Welcome back. In the last class we were looking at catalysis and we were first representing the whole process of catalysis using reaction coordinate diagrams. So shown on your screen is a representative reaction coordinate diagram in purple of a reaction which is being catalyzed and the transformation can be shown as below where you have A binding with the catalyst to give you A cat this lowers the energy of activation to give you B cat and finally you have B plus catalyst. So catalysis involves regeneration of the catalyst. The catalyst enhances the rate of the reaction by lowering of the activation energy. So if you remember from the last class the red line here is much smaller than the green line which indicates that activation energy is lowered. Then we looked at classification of catalysts. So we looked at different types of catalysis and then we focus solely on acid base catalysis. So this is what is found very often which is why I will focus quite a bit on acid base catalysis. So acid base catalysis before we go on to catalysis we need to understand the acid base equilibria. So we had looked at a simple transformation where you have acetone. So acetone in the presence of a base will give you an enolate and then I had asked you to think about what would be a good base and relative acidities I told you is important because you have two acids here. One is the acid which is acetone. The other is the conjugate acid of the base which is BH plus. So both have a tendency to give proton. So if acid one or acetone is a better acid the reaction will go forward towards formation of enolate. If the conjugate acid of the base so if you use hydroxy then the conjugate acid is water. If you use methoxy the conjugate acid is methanol. So if this is a better acid then what you would see is the reaction will go towards the left. So you will not get much of your enolate. So it is important to consider relative acidities. So if pKa of one is lower than pKa of two the reaction will go forward. And we had compared the pKa of acetone with methanol and water both are 16. Acetone has a pKa of 20. So we know that these are not great bases for you to deprotonate acetone. So there were two ground rules I had asked you to remember. So when you have neutral acids if you are trying to compare their acidities what you do is you compare the stability of the conjugate base. So in this case you are looking at enolate. The more stable conjugate base implies a stronger acid. If you are looking at cationic acids like HA+, in that case when you compare the relative stability of the acid themselves what you would see is the more stable cation would be a weaker acid because obviously it would not want to give away its protons. So before leaving I had asked you to look at this table and you already have the pKa values given of acetone, water and methanol. Now based on the pKa of acetone if you write the structure of ethylacetoacetate and diethyl malonate what do you expect the pKa's to be? Will they be lower than acetone or will they be higher? Also between these two which would be more acidic? So I want you to write the structures of both of these and compare the pKa's of the hydrogen which is alpha to the carbonyl group. So if you do not remember the structure of ethylacetoacetate, ethylacetoacetate is you have CH3, C double bond O, CH2. So this is the acidic proton that we are talking about. So this is ethylacetoacetate and diethyl malonate the structure is here again these are the protons we are looking at. So now if you compare the acidity of these two protons in one case you have a proton next to alpha to 2 ester groups. In one case it is alpha to an ester and alpha to a ketone. So this would be more acidic as compared to this and if you see compared to acetone now in acetone you have only one C double bond O next to the acidic hydrogen whereas in this case you have two C double bond O's. So both these compounds would be more acidic than acetone which means a lower pKa and among the two ethylacetoacetate would be a better acid. So it has a pKa of 10.7 as compared to diethyl malonate which has a pKa of 12.7. So these are commonly used compounds which have an acidic hydrogen, acidic alpha hydrogen which is used in a lot of organic transformation. So I would suggest you have some idea or maybe even memorize these pKa's because it would be very useful for you when you try to understand reactions involving these compounds. Now let us look at the conjugate acids of the bases. So if you have ethoxide as the base the conjugate acid would be ethanol. So now when you compare methanol with ethanol methanol has a pKa of 15.5. So what do you think would be the pKa of ethanol? Will it be more than methanol or less than methanol? So hopefully you have gotten the answer correct the pKa will be more because ethanol is less acidic than methanol. It has an extra releasing group which is the CH3, CH2OH as compared to CH3. And the other thing is once you generate the ethoxide the stabilization due to solvation is less as compared to the methoxide which would be solvated more. Ethoxide is solvated less because of the bulk. So if you had isopropoxide that would have a further higher pKa because solvation of the iron would be worse. Now let us look at these two diisopropyl amine and then you have another amine but here you have two silyl groups next to the amine. So when you look at the pKa's of these these would be significantly higher than that of ethanol or methanol right because you are generating the n-ion here and you have releasing groups on both sides. So there pKa's as you can see is 36 and 30. Then if you compare methane so methane what you would see is the conjugate base is CH3 minus. So this is not as stable as compared to methoxide. So what you would see is it has a very high pKa of 56 and hydrogen if you compare with methane is slightly better it has a lower pKa of 36. So it is good for you to have a feel of all this. So based on this what do you know is any of these compounds would be very good bases to deprotonate. So these are the conjugate acids the BH plus which we looked at the previous slide. So if you use a base such as LDA we have seen that before it is a very good base because its conjugate acid has a very high pKa. So the reaction will not go back towards acetone. So now are there some principles that you need to know in order to predict the relative acidities of two molecules. So there are several factors and usually what you see is a contribution of all of these. It is not only one factor which predominates. So let us look at what some of these factors are. So this is the generic equation we had seen before. So you have an acid a base you generate the conjugate base of the acid and conjugate acid of the base. Now one thing which really has an effect on the pH or pKa is the reaction medium. So most organic reactions that you carry out you carry out in a solvent. So the solvent we have seen earlier also plays a very very important role. But here we are looking at specifically the role of the solvent on pKa. So if you compare a neutral acid. So when you compare the pKa of a neutral acid like acetic acid in different solvents you would see that the pKa increases as you go from water to DMF. So what is happening here? Remember the two guiding principles I told you. So for a neutral acid when you compare the acid strength it is important to look at stability of the conjugate base. Now what happens is if you have a solvent like water which is very good in solvating your conjugate base which is an anion you would see that the acidity is improved. So what you see is in water acetic acid has a pKa of 4.76 because the conjugate base is solvated very well. But as you go to methanol the pKa increases because now solvation is less. And then as you go to DMSO and DMF you see that there is a increase in pKa. Similarly with para-nitrophinol you would see that to start with you have a pKa in water at around 7.16. But then as you vary the solvent from water to methanol DMSO and DMF the pKa increases. Now we look at the second example here. Here what you see is you have a protonated acid. So when I told you the guiding principle this comes in the second category where you have a cationic acid. So here what you see is in water the pKa is 4.6. But when you go to DMSO and DMF the pKa decreases. So why is this the case? Now I want you to think before I tell you the answer what happens when you change the solvent from water to DMSO or DMF. So hopefully you have understood and gotten the answer correct. What happens is in water now your acid which is charged is more solvated or more stabilized. So what happens is when you go from water to DMSO DMSO does not solvate the acid as well. So it is easier for the acid to give away the proton. So here what you see is you see a reverse trend because the solvent stabilizes the acid more than the conjugate base. So hopefully you have understood how the reaction medium or solvent has an effect on pKa. The other factor is the electronegativity and what is called as the inductive effect. So if you remember the very first class with that we had for this course we had looked at inductive effect. So now we are essentially looking at the same concept towards the end of the course. But in a very different context we are looking at inductive effect in the context of acidity. So if you have HA where A is more electronegative that is A has a greater tendency to pull electrons towards itself then it would be easier for it to dissociate because the conjugate base that you get A- would be stronger. So the more electronegative atom attached to the hydrogen would be very good to improve its acidity. So that is one of the factors as I told you. So now I have shown you on your screen 4 different acids. So based on this concept what I would like you to do is I would like you to compare their acidities. So which would be most acidic and which would be least acidic. So if you were to compare the acidities you will see Hf would be most acidic greater than that would be RoH, greater than that would be R2NH and greater than that would be R3CH. And you can easily explain this in terms of the electronegativity. So as the electronegativity increases you see in this case across a group the acidity increases. So this is quite straight forward and something I am sure you must have studied earlier as well. The other thing is resonance stabilization. So if I compare methanol with phenol now we have seen this when we were looking at linear free energy relationships. The phenoxide ion is stabilized by resonance. So you can write resonance structures of this. You can write multiple resonance structures where the negative charge would be either at the oxygen or it would be at the 2 position or the 4 position or the 6 position. So you can have the negative charge delocalized which is why it is stable. Now what happens is as we are looking at stability of the conjugate base if I put electron withdrawing groups at these 3 position. So in this case I have one electron withdrawing group at the 4 position in this case I have 2 electron withdrawing groups and in this case I have 3 electron withdrawing groups. So what do you think will happen to the pKa as I go from methanol to picric acid this is called picric acid which is the 246-tionitrophinol. So what do you think will happen to the pKa? Think about it I will wait for a minute or you can press the pause button. So now what you would see is as you increase the number of electron withdrawing groups there is a major effect on the pKa. So we start with the pKa of 16 for methanol and already when you put an aromatic ring instead of methyl you see a drop in pKa to 10. Then when you start putting electron withdrawing groups you have a further drop. So you go to 7.15 and 4 and when you have 3 nitro groups it goes as low as 0.4. So what you see here is a great decrease in pKa because you are adding electron withdrawing groups. So this is due to the resonance stabilization. Now we will take another case here. So here you have toluene. So imagine you are thinking of deprotonation of toluene the CH bond as you increase the aromatic rings here. So here the conjugate base that you are generating will be. So this again is stabilized by resonance. Now what you see is you would assume that as you increase the number of aromatic units you would see a decrease in pKa. What you see is you do see a decrease in pKa. So for toluene it is 41.2 but when you put one aromatic ring it drops down to 33 which would make sense because now you have two aromatic groups which can be involved in stabilization due to resonance. But you put the third aromatic unit you see that the decrease is not much. Now again I will ask you a question why do you think this decrease is not much? So think about it there are two reasons you can think about it press the pause button. So one reason is sterics. So what happens here is due to sterics there is a loss of planarity. So what happens is when you have three aromatic rings there is it is almost like a fan that you have here you have a slight loss of planarity and because of this resonance essentially involves conjugation or delocalization and in order for delocalization to happen you need to have a planar structure. So if planarity is lost delocalization is reduced which is why you do not see as much as an effect that you saw in the earlier case of picric acid. Now the second reason is there is what is called as a saturation of stabilization due to delocalization. Now in the case of picric acid there were three positions where you had negative charge which could be stabilized by electron withdrawing groups. But in this case the additional stabilization that you get by adding aromatic units is not significant which is why adding three aromatic groups is not as useful as just having two in terms of improving acidity. So this is again this shows you that there are multiple factors that you need to consider when you think of pKa. So in this case one is the sterics and the second is what is called as saturation of stabilization. So so far we have looked at solvent effects, we have looked at inductive effects and we have looked at stabilization due to resonance. Now let us look at some more effects. One is the bond strength. So as I told you earlier within a row as the electronegativity increases the acid strength increases but what happens within a group? So let us say we compare the acidity of HI, HBr, HCl and HF. Now fluorine is the most electronegative but what you see is that the most acidic is HI and that is because the bond strength is lower for HI as compared to HF. So it is very easy to break the HI bond as compared to the HF bond. So within a group you can use the bond strength as a criteria but when you compare acidities of molecules across different groups it is not very useful to use this criteria because a lot of other factors will play a more dominant role. The other thing is when you think of bond strength you are typically thinking of a homolytic bond cleavage whereas in this case what you have is a heterolytic bond cleavage. So it does give you some idea about predicting acidities within a group but as I said you cannot compare it across different acids which have atoms across different groups. The other is what is called as an electrostatic effect. Electrostatic as the name suggests we are talking about charges. So you can have the case where you have a positive charge next to the conjugate base. So your conjugate base is negatively charged. Now if you have a positively charged species next to your conjugate base obviously it will stabilize your conjugate base due to electrostatic interactions and if you have a negative charge it will destabilize it due to repulsion. So let us see a classic example for that. I will come back to acetic acid. Now instead of acetic acid we have propanoic acid here. So the pKa would be quite close to acetic acid slightly higher. Now shown here is glycine. Glycine is an amino acid. So if I ask you to compare the pKa of these two hydrogens so we are comparing the pKa of the carboxylic acid from propanoic acid and the carboxylic acid from glycine which do you think would be more acidic. So let us see if you have the answer correct. Between these two glycine would be more acidic because it has a positively charged NH3 plus right next to it. So if you compare the pKa of these two propanoic acid has a pKa of 4.82 whereas glycine has a lower pKa of 2.31 and you see this a lot in biology all the amino acids have a structure like this and their pKa's are in the range of between 2 to 2.5. And what you see is in our body at neutral pH what you would see is these would have a zwitterionic form. Another example I have here is where you have positively charged phosphorus right next to the methyl group and where have you seen this? You have probably seen this when you have studied Wittig reaction. Having this positive charge next to methyl reduces the pKa of that methyl and it is easy to generate this species which you know as your Ylid which is used in Wittig reactions. So shown here is another example where the electrostatic effect is used a lot in organic synthesis to stabilize this particular Ylid structure. So now we will go ahead and look at two other factors one is hybridization. So shown here are three species and what I want you to do is I want you to compare the pKa's of these hydrogens, the hydrogen missing here. So I want you to compare the pKa's of these three hydrogens. You can press the pause button alright. So let us see if you have gotten this correct. Out of these the most acidic is this species. So if I were to compare the pKa the pKa of this is lower than and these are the values. It is as low as minus 12. So you have the pKa here as minus 12 compared to 5.23 to 10 to 11. And what is the major difference between these three species? It is the hybridization because if you see the electronegativity of the atoms is very similar here. What you see is you have an sp hybridization here as compared to an sp2 here as compared to an sp3. So as the percentage s character increases the acidity of the species increases. So what you see is if you this will also work if you were to compare alkyne versus alkene versus alkene. So you would see the same trend where the pKa of sp would be less than sp2 alright. So we are talking about pKa's. So sp hybridization leads to greater acidity and the last factor that we are going to look at is aromaticity and this is something which you would have probably studied in 12 standard. So if you were to compare these two species so we are looking at acidity of this hydrogen versus acidity of this hydrogen. So what you see is the pKa of this molecule cyclopentadiene is 16 whereas the pKa of this is around 61. So you see a major difference in pKa this is quite acidic as compared to the cyclopropene and the reason being that in this case the conjugate base that you generate is aromatic. So you have added stabilization due to aromaticity whereas in this case the conjugate base that you generate is anti aromatic. So which makes it highly unstable. So these are some of the factors that affect acid spring. So if you go back and look at the table that I showed you earlier you can try to figure out each of these factors playing a role in the pKa that is shown here. There are also several papers where people look at relative pKa of organic acids and this is very very useful when you are trying to do organic reactions. You can specifically look up this paper. So you can look up this paper by Baudwell which compares the pKa's of organic acids. This gives you an extensive list of pKa's of several organic acids in water and DMSO mainly you would see that the pKa's are measured in DMSO. So with this we will end today's lecture. In the next lecture we will look at acid-base catalysis and now that we have a general idea of how the acid-base equilibria works I think it will be easier for us to figure out how acids or bases catalyze reactions. Thank you and see you in the next lecture.


So let me start with Mr Akita, Mr Akita, the floor is yours, I have asked all the panelists to speak about six, seven minutes before having exchanges and turning to the audience. Mr Akita, the floor is yours. Hi, thank you very much for having me here today. I'm sorry I couldn't come to the conference venue, actually when I was invited I get excited and I check all the information about Abu Dhabi from culture, restaurant and food and so on, as well as conference agenda. So I hope I can visit Abu Dhabi in the future. So, I will finish my process in six minutes, so I just want to make three brief points. First point is about the changing nature of US China rivalry. Second point is the prospect of that rivalry. And thirdly, lastly, is about what we should do to win this competition. So first point, changing nature of US China rivalry. Before the pandemic, I think that the rivalry was more or less about competition over the high tech and maritime security domain. But through this pandemic. Now we have a very important new element with this rivalry. That is fierce competition over the political system. In short, competition between communist party regime political system versus US democratic system. So now US generally believe that communist party regime is part of responsible to this COVID situation in the US or other country. And the US believe that if communist party allows freedom of press or press freedom of expression. Maybe Beijing could have avoided this situation and could contain the outbreak of the infection in Wuhan at earlier stage. So US perceive this situation as a program of the political system. On the other hand, China believe that US current situation is largely due to the former Trump administration's way to handle the COVID. Beijing now explained the narrative that communist party regime system is superior than US democratic system. So it seems to me that now it is this rivalry is beyond high tech or maritime security, but also to do with the political system. This is the first point. That's the second point. What is the prospect of this rivalry? I'm afraid to say that I think that Western countries are in less favorable position and Beijing is in a much better position now. Let's look at the economic front. China has signed mega FTA agreement with 15 Asian countries last year. It is called RCEP. Now China also apply the participation to TPP. We cannot underestimate China's willingness to enter TPP. On the other hand, US does not have any alternative economic strategy. US is not maybe willing to come back to TPP. So this is economic competition. And also on the military front, again, we have to admit that China is in a more favorable position as of today. China's military now deploys about five times more submarine aircraft planes and also warships than US military deploys in the Pacific. And according to the projection of US in the Peicombe, this military balance of power will shift toward China's favorable war in coming years. So second point is that we are not in a favorable position now vis-à-vis China. So that leads to my last short point. What should we do to win this competition? Obviously, we nearly need to have better common in the Pacific strategy to push back. We have in each individual country or EU now have their own strategies, but we have to have common strategy. But this is very, very difficult because this tolerance to counter China largely differs depending on Asian countries. For example, Japan and Australia can accept highest risk to counter China because we are the treaty ally of US and we are under the security umbrella of US. But on the contrary, Asian country, relatively small and largely rely on China economically, cannot afford to recent China. So accommodating all these Asian like minded country and proceed in the Pacific strategy is very, very difficult, but I don't think it's impossible. My conclusion is this. If we were to be, we were the painter, let's say. Maybe we should pursue georgio-sula point-rism painter's approach rather than alternate painter approach. That is, on campus, we placed dots on the important spots with like minded country. And accumulate those dots with aim to evolve to be ambiguous in the Pacific strategy. So that's dots includes high-tech or supply chain or consequential digital rulemaking. So this is approach rather than a portrait painter approach to draw clear picture, strategic picture and impose it to everybody. That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Akita, for your points on the changing nature of the rivalry between the US and China for the prospects. You argue that China is in the better position. So it would be certainly the good way to start the discussion with Renault who may have another vision and also for your proposal at the end.


The study found that the Mach wave, a type of acoustic wave generated when a pile expands radially during impact, can be detected using hydrophones placed at various distances from the pile. This wave is characterized by a delay time or the amount of time it takes for the wave to reach the hydrophone after the pile has expanded, which is equal to the distance traveled multiplied by the speed of sound. Additionally, the Mach wave is also characterized by a peak frequency, which is determined by the speed of sound divided by the distance traveled. These characteristics allow researchers to estimate the speed of sound and the distance traveled by the pile. This article was authored by Peter H. Dahl, Alexander McGillivray and Roberto Raqqa.


Coming up on DTNS, how Amazon plans to keep you stocked up on the essentials, even online conferences are now being canceled and the major social media platforms unite to stop virus misinformation. This is the Daily Tech News for St. Patrick's Day, Tuesday, March 17, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And from the dark forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about dealing with online delivery of movies. We were talking about our favorite Saints' Days. It's all there on Good Day, Internet Become a Member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sonos announced its new Sonos S2 app and operating system will come on new Sonos devices starting in May and arrive for existing devices in June. It will enable higher quality audio and better usability. Sonos device is made between 2011 and 2015. However, we'll need to keep the old Sonos app, which will be renamed Sonos S1 controller. Wah, wah. Apple announced its retail stores outside China will no longer reopen March 27, but remain closed until further notice. Return periods are extended until 14 days after the store reopens. Google. Whenever that is right. Yeah. Translate for Android can now translate from voice to text in real time, something they showed off in January. At launch, it supports English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Thai. It will require an internet connection to work because it sends it to the tensor processing units for all that machine learning magic. Starting on March 20, when, no, not 20th, that wouldn't be that March 9th, rather, when Indian mobile phone users placed a call, several carriers started playing a 30-second information alert about COVID-19 instead of the usual tones indicating ringing. Users can press the number one or pound hashtag key to revert to a ringing sound. Yeah, because once you've heard it a couple of times, you really don't need it again properly. The ringing sound is so much more entertaining, I guess. Waymo is halting testing on public roads in California and pausing its Waymo One service in Phoenix, Arizona, which lets customers hail autonomous car rides that include a human safety driver. However, Waymo's fully autonomous rides in the Phoenix area that do not include human safety driver will continue. That's interesting. TransferWise has partnered with China's Alipay for international money transfers. TransferWise's 7 million plus users can now send Chinese Yuan, converted from 17 currencies, to Alipay users, which make up about 1.2 billion people worldwide if you include its e-wallet partners. Let's talk about Amazon. I don't know about y'all, but I have noticed that things that I want to order from Amazon have much longer delivery times than they used to. Things like Amazon Fresh here in the United States where they deliver the groceries, pretty much unavailable to get a delivery time. Amazon running into stock shortages, these long delivery times because, of course, people are stocking up for self-isolation. Here are a few of the actions Amazon is taking as a result. Amazon says it will hire 100,000 workers for its U.S. warehouse and delivery operations. That means workers in the U.S., U.K. and Europe will also get temporary raises of either $2.00, two pounds, or two euros per hour through the end of April. There's a raise for Canada in there, too. Amazon has also instituted compulsory overtime at some locations, including in the United Kingdom. A clause in a lot of contracts allows for this implementation of overtime with pay. The clause is usually only used during holiday periods, so they're basically seeing what they expect to happen in November and December, unexpectedly happening right now. Working-time regulations in the U.K. at least limit overtime to a maximum of 48 hours per week, averaged over a 17-week period. And finally, the Fulfillment by Amazon program offers warehousing and shipping for third-party sellers. So if you want to sell your stuff, you can let Amazon keep it and ship it for you. And the other thing is that sales services, along with larger vendor shipment services, are being suspended through April 5th. So no new inbound shipments can be created before that time. If you're a store that has stuff in an Amazon warehouse, people can still buy that and they'll ship it for you. But you can't send anything to the warehouse until at least April 5th, and it might be longer. Sellers can still sell products on Amazon if they fulfill the orders themselves. So anything you were thinking of sending to Amazon for this program, you could decide to just ship it out yourself. Amazon is doing this because it wants to prioritize the shipment of, quote, household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products. And a third party that provides those products can still participate because they're making exceptions for these products. They want to prioritize that. A lot of things going on here, from the hiring to the over time to the shipment. But this is significant to me because Amazon is the best at this. We have almost taken for granted that you push a button on Amazon and you can get it sometimes that day. Patrick, how does this make you feel? I think there might be a worry from some that would be, oh my god, Amazon is having difficulties. It means the supply chain is constrained or might, you know, become, it might become difficult to get goods in the stores. I'm 100% not an expert. But what I do know is that Amazon is the destination where everyone is going to try to get something from. So I'm guessing that, yes, it will affect Amazon, it seems. But I'm guessing that other traditional retail stores, brick and mortar, might not get affected. It's what we've been hearing. But from Amazon's perspective, I think all of it makes sense. There are two concerns. One is the businesses that usually sell on Amazon if they don't have a lot of stock in their warehouses that might become an economic problem for them. And then the hiring of all of the workers, of course, is I'm guessing they're going to implement very strict safety regulations for them to work and not become transiting factors of the virus. But they're not the only ones that have to go to work. So I'm guessing they know what they're doing, hoping in that department. You know, for all of the businesses that are suffering a real drop in customers, there are the industries that are seeing a huge spike, temporary as it may be, something like a company like Amazon or a streaming service like Netflix. There are temporary spikes of demand in some industries just because of the nature of what's going on. Amazon hiring 100,000 workers and also encouraging people who have lost jobs or at least have jobs on hold in other industries, hospitality, restaurant, travel, for example.  I mean, it's more complicated than that, but to be able to absorb some of that workforce that wants to work and Amazon's saying, we need you because we don't have the capacity to be able to meet your demand at this time, it makes sense. I mean, it's moving around of jobs and I hope that at least for some folks, this is a good situation. Yeah, like you say, Patrick, this doesn't mean that the supply of things is drying up. This means that more people are ordering than Amazon anticipates even for peak demand. Demand has passed a normal peak and that's because a lot of people suddenly in many parts of the world are stocking up and you combine that with the fear of going outside. Some people are like, you know what, I don't want to go to the grocery store, even if they did have what I want, but maybe your grocery store is out of a particular thing because a lot of people are going to the grocery store and buying that particular thing right now.   So yeah, that means that Amazon does have to increase its staff in order to deal with this. I'm also not an expert in how this works on the back end either, but the fact that nobody's saying there isn't enough stuff out there, it's the way we're getting it to people that is the problem and Amazon is trying to be a solution for that. Well, even more than just the way we're getting it to people is that, as you said, there was a peak so the existing warehouses are empty, but people are going to be stocked up for a week or two or three and those stocks are gonna get replenished in the stores in the meantime, probably even faster than that. At least that is what in Europe, the people responsible for the big retail stores have been saying like, we have so much stuff. The price of toilet paper is gonna plunge now because everybody has it. Basically, essentially, yes. Yeah, and I think more people are going to keep buying things from Amazon simply because they wanna avoid that interaction. Somebody leaving it on your porch is more reassuring to a lot of people. And just have it. I mean, I used to live within walking distance to several grocery stores, not the case anymore. So I order a lot of stuff on Amazon that I used to just kinda stroll down a couple blocks and pick up in person. So it's that nature of, well, this is how I get stuff. Oh dear, this is not how I can get stuff the way that I've been used to getting stuff and it's a disruption all around. Microsoft Research, the Allen Institute for AI, the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health and the White House Office of Science and Technology have released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, or CORD-19. The open dataset of more than 29,000 scholarly articles on the coronavirus family can be used by machine learning communities to mine the data for insights to fight COVID-19. Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer, Eric Horvitz, said that the goal was, quote, to create tools that can help scientists stand top of thousands of articles to enable them to develop approaches to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. Data mining like this can help researchers evaluate hypotheses, create research plans, understand works, and create question answering thoughts. Yeah, this is not a silver bullet, right? But there is no human that can read and understand 29,000 scholarly articles in the time that the scientists need to get this information. So this is an extra tool to put in their tool set to be able to understand what's out there and what could help. Indeed. I don't have a lot to add to this. I think it's a good thing and it's what should happen and it's happening, so hopefully it will help. Yeah, and it's good to know out there if you're somebody who is in the industry or you work with someone or know someone or have a relative who's in the industry who's working on this to know that this is another resource that people have in order to crack this, and hopefully they will. Yeah, I mean, with a lot of information out there, not all of it correct or what's best for the global population. This is a very good tool. Open data is, this is the perfect situation for those. Just to be clear, is this data, it's not data on the virus itself, on the illness it's like societal data, the people where they are. On the coronavirus family. So it's 29,000 worldwide articles that are about coronaviruses and they put them in this data set and structured it so it would be easy for researchers and scientists to say like, okay, have you seen anything like this in the research and then the machine learning can pull that out, do some Q and A, make recommendations based on hypothesis, like, oh, there's research that supports that hypothesis from this study, this study and this study. I want to believe that we would tackle this issue more quickly than we would have a few years ago, but we'll have to wait and see, of course. But this makes me a little bit hopeful because these kinds of tools, maybe we wouldn't have had access to as quickly, you know, a decade or two ago. No, that's fair, definitely. Google's cloud next conference was supposed to happen online, April 6th through 8th, but now even the digital version has been postponed. Google will focus on supporting our customers, partners and each other and put on the conference when the timing is right. Yeah, this is significant because this is the first major online conference that I've seen canceled, where a company is saying, not only can we not do it in person, but we can't even stream it. And there can be multiple reasons for that. Google's being a little vague when they say we want to focus on supporting customers, partners and each other. But what it sounds like to me, they're saying is, it's not necessarily safe to have all the people come together to do a streaming event that we would want to have come together if we don't have to. A lot of people out there that would pay attention to this are probably prioritizing other things right now. So let's wait until everybody can focus on these. These announcements are not time sensitive so much that we have to put them out now. There's other things to focus on. And Patrick, you know from working at Blizzard how hard it is to put on a conference, how much time that takes away from people. There are other priorities within the company that I think they want to reassign people to rather than working on a conference. Yeah, absolutely. I think even for something that is smaller scale than something public, it would take a lot of resources. And that might be one thing that is key there. They just don't have the resources and it's not easy to get them together even beyond the fact that it would bring people together physically, which could be a concern. They have to focus on other things. I'm wondering as well, the proximity of the conference, you know it's two, three weeks away, something three weeks maybe away and it would probably be more interesting for the business world. It's not a very public facing conference. And the IT people who might be interested in that I think have other things on their plate as well. Yeah, very true. Yeah, they're busy making sure that the IT infrastructure for their company is up and functional and adding new elements so that remote teleworking, telecommuting is possible. So that might be another factor too. Yeah, raise a glass to the people who are keeping the networks running. This is not an easy thing to happen. There was a lot of consternation that when everybody started working from home that it wouldn't work the way it has. And with a few exceptions, you know a few bumps in the road it largely has. So that's a really good point. A couple members of the DTNS Patreon asked us specifically to talk about this next story from TechCrunch's Zach Whitaker came out yesterday afternoon. Talks about an engineer, video operations engineer for Charter called Nick Wheeler in Denver, Colorado who resigned in protest over Charter's refusal to offer a work from home policy. He basically wanted to change the policy and they said, well, you can come into work or quit and he offered to resign and then they said, no, go home and think about it. And then they called him up and said, yeah, we're gonna take your resignation. So he sort of resigned, but sort of was forced into it. By comparison, AT&T and Verizon are asking their employees to work from home if they can. Obviously, there are some jobs you just can't do. But if you can, they're asking them to do so. Comcast is reportedly testing a number of work from home scenarios as well. I know that the NBC universal side has said everyone should work from home if they all can. But Charter is taking a different approach. Charter's CEO sent an all staff email Saturday saying it was preparing for the possibility of broad remote working policies. But it believes it's quote, approach to supporting frontline employees is the right way for us to operate at this time to continue to deliver those important services to our customers. So in essence saying, we don't think you should work from home. The email also went on to say, stay home if you're sick or caring for someone who is sick, but continue to report to your usual work location if you are not. While some back office and management functions can be performed remotely, they are more effective from the office. And again, that's from the CEO, Tim Rutledge of Charter. You know, my brain immediately goes to, okay, Charter did not plan for something like this and Charter doesn't have a good work remotely policy as far as the technology that would be needed for employees to work from home. And so it's just a scramble because I can't really see any way that this makes sense besides being hugely irresponsible because if you don't feel sick, it doesn't mean you aren't sick.  I don't know how Charter can get away with this. Yeah, it feels, maybe there are some specific set of circumstances that mean our understanding of how all of this works doesn't apply here, but the only, that's a lot of caveat before I'm gonna agree with you. It's incredibly irresponsible. The one thing that we will remember after all of it is said and done and we are all better and hopefully the crisis is behind us. The one thing we will remember from this is that the point is to flatten the curve and to make sure that the virus doesn't spread too quickly so that the health services can deal with the influx of patients. And you can be a carrier even if you are asymptomatic. So I don't understand how you square that logic with what he is saying. It seems to me like someone who has the wrong priorities. Yeah, and if you read the Zach Whitaker article, there's some anecdotal information in there, of course, but it makes it sound like Charter just culturally is against working from home to the point that they're hostile to the idea of working from home even in this situation. At least, the one thing I could say is Tom Rutledge did say they're considering policies, but like you said, Sarah, maybe the culture is so against working from home that they're starting from scratch. Right, and it's okay to say the culture is against working from home. I've worked at lots of places where working from home was simply not an option for lots of reasons, you know, company morale and getting things done and being on the same conference room at the same time. This is a whole different ballgame though. We're not operating under normal life right now. So for Charter to be like, well, we just don't encourage working from home, you're gonna slack on us. I don't know, you gotta pause that whole rhetoric. I think within 48 hours that policy will be reversed and if only if not for the moral slash health risks, the legal risks will make this guy reconsider. Yeah, we need to get some negative kurtosis on that distribution as the statisticians say. To get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, last story today, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Reddit and Twitter, that is not just a greatest hits of social networking platforms. It's also a group of companies that issued a joint statement Monday on preventing misinformation about COVID-19. The statement said, we are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We're helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms and sharing critical updates and coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe. Facebook is working with partners to send all of its contract workers who review content home with pay though. And Google is similarly letting a lot of their human moderators either work from home or not work at all with pay. If you say, well, why can't they just moderate from home? Sensitive content, sensitive connections, it may be not secure to do that. It may not be good for the reviewer to do that. And Facebook said, with fewer people available for human review, we'll continue to prioritize imminent harm and increase our reliance on proactive detection in other areas to remove violating content. Now, so we have all of the social networks saying the right thing, which is we're gonna fight this misinformation seriously this time. On the other hand, they're also doing the right thing and saying, but we need to let these reviewers go home and we don't wanna put them in an unsafe situation. So YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have warned of an increase in erroneous takedowns as companies rely more on software for moderation. Appeals may take longer as well. Twitter said it's not gonna ban a user based solely on an automated, moderated decision, but it is going to not be as accurate because they won't have as many humans on this. How do y'all feel about this? I mean, it's good and bad mixed together, right? It seems like it's, I don't know, it's really interesting because if they can manage to do it, then maybe I'm jumping the gun a little bit on the end of the conversation, but if they can manage to handle and manage the misinformation on this, why couldn't they do it on the other stuff? That's where my mind goes immediately because it's been such a hot topic for the past five years. And if they can manage to do it, maybe they will learn enough that it will make the other things easier down the line, but I guess it just takes the most serious global pandemic we've seen in a century to get them to work this hard. But... Focuses the mind a little, doesn't it? I guess one might argue, and I'll say it for the sake of the emails we would get, there are other issues that down the line or will be even greater concerns and dangers to the human race than this, namely the climate change. So they could work similarly for that, but of course the urgency makes the mind weird. Having friends who work at Facebook, I know people who work at Twitter, Salesforce, I mean, Google of course, I mean, these are all Silicon Valley companies, at least based in Silicon Valley that I'm naming, but huge companies. And everybody's working from home. That's just that's kind of across the board, at least the people that I know. And it's sort of like, okay, well, this is necessary right now, but I don't think anybody was like, and nothing will be disrupted because we've completely changed all of our policies, even for a temporary amount of time. Something is going to fall through the cracks because of this, because if you could have just worked from home the whole time, then companies could save lots of money on leases for huge buildings and all sorts of infrastructure and that kind of thing. So I feel like knowing that there's going to be maybe a little bit of backlog, maybe some erroneous takedowns, stuff falling through the cracks, I feel like that's something that I can take that. It's going to be annoying for anybody who's more inconvenienced than usual, but I don't see how this could all just work as usual, given what everybody has had to do and how much they've had to switch the way that they do their job. That's the difference. If this was the election and no one's life is on the line directly, right? It's just about who wins.  Just to preserve honesty in the election, you might get some erroneous takedowns, no way. The backlash would be horrible, but given the fact that people are like, well, you're stopping deaths, I guess maybe that's okay. You're not going to get, I mean, I've seen some people who are like, you know, I'm kind of concerned about this being used to suppress speech, and that's a valid concern, but it's much less than you would expect given the situation here. I think it also really forces companies to say, look, you don't have any wiggle room or whether it's wiggle room or doubt, depending on how you look at it, to say, but if we do this, are we causing more harm than good? We don't really understand how politics works, et cetera, et cetera.  Like I said, it focuses the mind. The Verge has a report published this morning by New America's Open Technology Institute, arguing that personalized targeting is the root problem and that moderation isn't the fix, and maybe because you can't just throw humans at the problem, you can't just hope that the algorithms get all the misinformation, maybe this will be put to the test. There's a senior policy analyst, Natalie Marshall, who told the Verge that the problem is the system used to influence you to buy something, advertising is also being used for news and propaganda, and she says, if there is less algorithmic boosting optimized for the company's corporate profit margins and bottom line, then misinformation would be less widely distributed. Boost first and moderate later doesn't work. So if they change the algorithm and how it promotes things, then the moderation will be easier, is essentially the way I read what she's saying. But they would need to have two different algorithms, essentially, and know which topics are pandemic related and which are just the thing they're used for. Just apply the algorithm to everything, but then you take it to your bottom line, right? Yes, and I don't think they would, maybe they would do this during these next couple of months because they're impacted as well. The longer it lasts, the longer their bottom lines are going to be impacted as well. Yeah. Big thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit, those who submit stories, those who vote on other stories and make sure the good stuff res to the top. We love our subredditors. Join them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's. Nick wrote in about our discussion on some Xbox specs that we laid out yesterday. We all said, sounds like a pretty good machine. Nick said, ray tracing to this point in the hardcore PC gaming community has been perceived more as a joke meme than a real feature because of the massive performance penalty. And Microsoft's massive info dump on Monday about the Xbox Series X specs, they gave Digital Foundry the tidbit that the GPU of the Xbox Series X does 13 teraflops of ray tracing performance and they demoed a version of Gears 5 running at 4K with ray tracing at over 100 frames per second. You can't directly compare teraflop numbers between different GPU architectures but the performance shown in this demo and the fact that the mighty NVIDIA 2080 Ti only does about five teraflops of ray tracing performance and can't maintain 60 frames per second at 4K in any game with ray tracing gives me hope that ray tracing is going to go from a glorified tech demo with NVIDIA's Turing architecture to a must have feature with the next gen of PC GPUs. I can't wait to have smooth running ray tracing in my games. It's a really good. Yeah, first of all, it's 12 teraflops so I don't want to be the well actually guy but for someone who's deep into the hardcore PC gaming community, I feel that's okay. You could always use it slightly lower resolution, man, but I understand what you mean and consoles are always better optimized and they're ahead of the curve on hardware stuff. This is exciting. The PlayStation 5 tech specs will be unveiled tomorrow so we're probably gonna get something similar-ish, maybe a little bit less powerful but it will be interesting too. The ray tracing future is upon us. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Adam Carr, Martin James and Bjorn Andre. Also thanks to Patrick Beja wearing his green scarf today. Always a festive man. Patrick, what's been going on in your worlds? You know what, if you're interested in gaming, if you've had enough of all of this pandemic talk, you can go check out Pixels where we will by the end of the week have a summary and explanation of all of these new announcements and more doom and animal crossing are coming out. And if you want more about the pandemic, the Philius Club was just released this past, well, yesterday and we got people from South Korea, Italy, France, myself and Finland and the US to discuss how populations are reacting to all of this and at different stages of the contamination. It was really interesting. That's the Philius Club and you can find it at frenchspin.com. I have to second that, the comparison of the experiences of people in Korea, two places in Italy, the US and France, slash Finland from your perspective, it was incredibly helpful and enlightening. So thank you for doing that, Patrick, it was really good. My pleasure. If you can afford to keep supporting us directly, of course, please do. You'll be helping cover for somebody who can't. Direct support is the best way to keep us independent. It pays for Roger, Sarah and myself to be able to have our livelihoods. We're incredibly respectful and appreciative of that at a time like this. But just know if you have to cut this cost for a while, we have other ways you can support the show and other folks here on our Patreon have already stepped up to help cover you in the meantime. So if you have to cut us, you can always promote the show to others as a way to support us too at dailytechnewshow.com. If you've got some feedback, or email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and if you'd like to join us live, well, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, that's 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson, talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.


The House of Representatives is moving to review the country's copyright and contract laws as drafted with a view to correcting gaps or areas in need of reform. The motion towards this end was sponsored by Honourable Babajimi Benson from Lega State at Plenary on Tuesday. Honourable Babajimi Benson called for collaboration with relevant stakeholders including record labels, artists, legal professionals and industry associations to develop and implement industry-wide guidelines that will ensure fair treatment, transparent contractual agreements and adequate compensation for our tests. The House is cognizant that the Nigerian music industry lacks substantial institutional funding, pushing many artists into unscrupulous contracts with record labels. Addressing this issue is vital for the industry's growth and sustainability. The House is also cognizant that the Nigerian Copyright Commission functions and compels copyright registration, law enforcement, education, royalty management, international collaboration, legal advocacy, policy development, hence they should be protecting copyright and promoting artists' interests in Nigeria. Monitor the ongoing investigation of MOBA's death, particularly the allegations of harassment and unpaid royalties. Collaborate with stakeholders including record labels, artists, legal experts and industry associations to develop and implement industry-wide guidelines that ensure fair treatment, transparent contractual agreements and proper compensation for artists. Reviewing existing copyright and contract laws in Nigeria. Identifying gaps or areas in need of reform. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news, please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Essential Health St. Joseph's Medical Center in Brainerd recently received an important designation based on how the hospital treats patients with signs of a stroke. The hospital was recognized as a primary stroke center for its preparedness to evaluate, stabilize, and treat patients who show serious stroke symptoms. Doctors say that the designation from the Minnesota Department of Health is an important one, especially for a hospital in a rural community. We're able to provide world-class stroke care while still being able to keep patients here within our community. And for this patient population, that's obviously a big deal that they're not having to travel down to the cities. They're in a more comfortable environment. Their family is able to be with them at bedside, but they're still able to get that same level of care. Clayton Castle will have a full report next week on the primary stroke center designation and how Essential Health goes about treating someone showing symptoms.


Hello everyone and welcome to the Science Exchange series from the University of Western Australia. My name is Angela Rosson. I'm an artist and a biodiversity educator. And it's my good luck to work with scientists, which is fabulous for me because I get to learn what they're doing and I take their work out to the community and share it with children. In my work I also take young scientists out to schools and community groups so that people can connect with what's really the exciting science things that are happening right here at the University of Western Australia in the Faculty of Science. Let's get started with some introductions. I'd like to welcome our presenters, Dr Greg Schkebek and Dr Alexi Sadekov. Greg is a senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia and an expert in the field of stable isotope ecology and biochemistry. He uses these stable isotopes to trace water and nutrient fluxes in natural habitats and environments impacted by mining and agriculture. Alexi is a research fellow at the ARC Centre for Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at the University of Western Australia. His research interests cover a broad spectrum of the earth scientists with particular emphasis on past climate change, ocean chemistry and bio mineralisation. We'll start with Greg, who'll give you a 10 minute overview of how we use stable isotopes in various natural environments to record and observe changes. And then we'll move on to Alexi, who will discuss his research at using marine calcifers to investigate pollution in our oceans. Over to you Greg. Thank you very much, Angela. Thanks for introduction. So, as Angela said, I will start first with toolbox and a special tool, which are stable isotopes. Stable isotopes, which can be used for many different things, but I will focus here on stable isotope composition and how we can use this to understand our environment. So, if you will start with water and water chemistry, obviously water is just H2O, so hydrogen to collect the two atoms and one oxygen. However, if we would like to distinguish one molecule of water from another molecule of water, we need, in this case, something more. In this case, we need to understand also stable isotopes. We have two molecules of oxygen, two isotopes of oxygen, Oxygen 16 and Oxygen 18. This is allowing us to tell difference between, for example, source of water or processes which are happening in the environment. So, what is the difference? The difference is in the number of protons. One isotope has in the core, in this case, will have in this case two less neutrons than the other one. Still, number of protons is the same because this is still the same element, but mass is different and this is causing a small differences which are called fractionation. I will show you first couple examples and then go to case studies. If we will think about the cloud, cloud which is hanging above the continent, in the cloud we will have both 16 and 18 O. But because there is a difference in mass, if there will be any precipitation and rainfall, those which are 18 O will disappear quicker from the cloud and actually will contribute to the rainfall more than 16 O. Of course, both will be contributing, but in the rainfall we will have slightly more 18 O oxygen than in the cloud. So, this is called ray wave fractionation and actually this will depend on few factors and the most important are temperature and humidity and then eventually also distance from the sea. If we will think about surface water, in such case we need to think opposite direction. If we will have any puddle of water or a water hole like this one from Karogeny, you will have evaporation which will carry both water molecules, both those containing 16 O and 18 O as the vapor flux. However, vapor flux for 16 O will be slightly higher than for 18 O. Why? Because again, in this case, you need less energy to mobilize 16 O lighter molecule to the vapor phase than 18 O. This is explained by Craig Gordon model. This model is explaining how this fractionation is occurring. So, if you will think about the puddle of water, lake or ocean, doesn't really matter. What is going to the vapor phase is disappearing from the liquid phase. In this case, 16 O is disappearing quicker than 18 O. So, when evaporation is progressing, we will have finally in the residual water more 18 O than 16 O comparing to initial conditions. So, then we can basically collect two samples prior and after evaporation. And based on stabilizer composition, we can actually estimate how much water was evaporating. What we are looking for is ratio. How much is 18 O versus 16 O in water? In sea water, this ratio looks like this. This number is quite difficult to read. This is why we are using something what is called delta value. Delta value in ocean water by definition is zero. If we will have positive numbers, this will mean more 18 O than in ocean water. If we will have negative numbers, then it will mean less 18 O than in ocean water. Similar situation will be also for hydrogen stable isotope composition and hydrogen rational. So, let's go now for two case studies. I will give you two examples how this type of toolbox, this type of geochemical tool could be applied. Let's go first to Pilbara and I will show you here a couple of results for different type of research in the very arid zone where water is very important both for human as well for ecology and well-being of many different species. So, this is Fortescue River shortly after flooding by Cyclone Heidi. This Cyclone Heidi was contributing a lot. This Cyclone was happening eight years ago. Since then we had couple other Cyclones, but none of them was that large as Cyclone Heidi, which was contributing up to 200 millimeters over 48 hours. This was making many creeks to flow and this flooding which you can see here, this is upper part of Kundayna Creek, one of the creeks. The creek is usually ephemeral, it means it's not flowing at all or we have very little water in the creek. During flooding a lot of water is passing through the system, but this continuous flow stops after approximately couple weeks, sometimes couple days depending on the amount of water. So why we need to understand this? First of all to understand and apply stable isotope composition of water, we need to understand what is rainfall signature. We know this quite well because we are observing rainfall in Pilbara over several years. Here you have examples showing stable isotope composition of hydrogen versus stable isotope composition of oxygen. And you can see here several dots which are representing different rainfall events. Those different rainfall events are actually making a robust line which is called local metoric water line. So there is a strong relation between hydrogen and oxygen. Knowing this, we can actually apply this for different type of studies. What you can see here is a section of Kundayna Creek in Pilbara. You can see a few pools over here. Those pools are usually persisting in environment for several months after the last flooding to a couple years. Some of them are permanent. If we have any mining operation in this area, it's very important for us to understand which pool how long is holding water. Especially which pool is, for example, this number 6, 5, 2 or 1 connected directly to groundwater. Because if mining company will start manipulating water level, then likely this will impact pools which are connected to groundwater, but not those which are disconnected and are simply just puddles of standing water. But let's have a look on the regional scale, how we can apply stable isotopes. On the regional scale, what you can see here is flooded for the skirmish. On the regional scale, we would like in this case understand first what is recharge. Recharge means how much water from recent precipitation is infiltrating to the aquifact. Because this is our resource for future. Perhaps we would like to use this water in the future, so we need to understand what is the frequency of recharge and how much water is going there. So from our study, we know that large cyclones on average are happening every 4-5 years. We were studying about 100 years record. And we understand as well what is signature of those large rainfalls. And in this case, stabilized composition of large rainfalls is between minus 10 and 12 per million. We also know based on study of different locations, especially at mining sites, what is stabilized composition of groundwater. As you can see, there is a difference about 2 to 4 per million between minus 10 to minus 8. Why we can see this difference? This difference is primarily because of operation. So in one of our studies, we were trying to estimate how much water actually is evaporating before is recharging groundwater aquifact. We were using long term average time future for human humidity. And based on this stabilized composition, we are able to calculate that only 13 to 20% of precipitation from large cyclones is evaporating prior infiltration to groundwater aquifact. So this is quite important for us to understand that this infiltration is very rapid, very quick, but also is important to understand that it's not occurring every day. It's occurring usually every 4 to 5 years. So this will help us to manage water resources in this area zone. Let's move now to second example of stabilized application. I would like to introduce you to Neanderthals. Do you remember who are Neanderthals? This is a human species which extinct about 30,000 years ago. But really, if you are blondie and you have blue eyes, as me, from genetic perspective, you are Neanderthal up to 3% because you will have up to 3% of Neanderthal genome. But the species extinct about 30,000 years ago. So what do we know about Neanderthals? Okay, we don't know too much, but we know something. But the most important question in this case was how cold was for Neanderthals moving to Central Europe? It was about 50,000 years ago. How we can tell this? Actually, there are a few archaeological sites around the several countries which contain a lot of flint tools. Those flint tools made by Neanderthals, you can see here on this picture as a sea. And in some location, we can see also a lot of bones and skulls of animals which were how eaten by Neanderthals. So actually, those bone remains are sort of dining scarves of Neanderthals. Several of them have traces of cutting with stone tools. So investigating those locations, we actually can apply stable isotopes to tell how cold was Neanderthals. What is the process? How we can do this from scientific perspective? First of all, we need to have a good sample. The best one would be a teeth, especially LML, this glassy thing on the surface of teeth. And having this, we can eventually extract phosphates and analyze stable isotope composition, delta 18O or 18O to 16O ratio to tell what is temperature or actually it was temperature at the time when Neanderthals were leaving. So how does it work? I will show you here a quick procedure. You can see this blue cross. This is delta 18O for phosphate from mammoth bone, actually from mammoth tusk. And this is 50,000 years old. This in blue. This in red is for comparison, a stabilized composition of human teeth from medieval climatic optimum, which was the warmest period in Europe over the last 1000 years, except the current time. We can do it. Actually, we can calculate this way using a calibration curve for humans showing relation between bones, stabilized composition, phosphate stabilized composition and water drunk by mammoth. Doesn't really matter if this is human or mammoth. We need to use just different calibration curve. Actually, we can calculate what was stabilized composition available for those humans and for those human and this particular mammoth. Okay, so this is the stage number one, we can see that this stabilized composition is quite different minus 10.7 and minus 7.5. How we can relate this to current precipitation. If we will look map across the Europe, this map is showing a stabilized composition in annual precipitation sort of average. So if we will place those two samples, we can see that okay, this value minus seven is typical for more southern Europe. This value minus 10.7 is for northern Europe, but actually our sampling side is somewhere here. What doesn't tell us basically the climate medieval optimum was actually warmer than current average temperature at the sampling side. And at the same time, if we will compare this with minus 10.7 signature for mammoth, it will tell us that it was colder than currently is at the sampling location. So knowing this and having those two numbers actually we can use another relationship as well relationship which is showing us what is regression line between environmental water stabilized composition and air temperature. And we can use another calculation to calculate actually what was average mean average actually mean temperature weight by volume average for precipitation. Okay, so we can see this is 12.4 for medieval climate optimum and 6.8 for the time when the under tells we're moving to central Europe. 6.8 from Australian perspective is pretty cold because Perth would be somewhere here, but please remember we are in Europe so 6.8. It's not that cold. How we can tell this. If you will think about the under tells they were leaving lightly in the landscape like this one. Those are a few photos from Iceland, but actually wasn't that cold as is now on Iceland. Temperature 6.8 Celsius degree which we had 50,000 years ago when the under tells were moving to central Europe is actually higher than current temperature in Stockholm in Sweden or Riga in Latvia now. So it was cold. Sure, but not that cold as we would expect and initially anticipate just for macro fossil of different plants. So what is conclusion I was presenting you here a few application of stable isotopes for different research study for different research subjects. But what we can learn isotopes are extending our knowledge and extending our chemical toolbox, giving us additional dimension. So to quote Dobrzejski or actually changing his final sentence, we can say almost everything in environmental science makes greater sense in the light of the light stable isotopes. Thank you very much. We will leave questions to the second part, but first Alexei will be presenting his perspective on application on chemistry and marine environments. And yeah, thank you for introduction Angela and thank you for opportunity to present. Yeah, I'll continue on the similar path I just trying to explain how we use the chemistry in general to understand environment. And in my particular case, I'm going to present you results of how we use in the chemistry of marine calcifiers everything which build in shell to understand pollution in coastal and ocean environments. So first of all, I think it's not surprising what people are and being and always been worried about the pollution coastal environment because majority of us actually live in coastal zones. And this is particularly true for Australia where almost most of population live within 50 kilometers from the shore. So not surprising what for us is vital to keep this zone healthy and clean. And therefore a lot of efforts went into monitoring manager in this environment and preventing it from pollution. And when we talk about pollution is different types of pollution and I think we all were currently the plastic pollution is one of the hot topic. And, you know, I think just recently was a talk on through you w about plastic pollution. What I'm going to talk about chemical pollution. I mean chemical pollution mostly is related to heavy metal pollution. And I believe they are a bit more, how to say concerning for society simply not because we are kind of more dangerous or more kind of high impact, but because we're invisible and invisible means you don't see them until it's probably too late. And there are such a normal tools for normal citizen to kind of monitor this chemical pollution and monitor in this chemical pollution, even the scientific tools which I'm going to present here is quite challenging.  And in Australia, for example, we have a really strict guidelines about what kind of a level of pollution and talk about concentration how much of particular element in environment allowed to be I mean it just before it's become quite harmful. And all I mean this is available information over internet the quality guidelines. And here I just highlighted couple of elements for example led but what is important that we saw numbers don't, you know, is to keep in mind the units and I'll explain details of this unit, but he all the numbers on the PPB scale this is part per billion is basically if you dissolve one part in a billion of parts. So we're talking about very small concentrations, but at least small concentrations, these elements become harmful to environment. And there's a different tools to how we monitor these things is a chem catch is kind of for reasons you put in the in the water. Direct measurements, where you just take a little bit of sample of the water and use the specific instrument to measure these elements and also buy accumulators majority of these elements basically through their life they consume this element for the natural ways I mean for the food for us Moses through the water, but they don't have ability to get rid of them. So through the time, the same as humans we do accumulate this heavy metals. And that's why we're so dangerous because there's no way to clean our body from them. And yeah, so the PPB and this is important because when you go to natural environment and open ocean environment and we're trying to understand cycles of this heavy metals in an ocean natural cycles without humans and they are present they were originate from sediments from rivers and so on, but the concentration we're talking about in a natural environment are usually in PPT scale, which is a part per trillion, this is a thousand times smaller than what I was talking about the guidelines. And why it is important because let me just go to the scales and here's a small cartoon about the scales it's a right American kind of way of taking it on a penny since one, but I have sort of kind of visualized example of that. Imagine the lake by Carl. It's a largest body of fresh water on the planet. So if you want to pollute the lake by Carl to the natural environment okay not pollute but bring it to natural environment we fled. We just need to dissolve 20 wagons, the train wagons of lead into Lake by Carl. So that's will be on natural background of Lake of the of the lead. But if we want to highlight these things in terms of pollution, and then say let's when our environmental agency will read the alarm. What Lake by Carl is polluted with lead. We need to dissolve actually the train with wagons which spun in distance, almost across whole half of Australia, just to give it to you in skin in scale. Right. So this gap between what is actually environmental agency considered to be dangerous. And what is actually not natural environment varies in different places. But it's important because there's not many tools we have to actually measure this small concentration between natural environment and natural environmental level and environmental agency kind of guidelines. So what I was trying to summarize these things in one phrase before, you know, you know what you're polluted you already polluted this area by 1000 times. So, and that's where we kind of trying to develop novel tools, how we can use marine calcifies is the organisms which live in the ocean. Corals and what I study a lot is for a minute for the small protozoa unicellular organism, which calcify will build these small skeletons out of calcium carbonate and this calcium carbonate is the same mineral as forms in your cattle is a scale basically. And good things about them when they form this scale with these shells. They also incorporate elements heavy metals from natural natural from natural water into the shells. And therefore by studying this organism the skeletons, we can reconstruct deduct of what the concentration of this element were in the natural environment in the first place. Okay, it's kind of free monitoring tools for us. But to do so we need to do of course a quite a bit of background research we're trying to understand how this organization by minerals like how we build these things. So what we do for example in this case we use culture in facilities like we have in water months where we culture in this organism in particular conditions and we spike them with heavy metals. And then we analyze them with mass spectrometry laser relation mass spectrometry. Just to give you idea here there's a small video showing what's a laser relation look like. And it's probably a bit slow what you need to pay attention in this bright sport and look at the scale is tiny is less than the human hair. This is actually a laser firing on a fragment of the shell. The laser is firing it's evaporating a little bit of the shell, and this vapor with of the shell is transferred to the mass spectrometry this mass spectrometry is instrument, which measuring different concentration of elements. Therefore, by doing so, we can calculate these concentrations and understand environment and level of pollution. For example, here is the results of our some of our culture experiments below you can see this is for a minifra which grew in the nature and when we spike it with some heavy metals and this is logarithmic scale. This is natural background and this is 10 times up of natural background. And this is only two weeks spike. So the short leaf events and only 10 times as in reach as a natural background. We can see them with our methods, which is really great improvement before we can actually not only detect the small changes environmental pollution, but also short leaf events like spills or some kind of runoff and so on. On the right scale here there's a lot of curves, but this is the record of core from the corals. So this is different elements, and particular for example manganese and barriers very, very good indicators of a river runoff. So when the river flooding in the Great Barrier Reef, for example, then these elements are carried in the open ocean and recorded in the corals. So we can see how, for example, the management of a catchment in the Great Barrier Reef is progressing through the time by just analyzing the corals which been living there, you know, for last couple of 100 years. So that's the toolbox I'm kind of presenting. So it's a use of chemicals in calcifies to understand the pollution in ocean. So thank you. And I think I'm going back to the Angela. Thanks, Alexi and Greek. That was that was really interesting and gives us some insights into your very, very elegant processes. And whilst we're waiting to hear from you, I just want to just go back to some some basics and that is, it was very lovely to have that glimpse into these incredibly elegant processes that have been developed for understanding the natural world. And I think that that's the wonder of science that no idea stands out on its own. It's built on a long history of thinkers and people who've who've started with a premises. Stuart Feinstein, the neuroscientist says of the pursuit of ignorance. And I kind of like that he's he elaborates on it when he says what we don't know is the best question to start with. And I would just like to put it to you, Alexi. More generally speaking about your life as a scientist. Can you just kind of speak to that a little bit that idea that scientists start from the point of what they don't know. And, and that's how they uncover understanding. Well, I think, yeah, there's such as an expression as a scientific mind. I mean, nothing to do with scientists. I mean, all what it means is you have some kind of internal inquiry into different questions in your life.  Some kids have more inquiries about life. We're really interested to know how does this things work.  So yeah, this is really basic thing to kind of understand what the scientist is. It's actually this kind of set of the mind where you can just want to understand how things work. And I mean, and of course, you know, it's not just the kind of a hobby things, you know, we're trying to understand something which is important for society. And that's why, you know, it's, it's a not a hobby, but it's actually profession. And you know, you kind of been paid by taxpayer money, hopefully by the important research. Yes, that's true. It's very true. We've had an interesting experience with COVID-19 where our policy makers, our political leaders have actually listened to science in a very real way and and taken the the advice of scientists. And it's I find it very heartening. But when you think about the amount of time that the words of scientists have not been listened to, it's possible to lose heart a little bit. And Greg, I just like to ask you, I realize this is outside your area. And as a senior scientist, you will probably most likely to say, it's outside my area. I wouldn't comment on that. But but it's it's in principle. And that is, for example, the great spill of the deep water horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, when, you know, we're looking at pollutants that are diluted over huge areas of ocean and how we address that issue. It kind of passed under the radar a little bit where everybody said, well, we put lots of detergent in the ocean. So everything's fine. How is it? Do you think that without going into the great detail more as a kind of a policy thing, how the sort of work you do can be harnessed to address something as massive as that? Probably we need probably we need to think here about two, let's say approaches. First of all, is how science is made. Because what you are talking here about COVID, for example, application of scientific advice is sort of shortcut. Usually scientific process is more complex. And on the first stage, it's much more difficult to understand. Majority of science is done by researchers like me or Alexia, and we are publishing scientific papers in scientific journals. And those are highly technical papers, difficult to understand for non-scientists. So on some point someone is taking several of those papers if they are published and confirm the findings and publishing sort of review. When is this review published is sort of synthesis of what we know on this subject. And later those reviews actually are ending up in academic textbooks. And in the final stage, eventually they are ending up in the textbooks for high schools or primary schools. But the process is taking quite a while before knowledge is very well established. So this is why eventually why very new discoveries are not applied and fully appreciated straight away by the public, because the process is taking several steps before this is verified and very well described. The shortcut for this could be a good science communication. And this is we need people like you, Angela, or other science communicators, which are giving us this shortcut directly translating those papers or those new findings for common public. And what you were mentioning about the deep horizon spiel is a very good example. And there is a sentence which is saying, dilution is not a solution. And in this case we have primarily dilution as a remediation strategy, except of course collecting some oil from the surface. But this type of research which we are doing as Alexei or me are actually going into deeper details how to record this what was happening, even this is on the law concentration. So actually those traces are always remaining in the environment one or another way. The question is how we can decode this. And of course, if the problem is more complex, we need more sophisticated methods and in such case advanced chemistry or stable isotopes are offering some solution for this. Thank you. Thank you. That brings it together. I'm just looking up here to the question here by Kiran Kimister, who says, hi Greg and Alexei, have you guys ever combined your types of approaches, for example with laser ablation, IRMS, not sure if facilities exist in WA, thanks Kiran. Well, I don't know, I can probably try to answer on this. Yes, they're not a new WA, but they've been trial to apply this kind of combining stable isotopes mass spectrometers with laser ablation people did these things on the carbonates and many other materials. But what's for Greg was talking is they were called light stable isotopes. They are different isotope systems, and we have facility in UWA to study these isotopes with laser ablation, for example, isotopes of magnesium, isotopes of sulfur which Greg was saying, this all can be done already in UWA. So yes, research is kind of in this area been done before and actually actively been done in, for example, our laboratories. Some of this type of research were done also even in 90s when we are thinking about laser ablation of silicates. In this case, the systems are directly connected to IRMS dual inlet type of mass spectrometry. But yeah, Alexei is right. In this case, we have two separate sort of facilities, but we are frequently collaborating. For example, some samples of corals which are analyzed in Alexei lab using ICPMS are analyzed also in our lab using IRMS mass spectrometry. Paige Maroni says, thank you both for such a great talk to Alexei. Is there work out there similar to yours or have you ever worked with cartons, the radula in mollusks instead of calcified materials? Yes, thank you. Thanks for the question. Actually, the cartons, it's also calcifiers. We just calcified the different thing. So yes, there been studies in mollusks in the different parts, including the teeth of the mollusk radulus, where people look at the different chemical composition of this. None of them being actually applied for pollution directly for pollution studies, at least I'm not aware, but they've been usually used for tracer for different environmental parameters, like for example, temperature and salinity. So these studies do exist and people do use these things. Maybe also interesting is that some of those materials, like organic materials, type of height, for example, in whales are analyzed also for oxygen stabilizer composition to basically trace how much time animal was spending in different type of waters with different stabilizer composition respectively to contribution of ice. We might move to sign off unless Greg or Alexi had something in particular you wanted to add? I think I specifically like the quote which you gave on the beginning of your talk. Also Yuval Harari, the author of Sapiens bestselling books, was saying that the most, the major human discovery was actually that we don't know everything. And this was contributing to the scientific and technological revolution three, four hundred years ago. Because if we realize that we don't know everything, there is a room for development, for advancement, and actually the most important part of being scientists is curiosity. Do we know everything? Can we question something? Can we improve something? And probably this is the major, major driver for majority of scientific discoveries. Well, just follow up on this similar note. It's actually interesting, there is a line in Quran about more or less similar things what the humans, we don't know thing, we just assume what we know from our experience. So we only know the world around us through experience basically. We're all scientists in some ways by studying things by exploring how it works, we kind of understanding the world around us. So yeah, I think, you know, using the different toolbox, you know, you as a member of a public, every day you observe the world and seeing crime happening, something happening here and here in the reporting. And we scientists doing almost similar things. In our case we're using chemistry and we're trying to report to community what's happening to our environment here and there. That's great. I think that's a very lovely note to end on, that science is driven by curiosity and leads to the wonderful elegance of its processes. We'd like to thank everybody who's attended today's session. A special thank you to our presenters. Thank you for spending the time with us today. Stay safe and healthy. Goodbye. Thank you very much.