Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. Today on the program, you will hear stories from Dan Friedle and Brian Lin. Gina Bennett presents this week's Education Report, and John Russell has today's lesson of the day. But first, here is Dan Friedle's report on nickel mining in the American state of Michigan. About 20 years ago, the international mining company Rio Tinto said it would open a nickel mine in the far northern part of the American state of Michigan. Rio Tinto promised good jobs for people in the area close to Canada. But environmental activists had concerns. They were worried about industrial pollution from the metal, the mining byproducts, and contaminated water runoff into rivers and lakes. Many observers expected a long legal fight between the two sides. Some did not believe the mine would ever open. But the eagle mine has been open for more than 10 years. There have been no accidents or pollution problems. People in the area who once protested the mine have found a way to exist with the mine. Mora Davenport is one of those people. She is one of the top leaders of the Superior Watershed Partnership, SWP, an environmental interest group. I was fiercely opposed to the mine, and I changed, she said. Davenport's group was invited to act as a watchdog for the mine. Rio Tinto asked the group to oversee pollution testing that has higher standards than regulators require. The cooperation between the environmental group and the mining company may be an example for other mines around the world. Many new mines are opening in order to provide minerals needed to make items used by the green energy economy. These items include batteries, electrical wire, and magnets. If countries around the world are to meet the climate goals set in Paris in 2015, there needs to be a 400% increase in the production of these minerals. The International Energy Agency said there needs to be an increase of 19 times in nickel production alone. Davenport said the Eagle Mine proposal divided our community. Other mines in northern Michigan had opened in the 1800s and closed in the 1930s. The mining companies left behind large open holes and environmental damage. Water that ran from the mine polluted Lake Superior, one of the Great Lakes in the northern Midwest. Simon Nish worked for Rio Tinto when the Eagle Mine was proposed. He said he understands the dilemma that communities face. They need jobs and an economic benefit, he said, but don't want long-term environmental consequences. Residents do not trust the big mining companies, he said, so it makes it easier to say no to proposals. He worked in Australia in the 1990s when mining companies wanted to use land where native Aboriginal people lived. He said he learned that businesses need to understand the interests of both sides if they want long-term success. When Nish arrived in Michigan in 2011, the mine was under construction, but it faced several legal disputes. In order to find a way for the mine to open, Nish considered looking for a partner. Nish said the Superior Watershed Partnership was already testing water around the area. He asked if they would consider running an environmental testing program for the mine. Over a few months, Rio Tinto and the SWP made a plan for testing. The group required open access to the mine. It would also test groundwater in the surrounding area, and it required permission to test a processing center 30 kilometers away. Rio Tinto was required to pay for the work. The agreement launching the Community Environmental Monitoring Program was signed in 2012.  But some environmental groups are still concerned. Rachelle Dale is head of the Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve. She said, Eagle Mine and the testing program are doing good work. But she said, A lot of the sulfide mines in the past haven't really had a problem until after closure. It's something that our grandchildren are going to inherit. As more mines open up to help meet the world's demand for new minerals, mining companies are starting to understand how important local support is to their success. The partnership in northern Michigan gives large mining companies a roadmap. But although it has been successful so far, there is no guarantee that an accident will not happen, that pollutes the area in the future. I'm Dan Friedel. Brazilian officials say bird flu has killed nearly 1,000 seals and sea lions in the country's south. As of December 11, the southern state of Heirgrunda do Sul had confirmed 942 sea mammal deaths. Many animals were infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza, also known as bird flu. The first cases of the sickness were reported in Brazil in 2023. During past outbreaks in Europe and America, agriculture industries have killed hundreds of millions of farm animals to try to contain the disease. Officials at Brazil's Agriculture Ministry said preventive measures were put in place after the first report of bird flu in May. This action made it possible to avoid an outbreak on poultry farms. That kind of outbreak, officials say, has likely led to a ban on such exports from Brazil, the world's top chicken exporter. Silvina Bota studies oceans and sea life at Brazil's Heirgrunda Federal University. She told Reuters news agency the remains of dead animals need to be buried or burned as soon as possible to prevent further disease spread. Scientists have found some sea mammals convulsing along local beaches as the virus attacks their nervous system, Reuters reported. Bota said that under government health rules, the animals must be killed immediately to prevent their suffering. Bota added that the first case of bird flu related sea mammal deaths in the area came in September. That is when local scientists first became aware of a large increase in disease deaths. Three towns in the state still have active bird flu outbreaks. Bota said the spread among sea mammals appears to have started through and then reached the South American continent. The disease has also affected wildlife in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Brazil's Agriculture Ministry has reported 148 bird flu outbreaks in the country, mostly along the coast. Officials have declared a health emergency to contain the disease, which it says is not yet considered endemic in Brazil. The virus has also affected other animal populations in the country. In addition to the outbreaks among seabirds, seals and sea lions, researchers have collected remains of dead porpoises and penguins found on beaches. Officials say they have not yet confirmed those deaths were also from bird flu. I'm Brian Lynn. Students around the world suffered historic setbacks in reading and math during the COVID-19 pandemic. That information comes from results of the latest program for international student assessment or PISA. The PISA is an international comparative study of the scores of 15-year-old students on tests in reading, math and science. Nearly 700,000 students took part in the study. PISA is administered every three years. The latest results showed an unprecedented drop in performance since 2018. The PISA 2022 study was supposed to happen in 2021, but it was postponed because of the pandemic. The 2022 results were released on December 5th. It is the first extensive study with data on how the pandemic has affected student performance around the world. The study looked at 81 education systems. They include 37 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD. OECD has been administering the test since 2000. The study found decreasing test scores in both rich and poor countries. Andreas Schleicher is the Director for Education and Skills at OECD. He said the world is no longer divided between rich and well-educated countries and poor and badly educated countries. The study found the average international math score fell by 15 points since 2018. Reading scores across participating countries fell by 10 points. The OECD considers 20 points to be equal to one year of learning. Scores did not change in a major way in science. Albania saw the biggest decrease in math scores with a massive 69-point decrease. That means Albanian students lost more than three years of learning. Many countries fell by more than one year's worth of learning in math, including Germany, Iceland, and the Netherlands. Four places did improve their performance between PISA 2018 and 2022 in all three subjects. Brunei, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, and Taiwan. Six East Asian education systems outperformed all other countries in math. Scores in Singapore were measurably higher than all other countries in all three subjects. The math scores for U.S. students were about even with the international average. Science and reading were slightly higher. The COVID-19 pandemic was a major reason for the worldwide score drops, but science and reading scores were dropping even before the pandemic. This suggests there are other reasons for the decrease. Factors such as the level of investment in education, the social value and pay levels of teachers, and educational beliefs of students have all influenced educational results, the OECD Schleicher said. The PISA tests explore how well students can solve complex problems, think critically, and communicate effectively. The goal of PISA is to provide useful information to educators and policymakers on the strengths and weaknesses of their country's education system. OECD Secretary General Mathias Corman released the latest PISA results in Paris. He said PISA 2022 helps to identify the comparative strengths of education systems that have performed well despite recent shocks. Policymakers can use such information to consider reforms to education systems for a brighter, more financially successful future, Corman added. The study also reported on the fast-changing influence of technology on educational performance. The results found that moderate use of electronic devices in school is connected to higher performance. Unacademy is a popular test prep website. It offers a free PISA quiz. You can see example questions and compare your math skills against the 15-year-old students from around the world who took the PISA 2022. I'm Gina Bennett. Gina Bennett joins me now to talk more about the report. Hi Gina. Hi Ashley. Your story said the COVID-19 pandemic was a major factor in the global decrease of reading and math scores. That's right. Officials believe the pandemic was a kind of test for resilience in education. What do officials mean exactly by resilience? The OECD defined resilience as the ability to recover quickly or even grow from difficult experiences. The pandemic would certainly count as a difficult experience. Exactly. So the education systems that were able to successfully adapt to the sudden and major changes in how students were taught and learned during the pandemic, they are resilient. Only four countries were considered resilient, Japan, Korea, Lithuania and Taiwan. That's not very many. What is one thing that made those countries resilient? One thing the data showed was the length schools were closed during the pandemic affected performance. Education systems that were closed less than three months were more resilient and had better scores. That's good information for education systems to have for the future. Thanks again Gina. You're welcome. In this next story, Katie Weaver tells us about changes to international trade. We learn about how a major American company is importing more goods from India than from China. Pay careful attention to the term supply chain. We will talk more about it after the report. Walmart, the world's largest store, is importing more goods to the United States from India and reducing its dependence on China. Between January and August this year, Walmart shipped 25% of its U.S. imports from India. That compares to just 2% in 2018. Import Yeti, a data company, shared the information with Reuters. The same data shows that only 60% of Walmart's imports came from China during the same period, down from 80% in 2018. China is still Walmart's biggest country for importing goods. The shift shows how the rising cost of importing from China and increased tension between China and the U.S. are leading American companies to import from other countries. Those countries include India, Thailand, and Vietnam. Andrea Allright is Walmart's executive vice president of sourcing. She said, we want the best prices. She added that Walmart has to deal with natural disasters to shortages in materials and cannot be dependent on any one supplier or area for products. Walmart said the import information did not mean that it was reducing dependence on any of its markets. We are a growth business and are working to source more manufacturing capacity, the company said in a statement. And Allbright added that India has become an important part of Walmart's efforts to build that manufacturing capacity. Walmart has been increasing growth in India since 2018. It bought 77% of shares in the online company Flipkart. Two years later, it promised to import $10 billion worth of goods from India each year by 2027. That is a target it is on the way to meet, Allbright said. It is currently importing around $3 billion worth of goods from India each year. Walmart is importing goods including toys, electronics, sporting equipment, and medications from India. Foods like packaged food, dry grains, and pasta are also popular imports from India, Allbright told Reuters. India, whose stock market has risen to record highs this year, is viewed as the country best equipped to outperform China in low-cost and large amounts of manufacturing. The South Asian country also has a growing workforce and increasing technological developments. China, however, recently reported its first population decrease in 60 years. Walmart started its sourcing operations in the Indian city of Bangalore in 2002. Now the company employs more than 100,000 people including temporary workers around the country. The rising cost of shopping goods from China has also added to the shift to India, supply chain experts say. Chris Rogers is a researcher at S&P Global Market Intelligence's supply chain research group, Pangeva. He said sourcing from mainland China has become less competitive because of rising labor costs versus other manufacturing centers. China's minimum wage ranges between $198.52 to $376.08 monthly. Meanwhile, average wages for unskilled and semi-skilled workers in India are between $108.04 and $180.06. The COVID-19 pandemic showed weaknesses in worldwide supply chains showing U.S. importers were over dependent on a small number of markets. Albright said planning for an event like the pandemic is like planning for a natural disaster. She said, what I can control is where my product is coming from and how do I make sure that Christmas still happens if something happens in our supply chain. I'm Katie Weaver. Before the report we asked you to pay careful attention to the term supply chain. Can you remember when you heard it? You heard the term several times in the report. Here are the first two examples. The rising cost of shopping goods from China has also added to the shift to India, supply chain experts say. Chris Rogers is a researcher at S&P Global Market Intelligence's supply chain research group, Pangeva. He said, sourcing from mainland China has become less competitive because of rising labor costs versus other manufacturing centers. Supply chain is a noun. It consists of two words. Supply spelled S-U-P-P-L-Y and chain spelled C-H-A-I-N. Let's explore a little of the history of both words. The online etymology dictionary reports that supply dates to the 15th century. It originally meant assistance, relief. It was not until the 1650s that it took on the meaning of necessary provisions held for distribution and use. The word chain has even deeper roots in history. The online etymology dictionary says that the word dates to around 1300. It meant a connected series of links of metal or other material. In 1846, we have the first example in American English of the meaning a series of stores controlled by one owner or firm. Now that we have learned a little about the history, we should talk about the modern meaning. A supply chain is basically a network of businesses that supply the materials and parts needed to provide people with products. Google's Engram Viewer, an online database of thousands of books, has some interesting information about the term supply chain. Engram Viewer shows that supply chain started to become more common in the early 1990s. It has become increasingly common ever since. There are a few different ways a person could explain this change over time. One way might be that the world has become increasingly connected in terms of how goods are produced. The supply chain has become a large, complex part of many businesses, and it has become a more important part of our daily lives. And that's the lesson of the day. I'm John Russell. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.


Hello, everyone. It's your girl, Kenzie here from Layton Sports Cards, and I'm ripping Six Box F1 mixer of 2022 Top's Chrome Formula One hobby and light number 16 random teams. Again, here's a look at the random results. You can always find these at leonsportscards.com, another results tab at any time, and the link is also right in chat for you. All right. Good luck, everyone. Thanks again for the fill. Let's see what we can get out of these. Yeah, we've got three lights and three hobbies here. I'm going to start with the lights. 16 packs per box. What's up, Carl? How's it going? How's it going? Some sports. Nice, Pete. What sports do you collect? Fun to rip you some sports stuff as well. Here we go. Refractor of George Russell and Speed Demon's Charles Leclerc. Norris and Ricardo. Purple Checker flag of Theo Prusher for A.R.T. Grand Prix. 29 of 199. Awesome. Good to hear. We've got gold and purple Alexander Albon for Williams and Ferrari Refractor. She's doing good. She's doing good, Carl. She'll be four months on Monday. Crazy. Sergio Perez-Weyre, T.P. and Albon. Football Baseball and some basketball. Nice. You PC anybody? Creamer Refractor. Football Baseball myself. Latifi Speed Demon's. Future Star's Refractor. Clement Novolak. Williams Refractor. Pre-process. Yeah, those are the purest, Pete. Those are so sick. Max for Stappin' on the way, Rave. I ripped a few of those last Monday on Drift. They're a really cool product. Four-in-Case Autos. Schumacher Magnuson and Pink Max for Stappin' on the Grand Prix winner. 63 of 75. Nice one there, Red Bull. I ripped two boxes and I believe you pulled six different sports out of that. We have Max for Stappin' Refractor, Ferrari. We pulled a Tony Hawk auto. Jenny Finch softball pitcher. We got Michelle West with golfer. Mike Tyson auto. Checker Flag, Sebastian Vettel. And we got a one-of-one Blue Tumbo, which was cool.  Weyre for Red Bull. It was Hamilton Refractor. Then I think we got a Barry Sanders auto. And then I pulled a Triple as well. It's a really cool Triple auto baseball. George Russell Refractor. Really, really cool product. Eric, I played every sport imaginable growing up. I played flag football. I played basketball, soccer, volleyball. The only sport I wasn't good at was softball. Joe Guania. They pitched it too darn fast. I could never hit it. Purple Charles Leclerc, 208 out of 399. But I have an arm. So the coach is like, just put her in the outfield. She can throw the ball. I was like, whatever. That was the one season of softball that I played. Sergio Perez Weyre. I was quarterback when I played flag football. All the boys would laugh at me, especially when they saw me walk up under center. And then I threw the ball and their jaws just dropped. I'm like, yeah. All right. That was box one on a number two here. Yeah. And then I played basketball in college out in Nebraska. I have a few cards for Carl. A few cards. Got Kevin Magnuson Refractor. Vettel Speed Demons. Hamilton Russell. A nice green way rave of Yuki Sanota for Alphatari, 8 of 99 there. Oh yeah, a toke. Absolutely. Never had a single Barbie doll growing up. Didn't want one. Nice. We got a gold and purple rookie of Joke Wanyu. Beautiful card there. Alpha Romeo. And Williams Racing. So it's like, I joke with my mom. I was like, I never had a Barbie doll growing up. But now I have like a real life Barbie doll that I get to dress up and buy clothes for a Sebastian Vettel Weyre. And it's actually very fun. I love it. Ward winner Refractor, Lewis Hamilton. We've got Frederick Vessey on the Refractor. And purple Sergio Perez. Red Bull doing well so far. 284, 399. It's a really cool photo on that one. But again, y'all, only spots left for daytime breaks is going to be the basketball mixers. Liam Lawson, Future Stars Weyre. Three boxes of the new Prism Collegiate draft picks and two boxes of the Mosaic Fast Spring. Fun little mixers there. 4,499 a spot. Get to your random team. Some really nice stuff coming out of that Prism draft picks. Like I said earlier, fourth cold, a Devon Booker stained glass, a Zion Manga, a Blue Cracked Ice, a Palo Auto. Those are really nice stuff out of that product for 45 bucks a spot. A nice price point for that break. Botox on the Refractor. And then out of the Fast Breaks, again, you're looking for the Disco Parallels. Joe Wanyu on the Rookie Weyre. And then there's one variation Disco Rookie Purr Box and that along with an autograph. So good mixers for sure. We have three of those at the end of the day. A Ollie Conwell on the Pink Weyre, 29 of 75. Future Stars Refractor, Fitty Paulding. Williams Racing. Staffing. Got Shaker Flag, Pierre Gasly for Alpha Tari. Yeah, especially with like their multi sport product, I really like their, you know, the very different variety they have. Botox on the Weyre. And they don't see too many like women autographs and, you know, the variety that they do, then in their multi sport product. So I am a fan of that. All right, box three here. Disappointed this last name, isn't it? All right, last light box. And then we'll get into the hobby boxes. Alexander Albon Refractor. Of Charles Leclerc. Prima. And a Lewis Hamilton Green. Nice one there for Mercedes 90 of 99. Nice green. More group breaks tonight, starting at five. We have Amax for Stappen on the Grand Prima. Ricardo Speedyman. Baseball basketball and football breaks go in there. We've got Shaker Flag, Future Stars, Liam Lawson. A new release coming up Wednesday, Esteban O'Conn Weyre. It's going to be tops update series Sapphire. Breaks are already posted in Philly. They're filling pretty fast. I think the first couple are already sold out. Esteban O'Conn Refractor. Williams Racing. Vettel and Stroll. And a Purple Fernando Alonso for LP. That one is 168 of 399. Griffey Junior Mike Trout Jeter. Cool house and bright server. Wow. That's crazy. Now it's out of five star, right? I think I saw that in the group chat. McLaren Science. What a card. We have Orange and Red George Russell. We've got Mercedes, Williams Racing Refractor. It's got to be a one-on-one, right? I couldn't imagine more than one of those. Zoffner, Oni Weyre for LP. Refractor Total Speed Demon, Stroll, Bestie. We've got Nicholas Latifi for Refractor. Latifi. And Mini Diamond of Bolivasi for Charuse. 76 of 299 out of five. Yeah, I was thinking it'd be either, you know, one-on-one or super low number. Charles LaClaire Weyre, Ferrari. Yeah, absolutely. A few packs left here of the lights. Max for Staff and Speed Demons and a last pack. Passed it to Martin Refractor. All right, that will do it for the light boxes. Now on to the hobbies. Again, says look for autograph cards and the hobbies have 18 packs of box. Here we go. That is a very good point, Pete. Yep. That's the thing with baseball, especially like heavily investing in prospects and stuff, too. Sometimes it can pay off for sure, but other times it can invite you. Our Atari Refractor. All right, it's a gamble. Color coming up. A green Max for Staff and Driver of the Day. A Red Bull. 67 of 99. Lando Norris, Driver of the Day. Photo variation. Refractor, Kaelin Williams, Creature Stars. Got Max for Staff and Grand Prix winner Refractor. LaClaire and Sainz, Sainz, Sainz. Refractor, Haas, Sadie. So we've got George Russell on the purple for Mercedes. 45 of 399. O'Conn, Speed Demons. If I've been having a great Saturday, thanks for tuning in to the stream. Kaelin Williams Refractor. Hoppin' in, saying hi by his spot. Who appreciate it. Wargrove Breaks Again tonight. Starting at five. We've got Orange and Red, Esteban O'Conn for LP. Gasly and Yuki. Make Shumakura on the Checker Flag. And Speed Demons, Gasly. Offer a Mayo Ricky Refractor to O'Conn. Haas and Purple Feature Stars of Roy Nassani. 134. 399. If you didn't see it earlier, pull this card out of the Sapphire 101 pad for Aston. Let's start the daytime breaks. Refractor, Perez. That gold wave here. George Russell on the Refractor. Gold wave. That's one. Sebastian Vettel for Aston Martin. That is 11 out of 50. Nice gold wave there. Aston Martin is going to go to Bobby S. There you go, Bobby. Nice Vettel. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. We have another banger. F1 is just hot this morning. No black. We have a red auto, y'all. All your match there with the Red Bull. Put this in a mag. So you get one F1 team paired with an F2 team. There's a couple that are comboed. The F2 teams. Vettel and Stroll. Wow. What a box. It's one of the biggest racers in F1P. Wow, wow, wow. All right. Let's continue on. Two boxes for this break. Got Lando Norris checkered flag and Speed Demon's Lando Norris Refractor. Got Jake Hughes Refractor. Got Rookie Joe Guanyu Refractor. Again, y'all, we do offer insurance on your packages for big hits like that. They're under our supplies tab at LeightonSportsCards.com. Let me drop the... There is the link for insurance. I don't know if you have any questions about that. If you're watching, Aaron, ask the Martin Refractor. Glaren and purple appear ghastly for Alcatari, two of 39. Speed Demon's Stroll. Yuki Sanota Refractor. Got Charles Leclerc Refractor. Got Christmas, a little red and green of Iwasa for Dom's. That's the Martin. Rory, we've got purple Sergio Perez. That one is 210 of 399. Speed Demon's Albon. Yeah, gold. Glaren and Stroll Refractor. Glaren and Stroll. Gold. Mercedes. Both are... That is 32 of 50 on the true gold. Mercedes. Got Lewis Hamilton Refractor. And we've got Otto A. Nicholas Latifi on the Abase Refractor Auto for Williams. Nice. There you go. Williams is going to be Patrick L. Grats on that, Patrick. Back-to-back boxes with autos. We'll take that. Heck yeah. Again, they are not guaranteed any hobby boxes. Hamilton and Russell Refractor. William Bracing Refractor. Prima and Speckle. Mini Diamond of Lewis Hamilton. 185 of 299. Sharp-looking card. All right. Good luck. Last Holly Box here. Last F1. And we're going to get into some football. Again, only Brace with spots left are going to be our basketball mixers. We've got three of them to end the day. Three boxes of the new 2223 Collegiate Prism. And then two boxes of the Mosaic Fast Break Basketball. Carlos Sainz. Checker Flag. Ricardo. Only 45 bucks a spot there. Get you a random team. We have a Max Verstappen. Max Verstappen. Refractor. Refractor. Yuki Sonoda. Schumacher Magnusson. Got a Purple and Green Max Verstappen. He's a three for three for all. Red Bull Refractor. Alpine. Mini Diamond. Jack Duhun for Virtuosi. 127 of 299. Refractor. Alonso Speed Demons. Refractor. Frederick Vesti. Refractor. A.R.T. Grand Prix. Red Bull. We've got Purple. Checker Flag. Future Stars. Fitty Pauly. Refractor. Speed Demons. Verstappen. Here we go. What is going on? Carlos Sainz. We've got Red Checkered Flag. That is sick. I love the Red Checkered Flag look. Again, beautiful color match there with the red and the red bull. We'll get this one in a mag for you too, Erin. Two reds. One break. Christian Horner Refractor. Latifi Albon. Claire and F1. Male.  What a recap we have. Kevin Magnusson Refractor. You don't have to ask on that one. All right. Here we go. Quick recap here. Greens out of 99. Verstappen. Lewis Hamilton. Mercedes. Green way rave of Yuki Sonoda. Pink's out of 75. Max Verstappen. Red Bull. Ollie Cadwell on the pink way ring. We had a gold wave to 50. Sebastian Vettel for Aston Martin. And the true gold of Valtteri Bottas for Mercedes. Then base refractor auto, Nicholas Latifi for Williams. And Red Bull. My goodness. We had the Red Checkered Flag. Max Verstappen. One out of five. And then the Sergio Perez Red. Also for Red Bull. Four out of five. Congrats again. Thanks so much for the fill y'all. We've got some soccer coming right up.


No, it's shy, I get it, it's shy. I know, yeah. Okay, and then I'm gonna start. I've been told I have to start. I can understand the distraction. Okay, so I'll just get started. So it's cool to be here, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how astrophysicists are starting to use a blender, and a little bit about a package that I've been developing. So I figured not everybody knows what astrophysicists do, so I thought, also now it's an excuse to show some cool pictures, I would just sort of explain a little bit about what we do. So here's a cool image. Basically this is the group that I'm working with. We do big, large structure simulations of the early universe till now, and we try and figure out how galaxies form, what those galaxies look like, how many milky ways do we get, what happens to metals when they're created, that sort of thing. And so these things, these simulations track both dark matter, if you haven't heard of that, it makes up about 85% of the matter in our universe, but you can't see it, so since we're very clever, we called it dark matter. And then it also tracks gas, and gas has a lot more properties like temperature, composition, things like that. And so you have to include some other physics besides gravity, if you wanna be realistic, so you have to have some prescription for how stars form, the effects of magnetic fields, how elements are created and distributed through the universe, these types of things. And so these things can get big, and so what I mean by big, for example, the one that we're planning, hopefully to start in the near future, you get things that are about 100 billion particles or cells, and they each have their own physics, their own composition, things like that. And so we're planning on running this on something like 90,000 cores for several months, hopefully only several months. My postdoc is only so long. And the snapshot files, which basically give you just a snapshot of how the universe looks at a particular time, those things can get up to several terabytes, right? So that's a lot of polygons. I don't know a lot about computer animation, but I do know that that's a lot of polygons. So how the heck do we understand what's going on in our data? And even for my own simulations for just smaller projects, these snapshot files can get up to a few gigabytes. So even the small things are kind of big. And so this is not just a problem for people that are doing simulations, observations now, we're getting to be bigger and bigger data. So I might just put two examples. So one is the dark energy survey and that is going on right now and they already have about a petabyte of data. So that's looking at the expansion of the universe, something that's coming online pretty soon at the LSST. That's gonna have probably hundreds of petabytes of data in a decade. So those are big things. And this is not just a problem for people that study like big universe stuff. Even people that study planets have this problem. So this is just kind of a cool example of all the planets that we've now, exoplanets that we've discovered. So the Earth is the little star there. And so you can see we have this wide range of dynamics. Also we're gonna start getting information, hopefully, about their atmospheres and so we have to model those things too. I'm very biased towards the sort of fluid simulation, so that's what I'm gonna talk about, but I just wanted to give you an idea for sort of the scales of data that we're gonna have to deal with in the near future. So here's sort of the workflow of a typical computational astrophysicist. So you have to pick a code. And so two examples that are predominantly used are adaptive mesh refinement.  Or I think smooth particle hydrodynamics is basically the fluid simulations in blender.  You can also do both. So I'm actually working on a code that's a hybrid. So it's sort of a moving mesh code that uses boronoi tessellations to sort of follow things. And you get these cool mesh structures, so I thought I'd show that. So here's just a subset of the different codes that people use, either particle or AMR somewhere in between. And they usually have their own individual data formats. So that's always exciting if you're trying to compare codes. Okay, so you've picked your physics code. So now you have to actually add physics to it. So how stars form, if there's heat being added to your simulation from supernova feedback. So when massive stars die, they explode as supernova. You have to model that somehow, all that stuff. And then you send it to a supercomputer and then you wait for a bit. And then you do your visualizations and analyzations. And so again, all of the data, all of the different codes have their own data formats and so usually they have their own specific visualization code. Or YT is the thing I'll talk a little bit about and that sort of tries to combine all these data formats. And so I just put up two examples in super weird units so you can ignore the units. But one is a more visualization plot. And so basically I have this cube and I'm modeling how gas forms into a galaxy and then I just take a slice on the Z-axis and plot this. And so I can ask questions like where are the spiral arms in my galaxy? Okay, so this is a spatial plot and coloring things by density. So I can say, okay, well probably the higher density things are where my spiral arms are. So I can look at that. I've also over plotted the grid so I can say, okay, where are things being refined in my simulation? And so this is an example of an analysis plot. So it's a phase space plot. So basically it's telling you how much mass you have in each density and temperature bin. So I can say, for example, where do I expect stars to form? So I expect them to form where there's cold dense stuff so I can just sort of go to this plot and in the lower right-hand corner say, okay, I've got this much mass forming stars. And then you usually just allow the rinse repeat, right? You're not gonna get it right the first time. So hopefully you don't have to go pick a different code but you probably do have to augment the physics and just kind of do this over and over again. And then hopefully at some point you get to make a super cool movie. And so Astro Blend is kind of at this end right here trying to fix and make these things a little bit easier. And so I just wanted to mention that I'm not the only astrophysicist that's working in Blender. So here's a few examples. Miguel Aragon has some really cool interactive pseudo volume renderings doing some Voronoi tessellation or delineate tessellation, some sort of tessellation. Art Taylor, I can't pronounce his first name so I'm calling him Art Taylor. So he just came out with a cool volume rendering package in Blender. Also Brian Kent has a nice website and also a great book. So if you have a computational scientist in your life that's really wanting to learn Blender, especially if they do astrophysics, I'd highly recommend his book. There's also other scientific visualization tools but they all have a variety of problems. So some of them are proprietary, some of them don't have easy accessible data formats. Some have user interfaces that have a little bit to be desired and none of them really allow for a lot of artistic input. So the idea is basically to have this package where you can easily access data from multiple types of scientific simulations and then be able to interact with the data and do analysis all in 3D and also to be able to include artistic models. So here's an example script since I do computational astrophysics. I'm kind of not as friendly with buttons so I'll just show what I started with which is an example script and you can also find this just on the website. And so here is the Astro Blend Library. I call it science because I can and I think it's funny. So you import science and then the next step is you load an object. So in this case these are some pre-generated surfaces. So these are some isodensity surfaces meaning they all have the same density. Then you set up your lighting. You say I want it to make a glow. Position your camera. You say I want to render it to this location and then you render, right, pretty easy. So you get this image. And so this image is actually the gas around that little slice plot that I was showing before of a galaxy. So this is the gas falling into the galaxy. And there's two isodensity surfaces. You can really see the outer one and the colors are temperature. So the hotter things are more yellow and the glowiness is basically from physical parameters. Bram's drawing a mission if there's any scientists in here. So you get this cool image. Okay, so you can also do this in a different way by directly interacting with the data. And so this data is actually available. You can download it if you would like from the YT project. They've got a bunch of different data sets. Some are more or less documented, but it's all there. And then you say, okay, I want to extract surfaces with these densities again in weird units. They're grams per centimeter cubed. Don't ask me why we use those units. And then you say, okay, I want my emissivity to be based on some physical phenomena. Again, I'm using Bram's drawing a mission. And then you actually load things directly using YT, this other data analysis software that I'll talk about in the next slide. And you can just use that as a backend to load things. And so basically what YT is doing is it's actually querying the data format. So again, it has front ends for a bunch of different astrophysical codes. So it says, oh, I'm using this kind of code. It knows how to query the data file. It can also generate a surface. So it does that. And then it also figures out what colors you want based on the different values on your surface and also the emissivity. And then it exports those vertices to Blender and then Blender says, oh, okay, I have these meshes with these colors and then it generates the mesh. So this is all done in memory. And again, load is able to figure out what you're trying to do. So if you're trying to load an OBJ file or directly with the data. Okay, so I've been talking about YT. So what is YT actually? So this is from their website. YT is a Python package for analyzing, visualizing volumetric multi-resolution data from astrophysical simulations, radio telescopes and a burgeoning intertipulmonary community. Woo, okay. Basically I'm just gonna show some cool images that you can do with YT. So this is an example of gas in the early universe collapsing and forming stars which are kind of the egg-shaped things. There are those two eggs. And so you can do some visualization and some analysis. So this is one of their volume rendering. This is a big plot. And then there's that phase space diagram that I was talking about before that's telling you how much mass you have at a given temperature and density. And then I just thought I'd show some gratuitous images because they're pretty. So I think this is radio data from Alma. And I think it's of a giant molecular cloud. Here I think this is supernova explosions going off in a small box. Here hopefully this is self-explanatory. So yeah, so you can use multiple, not just astrophysical, but it was developed for astrophysical simulations. Okay, so there's, but there's no interactions in 3D with the data. So I'm gonna show some movies because the loading is not optimized yet. So I didn't want everyone just to wait during a demo for 20 seconds as something loaded. So basically I've added a two panels to a GUI so I can directly with Blender go and load the data. So this is again that isolated galaxy simulation. So it loads it, that's sort of the domain box. So everything sort of scaled to some units that you get to choose. So now I'm gonna create with the GUI one of these isodensity contours. So I'm just choosing the color scheme and then the density value I want in grams per centimeter cubed. I'm gonna make it a little see-through. You can also put in a string for your emissivity but I'm not gonna do that here. And boom, you get this little isodensity contour in your box. So that's the same one we had before, it's just not glowy this time. So on top of that you can also do analysis plots. So I can do one of those slice plots that I was showing is sort of like your initial visualization you might wanna do. And it will do it in the 3D space. So here I'm again slicing along Z and you generate it. And so you get your analysis plot in your UV editor and then you get your slice plot plotted in the 3D space, right? And so you can see where your isodensity contour lives in your slice plot. You can also interact with these things in the 3D space. So here first I'm making a little bit bigger, right? Maybe I want a super cool big slice plot. And then you can also do off axis slices, right? So I can regenerate that. And then I'm just zooming out so you can see the whole slice plot. And then if I go back to the solid view, you can see that there's this extra little empty that's up there and I just call it empty my slice because I'm, you know, we call it dark matter, dark matter, so what do you want? Anyway, so you can then interact and sort of change where the orientation of your slice plot, you can also pick up your actual slice plot and move it around and it'll change the center.  You can also do this with another kind of plot called projection plot. It's basically the same formulation as a slice plot. You're just projecting everything along a certain axis. So I'm not gonna do that. Another cool thing you can do is make a phase plot in 3D. So here I'm just gonna generate a phase plot and then, and again, you can do whatever variables you want on your X and Y axis. I'm just doing temperature and density because that's what I've been showing. Excuse me. And so then you can generate your phase plot and then go back to the solid view and lo and behold, you're actually taking all of the data within that sphere and that's what you're using to make your analysis plot. And so that means that you can now interactively move around what data you're actually looking at in your phase plot. So this will allow you to, you know, figure out what regions in your phase plot or in your domain are actually interesting. I think I'm gonna show one more thing with this simulation. Yeah, so you can also, so I'm just cleaning up things, you can also plot the grid. And so that it's another way to look at where the most interesting things are. So this is an easy way to say, oh well clearly the most interesting things are gonna be where it's refined. You know, maybe I should make an isocontour there or something. So the other thing that you can do with this that is very hard to do with other astrophysical analysis tools is then you can load data from a completely different simulation. And so this is again made with a completely different kind of code, but it scales your domain box into the same scale as your previous simulation. And so in this way, I'm actually uploading some SPH, so a particle data code. And so in this case, I can make a particle cloud out of that. And so I'm just gonna do that and then boom generates point cloud. Again, the box size is pretty big, so we have to zoom in a little bit. And I'm just hiding the old domain box. And so then when I render potentially, I can have the results from multiple simulations in there. So in this case, this is a simulation of a galaxy as well, but it's a point cloud galaxy. So I zoom in a little bit and you can kind of see there's sort of spiral arm structure and stuff there. Okay, so even more on the dev-dev level, we're also able to do volume rendering within memory. So I'll just show a quick little simulation of that. So that's that isolated galaxy again, same isolated galaxy. I think I just turned the background to black. Notice that there's no texture panels there. Just keep that in mind for a second. So this again is another way that you can interact with your data sort of in a more intuitive way than making a bunch of volume render plots where you have to figure out where you should put the camera, right? You can just do the volume rendering. And so for example, I could say hey, there's something that's very interesting in the center. Maybe I should check that out. So I can do that while also keeping in mind the larger scale structure that I have, gas structure that I have, right? And so then I can also just interactively change what the color scheme is and that will bring out different features. Okay. So again, everything is done in direct memory. So YT is calling the data, storing in memory and then pushing it to the voxel data. But however the way we're doing that is a little sketchy. So we're actually overriding the voxel data structure with a C types array, which seems a little bit wrong. I mean, look at that face on that corgi. So I was hoping to maybe talk to a developer about maybe being able to pass like a pointer to the voxel data structure. So if anybody has any ideas on how to do that, that would be great. Yeah, so that's the reason why the texture doesn't show up. So you know if your variable that you're adding has hack in it, it's probably a bad sign. So basically, Blender then tries to access memory that's not there, right? So it's trying to preview these textures, but there's no actual texture there. So that causes it to crash. The other problem is that we're not supporting the adaptive part of the adaptive mesh refinement. So this is just a uniform grid that we have, and so we can't actually get up to the highest level of refinement, so that's another thing we gotta work on. Also the transfer functions are a little bit limited. I haven't played around with it that much, so that might be a full statement. But basically, for example, in YT, what you can do is you can say I want specific levels to be emitting fully at some temperature, just at those specific levels, or you can do some gradients where you know your cool stuff fades in blue and then your hot stuff fades in red. And that's how you get that kind of layered structure that YT had. So it'd be cool to do kind of interaction with that. And then I just thought I'd show some gratuitous movies. So here, this was actually in a paper, not the movie, but the plots from it. And so this is two galaxies interacting. They also have black holes at the center, but you can't really see anything. And so the different particle colors are different things, so the, I'll play it again. So the red are old stars, the yellow is gas, and then the white things are new stars that are formed. And so this was, I think, four million particles. So you can get up pretty big. And like the last data, the last plots, the data files for those were a gigabyte or something. So it's not impossible. It took a little bit of time, but it wasn't impossible. So I don't think I'll show this whole one. People have showed way cooler movies. And this was just sort of like a first test to see if I could combine a model with some observational data, that's the galaxies in the background, and then also some actual simulation data. So I'll just zoom through that. So I'm just showing the positions of dwarf galaxies. I mean, these are all scaled to the proper proportion, except for the background galaxies, right? And those are information about the orbits. That's what they're all named. And then you can actually, I put in some of my simulation data. So, and again, this is scaled to fit the space that it's in. So this is like a disk of gases forming because you've got a rotating dwarf galaxy potential. And it's then moving through the background medium of the larger galaxy of our Milky Way. And so that's why you get this bow shock forming around the disk. And so then you can also add annotations onto this very easily. So, I think I'd do that, yeah. So for example, I can show the motion of the dwarf galaxy, how the gas is, and then annotate it a little bit. Okay. So there's a lot of stuff still to be done. So again, volume rendering is still pretty hactacular. It'd be great if it wasn't. And also, being able to maybe switch between the YT rendering and our rendering would also be great. Everything so far is done with the Blender internal render, but of course Cycles is awesome. So we should use Cycles. And again, the loading of data isn't optimized right now. So YT can do things in parallel. I just haven't put that in because one crisis at a time. So right now this is Astro Blend is a package you can download from Bitfucket. But it'd be great to also make it a Python package since that's what computational physicists are sort of used to. And also make it an add-on so people like you guys can use it. Also, keyframing hasn't really been implemented yet. So we've got, again, snapshot files. And so the grid could potentially be changing a lot in between those snapshot files. So the way that we tend to make movies is just to make pictures of each of those snapshot files and then just put that together as a movie. But if you wanna use keyframes, then we're gonna have to figure out how to morph between surfaces and things like that. So that would be cool. Again, I have access to supercomputers so I know people have rendered Blender on supercomputers so it'd be great to do that. And also we're gonna at some point have to do remote access of data for the things that are really big because you don't wanna generate a surface from something where you have to transfer over a terabyte of data. That would be a little bit of a hassle. Okay, so in the last few minutes what do we actually get from all of this? So I think a great example is actually an example from a Python boot camp that I taught. And so this was aimed at young scientists so they didn't really have any coding experience and I hadn't ever done research before. And so I gave them basically a decremented data set from the Galaxy Merger simulation. I said, here, this is what all the particles mean, figure something out. And so they made these two movies for an example. So the blue basically is showing where the black holes are and then they've highlighted in the other movie the new stars that are forming.  And so in their poster what they said was as the two black holes merge there's a lot of stars that are formed. And that's like a big thing that observationally people have been really interested in and also people have been trying to show with computational simulation. So the fact that they just did that on their own using purely visualization is really cool. And so that's an example of what you can learn as NASA physicists by doing visualization. So I'm just gonna guess what you guys can gain from scientific visualization because I'm not an artist. So you'd have easier access to scientists which you can debate if that's good. We're kind of odd, so I don't know. But you do have easier access or you will soon have easier access to scientific data. So the National Center for Supercomputing Applications is putting together the National Data Service. And so this is a way basically that scientists when you publish a paper you can also publish access to your data. So this is supposed to be all open source so you guys can also check this out. And so if you query the some information in the paper it will tell you where you can go get that data and that data will all be localized. So then if you're reading several different papers on the same subject you'll have access to all of the data and you can hopefully compare those things easily. You can also print cool things. So here is an ISO density surface from a simulation I did of stars in a cluster with their winds. So their winds are colliding and you get this cool structure.  And I was like, yes. And so we 3D printed this. It only kind of crapped out at the last little bit there but you can still see the cool structure there. And so if anybody has any ideas I would love to hear them too. So let me know if you have any better ideas. And so I just want to finish with like a grandiose thought, right? So if we go back to this picture of how we're currently doing science now this is usually, this applies to a few astrophysicists in a collaboration or maybe one lone computational astrophysicist. But as we're getting more and more data both computation and observation we create this open source method of access if we can also develop easy ways to communicate across disciplines and to the public I'm just excited to see how science is going to change and particularly the way we do science is gonna change when we are able to more easily communicate across disciplines. So thank you very much. Thank you. No singlet question. It's very interesting to see this. Thank you for the talk. If you are here we can connect you with several developers.  But did you try to reach out to the Blender.org community or did you everything to yourself independently? I definitely post a little bit on Blender artists so they answered a few questions. So I didn't really, so not yet, I mean now that we're kind of overriding things in the C code I feel like maybe now is a good time because that seems wrong. So. I'm always impressed that people are using Blender without contacting us. It's amazing. So I'm very, very happy that you guys are using this. You got so far. Another one, do you know BioBlender? Yeah, I saw a little bit of their stuff. Yeah, it seems like they're doing right models of molecules. Yeah, they're doing molecular stuff, but at that level it's almost the same as the galaxy, you know? I don't know how many cells and stuff they have, but as far as their computational volume, like how much stuff. It might be slightly different problems, but I think, for example, trying to represent planets and atmospheres on planets, I think that there's probably gonna be some overlap. So yeah. One more tool because we have to keep our schedule, right? Yeah. Yes, I was interested. Can you use the tools you developed now to render fractal data or the other way around? Can you use the fractal rendering things because there are some amazing ways to render fractals for rendering galaxies? Yeah, so admittedly I haven't looked into that very much. I've definitely looked a little bit at what people are doing as far as how you have to interpolate your fractals, but yeah, no, I started looking at that and was like, that's really cool, and then didn't go back to it, but it might be useful. It might be a useful thing to look at. Okay, so maybe I asked the last question. What is the feedback from the scientific world about blender? Do you have some positive comments about this work or something like that? Yeah, mostly I get, well, that's cool. So I think the fact that you can sort of move your plots around in 3D, that's something that I have, I don't wanna get in trouble with anyone, but I don't think I've seen any other visualization package where you can do that. And then the fact that it supports a lot of data formats through YT as a backend is super helpful. So yeah, so far no one's thrown anything at me, so it seems good. That's super awesome, brand new roles. Thank you for that. Thank you. No, I'm just saying that I'm very interested in what you do because I work with a company that does simulation engineering. That is not something like this, but they export, I can't import the volumetric animation in blender, and I was wondering how do you do it? And if there is any resource, any book, any website where I can understand how you import volumetric data. Yeah, so I could show you the code. So I initially started by reformatting our data to the voxel data structure, so there's one website that kind of explained how to do it. So I can definitely point you at that. I can't remember it off the top of my head. But yeah, basically we just use things that were in YT to generate from an AMR grid, so an adaptive mesh refinement grid, to make a uniform grid, and then using that as the voxel data. But yeah, I think you just have to reformat. If you wanna just do it from a voxel data, from uploading voxel data, then you have to reformat your output to that. Okay, thank you. Now there is time for a blend for a web.