I'm going to start with the end and then show you the data that supports the overall scheme. And that is what I'm going to try and convince you is that intestinal microbes play a contributory role to the development of cardiovascular disease. What our group has found is that diets that were familiar or food sources that were familiar with increased risk of cardiovascular disease such as those abundant in fat and cholesterol and illustrated on the left there are also associated with increased levels of trimethylamine containing nutrients such as phosphorylcholine or choline shown in the bottom left and also carnitine shown in the mid-left. And what I'm going to show you is that gut flora contain enzymes that will actually cleave the trimethylamine moiety off of the nutrient generating TMA or trimethylamine. This is a gas at body temperatures. We have within our livers a cluster of enzymes called Flavin monoxygenases which are capable of then very efficiently oxidizing TMA into what we are the field used to think of as purely a nitrogenous waste product TMAO or trimethylamine an oxide. But what I hope to show you is that this actual compound has biological activity and can actually alter cholesterol and sterile metabolism at multiple different compartments and not only is it associated with cardiovascular disease outcomes in humans but in animal models will actually facilitate or accelerate the development of atherosclerosis suggesting that gut flora through this axis can actually perturb the development of cardiovascular disease. There are also a couple other take home messages that I'd like to try and discuss today. That is the first is that if you think about things coming from either genetics or environment, how we perceive that environment is influenced through the filters that are there. Our largest environmental exposure is what we eat. We literally consume kilogram quantities of foreign material if you think of food as a foreign object and it is through this filter of the intestinal microbiome and if you have different compositions and you're making slightly different metabolites at different levels from one person to another the filters can actually influence phenotype in that way. The second thing that I'd like to also suggest is that we should think of the intestinal microbiome as an endocrine organ. An endocrine organ is of course something that makes a hormone and if a hormone by definition is a biologically active compound that will diffuse in the circulation and act at a distant site. I'm going to give you examples of how compounds are being generated in the intestines and diffusing and then acting at the site of let's say a macrophage in the artery wall or a hepatocyte in the liver or an enterocyte in the intestine and influencing the biology. It's a quite plastic organ to be sure and it changes depending upon what the chronic dietary exposure is and what the acute dietary intake is but nonetheless it's functioning like an endocrine organ and then lastly, well I'm not going to show you data on this. I think what is exciting about this whole field is that this is a druggable target. If we start to understand the chemical braille of the different pathways of what the microbes are generating and how they're biologically active then these become targets for pharmacologic intervention through inhibitors or agonists. Not an antibiotic but an inhibitor and so perhaps in our future we'll look at our medicine cabinet and see let's say a statin and say oh that's our homo sapien enzyme inhibitor for blocking cholesterol synthesis and right next to it will be a tablet for blocking a specific enzyme in bacteria that doesn't kill it but actually prevents the formation of compounds that might be linked to cardiometabolic diseases or obesity or whatever or maybe even our behavior as we just recently heard. Okay so how did we actually get into this? I am not a microbiologist and I am not actually my history has not been working on microbiome. Instead I'm actually a chemist and run the mass spectrometry facility at my institution and we started with an unbiased metabolomic screening study. We were using a cohort for which I'm the PI it's called Gene Bank has over 10,000 subjects for whom we've collected their blood and then followed longitudinally over time and so from this cohort we identified a small subset who went on and experienced heart attack, stroke, and death and age and gender matched control subjects and then within each person's plasma in this small case control cohort we asked can we find small molecules that are associated with cardiovascular disease risk. So we did this in a learning set and we did it in a validation cohort. In the end we came up with a small subset of compounds which actually seem to reproducibly associate with cardiovascular disease. Well the surprising finding was is that some of these compounds fell into a common pathway and that was involved in phosphatidicoline metabolism. Now what the three main candidates in our first paper were choline butane which is the oxidation product of choline and then this small molecule that I call TMAO or trimethylamine an oxide which is shown in the structures at the bottom and so with this association study suggested is that that at least was an association between multiple metabolites in phosphatidicoline metabolism and cardiovascular disease risk. So we first wanted to actually look at mechanistic studies to see was there a causal link. So I'm sorry I'm switching the order of my slides here. So the first thing we actually wanted to also confirm was if one looks at phosphatidicoline metabolism the classic pathway that how all of us digest phosphatidicoline is we have lipases that cleave off the fatty acids and then glycerophosphicoline and the fatty acids are absorbed in our intestines. However there was a suggestion that TMA and TMAO might be ultimately generated via gut microbes because certain bacteria could cleave choline and forming TMA but this really hadn't been shown especially for phosphatidicoline to involve intestinal microbes. So we received germ-free animals from Teconic and then did the experiment where we took the germ-free animals and immediately upon opening the micro isolators, gavaged them with isotope labeled phosphatidicoline or egg yolk phosphatidicoline and then monitored in the plasma the appearance of the different isotopologs of the metabolites of phosphatidicoline such as choline, butane, and TMAO and as can be seen on the left what was found is that in the germ-free animals following ingestion of phosphatidicoline no TMAO was generated or appeared in the plasma over time but in contrast if you took the same germ-free animals and now we put them in conventional cages and two weeks later they've now assumed intestinal microbial communities they've become conventionalized and now when we gavaged them with phosphatidicoline TMAO rapidly appeared in the plasma following ingestion of the phosphatidicoline showing that TMAO was indeed formed in an obligatory way or it required the role of gut flora to be generated or gut microbiota. Now you've seen this slide shown I guess throughout this just earlier today but more recently Wilson Tang in our group kind of tried to extend these studies to humans and what we looked at we're using egg yolk or two hard-boiled eggs as the dietary source of phosphatidicoline in subjects and at baseline we would give them the hard-boiled eggs and then monitor for the appearance of this metabolite TMAO in the plasma and in the urine. We also gave them a capsule of synthetic isotope labeled phosphatidicoline where the N-methyl hydrogens were now deuteron so we could trace the and so for certain that the metabolite that we were measuring TMAO came from phosphatidicoline because there's many things inside of a hard-boiled egg besides phosphatidicoline and what we're able to show is that at baseline you could readily detect TMAO if this is six hours following ingestion of two hard-boiled eggs. If then the these are healthy volunteers replaced on a cocktail of oral antibiotics and then came back five or six days later and repeated the challenge the formation of the TMAO was virtually completely eliminated and so none was detected in both the plasma and in the urine and then after cessation of the antibiotics and going home and coming back month later repeated the challenge and now you see it again so this showed an obligatory role for intestinal microbes in the formation of this metabolite that we're measuring in the blood. Now why do we think that's important? So first of all if we actually measured the metabolite in the plasma of subjects we saw that it was strikingly associated with cardiovascular risk. What is shown here is an independent study of over 1,800 subjects where we have the baseline plasma level and we're looking at cardiovascular disease this is the risk is shown on the y-axis the odds of having cardiovascular disease after adjustment for traditional risk factors such as those in the Framingham risk factor or formula age gender diabetes hypertension smoking LDL HDL and also has the addition of other labs that are currently used for evaluating cardiac risk such as triglyceride and CRP and an estimate of renal function and if you focus your attention on the center graph what you can see is that there's a striking distribution or association between the plasma level of TMAO and the likelihood of risk of having cardiovascular disease in subjects so the line in the middle is the odd ratio and the dotted lines are the 95% confidence interval and there's quite a steep association and if one were to look at LDL cholesterol for example it would be a much more horizontal line in this cohort so this is still just associative data but nonetheless it's compelling because that was independent and above on top of traditional risk factors more recently we've extended this to an alternative independent cohort for whom we followed over time who went on to develop heart attack stroke or death and what we see is that baseline levels are predicting future risks of myocardial infarction stroke and death if one looks at the composite of this of major adverse cardiac events that's in the bottom left-hand corner the fourth quartile so the top 1,000 subjects compared to the bottom 1,000 the first quartile is the index group for comparison they have about a fourfold increased likelihood of experiencing an event in the next three-year period and the line represents the 95% confidence interval and shown on the right are cap and viral survival plot showing that your plasma TMAO level is a good independent predictor of prospective survival so to take this into a more mechanistic realm we started doing animal model studies and at first we actually fed mice phosphatidylcholine and actually saw that they got accelerated atherosclerosis but they also gained more weight they were getting more calories and there was the whole issue of the fatty acid composition maybe that was contributing to the disease so we instead started just giving choline in the diet now choline for animals for mammals has no calories we don't catabolize choline and generate calories from it and we also don't see changes in either the cholesterol or the lipoprotein or glucose or insulin levels in the animals that are on the choline diet but nonetheless what we found is that augmenting an atherosclerosis prone animals diet with choline led to accelerated atherosclerosis so shown in the open bars where the wild type conventionalized animals on a normal child diet on the control side and the choline represents a high choline diet which is approximately what would be a very high fat Western diet in terms of its choline content shown in the black bars are animals in which the intestinal microbial community was suppressed by a cocktail broad spectrum antibiotics the TMAO levels in plasma which are shown below in red were suppressed to near zero levels throughout the course of the study which is about a 20 week duration and what was seen is that the increase in atherosclerotic plaque here measured by macrophage of the major cell type in the in the macrophage in the aorta but also this is done has been done by cholesterol content or already staining that the diet induced atherosclerosis was inhibited in the animals in which the gut flora was suppressed in TMAO was not generated now importantly what was also found and I'm sorry I don't have it here what was also found is that if we fed TMAO directly to the animals and bypassed the microbes that alone was sufficient to increase an augment accelerated atherosclerosis in the mouse model now I'm working out the mechanism we started looking at a variety different places and if what was found is that the macrophage was accumulating cholesterol so we focused on cholesterol metabolism and so if one thinks of the the macrophage kind of shown in that ugly cell on the right in purple as a black box and you say it's accumulating cholesterol you can either have enhanced pathways for delivering cholesterol into the cell more cholesterol being synthesized in the cell are decreased removal of cholesterol from the cell you know increased flux in decreased flux out or more synthesis in the cell and so we kind of looked at it in this simplified black box approach and looked at candidates involved in cholesterol metabolism to try to work out the details of how was cholesterol accumulating in cells of the artery wall it turned out to be a little bit of a complex mechanism and we still don't know precisely all of the pathways that are involved but what was found was that there was both enhanced forward cholesterol transport and in particular on the macrophage there was up regulation of genes involved in recognition of modified forms of LDL such as scavenger receptor SRA1 and CD36 these were effects of directly of TMAO when fed to animals as well as when cultured with when incubated with cultured macrophages what was also observed is that there were changes in cholesterol and bile acid metabolism at the level of the hepatocyte and also the enterocyte so there's a substantial reduction in bile acid pool size and composition changes in the bile acid transport pathways such as CYPS 27a and CYPS 7a1 and then also changes in enterocyte cholesterol and bile acid transporters as well the net effect is shown on the top right hand corner there's enhanced forward cholesterol transport and if one actually directly measured the reverse cholesterol transport pathway using methods that were first developed by Dan Rader and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania we saw that there was actually about a 30% reduction in reverse cholesterol transport that was mediated by either TMAO directly in animals that were fed the TMAO or in animals that were fed the precursor choline when they had intact flora but if you suppressed the flora and blocked the TMAO formation you no longer saw the changes in cholesterol and sterol metabolism or in bile acid synthesis that was being observed now I so far kind of showed you data that was mostly done with choline but more recently we've actually started expanding these studies to alternative dietary nutrients that are similarly trimethylamine containing and so like carnitine was the one we're focusing on now the reason why we focused on carnitine is because there's substantial epidemiologic data that argues that red meat is associated with increased cardiovascular risks and in particular for example this recent study that came out by the Harvard nutrition group looking at both the health profession follow-up study and the nurses health study combined they have over almost three million follow-up years of information with almost 24,000 deaths followed with an average follow-up period of over 20 years and what was seen is that for each one portion increase per day in red meat amongst the individuals that were followed in this these cook these studies and it counts for somewhere between a 13 to a 20% increase in mortality over the course of the duration of follow-up which is as I said either a 20 or 28 year period depending on the two different studies and and by the way a portion size by the nutritionists it's always strikes me as a little bit funny that they're so small it's only three ounces is considered one portion of red meat I don't know about you but that seems to me like the snack that you eat before you have dinner as opposed to the real portion size so why with the interest in red meat well carnitine is a nutrient that's almost exclusively found in red meat certainly in meat and the structure is shown here and it has that same trimethylamine moiety on it and it actually derives its name from the Latin root word where carnivore comes from meaning flesh and that's because the chemists who first discovered carnitine structure over a century ago found that the the food substances that it was in were essentially a flesh and red meat in particular has high level and if you're wondering what red meat has the highest level kangaroo by the way has 50 fold higher level carnitine than beef so don't go out meet kangaroo patties if you want to try and cut down on your carnitine ingestion but in any way carnitine plays a role normally in fatty acid transport into mitochondria we make all the carnitine we eat from our diet it's not an essential amino acid it is made by lysine after and lysine being the single most abundant amino acid in both plant and animal proteins most individuals unless you have a genetic defect do not have carnitine deficiency or it's a very rare phenotype so we were interested in the same kind of story could carnitine generate TMAO and accelerate atherosclerosis just to speed up because I want to leave time for questions we use the germ-free animals and we're able to show that when you ingest or when animals ingest carnitine they in their germ-free they do not make TMAO but when they're convention lines they do we then wanted to translate this to human clinical studies Bob Koth a postdoc or I'm sorry is an MSTP in my lab this was his thesis research the carnitine story he did the study were actually we generated we used a literally a a grill that had that on the box cover and and used steak as our source of natural source of carnitine isotope labeled carnitine in a pill and did the same kind of experiment we're at visit one they get a carnitine challenge and over time measure the appearance and disappearance of the metabolites go on antibiotics suppress the intestinal flora etc so doing that same kind of experiment as we did with the phosphatidylcholine what we saw is that while they hadn't individuals have intact flora they readily generate TMAO from ingestion of carnitine but following suppression of the intestinal flora no TMAO is generated by ingesting carnitine suggesting that carnitine formation of TMAO has an obligatory requirement for gut flora as well so taking this to atherosclerosis animal models we use the APOE and all mouse model what we saw is there was about a two-fold increase in aortic root atherosclerosis and animals that were on a carnitine diet despite no changes in their cholesterol levels their weights or triglyceride levels if you suppress the intestinal flora and bring the TMA and TMAO levels down to near zero over the course of the duration of the study we saw and looking at the right hand panel no diet dependent increase in atherosclerosis now one of the intriguing findings that we saw during the course of these studies was that the animals that were on the chronic carnitine diet showed a tenfold increase in their synthetic capacity to make TMAO compared to normal chow mice this suggested that the chronic dietary exposure to carnitine had actually shifted the intestinal microbial composition to such that the microbes were now those that those that preferred carnitine as a substrate had become had a selective advantage and had grown more and now carnitine dependent conversion into TMA and TMAO was occurring more readily because of the shift in intestinal microbes and actually through you looking at the 16s ribosomal DNA of the feces or and also of the the sequel contents we saw that this had actually in fact happened in studies that we actually performed in collaboration with our U Penn colleagues such as Rick Bushman and Gary who are here we actually looked at omnivores versus vegetarian and vegans as well to see if this naturally occurring diversity in carnitine ingestion that is vegetarian and vegans have a very low carnitine ingestion rate compared to omnivores could we see a microbial shift if you will in the formation of TMA production in the subjects and this is data just from one omnivore who was characteristic or exemplary and one vegan who is an intrepid vegan who agreed to eat a steak as well as take the capsule with the methylated carnitine the deuterated carnitine and what was seen is that following ingestion of carnitine the vegan had an exceedingly low synthetic capacity to make TMAO compared to the omnivore and this was true with both the natural abundance as well as the isotope labeled precursor carnitine what's shown here are data with larger numbers that when we compared a larger number of vegetarians to omnivores that the omnivores had a higher level of TMAO in general and then shown on the right are for those who went through the full isotope labeled carnitine challenge there is a very dramatic difference in TMAO synthetic capacity or production rate following ingestion of carnitine seen in the vegans compared to the omnivores the vegans as was seen with the the other vegan who ate only the steak and capsule those who just had the capsule were very very poor at generating TMAO now when doing the microbial composition analysis of the from feces analysis what was seen is that there are multiple different taxonomic groupings of microbes that associated not only with the dietary pattern but also with the plasma TMAO level and shown in the red box here is an example of two different patterns the top one is illustrated as a lower proportion in vegetarian and vegans this particular taxa and associated with lower TMAO level and in contrast for example in the lack no spirit that's a proportion of a specific genus that's higher in the vegetarian and vegan and associated with lower TMAO and so the chronic dietary pattern had actually shifted the intestinal microbial composition of the subjects and this was associated with the altered TMAO level now to bring this back to humans and cardiovascular disease which is my main research interest we wanted to know how could we do this and it turns out that there have been many studies that suggests that individuals who eat more carnitine have higher plasma levels of carnitine and so we actually then one head and measured carnitine in over 2,500 subjects and asked does it track with cardiac risks and the answer was it did actually quite well if you adjusted for traditional risk factors it worked as good or better as LDL cholesterol or blood sugar or any of the current diagnostic tests that we use for and are associated with cardiac risk carnitine was independent and better if you will but what we also found is that in individuals if you then stratified by their TMAO level only those subjects who had a concurrent high TMAO level where this is above and below the median analysis so you needed to have a high carnitine and a high TMAO level to have increased cardiac risk if you have a high carnitine level but a low TMAO level that is let's say your microbiota composition was healthier you didn't you weren't a TMAO producer you're at low risk even though you had the high carnitine level presumably these were high carnitine ingesting subjects we don't we don't know the dietary patterns of these individuals unfortunately this was a study of over 2,500 subjects so to summarize I'd like to suggest that in addition to foods high in cholesterol and saturated fat there are other dietary nutrients that through their the action of gut microbes that is like choline and carnitine can generate small molecule metabolites that are biologically active acting at a distant site and influencing cholesterol and stereometabolism in the artery wall such as in the macrophage in the in the liver such as in the synthesis of bile acids and in the enterocyte in terms of cholesterol absorption and cholesterol and bile acid metabolism and collectively it's serving like a rheostat on the light switch you need cholesterol to have atherosclerosis just like you need electricity to have a light bulb turn on but you can have a rheostat and if you have a high TMAO level the dimmer switch is bright and at any given cholesterol level you have a more bigger chance of getting atherosclerosis if the dimmer switch is down you have a low TMAO level you have less chance of getting atherosclerosis now I'm going to end just by saying where else do we get carnitine well in addition to these foods it is a very common recent dietary supplement and not only in things that are shown here but also you know some of these energy drinks have an extraordinary amount of carnitine within them if you'll notice that it's the carnitine content and monster in particular is in front of the glucose so it's the most abundant additive that they have and it's one portion of a steak is approximately 160 to 180 milligrams so we're talking a lot of carnitine in the can so we were interested in asking this is the last piece of data this is unpublished if you're on a chronic vegan diet are you protected if you start taking carnitine supplements because actually many vegetarian and vegans to try to augment their carnitine will be on a daily carnitine supplement thinking that they're missing it because there are on a vegetarian or vegan diet and what's shown on the left are the carnitine challenges that were done at baseline or after one month or two month of daily carnitine supplementation and the vegans are that we've done so far shown on the left the omnivores on the top and the omnivores on the bottom and what can be seen and then on the right-hand side is just fasting plasma levels and that tells the story if you have chronic carnitine supplementation regardless of your diet you know we are walking tissue culture dishes and if you give a nutrient that the microbes like those that have the selective they get a selective advantage and now they're going to be more populous and grow and so actually chronic dieting carnitine exposure is changing the intestinal microbial composition and making the subjects more prone to making TMAO which we think is a pro-athrogenic phenotype so it suggests or makes us wonder if chronic carnitine exposure and things even like energy drinks might be a long-term adverse thing that certainly needs further studies in the future. I'll just end by thanking you for your attention and point out four main individuals in particular the four major papers that I've discussed were each co-first authors by individuals in my groups in Aang, Wang, Bob Koth and Wilson Tang, Brian Bennett working with you at UCLA with Jake Lucis was the author of the Selma tab paper and I also want to point out our colleagues at UPenn, Rick Bushman, Dr. Chen and Gary Wu as well thank you very much. Okay maybe one question while we're transitioning between speakers here we're running a little bit behind. Well here's one the over here the since a number of of lipids can be a source of the of trimethylamine that with the choline head group why is it that carnitine sticks out as being a substrate or is that the conclusion that you have or is that not the case in other words is it that making the trimethylamine is one thing but then there's some other ecology or indirect process related to L-carnitine which goes with the cardiovascular risk. Well we I think that any of the trimethylamine nutrients whether it's carnitine or phosphatylcholine or choline possibly butane, acetylcarnitine all of these can be converted into TMA and TMAO and so far in an animal model level all of them are associating with accelerated atherosclerosis so I don't think there's anything unique about carnitine I think we studied carnitine after our first study on choline so carnitine just has that trimethylamine group and is yet the gut flora can actually cleave it off and it has the same conserved group that's why we started looking at the carnitine as a so but the two most abundant trimethylamines in a Western diet are going to be carnitine and phosphatylcholine less than. Do you have a quick question? Excellent talk you measure you mentioned that carnitine can be bad if TMO levels are high but carnitine has a lot of benefit in certain diseases of interest there are diseases with low carnitine autism the work we're doing in working in other efforts to look at TMO levels in other disorders where carnitine metabolism is involved and you've made an excellent point which went for supplements what might be good for some disorder maybe very bad for another. We haven't looked at autism we actually after our paper came out I got a landslide of emails asking about acetylcarnitine because there apparently it's a common nutrient or supplement that's used with reported benefits for cognition and in various neurodegenerative disorders or dementia. We have been studying it all I can say is that we're looking at it from the cardiovascular standpoint not the dementia standpoint and I can say that you get accelerated or you get enhanced TMA and TMAO development by ingestion of acetylcarnitine whether that leads to accelerated atherosclerosis in an animal model we don't know the answer yet. But it's a good example that you know for some disorders it shows promise in specific studies as opposed to being a carp launch thing that everyone eats it's an excellent study. Thank you. Okay thank you I think we need to move on. Okay the next speaker is Christian Chabon from the University of Florida School of Medicine and he's going to be talking about the gut microbiome and colorectal cancer.


Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to TV UP's Science Innovation Series. I'm Giselle Concepcion, a professor at the Marine Science Institute of UP Dileman, and I do research on marine drug discovery and development. I'm your host for today. Our topic is one of the hottest topics in the country today. And it's a dirty topic. It's unresponsible, sustainable mining. We're happy to have with us two resource persons from UP Dileman, the director of the National Institute of Geological Sciences, Dr. Mario Aurelio. Melinda Naro. Welcome, Mario. And Dr. Perry Ong, professor of biology, initiative biology. Thanks for coming, Perry. We know that this is a controversial topic in our country today, and so we would like to hear it first from our NIGS director. Mario, what's the business as usual mode of mining in our country today? Okay, to put things in perspective, that question should be answered, I guess. Taking into account what has recently just happened as far as the regulatory bodies concerned, meaning the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, a cabinet department of the government, which recently had a drastic change, I would say, in its leadership, because the former secretary-designate Gena Lopez was replaced by a new secretary now, General Sima II. So on the basis of that, because during the time of secretary-designate Gena Lopez, ex-secretary-designate Gena Lopez, she instituted a lot of changes, including, for example, the suspension of mining permits. At least about 70, 75 mining permits were suspended. Until now, those mining permits are still in suspension because that suspension has not been legally changed yet. So in other words, the status at the moment is that those suspensions exist. So it's still a sort of a status quo, although the industry is a bit more up-mode now because of the expectations that soon enough these suspensions will eventually be reverted back into non-suspensions. And therefore, the mining industry can proceed with its usual business. But having said that, however, there's now a difficulty as far as the government is concerned to do just the reversion of the suspensions because it has to go through a process again, which will take a little time. So I would say it's a little bit more hopeful than in the previous year, at least. So Mario, what was the basis for the suspension of the 75 out of the more than 200 mining companies? What were the criteria that were evaluated? Well, the suspensions came after what was then called as a mining audit. And the mining audit was conducted by the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, of course, together with the Environmental Management Bureau. These are two bureaus of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. And it was a countrywide mining audit, highly technical. And after the results of the mining audit, then the Secretary decided to make her decision to issue the suspensions. As to the basis of the suspensions, it's very technical. There's at least some sort of a checklist for the mining auditors that they verify in the field. So technical personnel were sent out to the field to check on all the highly technical issues, including, for example, environmental issues, environmental compliance. Because we have to remember that mining operations according to the Mining Act of 1995, R.A.7942, has really very strict regulations, including environmental regulations. And if you violate any of those regulations, then it could be a justification for your suspensions. I would say it's essentially non-compliance or violation of some of the several of the regulations in the Mining Act. But foremost among them would be the environmental issues. So I've always been curious, Mario, what the basis for, say, violation would be. Do we as an academic institution, NAICS in particular, help the DNR in monitoring, say, chemical pollutants in the soil, in the water, in the air, in the... Yes, from time to time, there have been instances in the past, until now, that not only UP, other institutions as well, are consulted by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. In fact, they even grant projects, they fund projects to basically address some issues that the DNR thinks is not capable of doing, as far as the technicalities are concerned. But in theory, actually, the DNR has capability because it has the MGB, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, and the Environmental Management Bureau. These are the two arms of the DNR for such concerns. But as I said, yes, there are instances where, from time to time, DNR would consult academic institutions, UP included, to take a look at such problems. I can cite several where NAICS has been involved, like, for example, the pollution along Boak River after the disaster in the Marine Duque Mining, dam failure. Some of our faculty members at UP were given a small grant to study precisely what happened to the river in Boak. So, my own thinking as a chemist is that if someone were to do an audit, it would be based on the scientific data. And so I wondered when the 75 were suspended, whether there was chemical analytical data as basis for saying, you are causing pollution and therefore you have to be suspended. Because I know that's how it's done in other countries. And the monitoring of the pollutants is continuous. It's periodic. It's regular. It's not just a one-time monitoring. So I'm happy to know that NAICS, other UP units and other academic institutions have been asked by the DNR to help in the environmental monitoring. But we know very well that it's not only the physical or geological environment that is affected by mining. We say there is the biostrata in particular, the biodiversity, and of course the human population that's affected by mining activities. So, Perry, can you tell us a bit more about your own findings about the impact of mining on our biodiversity? Yes, but to answer that, I'd like to preface it with a statement. First of all, mining in itself brings societal goods. So there's no argument it brings societal goods. So the question is whether it's not whether we do mining or not. If we want to maintain and continue the way human society lives now, then mining will continue. Even under the law, as Dr. Ariello mentioned, it's legal to do mining in the country. The question is, what's the problem with mining? So as you mentioned, there are impacts on the human environment. There's impact on the ecosystem, on biodiversity. So those are the things that need to be addressed. And in this context, I'd like to... The context I'd like to bring in is that even the President made a pronouncement that he is not against mining. But he is against the continuing practice, the way mining is practiced in the country. So having said that, it means that the business as usual model of mining cannot proceed. It has to be undertaken now in the new context of awareness about the impacts. How do you now do mining, giving considerations to human welfare and environment? So again, to reiterate, we need to have a new mode of operations for mining to consider biodiversity and human welfare into their equation. Now, the problem is, I think that one of the major problems is that mining companies look at taking these considerations into the equation will mean reduced profit. And that's where I think the issue, the conflict could arise. Because most corporations being corporations, they have stock dividends, they have to have profit. And they're used to earn mega profit. And if they change their operation, it might reduce their profit. And that's usually the reason why they are hesitant to include these two considerations into the equation of their operations. But if they're willing, again, if they remember that mining is not being banned, but rather mining needs to be operated under new conditions, then as long as they're willing to reduce even bit of their profit, I think it can be done. So, Barry, what would you suggest we propose as academics to improve the policy and then the implementing rules and regulations for the mining industry that would take into consideration these biodiversity environment and human health and socio-economic improvement issues that have been raised with the mining industry. So, maybe you can tell us, you know, there are areas where we should not allow mining at all. Are there areas where this is to be encouraged? Are there new areas to explore? I think I've been in discussion with many groups about how to improve the operations of mining. And first of all, there's this mindset that mining rehabilitation happens only after the closure of a mine. I think the first mindset that should be changed is that mining rehabilitation should start on day one. For example, in terms of heavy equipment, in mining operations, the main equipment at the start would be a bulldozer. They would bulldoze trees and all the topsoil, et cetera, so that they can get to the mine. The mindset we need to change is instead of a bulldozer, we propose to use a backhoe. Meaning, a backhoe will now lift the soil and place it somewhere instead of just pushing it off the rinse. Okay, so it means that topsoil that the backhoe will collect will be the source of material to rehabilitate that area that had been mined out. So, in terms of heavy equipment that will be used, it's just a change from a bulldozer to a backhoe. I have to ask Mario if you think this is feasible. I do not completely agree because different materials have their own properties, and therefore the mechanisms or the methodologies that you have to employ will also differ. Of course, economics come in. The reason why bulldozers are used as they are cheaper, basically. But then again, as Perry said, there's a better way, more environmentally friendly way, but it will be more expensive. And again, that goes into the economics of mining, and that was mentioned by Perry, which eats up into their budget and therefore lessens their profit. But then if they do it, it will reduce their problem with the public. So, instead of spending PR money to clean their image, why don't mining companies use it at the front end instead of using it to clean up their image? So, what I'm asking the mining company to do is to look at the big picture because if they continue doing what they do, they're going to be stuck. If they want to continue, then they have to change the ways they do business. Of course, I think the worst thing I'd like to reiterate is the mindset itself. The details we can work on later, but we have to agree first that we have to change the way we do business because continuing the way mining does its business is not sustainable. It's going to end badly. So, my suggestion is rethink how we do business. As I've said, it will eat up. But again, you spend money at the end to clean up your image to make you look good. Why don't you do the right thing right at the very beginning? It's also a matter of scales actually. The very simple example of Berry about replacing a bulldozer with a backhoe, that can take place in a room like this. But if you're dealing with a larger area, a mountain, then that same concept, a usable dozer, but then you'll have to recover the same material that you pushed with something else like trucks. And that's what they are doing in some areas. They push some dirt or some soil, but then they recover it and put it somewhere else. They call them stockpiles, for example. So, in any case, there are ways of approaching these problems. Only that, admittedly, there are companies who choose the simpler way, cheaper way, but at the end, more environmentally-destructive ways. So, I'd like to interject at this point something that I've been thinking about a long time, not just for mining, but other major industries in our country. So, the investment or the cost, the capital cost of equipment, is accepting the return on investment or the profit margin. Now, I've heard or I know for a fact that many of the products from the mining industry are of a medium quality. What I mean is the mining products are not pure. They are of a semi-crude nature. And in fact, these are being exported to other countries. And then the purification, the extraction to the high-value mineral products are done abroad. And the irony of it is these are re-imported back to our country. So, now, getting higher-value products from our mining industry would require more highly technical capabilities in our country. Expertise, producing our own high-value metals, minerals, alloys would necessarily increase our capital outlay or investment, but it would also increase the profit margin or the return on investment. If only we would also invest in the technologies required to produce those high-value products. So, Mario, what is NIG's doing about this situation? Because Peri suggests the more environment-friendly backhoe, very expensive compared to the bulldozer. So, if your products were to fetch a higher price in the market, then that expensive capital investment would be okay. The picture is like this. Not for all minerals, we send them as ores. Well, there's a difference between the pure mineral and what we call the ore. The ore is the piece of rock that contains some bits of minerals inside. Now, with the exception of gold, because in the Philippines, we process the gold until its purest existence, like in gold bars, for example. We produce gold bars. But the other minerals like for copper, nickel, basically those are the two big mineral industries right now in the country. Indeed, yes, what's happening is that the mining companies here, they extract the ore, and then the ore of copper or nickel, and then they send it abroad for processing, the term is processing. The ideal scenario, however, is that we should have our own processing plants. But the main hindrance in putting up our own mineral processing plants is the cost of electricity. Which is, I think, the highest in Southeast Asia, if not in Asia. So there's, again, an economics behind why we are not able to process our own minerals. Technologically, capability-wise, we are capable. We are trained personnel. But then again, it all goes into the business of it, the economics of it. That's also true for what used to be the steel industry in the Philippines. During the 1970s, there was a steel industry in the Philippines that's based in Iligan. The plant, the infrastructure still exists there. There are plants to revitalize that plant, but it has not been flying yet. But they are also hopeful given now the better ratio of cost benefit as far as materials are concerned and the technology is concerned also. So ideally, yes, we should be processing our own so that we are adding value to our resources. But somehow there's hemp that is being introduced by the more expensive power rates in the country. Basically, that's the reason. Of course. Again, going back to the ROI, I think the mining companies are faced with a situation of maintaining the current ROI which will eventually become zero or reducing their ROI but sustaining it for the long term. Because if they worry about to maintain their ROI now, I'm sure they're going to be closed down. They cannot continue as it is. So they should be willing, as I've said, changing mindsets, that are willing to take in reduced ROI but ensuring that their operations will continue over the long term. Basically, it's a no-brainer. So ROI of six versus ROI of zero. So I think the decision is easy to make. And also, we have to put things in context again. The business of mining does not happen overnight, of course. The gestation period from... Okay, there are basically four parts in the mining cycle. First is prospecting and exploration. Then you have the development period, then the mining phase, and then rehabilitation, which, as I said, should start from day one, which I agree also. You can put in rehabilitation procedures starting from day one. So of the four stages, the gestation period from the first to the... Let's not go yet to the final rehab. To the end of the mining, where the ore is all taken up, extracted, would range between 10 to 100 years. I can give you an example. Felix Mining has been mining their Santo Tomas to deposit. It's a copper gold deposit for the last 60 years, I guess. They started in the 1950s. It's still operating until now. But they started way back for the exploration period at least 20 years before, maybe 10 years before. So it's a very long engagement by a contractor who does not own the minerals, by the way. The regal endocrine in the mining industry is that anything below ground underneath the earth belongs to the state. But the state is not capable. It's not always capable of extracting it. So the government gets into contract with the second party, and that is the contractor, who will spend all, risk all its financial capabilities to do the procedure. Of course, the government will be the regulator. It provides the permits, it controls its monitors, and all these regulations. It comes from the government. So it's a big investment. It's a high-stake endeavor. It's a very risky business. So many things to talk about. But I'd like to pick up Philex. He said it's been around for 60 years. Would you say that it's sustainable and responsible mining on the part of Philex? Are there other examples? And then I also wanted to ask about steel, because I know that a new company, Steel Asia, claims to be providing half the supply of steel for the construction industry. And that's based in Mindanao. My third question is about the nickel ores. And we know that price of nickel is relatively down. At the moment, yes. But still manageable. We're aware that some of our mining companies with foreign partners are mining nickel for the very, very valuable transition metals that are found in the nickel that could be extracted by them. So there are those three questions, but I have like the same number of questions for Barry. So quickly. I'll try to be brief, yes. Let's start with the case of Philex. Well, it is not only Philex that has been in existence for quite a while now, but perhaps one of the reasons why Philex is still existing, I'm speaking of that particular deposit, Santo Tomas, that's in Padcal, just south of Baguio City, is that, well, because the geological setting is also very promising. The grades are good. The volume is quite large. But also, the company has practiced responsible mining in the last 50, 60 years. And then the second thing is that if the image of mining to most people is simply extracting dirt on the surface of the earth, the method they use in that particular mine is underground mining. So you don't basically visibly see what's happening at the surface. It's as if nothing is going underneath. But it's underground mining. This perspective of a normal person, it's a matter of perspective, normal person seeing directly what's happening on the surface. But in this particular case, it's underground mining. Of course, the technology is quite more difficult, more expensive, even more risky actually. But environmentally wise, it's not seen at the surface as being the extraction of materials from the ground. And perhaps the third is that the company has been very socially responsible. In the Mining Act, there's such a thing as the SDMP, the Social Development Management Program, which sets aside a big chunk of your mining budget that is meant exclusively in the development of the social environment, the cities, municipalities, or barangays around. And perhaps that's also the third reason why this company has stayed there, because it's been very responsible in taking care of its SDMP program. For the case of, let me go first to the nickel issue, there's also a particular company, which is always being mentioned in several fora, or forums, Rio Tuba in Southern Palawan. That nickel mine has also been existing for quite some time now. And it's also a good example where rehabilitation has been successful. Of course, as I mentioned at the start, different ores, different minerals have their different characteristics, and therefore different methodologies are viable. In the case of nickel, nickel exists at very shallow depths in the surface so that the viable option only to mine it is by, it's not even an open pit, we don't consider it as open pit, it's scraping, just scraping the ground. But the very drastic effect of that is that you cut trees basically, but then it's not impossible to replant trees. So that's what has happened in Rio Tuba, they're continuing to do that, and it has proven, been proven that it is viable and it's sustainable. As far as the iron industry is concerned, I'm not so familiar with that, but as I said, there are attempts now to revive the industry, but then again, it's the power rates, which is, you know, it's killing it basically, yes. I also heard it's not only the power rates, it's also the smuggling rates. Okay, so you are producing steel, but you have second grade steel from other countries being smuggled to the country. So I was told that if you only tried to control that smuggling, then these local steel industries will start to flourish. I want to ask Barry about the other factors.  Do you realize that we don't produce a single nail in the country? Even the needle that we use, it's imported. We don't produce anything. What still Asia produce are rolled sheets. So the needle, the nail, the paco, the tognilio, they're all imported, we don't produce it, even when we are still in the industry. That's a good start. And that's already brought down the price of steel. And it's really partly why we also have the booming construction industry. That's why we need to have our steel industry. Yes. But as Mari have said, the electricity and the smuggling have to be first. So we have the iron ores. Going back to what Mari was discussing about Ryutuba, while, yes, Ryutuba did some reforestation, but this is where the point I made in that area. They could have done that. If they had a backhoe, the trees put it somewhere, they could use it to replace it now. What they did is, yes, they did replanting, but they replanted with exotic species. So with what I was thinking is if you use the backhoe, you could have returned what was removed. The same trees. Yes, the same trees. Ideally, almost, you could restore it to as close as possible. We know it couldn't be restored to its original state, but it would be restored as close as possible. So, yes, it could have been done better if they had a different set of mines. It all boils down to the cost. Yes, I know.  So in some areas, the conflict between biodiversity and mining stems from the fact that biodiversity as a legal concept came only into the picture in 1992 during the Earth Summit. So before that, mining was already in existence. So in an island like Denagat, it had been declared a mine reserve in the 1930s. Can you please tell us a bit more about Denagat Island with a unique biodiversity? So Denagat Island is north of Surigao, and it is an island where a forest called Ultramafik, Forest Ultramafik is found, meaning it's an area that is highly mineralized. And the trees, the plant materials that grew there are only specific to that condition. So this is where you can see Bonsai Forest or the Pygmy Forest. But as I was saying, it had been declared a mining reserve since the 1930s. And there are now about 18 mining production sharing agreements in existence, some of which had been suspended by the former Secretary Gina Lopez. And again, I've been to that island at least twice, and if you look at the way they have been mining, it's really scary because we were up 800 meters in one of the areas, and you can see down below, they are almost level. So again, is there a better way? Maybe there is. But I think that the main challenge is because it has been done in the easier way. Nobody has put their heads to think about doing it a better way. They're so used to doing it the business as usual model, they have never thought of doing it or talked about doing it some other way. And I think this is the right time. The geologists, the mining engineers, the metallurgical engineers should come together and think about how do we make things better? So we all agree that mining should not be stopped at this rate. It needs to be improved. It needs to address the environmental issues. It needs to address the social issues. And everything can go on. So it's the change in mindsets on how do we do the mining that needs to be talked about. There are many things that are done that we haven't thought about that there are other ways. And this is the right time to think about it, to help us. As a company, this is the best opportunity for us to think about it, to help us. It's important. Personally, I'm now engaged in working with two non-metallic mining groups. And the reason I got involved is that I was challenged by the former director of NEEDS, Kalloy Aisilya.  Yet when we approach you to help us, to tell us how to do good, you won't work with us.  That's why I have to take up the challenge to work with these non-metallic mining groups to find ways to do better. I think the perspective should be ecological, one ecosystem, and also geological. But let's focus on, say, the top five metals or mineral ores. You talked about gold, copper, iron, nickel. So you say Philex is good for gold and copper. So the metals there are not affected because they are underground. So there's no geological impact. There's also an impact in the sense that when you excavate a solid object, you actually lessen its strength. But again, this is where the mining engineers, the civil engineers come in. They design the structure in such a way that it can resist any eventual, for example, earthquake. That place is very close to Baguio. And you remember Baguio City, what happened to it in 1990. The mine site had barely any scar from that earthquake. That means that it was very well designed. Now, I think the problem with the image of the mining industry as far as degradation is concerned is there's a big contribution from the small-scale miners. Well, it is in the law also that you can do mining at the small scale. That's in the mining act also. But then there are a lot of others, small-scale miners who do not care about the environment at all. They use, for example, mercury. They use cyanide, which are all prohibited by the law. But this is the image that people see. And then the mindset, again, is that when you see that, even if I'm not a geologist or not well educated about the issue, I would also have the same perspective. So that has to change also. But even within the big mines or the company operated mines, there should also be a way of polishing their own ranks. There really are mining companies. There's no argument about that. And that has to take place now. And in fact, if there's one good thing that was, there was a wake-up call when Secretary Gina Lopez suspended all of those companies because it was a wake-up call that the industry has to polish its own ranks. Gina really did the first pass. So out of 200, not too many, about one-third. So it looks like... There was supposed to be a next step. A next step. Okay, but that's the most non-compliant. So for the interest of our viewers, let us reiterate what is the value of the mining industry? What are the benefits to society? Gold, copper, aluminum, nickel, iron. Just summarize, Mario, because you know, it's very basic. But in our daily lives, it's really very important. Yeah, well, what we started as primaries is civilizations need the mining, especially when developing this civilization. For the Western world, they also started as mining countries, actually. So there's really a need for extracting these minerals. Actually, the motto of miners is, if it cannot be grown, it has to be mined. Yeah. And so the industry... Well, let's put again them in the proper context. For example, cement. You need cement to construct this building. So there's no way you can construct this building without mining the raw materials for cement. And that's for open pit mines, actually, because these are limestone areas. The mineral sector that was mentioned by Perry, which is non-metallic. Gold, obviously, has its own purposes. But even for technology, your cell phones have gold in it. And all the computer software, there's gold in them. For copper, obviously, all the lights here wouldn't be here without the copper wires. And yeah. The only, perhaps, the emphasis of... What should be the emphasis right now is... Because we can call these the traditional metals. The copper, gold, nickel, even iron, and silver, which usually goes with gold. I think the focus should now also be, as far as the academic sector is concerned, is to look into the minerals that will be used in the future. And in fact, Kalaya Arcilia has a project with DOST looking at the content of nickel laterites as far as scandium is concerned, which is much more expensive than gold, which has applications in high technology, high technology, such as space technology. And there are others, actually, cobalt and other rare earth elements. And fortunately, the DOST has been also supportive in granting, although still minimal, I would say, research grants for this purpose. The government should provide more support as far as doing these kinds of research are concerned. So I think IT and nano technologies make important use, have many medicines from our transition earth metals. And so it's important to support the mining industry, but they should be responsible, and they must come up with long-term sustainability. Change the way they do business. Yeah, programs. So I'd like to maybe ask Perry for some final words, words of advice.  Is it chromium? Scandium. So basically, I think the largest producer of scandium now is China, but they don't have scandium in the land. So they take it from the nickel ores that we export to them. That's the other concern because the mining company sells only the nickel content, and the scandium is free. But in fact, if you do the math, it's even more... They earn more from the scandium. Exactly. So I think that the NIGs should take the lead in trying to learn this scandium extraction technology, and then perhaps we would get a better return on investment on our mining activities from the nickel. I heard that in the mining forum two weeks ago, YouTube was setting up a plan to extract scandium. They were the first ones to do it. My last word is that I think biodiversity mining could coexist. It's just that you have to change the mindset on how we do business, on how we operate the mines. It would be difficult at the start because nobody has done it before. But if we as a university don't even think about it, how can it even happen? So I think that's our role as an academic institution, to explore ways on how the mining, the geologists, the mining engineers, the meteorological engineers, the biologists, the physicists, the chemists to work together and come up with solutions that will ensure that we get the benefits of the mining, reduce its impact on the environment, and make everybody happy. So Perry has been focusing more on land-based mining, but he has a view on watersheds, and I know that Mario also has some view on new sites of mining. So Mario, perhaps you can tell us about the future of mining in the Philippines, assuming that we're able to fix up the way we do the land-based mining, the forest-based mining. You mean non-land-based mining? Non-land-based mining, yes. Okay, there's a new frontier in mining. I say new frontier because it's relatively new. It started only in 1996 when a United Nations organization called the International Seabed Authority was established. The ISAA, for short, was established to carry out or to implement Part 6 of the United Nations Convention on the Love of the Sea, and what is Part 6? Part 6 is the area beyond national jurisdiction. So we are in international seas, but underneath the oceans there's a seabed, and in the seabed there are minerals, which are unpatched, but they are also very fragile, but they contain also high technology minerals, and therefore at the moment this UN organization is the regulator for exploration activities in the seabed. We can perhaps set up another forum for this, but yes, that's a new frontier, and the Philippines can engage in this kind of mineral exploration activities, but as a state party to enclose. Only state parties can participate in seabed mineral mining activities, as regulated by the ISAA. So it's nice to end on that note, Mario. We're thinking of future exploration, and I'd like to thank you and Perry for grazing this occasion, and let's just say that from the University of the Philippines, we know what needs to be done on the basic level. It's to increase the number of technical experts in geology and in the related disciplines, but I think it's also important to have that bigger, long-term view of what's good for a particular society in the mining area, and so Perry talked about the impact of mining on biodiversity and the biostratum, and we already know that the mining companies are being required to take care of the employees. So it's about social engagement in the long-term or corporate social responsibility, which the National University emphasizes in any major industry or undertaking in the country. So thank you very much for being with us in this science innovation talk on responsible, sustainable mining. Thank you very much.


In this step, I'm going to show you how to use mesh lights to create some pretty sexy looking candle flames I know that we just created some point lights to be like the candle light But that was just to introduce you to point lights. I don't actually want them anymore So we're going to delete those out of the scene. So we'll get rid of that one and that one I will just point out if you have any issues with selecting lights What you can do is just go into your outliner windows outliner and And all lights that we just undo all lights will be listed in here So if I wanted to get rid of that point if I couldn't select it in here for some reason I can just click it in here and delete it that way and then if you just want to hide your outline and just click on The tab and it'll just sit on this left-hand side until you're ready for it Right before I create my mesh lights then I decided that I wanted my meshes to be a little bit bigger So I'm just going to scale these up a little bit because they weren't very visible when I practiced this so Let's make them a bit bigger. Now. We're just going to pick one So I'm going to choose the one that's in the corner because I prefer rendering that one So now that I've got that one selected we need to go up into Arnold So we've just been using standard Maya lights so far But Arnold has its own set of lights as well and these generally work pretty well with Arnold because that's what they're built for So what we're going to do you have to have the mesh selected for this We're going to go to mesh light and what that does is turns the mesh into a light Which kind of makes sense? What we'll do now is make sure that we show original mesh in fact what we'll do Let's get IPR rendering going as we're working on this. I'm actually going to close this view I want to show another way to do IPR rendering So I'm going to change this panel here to a perspective view and then I'm going to change my renderer to Arnold You'll see that this little box pops up and then I can press play and that's going to start doing some rendering So at the moment, it's just giving us a fairly basic white light Which is not quite what I'm going for so we'll just press stop on that for now And we'll make some changes and the main change that we need to make is to the color So instead of just changing the color to be a uniform color We're going to put a bit of a gradient on it to mimic a little bit more of how a candle flame would look So we'll click on the little Checker button there to make a connection and we're going to add a ramp Which is what Maya calls sort of its gradient builder? So I'll click on that and at the moment we've got a green it going from black to white So if we click on black, we're going to make this a fairly deep red color And then we'll bring that up to about there So you see now we're going from red to white Next color one, and I'm going to put it I think about in the middle for now We're going to have a fairly orangey color. So let's go somewhere in the orange spectrum That's pretty nice now. I need another color in here So to do that I just click somewhere in this little rectangle and that will bring up a third color This one's going to be quite yellowy That's kind of nice and I want another color like this orange. So I click here and It's remembered that orange for me And now what I'm going to do is this area here sort of is how I want my flame to look So I want it to be orange there sort of yellow to about There let's bring that in a bit closer. Yeah, that looks pretty nice So that's my gradient that I'm going to use to create my flame out So it might move these a bit further apart get a bit more yellow in there. Yeah, that's cool So that sets up the color if we now turn on our IPR rendering again, not too much is happening So let's now start making some changes on this to get the result we want So we can see that light is being emitted from it because it's impacting the top of our candle But it's not yet doing enough I'm just going to go into my outliner to make sure that I can select my new mesh light and It will have been put inside the candle group. I've expanded candle group I've expanded flame and there is my new mesh light What I want to do is make sure that I tell it to show the original mesh and That should get the flame to show up It does appear to be happening and then it's up to you to mess with the intensity and exposure until you get a Sort of a level of illumination that you like So I'll start by upping the exposure. I think That's pretty nice. Let's up the intensity a little as well I just need it to like the environment a little bit. I want to go too far with it and This is just trial and error until it looks right what looks right for me might not quite look right for you So use a bit of your own judgment and see how it comes out I think I'm pretty happy with that for now One other setting that you might just want to turn on before you're done is this light visible Which I think looks quite good. It just brings the flame up a little bit more makes it more visible So I think that's come out pretty nicely So all we need to do now is repeat this for the other Candle so I'm just going to run through this dead quick. I'll speed it up So you can see what I'm doing and then we'll meet up at the end There we have it then we've now got two candle flames that are being provided by Arnold mesh lights And I've also introduced you to using the Arnold IPR renderer as one of your panels in your viewport So I think that was a pretty successful step that we've just gone through together. Well done in the next step I want these candles to look more like they're glowing and in order to do that there We need to simulate like moisture in the air that the light can hit and illuminate So that involves adding an atmosphere to our scene which will do through the Arnold settings as well So I will see you in the next step for adding an atmosphere Game Dev Academy is graciously supported by these absolute legends If you'd like to offer your support then check out our patreon page using the link in the description below


This month, the Navy celebrates the contributions of military women. In 1908, women served in the Navy as nurses. Yomones provided clerical support during World War I. In 1942, Congress established the Navy's women's reserve program, or WAVES. Women were authorized to enter the regular Navy in 1948. In the early 1960s, non-combatant ships were open to women. In 1993, women got closer to the action when Congress repealed the combat exclusion law, which allowed the women the opportunity to serve on board all surface ships and squadrons. Today, women serve side-by-side their male counterparts in peacetime and combat as sailors and shipmates. For Defense Media Activity, I'm Petty Officer Jamia Cabredin.