us here is that the fertilizer use efficiency this is a nitrogen use efficiency curve tells us that since 1960 we've had an increase in global cereal yield not going to dispute that we've had an increase in yield technology, breeding, all of those types of things the bottom curve is a nitrogen use efficiency curve this is the amount of nitrogen that is needed so it's the yield per the amount of nitrogen applied that curve is going down it takes more nitrogen fertilizer today to produce a bushel of grain than it took in 1960 more fertilizer today synthetic fertilizer to produce a bushel of grain than it took in 1960 regardless of our mechanical breeding or chemical tools and the reason is is because what the plant needs is the nutrients at the right time and the nutrients that are applied synthetically aren't available at the right time so it has to get those nutrients from the soil the more that we have added those synthetic nutrients and the more that we have added the pesticides that have killed various types of organisms not all of them completely didn't wipe their populations completely off the map but the more that you do these repeated practices their population declines the more that you add synthetic nutrients then organisms don't have a job if they don't have a job they don't get fed, if they don't get fed they don't reproduce their populations decline in 1960 there were more organisms in the soil that provided more nutrients to the growing plant than there are today in most of our crop fields we can turn this around and I'm running out of time so I'm going to skip to this because this is the big one the mycorrhizal fungi so we're going to end here with the mycorrhizal fungi these organisms are basically a pipeline connecting the soil to the plant they grow inside the plant roots their bodies are threads so they grow inside the plant roots basically it's like somebody dropping off the nutrients from the front door knock on the door plant just has to open up its cell membrane and the nutrients can come flowing in so they deliver right to the door they go out into the soil and they pick up the nutrients that are released by the activities of other bacteria and fungi they work with these phosphate-cellulizing bacteria these phosphate-cellulizing bacteria live on their hyphae they live their attached to their bodies so that they can release phosphorus in the soil right next to the door for the fungi to open up the door let the phosphorus come flowing in that was released by the bacteria that phosphorus will come flowing in and you'll get those nutrients coming into the system so what you've got is you've got the ability to have nitrogen and phosphorus be exchanged not just from the soil matrix to the plant but also between plants different plants will actually stimulate different communities to go out there and get different nutrients so in this case we're going to just talk about this from a nitrogen and phosphorus standpoint we know that there are ways in which plants can work with plants like flax and get various types of micronutrients flax is really good at releasing some micronutrients they can transfer those between the flax plant and other plants so if you're doing things like excuse me, Lee brought up apologize if you're doing things like Lee brought up of growing flax and peas together you could have this exchange of different types of micronutrients but what we're going to talk about here is just looking at nitrogen and phosphorus we're going to talk about five organisms we're going to do this really fast five organisms you've got a nitrogen fixing organism and you've got a non you've got nitrogen fixing bacteria you've got phosphate-cellulizing bacteria you have mycorrhizal fungi you have a legume plant that's associated with nitrogen fixing bacteria and you have a non-legume plant now the non-legume plant tells the mycorrhizal fungus you've got to go out there and get me nitrogen phosphorus mycorrhizal fungus says okay I can do that because I'm associated with the phosphate-cellulizing bacteria that are colonizing my hyphae that will release phosphorus from the soil I can open up my door and I can be able to take that phosphorus in and that phosphorus then can go to you then some of that phosphorus I will then utilize some of that phosphorus to go over to the legume plant the legume plant will take some of that phosphorus it will give me some carbon but it also will give me some nitrogen because it seems to have excess nitrogen I can take some of that nitrogen and I can give that to you so everything will be fine mycorrhizal fungus then goes over to the legume plant and it says alright here you go here's some phosphorus give me some carbon and give me some nitrogen so that I can give some of that nitrogen to the non-legume plant now the legume plant then goes to the nitrogen fixing bacteria in its roots and it says you have to do more nitrogen fixation because I need to give some of that nitrogen to the mycorrhizal fungus for the mycorrhizal fungus to give some of that nitrogen to the non-legume plant so the rhizobium bacteria, the nitrogen fixing bacteria says alright I can do that for you But nitrogen fixation is a very energy intensive process. On a cellular level, what happens in order to be able to have the energy to do nitrogen fixation is you have to have the cycle called the Krebs cycle. It's basically where you have a molecule called ATP, adenosine triphosphate. Three phosphate groups are bound to a molecule called adenosine, amino acid that essentially has got a carbon backbone. So it takes roughly about 32 cycles in order to fix one molecule of nitrogen. So the rhizobium bacteria says, you have to get me more phosphate, because I can't take the phosphate that got ripped off. When the phosphate gets ripped off, electrons are released. Electrons, as they pass through a membrane, fire the cell, and it provides energy in order to be able to do the nitrogen fixation. So the rhizobium then says, you have to get me more phosphorous, because I can't take the phosphate group that got ripped off and put it back on, because it lost its electrons. So I need more power. You've got to give me more power. It comes from phosphorus. So the legium then says, all right, I can do that. I will go to the microisophagus, and I will tell it that it needs to give me more phosphorous, so that I can give phosphorous to you. What ends up happening is that, all of a sudden, you have the carbon that's taken from the legium plant, the carbon that's taken from the non-legium plant. They go and they feed the microisophagus, and they feed the phosphate-sogabilizing bacteria. The phosphate-sogabilizing bacteria solubilizes a whole lot of phosphate. There's a whole lot of phosphate that's flowing into the microisophagus. There's a whole lot of nitrogen that's moving between the legium plant and the non-legging plant, and phosphorus that's moving between both of those plants. And all of a sudden, there's a huge traffic jam, because there's too many nutrients that are moving all over the place, and everybody's crazy. So what ends up happening is that, now you can't get enough phosphorus in order to be able to feed the legium plant and the non-legging plant, as well as the rhizomium bacteria, to do enough nitrogen fixation, to be able to give enough nitrogen to the non-legging plant. So the microisophagus then goes to the non-legging plant and says, I can't do this. The legium plant and the non-legging plant then says to the microisophagus, well, I have a secret code. The secret code will tell you how to absorb phosphorus against your gradients so that you can put more phosphorus in your hyphae, and then when you want to have a traffic jam. So the microisophagus says, cool, I'll take the secret code off your hands. I will use that secret code to absorb more phosphorus. So it takes some of the carbon from the non-legging plant and gives some of that carbon to the phosphates-olubilizing bacteria. The phosphates-olubilizing bacteria leaves a lot of phosphate. The phosphate then goes into the microisophungi. The microisophungi will take some of that phosphate. It gives it to the non-legging plant. It will take some of that phosphate and then it will give some of that phosphate to the legium plant. The legium plant will give some of that phosphate to the rhizomium bacteria. So the rhizomium bacteria can fix more nitrogen. Nitrogen will go into the legium plant. Some of that nitrogen will go into the microisophagus. Microisophungus will take some of that nitrogen. give it to the non-legging plant. Everybody's happy. Everybody gets their nutrient needs taken care of. It happens without a thought. All of that stuff we know occurs. We've known that this system has happened since the 1980s. We know, I mean it's happened longer than that obviously, but we know about, we've been able to follow and see that this occurs. This is how we can satisfy the nutrient demands that Dr. Albrecht talked about without having to utilize synthetic fertilizers. The efficiencies that exist here are possible for us to be able to tap into. All we need to do is design the systems that are feeding and keeping the habitats alive. And that's it. You can do it, right?  It's February. You can think about how you're going to design the system now, right? All right. My time is up. I will be around for the rest of the day, so you know, feel free to ask questions.


Thanks for staying with us. Now, a bill for an act to scrap the National Youth Service Code NYSE, which was introduced in the House of Representatives, has elicited various reactions. Sponsor of the Bill Awaji in the Bank Abiantay is seeking to repeal Section 3155A of the 1999 Constitution and the National Youth Service Code Act. Many fresh graduates earnestly desire to wear the National Youth Service Code NYSE uniform. It is usually an honor to wear the khaki served once father learned then, and the core members truly served with sincerity and honor. Well, that seems to be in the good old days in the 70s, 80s, 90s and even early 2000s. Now, the usefulness of the NYSE scheme has been called to question. According to the synopsis of the bill introduced by a member in the House of Representatives, Awaji in the Bank Abiantay, who pointed out that incestuous killing of innocent core members in some parts of the country due to mandatory religious extremism, ethnic violence, incestuous kidnapping of innocent core members across the country justify the intent of the bill. Today, what do we have? Even with the challenges of astro-strike and all of it, some students spend as much as eight to nine years before they graduate, so far as obvious. And when they graduate, it is no longer automatic that we just walk in and answer. In some cases, people are kept on the queue for two to three years. You sum all of this up.  And most establishments, most establishments will have it as a policy that you don't employ persons beyond setting age limits. There are challenges with this scheme. There are challenges with this scheme. So whatever way, whichever way it goes, it's going to be a win-win for everybody. But my stand is let us scrap it. A public analyst also gave his take on the bill. Is the answer scrapping it, or you look for a way to redefine the use of the scheme?  Such areas does not mean insecurity will be there forever. So you can, in the interim, alter the dynamics, or the operational dynamics, I would say, of the scheme. Because a lot of youth coppers have gone to other parts of the country and never went back. They got married, they stayed there. And those are the things that have helped us to integrate as a nation. I don't think that the scheme should be scrapped. There are many things not working with it. Don't go the lazy way out. Sit down, interrogate the process, and come up with a workable, you know, solution to it. Here is also some mixed reactions by some Nigerians across the streets of Lagos. About in my next month or so, so I don't see any reason why any Nigerians should not be given the chance to serve their country. Scrapping NYC still doesn't solve the problem of insecurity, right? Letting it continue still doesn't stop the problem.  So this also affords those going for the NYC to choose a better handwork to do.  They will come there to tell you that headsmen, whatever Bukoram has come to eliminate their own children, not our own children anyway. NYC's scheme was set up in 1973 by the Yakubu Gowon administration as part of strategies to foster unity in the post-Civil War era. Meanwhile, the FG has disagreed with House of Representatives. Nigerian youth and sports minister, Sondi Dari, who superhits the NYC said despite the security concerns raised as one of the major reasons to scrap the scheme, the scheme will remain. To Health Report now, did you know that art also has the power to communicate, educate, given a growing role of significance in health institutions? Well, some medical personnel, including the Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Akena Bayomi, have gathered for a conference to speak on the importance of art in health. Plus TV Africa correspondent Gozika Ohai-Jessey has more on this. It is the first inaugural National Art in Health conference in Nigeria and a guardian of medical students, professionals, healthcare institutions and stakeholders to promote art in the well-being of Nigerians. This year's theme is the arts, health and youth, which focuses on advocacy from the local to the national level through education on arts and medicine. Practices and hospitals, healthcare centers and communities, Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Professor Aki Abayomi speaks on the impact of art on patients and staff. The Lagos State government is 100% behind artists. We are the plan to totally transform the appearance of our buildings both in terms of art display and in terms of design. I've just come from a new building that we're going to be commissioning on Saturday. And if you just walk through the building, every wall has beautiful art that is aimed at uplifting the spirits of both patients and staff that work there. Professor Abayomi also speaks on sickle cell disease and the effective way of treating it. We all think that every sickler or every SS patient is going to live a terrible life of pain and suffering and early death. But what we discovered in Jamaica was that actually lots of people who are born with sickle cell never ever manifested with any of the symptoms of sickle cell and we only knew they had sickle cell because we tested them at birth. The convener helps in the vision of arts in the health and its impact on general well-being. Deputy public affairs officer with the U.S. Consulate Jennifer Falls highlights the support that the U.S. has given to the growth of healthcare in Nigeria. Our vision is that in the next 10 years about 1 million Nigerians would have benefited from the use of art either in the hospital or in the community for their mental health and personal well-being. The U.S. mission in Nigeria works very closely with our Nigerian partners to improve the health of the population because when people are healthy they can live full lives, they can get education, they can get jobs, they can provide for their families and that all contributes to the growth of Nigeria. The facilitator of the event encouraged government agencies, NGOs, art groups, healthcare professionals and institutions, among others, to advocate and advance arts for the collective health of communities in Nigeria. For Plus TV Africa, Gozika or HSE. Well report has it that in an atmosphere where the patient often feels out of control the acts can serve as a therapeutic and healing tool reducing stress loneliness and providing opportunities for self-expression. And finally, as part of efforts to inform Lagos residents on the developmental strikes adopted by his government, Governor Babaji De Sao and his deputies say their main priorities are youth, security and employment. The governor said there's the celebration of his 731 days in office Plus TV Africa correspondent Destin Momo has more on this. The 731 days celebration of Governor Sanwallou's administration was celebrated in high spirit attended by dignitaries of high repute. The event is a compendium of Sanwallou's administration project. The governor spoke on his developmental achievement saying the Fort Mainland Bridge will commence before the end of 2021, among other infrastructural projects. The construction and the execution are coming out from the ground. Our state will be like a massive construction site. And so I'll plead that for the next one year or so, just bear with us as we continue to change the face of your state. As a government, we have consistently matched our words with action. We have worked tirelessly to transform into reality a shared aspiration of making Lagos one of the most functional and habitable cities in the world. Deputy Governor Hamzat says this administration is people's friendly, productive and results oriented. My brother and friend Governor Babaji De Sao, Lagosians and of course our employers because in Lagos we pursue shared prosperity and shared responsibility. In the spirit of that, I want you to know that we have handled the mandate to be stored on us with reverence, humility and solemnity. Governor Sanwallou says the security and employment of youth are his major priority. Everything that we're about stands on two cardinal things, security and employment for our youth. And these are two things that I want to live with all of us.  The sixth focal point of this administration is traffic management and transportation, health and environment, education and technology, entertainment and tourism, security and governance and making Lagos a 21st century economy. Destiny Momo for Plus TV Africa. Now while some social commentators love the idea of stewardship, the charge to the governor is to work the talk throughout his tenure. Now it's a wrap but before we go, let's still remind you to follow us at Plus TV Africa on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and just subscribe to our YouTube channel at Plus TV Africa. I'm Jacinta Ubyuku. Thanks for watching.