Welcome everyone to our session number 10. This is the EGD Administrator User Group meeting, and we're going to hear from our presenters, Austin McLean, April Elsie, Julia Smith, and Allison Thompson from ProQuest, part of Clarivate. Without further ado, oh yes, my name is John Hagan, I'll be your moderator. If you would please, we can maybe handle this rather informally, but just to keep order, if you want to raise your hand, participate, and then Austin and you guys, it's up to you if you want to have people unmute their video and audio, I always think that's nice to engage folks. And then certainly feel free to use a chat to pose questions and I'll try to help monitor that along with you folks and we'll have a successful discussion. So without further ado, let me turn it over to our friends at ProQuest. Thank you John, and I'm so glad that you said that about having folks unmute their video and their mics when we have discussion because I was going to ask and I didn't want to be a rule breaker, so I'm glad that I've been given the blessing to go ahead with that. So I am sharing, can someone confirm that you are seeing my screen? We can see it. Awesome, and I'm trying to figure out my Zoom view here, but I cannot see you all. I think we're a small enough group where if you do have a question on something that I'm talking about, a feature release or something as it pertains to a slide, please just go ahead and ask. I won't necessarily see you, but I think Austin and Julia might be watching the chat as well, so utilize that. And then here, I'll talk about what we're gonna get into today. Firstly, we're gonna do some brief introductions. I'm joined by a couple of my colleagues here from Clarivate. So just to introduce ourselves and then we're gonna jump into what's new in ETD administrator. We have a couple of exciting enhancements that we've just released, including one that's hot off the press from today. So really happy to share those with you. And then what I think is the really fun part, so the roadmap review. So we're gonna see what's coming down the pipe. And in that slide and afterward, I really would like to encourage discussion. And so at that point, I will kind of make it clear that I wanna spend the majority of this time hearing from you, listening to your feedback. That is just so, so valuable to inform our efforts and really enhance your experience. So I will invite feedback at that time. But of course, if you have a question on anything specific, please do feel free to jump in and ask. So we'll hop right into intros. My name is Allison Thompson. I know many of you on this call. It's nice to see you. I am a product manager at ProQuest part of Clarivate and I am on the graduate solutions side. So my products include ETD administrator, of course, and the dissertations dashboard. And Austin, I saw you're unmuted, so I will nominate you to introduce yourself. Okay, great. Thank you, Allison. Yeah, I'm Austin McClain. I know many of you, it's great to see you again and have you participate in this session. I work on the side of the ProQuest dissertations business where we work with universities to make sure your participation in the program is going smoothly and easily. And I work to invite new universities that have not participated yet into the program. So I'll turn it over to my colleague, Julia. Hi, everyone. Good to see some of you from my met last year in person here. I am your contact for joining the ProQuest dissemination program if your institution has not. And there are several of you that I emailed yesterday to invite you to have a conversation about that. We don't do any hard selling. There is no money involved in this dissemination program. So please feel free to reach out to me if you've got an email. We'd love to talk with you about that. Okay, and lastly, Lane Bowman. Hi everybody, my name's Lane Bowman. I'm the user experience designer for the graduate solutions. So we've been spending a lot of time on E2D administrator getting lots of great feedback from you. So I'm certainly somebody if you have any ideas or see some ways that we can improve the product. I'd love to hear those, love to hear from you. So also I was gonna mention that I spent about a decade in higher education. And now obviously I'm with Clarivate, but certainly have sympathies for all the work that you're doing and really appreciate it. Thank you, Lane. Awesome. And so like Lane said, I'll speak for all of my colleagues here. This deck is gonna be made available and our contact information is here intentionally. So if you desire further conversation, if you have questions about joining the program or ideas on product improvement, we would absolutely love to hear from you. It's kind of the best part of what we do is talking to our users. So just a little background, before I jump right into what's new in E2D administrator, I think the majority of folks on this call are familiar with the product, but since Julia mentioned, there may be some that are not participating in the program. E2D administrator is our free workflow tool that is one of the products I manage. And it's utilized by institutional partners like yourselves to allow students to contribute their theses and dissertations ultimately for publication on the ProQuest platform. But it is a workflow tool. It's a place you can iterate with your students back and forth and revise E2Ds, request changes from them and really kind of streamline that workflow process from initial submission by the student to ready for publication onto the PQDT platform. And so just to jump right in, like Lane mentioned, we've been doing a lot of work and a lot of enhancements in E2D administrator. And I wanted to start with this one, the author order experience. And I wanna flag this one particularly because this is one as an administrator that you may not have seen because these are primarily housed on student pages. So we did include this change in our E2D admin newsletter. We have an in application communication alerting you. But if you missed those pieces of outreach, you may not have seen this yet. And we had a couple of goals when we rolled out this improvement. We really wanted to make it more clear for authors ordering copies of their books where they stood in the process. We wanted to eliminate confusion, help pare down some of the questions that our customer service team got, that you got and really improve the submission and if they purchased the copy order experience as well. And so Lane and our team did a really nice job making some improvements first to this copy order page. So you can see if a student is considering ordering copies, this is what we've found in our research, something that students authors really, really value. Typically we see a rate of almost a one to one. So nearly every author that is submitting is also purchasing. So we know that they find this really valuable. They like to have copies of their work. They like to give them as gifts. We see spikes during the holiday seasons. So it's something that our users find a lot of value in but we did often get questions about what exactly product were they getting. So Lane's done a really nice job here of setting up this information, including pictures of both the hardcover and the softcover options, calling out some of the features and the differences between the two and making that sizing information really palatable to really just give a clear picture to authors of what exactly they are purchasing and what the different options are. You can also see we did some work on the interface for the confirmation page when students have submitted their ETD. We've included a little process map here to help them understand where they are in both the submission process and order fulfillment. So I will go into that in a bit more detail on the next slide, but just so you can see it does appear here in the user interface. And this appears for both students that have ordered copies and for students that don't. The graphic changes to display accurately what their process is. Of course, students that did not order don't have that order fulfillment piece, but it does appear for both. So they have a good understanding of where they are in the submission process. And here's just a little bit of a bigger view. And I think the team has done a really nice job of making this really clear for students authors that are busy, that may not be reading every single word that's emailed to them. I think this just at a quick glance provides an easy visual for students to really understand where they are in the submission process. What needs to happen prior to order fulfillment, publication, you know, the things that they really care about that they're probably asking you about. And also who owns the piece of the process that they're in right now. So we wanted to make it really clear and help eliminate confusion for students. You know, if they're sitting here at that published to ProQuest, you can see ProQuest is the contact for that step. They can direct their questions to arts.


All right. So, hi, thanks for coming. This is weaponizing the Windows API with Railgun, which is an extension of Metasploit. So some of you probably have no idea who I am. I'm the light co‑sign. I am one of the core developers for the Metasploit Pro product. And before that, I was a long‑time Metasploit framework contributor and a professional penetration tester. Before I get started, there's just a couple people, and this is far from a complete list that I wanted to just give a shout‑out to. These are all the people who really helped me get to this point and mentor me, teach me a lot of the stuff that made me the person I am today. I've spent the past about two and a half years working on Metasploit as a contributor. And when I first started, H.D. Moore said something to me that I think is a quote that needs to be kind of immortalized. He said that if you don't think you're a noob, then you're not trying hard enough. So what I'm going to try and do with this talk is just kind of show that this stuff can be done by anyone who has the desire to learn it. And it's not as hard as you think. So hopefully at the end of this, you'll come away thinking Railgun is pretty cool. You'll want to contribute some modules back, and maybe next year you guys will do a talk on something cool you did with Railgun. So everybody knows Metasploit for its exploits and being able to get shells on a box. As a penetration tester, I said, well, that's great, but now what? There's a lot more you have to do than just get a shell on the box. You have to actually achieve some sort of objective that is meaningful for your client or your company. And that's where post exploitation comes in. There's a lot more that goes on in Metasploit now with the development of post exploitation from stealing credentials, gathering information, doing further reconnaissance on the network once you've gotten that first foothold. And in a very short period of time, we've come up with a lot of new possibilities through the advent of the post module. I don't know how well you can see that, but just in Windows post modules alone, there are 105 modules currently in the Metasploit framework. And these do everything from screw with the wireless cards to decrypting stored passwords to, I mean, just about anything you can possibly imagine. And this is all made possible on the Windows environment from our Meturpreter payload. For those of you who don't know what Meturpreter is, it is sort of like the default go-to payload now for Metasploit. It is a compiled CDLL that most of our exploits inject into memory via Stager. So it provides an enhanced command shell, but what's really important is that it provides a standard API that module developers can code to. And it provides a lot of functionality. One of the benefits of Meturpreter is that once we've gotten that initial shell, we can migrate it into other processes and gain system level access very quickly and easily. So jumping right into Railgun, Railgun is one of the extensions for Meturpreter. Basically it's a part of the standard API that allows for arbitrary loading of DLLs on the system. As long as you know the path of the DLL that you're trying to load, you can just pass that information into Railgun. It will map the DLL into memory and then you can actually get function pointers out of that module. So it's doing a runtime dynamic linking. And we're doing it on the fly. So we pass it a DLL name, then we pass it some function names, and we get to call that function as if it was already coded directly into Meturpreter. Since Windows API DLLs are always at a known location, this means the entire Windows API is ripe for exploitation and use for whatever nefarious purpose that we might have on that system. So Railgun is providing us a fully dynamic access to the Windows API. That's all the core functions that any Windows developer would want to use to do anything on that system. It doesn't sound that exciting at first, but when you start looking at what the possibilities that opens up for you are, it's very, very powerful. By calling these APIs from a user land process, we can actually impersonate any user on that system. And this can be very important for things like cryptographic context where the cryptographic context will change from user to user. So if we migrate from a system process into a user process, we can then call Windows cryptographic APIs as if we were that user. And the operating system will just go ahead and decrypt that data right for us. And you'll see a little bit of how some of that works later when we get to some of the demos. But basically Railgun and the access to the Windows API makes anything possible once you get that initial shell. Let's talk about Railgun and its history briefly here. In June of 2010, a community user called Patrick HVE submitted Railgun via the mailing list. And it was just an extension from interpreter to load at the time. By September, Steven Fuhrer had added 64-bit support. And February of 2011, Chaomu, another user on the IRC community, took over support for Railgun and started adding new features and patches and things. But by fall of last year, he kind of just disappeared off the face of the earth again. So here's where I get into some wishful thinking. Starting August 2012, some of you will start contributing back to Metasploit and Railgun. And December 2012, the minds predict the lives. Who knows? Maybe it's Railgun related. So how it works on the C side is that it uses a Windows API function called load library and another one called get proc address. So load library just takes a path to a DLL and maps that into memory if it's not already there and returns a handle to it. From there, get proc address takes that handle and actually takes a function name and get returns you a function pointer that you can then use to basically alias any function out of that module. There are some additional utility functions like some generic memory read and write functions. So as we return some of the data, we then read the return right out of memory. It can get a little hairy, and I'll show you what some of that looks like in the demo. On the Ruby side, we have a bunch of libraries. They all live in the Rex library under post, metterpreter, extension, standard API, Railgun. So the actual code for the Ruby side of the API lives there, but also what's important is the definitions for these libraries and these functions exist there. So you can, when you're writing a module, you can define the DLL and you can define your functions within your module or you can just go ahead and build it right into Railgun by creating these definition files. And here's a brief look. You can't see that really well, so I'm going to actually show you some, I'm flipping the wrong way. So this is what one of the definition files looks like. This is the definition for the advanced API 32 DLL. You can see there's actually a custom structure defined here. It creates the DLL, defines it by the path and puts in the Constance Manager. And then we can see all the functions, and it goes down quite a long way here, but these are all the different functions out of that DLL being defined for our API. Oh, sorry. So the basic anatomy of the function definition is that we have a function name, what type of function it is, basically what type of return value it has, and then just pass it in an array of parameters and flip it over here again so I can actually show you that. So this is the name of the function. Then we have our type, so this is a Boolean, it returns true false. And then here's our array of our parameters. And what you have is the type of data that goes into that parameter, the name of it, which is only sort of important. And then whether it's an in, an out, or an in, out parameter, for anyone who hasn't worked with the Windows API, what that basically means is an in parameter is one where you're just putting data in, an out parameter is where you're expecting to get back, and an in, out is where the function will read data in, but might change that data on the way back out. And so I mean, you can see once you actually know the structure, it's very simple and easy to define these functions and add new ones constantly. Railgun also knows about Windows Constants. They're defined in the APIConstants.rbe file in that same railgun folder. And flip back here again, flip back and forth off the slides, but it couldn't be simpler to add new ones of these either. It's just basically a call, you can copy, paste this, and just change it out for your name and value. So that way we don't have to constantly be looking up on MSDN like, well, what does that constant actually mean? Once you find it, just throw it in here and railgun will know about it forever afterwards. So just talk real quick about what those various data types are that are defined in those parameters. The most basic and probably the most common one you're going to see is a D word. The general rule of thumb, of course, is if it quacks like a duck, right? So if it acts like a D word, treat it as a D word. This goes for pointers, handles, you know, all the weird things that you're like, well, Ruby doesn't have any concept of that. Like, Ruby doesn't understand the idea of a function pointer or a handle, right? But in reality, all it is is a number. So we just treat it like a number. So from the Ruby side, we pass for a D word parameter, we just pass in a fixed number or a big num. Or if it's one of those defined constants, we can actually pass in a string representation of that constant and it will interpret it for us. We have the P D word, which is a pointer to a D word. You pass it as a fixed num in Ruby. And what you're doing is you're actually when you're passing it into the parameter for the function call, you pass in the content and Railgun will handle the actual referencing for you on the back end. So you just basically pass in the data and don't worry about the fact that it's a pointer. And the only kind of weird thing is if it's an out parameter, then you just pass it a four because that's the size of a D word and so it's the size of a pointer. And if you need an old pointer for any reason, you can just pass it nil. Then we have, of course, P Charges and PW Charges, which is just wide characters and pointers to characters and wide characters. Same thing, we pass the data. So we're passing it strings. And again, if it's an out only parameter, then we pass it the size of the buffer that we wanted to occupy. And that includes the null byte. So you have to watch that. You can get, you know, you're off by one errors there. But so here's just some example that shows some of those data types in use. So you can see the definition on the side here. We've got a PD word, pointer to a wide char and some D words in there. And if you actually look down at the acquire context call on the right, you can see that we point in four for the out pointer to the D word. We put a null pointer for the container. And then we have some basically fake constants that we define up above that we pass in for the other parameters. So just a quick little look to demonstrate those data types being used. And we'll have some demo here closer to the end. That we have a Boolean type, it's, there's not much I can say about it. It does exactly what you think it does. So you just pass it a Boolean, a true false in Ruby. And another example, here's the is debugger present Windows API call. And it returns an actual false value. Bytes and words basically do the exact same thing as D words, but they'll be truncated to the appropriate length by Railgun. So it handles all of that for you. And then the last sort of catch all is the pointer to a blob. And this is basically any data that doesn't fit any of the other data types. It's a blob. And on the Ruby side we just treat it as a string. And this is important also because Railgun doesn't really help you parse structures. So sometimes you have to do some kind of rejiggering there to work with some of the more advanced Windows structure types. There's just another, here's another example of a definition and then seeing how it's actually used with those data types. We, I mean, we'll go over all of this at the demo. I just wanted to make sure it was on the slides for anyone who didn't get to see the presentation. So sometimes we have to kind of fake it. And this is, I kind of made reference to this earlier with the D word thing. There's a lot of, there's a lot of crazy data types that you can run into with the Windows API, a lot of custom structures.  So we kind of fake it. Anything that basically boils down to being a number, you just treat it as a D word. Otherwise it's a blob. If neither really works for your scenario, my recommendation is add support for it yourself. It seems intimidating at first, but it's actually really easy to work with this stuff. So when you make an actual function call, you're actually returned a hash. That hash will always contain at the very least the result of a get last error call. So basically Railgun will make the function call for you and then it will call the Windows get last error function, which will tell you any error code that occurred with the running of that function. And then the hash will contain any out values from that function call. So if anyone, for anyone who's not familiar with get last error, it'll return an error code of zero if everything went fine. Otherwise you'll get a system error code and there's a nice handy MSDN page where you can look up what any of those mean. I recommend that everyone have that page bookmarked because it's super, super useful. I reference it all the time. Okay. Oh, so this is, sorry, this is just an example of some code using Railgun using two different function calls. And basically we acquire the cryptographic context here and the return value is then used in the next function call. So it just shows you that we call the cryptifier context and we get that hash and we just make a reference to the pH provider value out of the return and pass that into the next function call. So some of the more tricky situations that you can run into, again, is the complex structures that you'll have to parse yourself. A lot of times you end up doing some funny things like having to get pointers back and then increment the pointer yourself and do another memory and do a memory and increment a pointer. And so you can end up with some kind of tedious work with that. Because you're reading everything directly out of memory, if you don't know the length of a string, you can run into some tricky situations with that too. Although somebody was just telling me that they got around that by actually then using Railgun, again, to call size of back on the pointer. So that's something that you should probably be able to do. And one of the downfalls right now with Railgun is that it's slow because every single request and every read operation has to be sent as a packet from your client back to the interpreter on the victim machine. And so like large numbers of string reads, for example, is a very slow process. So it seems like, you know, I'm just pulling this data structure out of memory on my victim. It should come back to me. But if it's got like a massive string in there or a bunch of different parameters, it has to send a new packet for each little bit that it's pulling back. And that can actually take some time. That was one of the things Chowmoo was working on fixing before he dropped off the face of the earth, was doing some nice multi-read stuff. So hopefully we can get that back on track in the near future. So tricks of the trade, these are just the things that I've found exceptionally useful for learning to do Railgun. MSDN is your friend. I don't know how many people do Windows API programming or spend time on MSDN, but it's, it gives you all the information you need right there. It will give you function definitions. It will give you examples. So use MSDN, find examples of the code in C, and write it, whatever you're trying to do, write it in C first. Because you're doing this weird transition from Ruby into C. And sometimes things don't behave the way you expect it to. So if you write it in C and kind of look at it in memory at the time, you can know exactly what to expect. And then when you go to do it on the Ruby side it goes much faster. So it's kind of like Microsoft wants to help you own their systems. Because I don't know how well you can see that. But there's the definition of the function. It looks very similar to the function definitions we have in that Railgun code, right? Seriously. Right there, they give you an example down at the bottom of the page of what that C code looks like.  They even give you great tools, the free visual studio. You can write your C code and then just look at exactly what those structures look like in memory. So there's no real mystery if you do it in C on a Windows box first and then just port it over to the Ruby. So by this point you're all saying, oh, God, this guy's going on and on and on about this stuff. And why do I care anymore? What is Railgun useful for? So anything you can do with the Windows API is available and one of the reasons Railgun makes this extra special is that we're not compiling new extensions into that DLL, right? If we wanted to add this the traditional way, we'd have to write new C code, hook it in and that's more data that has to go down and expand the size of that payload on the victim's machine. Slowing the victim down, making it more likely that it's going to be detected. So here's some example mayhem that's been caused with Railgun. Smart FTP is a FTP client that stores encrypted passwords but it does it, it encrypts all the passwords with the Windows cryptographic API. So using Railgun we make those same exact function calls and get the victim machine to go ahead and decrypt the passwords for us. There's no pulling down the encrypted password and having to crack it and use our own processor time for it. The victim does all the work for us. Another contributor added one that Windows has a credential store where it stores passwords for things like RDP and a couple other Microsoft specific things and it's all exposed through the Windows API. So as long as you are in the context of the user who stored those passwords, you basically just ask the operating system to give them to you and it will because it doesn't trust it. You're that guy. Why wouldn't it give it to you? There are some post modules that will actually use the wireless API and with that we can actually get any stored profiles, so saved passwords for wireless networks. We can make the wireless card on our victim actually actively scan for new networks, disconnect from networks, connect to new networks. One that I haven't gotten around to doing but is on my plate is actually to use the victim's wireless card to then set up a fake access point.  You've got basically another whole network that you've set up that you can pivot into and trick people into connecting to. It's just some really fun things you can do. So enough blathering and slides, it's time for some demos. Hopefully this will be a little more exciting for everybody. So I've got a, come on, a server 2008 VM set up here. We're going to just go ahead and make sure all our settings are correct. We're just going to pop a shell on it with the PS exec module. So we've got our interpreter session. We're going to run the PS command to get the process list. And let's find explorer. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and migrate interpreter into the explorer process so that we're operating in user land. So you can kind of see some of this stuff interactively. And it'll take a little second here. It's basically just re-injecting itself into a new process. And so now we should, if we check our UID, we're running as that actual user. And we're going to drop into the IRB, which is basically IRB shell, which is just an interactive Ruby shell that we can basically write out commands as if we were writing a module, but do it in real time. And so we're going to just call on rail gun here. So everything's done through the client object that represents your connection to the victim. And then we're calling the rail gun extension. And within that, user 32 is the specific DLL that the first function we're going to use is based out of. And we're just going to throw a quick little message box up there just to be the simple, obvious example. So pass it a null pointer, pass it the message and the title of the window. And then we're going to pass it a string representation of the MBOK constant, which just tells that the message box is an OK button message box. And we're going to call that.  So we go ahead and say OK to that. And that's kind of cool. But for a PAN test, who cares if you can pop up a little message box, right? So we've got calculator running here in programmer mode. That's for human else. And we're going to find that PID here in our back in our process list. Excuse me while I find the PID. Oh. There we go. OK. 100. OK. Is that right? I can't be right. OK. Yeah, it was 400. OK. So again, we're going to call client and then rail gun. And this time we're going to call the kernel 32 DLL. And we're going to call open process, which just open, whoops, if I could type. All this does is open up a handle to that process with a set permission. And again, we're going to pass it in a constant, which rail gun already knows about. And it's going to be the process terminate. And that's just basically the privilege level that we're opening that handle with. False here has to do with handle inheritance and process manipulation. It's really not important for this particular demo. And then we pass it to PID. And you can see here, this is the return hash I was talking about. We know it worked because our get last error is zero. And that number is actually the representation of the handle. So I'm just going to go shove that return value into a variable here. And then we're going to call a new function, terminate termin beat. Terminate process. And for terminate process, all we do is we give it the handle and an error code or an exit code. And our calculator is gone. So that's sort of the easy version of rail gun. And just kind of a quick demonstration to show you the simple and easy way you can call some of these predefined functions. What I want to show you now is the smart FTP. This is one of the saved XML files that smart FTP stores a saved connection in. And you can see we've got the name of the connection, some data about what host it was, what port, the username. And here we have an encrypted password saved in that XML file. So what we do is in our, and I just closed it. That was brilliant. Sorry. Let me pull that back up. Modules. Control shift T. Control shift T. I guess I could just do this file. Open recent. There we go. So in this module, we actually there's a lot of garbage here just for searching out for the XML files and parsing them. But what we're interested in here is the actual decryption routine. So we pass in that encrypted password we saw in the XML file. We do some packing to get it in the right format. And we have, I predefined some constants here that are useful for the cryptographic functions. But then you can see we basically just, we call a series of crypto API functions to acquire the cryptographic context, create a hash that hash data is then used to derive the cryptographic key that was used to encrypt these passwords, destroy the hash, we decrypt the password then destroy everything and do garbage collect behind us. So we can turn this into this. This. So I mean this is a very common problem and you'll find a lot of these modules sitting in Metasploit framework for decrypting these passwords because a lot of clients think that if they use a real encryption algorithm, surely it must be safe. But of course they hard code, they hard code the encryption key or the routine for gathering the encryption key directly into the app. So it's very easy to reverse engineer that back out and they've broken sort of the first rule of cryptography of taking, like taking that key and separating it from what you're encrypting. So by simply getting onto that machine and calling the same exact API calls in the correct sequence, we just get the operating system to do all the work for us. I can't actually demo this part because I don't have wireless on the VM. But just a quick, another quick example. This is a module that does the wireless LAN stuff I was talking about and it basically uses Railgun to open a handle to the wireless LAN API interface and then actually pulls a list of all the saved profiles on that interface. And then we just basically do some pointer manipulation magic to parse through all of that information. And again, the same thing as long as we're in the correct user context, the context of the user who originally saved those passwords, the operating system just returns those passwords in a decrypted format for us. So to sort of recap, Railgun basically lets you turn the machine into a weapon against itself.  They provide you all the tools you need. All you have to do is basically redefine them so that you can call them from the Ruby side. And I'm sorry, I ran a little fast here, that's actually all I've got.


There, the sand dunes. We're getting close. I'll talk to you for this. Oh man, it's been years. Look at this place. There's the top dune. That's where we're going, Ryan. Oh yeah. Very tippy top. Another thing that's very exciting about right now is that the river is running. And that only runs like one month out of the year when there's spring runoff. This is a big deal. Oh, check it out, Zach. Look at this. I feel like we're at a beach. Everybody's got their lawn chairs out, having a great old time. Kids are building sand castles. Summer time. You feel that, Ryan? Oh, finally, it's my favorite time of the year. It's my favorite time of the year, shorts and t-shirts every day. Can he do it? It's flowing. He did it. We got here just in time. The sun has broken out of the clouds. We got in after five, so it was free. Ha ha ha, scamming the system. Ha ha ha, plus everybody's on their way back down. That's right. We're gonna go watch the sunset. Oh, it'll be so romantic, once again. I'm not sure why we even brought shoes, so we're gonna leave them here and hope that they're there when we come back, because if they're not there, we are without shoes. And worse things have happened, but we do not have any other replacement, so. Sand in the toes, feel so good, feel so good. So what's our goal here, Zach? Where are we going? We gotta go to the top. The top. We can't go anywhere else. We can deviate on the way, but we gotta get there. Yeah, we're just like any good human. We see something tall, we have to go to the top. Yeah, Zach. I don't know if this camera's doing justice for how steep this is, but this really is pretty steep. It feels like my heart's gonna explode out of my chest. We're so close. We're so close to the ridge. The ridge of dreams. That feels good. Look at this. Look at this. It's no man's land back here now. I predict a few fall summits along the way, but that's how life is. You think you get to the top and you're not. You've got a long ways to go. Yay, a little bit of downhill. We keep on getting to the top of these ridge lines and we think, oh, there can't be that much more, but then you look out and wow. We're almost there. Almost there. Zach, my man. This is it. I think we did it. I don't see any other place to go this higher. That means we're at the top. High five, brother. And now we just sit and contemplate life, appreciate the beauty, and talk about pretty girls. Good morning, everybody. It's a beautiful day in sand dune land. I didn't film much last night because the mosquitoes came out in full force. Even on top of the dune we were on when the sun went down, it was crazy. There were mosquitoes everywhere swarming us. You know, it was like that one cartoon in the Charlie Brown one of his friends that walks around with like a dust cloud around him. That's what it felt like with mosquitoes with Zach and I. All the other tours seemed fine and we were just getting dive bombed by all the mosquitoes. Really kicks up, Sunday! Good morning, Zach. What are you doing? I'm doing what I thought was just a regular thing that all children did, just take speargrass, pull it out, and then chase people with it. Get a nice little wad of spears and now it's too bad. Neither Beth or Jan, they were the girls that we used to like to chase back in the day. Quaker camp. They get whole fistfuls of this and run around. And they loved it? They didn't, they didn't pretend to love it but I think that they really did deep down. Oh yeah! Eating cereal is definitely a luxury because when I'm on a bike tour, I'm not bringing boxes of cereal and cold milk with me, so this is good. I like your cozy seat, bud. Yeah, a lot of people think it's just a staircase but it's actually a seat for a staircase segment. Look at these two guys, mosquito, mosquito, mosquito. Go away! Ah, let's go, Zach, let's leave! All right, we're out of here. Run, run! I just got 20 mosquito bites to get that shot. Zach, wait up! Okay, we're out of here. Bye-bye, sand dunes. So, Zach, where are we going today? We're going to Durango. We're going to Durango. We are heading up an over Wolf Creek Pass right now and I've only been on this once in my life and that was during Race Across America. I rode up and over this at about midnight. It was so cool and it was freezing cold. It was so cold, that's all I remember, but it was really fun riding over a mountain pass in the pitch black. That was a cool experience. Something you don't know about Zach and I is that we both love waterfalls. Yeah, we like everything, actually. We just love things. I love bananas. I love- I love lamp. Do you love lamp too? Waterfalls are raging this year because of all the snow melt. We got so much snow this winter in Colorado. It's going to be a good waterfall season. Last thing, right from here, I can already feel it. Ready for this? Oh yeah. Let's go to the shower. Let's do it. You know, Zach and I, we haven't showered in the last two days. This is our opportunity. That's right. And actually, Ryan, come to think of it, you probably need something like that. Yeah, I do. Ready for this? I've worn this shirt for three days in a row. Let's go in. That's pretty cold. Retreat. All right, how's that look? Yeah, I'm not wet at all, but totally worth it and definitely needed. You ready to go to Durango? Let's go to Durango. All right. Smellin' like Irish spring. Durango, we made it. Brr, brr, brr, brr. And Zach just ate the last cherry. Definitely the MVP of the entire trip was that bag of cherries. No. What are you getting, Zach? It's cowgirls' cotton candy. Yeah, buddy, what flavor? We're going great, because apparently it's the best. I believe it. Look at that. See, this is the only way to do cotton candy, to see it made. Look at that. Whoa, my goodness. Ah! Do you believe this? Oh, I don't eat at all. I haven't had cotton candy for probably 15 years. Does it taste awesome? Way better than I remember. Brrr. Oh, you made it talk. He was like, get away from me, weirdo. Zach, I'm here in country music here. What's going on? We found out why we came to Durango. Apparently it was to come to a rodeo. We didn't know it when we left. No, we didn't. The whole purpose of it. Just to be here right now, we called up our friends' parents. They said we're taking the family to the rodeo, so that's where we are. So I'm sitting here with my new friends, Auggie, Owen, and Sophia. How we all doing? Good. Good, we're going to watch some. What are we going to watch? Rodeo. Rodeo! What is a rodeo? I don't even know what a rodeo is. It's where Buckingbrock goes and bull riding. Buckingbrock goes and bull riding. That's what we want. Zach's excited. So this lovely lady right here is one of my good friend, Paul, his mom, and she was my soccer coach when I was 10 years old. Yeah! Yeah! You want some of this action? Ooh, no, you keep that for yourself. It doesn't even work on this. That's right. Zach, do we have to leave? Is the adventure over? No, but our time with the tiny house is over. It's been wonderful. It has been wonderful. Thank you, my friend, for inviting me on this little impromptu adventure. Yeah.  What else do we do? You know, if you can do such a thing, if you can just pull out without really any warning, that means that you are living a very beautiful existence in privileged life. Yeah, I agree with that for sure. I feel very grateful that I have the life where I can just, yeah, Zach, I can just leave for the week with you. Let's go have the time of our lives. I think if 16 and 17 year old Ryan and Zach could dream up this when, you know, 40 and 39 year old Ryan, they'd be like, you guys are awesome. Way to go. I think we would have included more motorcycles or something. Maybe so. There's been like a lot more rope swings. They'd still be pretty safe. Yeah, they would. They should be proud of us.


My name is Faith Osir. I'm Kenyan. I work on malaria. I have two labs, one in Kenya at the Chemri Welcome Trust Research Programme and one in Germany at Heidelberg University Hospital. We try to understand how we can make better malaria vaccines because it's still a big problem for Africa. But the exciting thing is that if you get infected by malaria repeatedly, you eventually become resistant to it. You can have the infection, but it doesn't make you ill.  They get the infection and it doesn't bother their bodies. And so what we try to do is to understand how this happens so that we can make vaccines that will then protect the little kids. That's mostly true for falciparum malaria and to a less extent for the other malaria. But falciparum is the highest, is the most common type that we have in Africa and that's what all my work focuses on. Well, as a junior doctor, I got interested in malaria when I went to work as an intern. So I ended up at the coast of Kenya. Lovely. I came from the capital city Nairobi. It seemed so romantic to go and work at the coast. I thought at the end of a busy day, I'll be strolling on the beach. Didn't quite work that way. But once I finished there, then you're posted to a district hospital. So you're sort of going away further inland, away from the city. And I ended up in Kilife County Hospital. And that's where I found people who were doing research on malaria. And I was working on the ward and there were lots of patients with malaria. I could admit five children a night with severe life-threatening malaria. And so it was surprising to me that this is a treatable disease. We're still seeing lots of patients with the disease. And then there were people researching the disease who seemed really clever. And I couldn't figure out, well, if you're so clever, why can't you just fix it? And that's how I got drawn into studying it myself. Yeah, so malaria is difficult to solve because it's a complex parasite. It's big. It exists in your body in multiple forms. And it goes into different parts of your body. And the question that I found the researchers asking is how do people become immune to malaria? And I couldn't understand why they seemed to ask the same question over and over again. But as I got into the research, I began to understand that when you're trying to measure what makes you and I immune, in the lab, you can measure one thing, two things. As time has grown, you can measure hundreds of things, even thousands of things. So from the time that we started, the few things that we could measure, they like fitted a puzzle, a corner of a puzzle. And then the more things that you can measure as technology gets better, you add more pieces to your puzzle. And that's what I think is happening with us understanding immunity, the parasites complex, where complex, and we're trying to fit that puzzle together and we're some way to completing the full puzzle. And that's why we don't have a vaccine yet. So two things, when you're that, you know, maybe it wasn't as clear, two things drew me into moving from a doctor to becoming a vaccinologist. And the first, and they didn't, I didn't realize them all at the same time. But the first one was, the first one is when you're a doctor, you can see you're really limited by your physical body, the number of patients that you can see in a day. Even if you think you're superhero, within a day, you're going to see the number of patients that you can see, and then you're going to drop down exhausted. So as a doctor, your impact is defined really by your physical limits. But as I've done research, it's been so much more exciting, because now you lead teams of people, it's like multiplying yourself. And so what I could do in one day, now I do 30 times that in one day, because I've got all those people working on different aspects. So I think, if you also think about it in the sense that if I treat you for malaria today, good for you, you go home, but there's hundreds where you came from that would also need the treatment and need the doctors. So if I could make a vaccine, wow, that would get rid of the problem, save the doctor's time for something else, and save people's lives. So that's why I'm keen on vaccines. So in my line of research, I think it's become really interesting in the last decade. And that's because of increases developments in technology. So when I started to do this work just over 10 years ago, we knew so little about the parasite in terms of at the molecular level, you know, how many proteins are there in this parasite? What do they look like? How do they change over time? We didn't know that. But in the course of doing my research, technology has advanced so that now we know that in detail, not for one parasite, but for many malaria parasites. And so that's been fascinating because you can understand how big your puzzle is in a better way than you could when you only knew a few things. So I think that's been fantastic. And then also on the immunology side, understanding how our bodies work, technologies advance so much. I used to measure your antibodies, how you respond to the parasite, one protein at a time. Now I do 400 proteins in a single experiment. And then now I have a new challenge is how do I analyze that data quick enough to see which are the important responses that I'm making? So I think it's a really exciting time. And I feel very optimistic that you know, we're making progress in the right direction. I'm optimistic that we can have a vaccine in five, 10, 15 years. I think that as a community of scientists, we've not understood the magic that would give us a vaccine. But a lot of science happens by serendipity. So I'm a strong believer that even though we can't see the direction exactly that we must keep working. And that moment of, aha, we'll find us on the bench doing what we do. We've already developed a tool. It's a chip.  It's a protein microarray that's got parasite proteins stuck on it. And if I have a blood sample from you, I can run it on my chip and I can tell you what your response to malaria was. And that's becoming an increasingly useful tool for us to try and understand the immune response and work out what might be good for a vaccine and might not be good for a vaccine. So to me that's already translational. We're using it in studies where we have volunteers who are infected with malaria and we're studying the immune response using that chip, both for falciparum and actually we're even making one for plasmodium vivax now. But the ultimate translation will be bringing a vaccine to the clinic and that's where we really want to go. So I think that the world should put a lot more money into malaria research because it has a huge impact on millions of people. When you do the math, and this was done some years ago now, it was estimated that if you add up all the costs of people going to clinic, laying at home, slow at school, all the problems that result because of malaria, this costs Africa 12 and a half billion US dollars every year. Now Africa needs all the money it can get for all sorts of other things, let alone malaria. So if we could get rid of malaria, I think we could move Africa towards the sustainable development goal of good health, well-being, economic prosperity.


Hi, I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your moderator for today's panel examining UNIX, A Journey of Innovation. We're here with a distinguished panel to look at the 20-year history of UNIX and its standardization. So allow me please to introduce our panel. We're here with Andrew Josie. He's the Director of Standards at the Open Group. We're also here with Darren Johnson, Director of Solaris Engineering at Oracle. Tom Matthews, Distinguished Engineer of Power Systems at IBM. And Jeff Kyle, Director of Mission Critical Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It's not often that you get a 20-year anniversary in tech where the relevance is still so high and the prominence of the technology is still so wide. So let me first address a question to Andrew Josie at the Open Group. How has that been able to maintain its relevance in such a dynamic world? Thank you Dana. We saw efforts such as the IEEE POSIX, then XOPEN, and later the Open Group was formed to bring that all together when the different vendors realized the benefits of bringing the innovation to become a common platform. All our companies provide cloud services, whether it's public cloud, private cloud, and whether it's infrastructure as a service, software as a service, or any of the other as a service options. And the interesting thing is that to really be able to provide that consistency, that capability to our customers, we rely on a foundation, and that foundation is Unix. How is it that the common spec has been so instrumental in making this a powerful underpinning for so much modern technology? I think a solid foundation is built upon standards because we can have, like you mentioned, assurance. If you look at the certification process, there's more than 45,000 test cases that gives assurance to developers, to customers, that there's going to be determinism. And of anything, I mean all the IT people that I've talked to, deterministic behavior is so critical because when it's not deterministic, things go wrong. Yeah, so if you look at the standard, it actually contains several components. And it's really modular in a way that depending on your need, you can pick a piece of it and support that. Maybe you don't need the complete operating system for a highly scalable environment. Maybe you just need like a microcontroller. Well, you can pick the standard, so there's consistency at that level. And then that feeds into, let's say, the development environment in which an engineer may be developing something on. And then that scales to, let's say, you need a lot of those services on a large data center. Well, you've still got that consisting throughout. And whether it's Solaris, AIX, HPX, or even FreeBSD or Linux, there's a consistency because of those elements of the standard. Well, I think, as was said, for developers, it's the consistency that really matters. Unix standards develop and deliver consistency. This allows the developers to focus a lot more on interesting challenges and customer value at the application and user level. And in today's virtualized, cloud-ready world, that's critical. In the end, customers are still trying to do the same things that they always had. They're trying to use applications and technology to get data from one place to another and more effectively, efficiently use that data to make business decisions. That's happening more and more mobily, right? I think every HPX, AIX, Solaris Unix system out there is fully connected to a mobile world and the Internet of Things. We're actually securing it more than many customers realize. In addition to just running the business, things have to stay up. And it's been that way for a long time, 7x24x365. So these three elements, reliability and availability and scalability, they've been a big focus. And a lot of that has been delivered through the hardware environment, in addition to the standards. I think in the standards test suite right now, stable reliability, availability, serviceability and this investment protection element. But what any standard, whether it's Ethernet standard or Unix, it helps bring things together in a way that you don't have to think about how to get data from one point to another. And mobility really is about moving data from one place to another in a quick fashion where you can do transactions in microseconds or milliseconds or seconds. And you want some assurance that the data that you send from one place to another. But it's also about making sure, and this is a topic that's really important today, is security. And actually it was basically the open group's members. Son and IBM and HP came to the open group at the time and said, look, we've got to go and talk to IEEE and we've got to talk to IISO about bringing all the experts together in a single place to do the standard. So starting in 1998 we met in Austin at the IBM facility, hence the name, the Austin Group. And we started on that road. So now today, since then, we've developed a single set of books. And on the front cover we stamp the designation of it being an IEEE standard, an open group standard and an international standard. So the technical folks, they only have to go to a single place to do the work once. And then we put it through the adoption processes of the individual organizations. Common APIs, that's one thing we've always wanted to do, is to look at raising that bar of common functionality. So, you know, Linux and open source systems, you know, they very much are working with the standard as much as anybody else. And I think there's a couple of key points. One is it's great that we have an organization open group that not only helps create the standard or manage the standard, but is also developing the test suites for certification. So it's one organization working with the community, Austin Group, and of course IEEE and the open group members, to create a test suite that allows us to, again, we've mentioned 45,000 tests, right? If any one of our organizations had to create or manage that separately, that's a huge expense. They do that for that. That's part of the service. And they've evolved that, and it's grown. I don't know what it originally was, but, I mean, 45,000 tests has grown and they've made it more efficient in terms of the process. And it's a collaborative process. If we have issues, well, is it our issue? Is it the test suite issue? And there's great responsiveness. So, I mean, kudos to the open group because they kind of make it easy for us to certify. So I think another element that's important on this cost point is just, you know, back to the standards, the cost of doing development, the cost of doing that. I mean, imagine a world, particularly being an ISV, a software ISV, imagine a world where there were no standards. And that world existed at one point in time. Now with the standards, of course, you know, ISV, you know, you've got to write it for one platform, it's portable over to the other platform. So that's been crucial, right? I mean, is that the standards have actually encouraged innovation in the software industry because it made it easier for developers to develop. Yes, Dana, in our standards process, we're very much able to take on almost any problem, but this would certainly be a very exciting problem for us to look to tackle, to bring parties together. But that's one thing we were able to do is to bring different parties together, looking for that commonality to try and build the consensus. That's the one thing we do, we get people in the room, people talk through the different points of view. What the open group is able to do is to almost provide a safe harbor where the different vendors can come in and not be seen as talking in a anti-competitive position, but actually, frankly, discussing the differences in their implementations and deciding what's the best common way to go forward with setting a standard. I think that true innovation can be best done on a foundation. In OpenStack, it's a number of communities that are loosely affiliated, delivering great progress, but there's interoperability, there's issues that, and it's not with intent, it's just people are moving fast. If some foundation elements can be built, that's great for them because then us as vendors can more easily support the solutions that these communities are bringing to us, and then we can deliver to our customers. Now I know that each of our companies will go to great lengths to make sure that our customers don't see that inconsistency. So we bear the burden for that, but what if we could spend more time helping the communities be more successful rather than, as I mentioned before, reinventing the wheel? But I think Unix can present that secure, reliable foundation to a hybrid cloud environment for customers. I mean, we've got IBM, HP, Oracle, sitting here, and I'll say virtually, Linux, other communities that are participating coming to a mutual agreement saying this is what we believe is best. And you know what, it's open to disagreement. You can have an open dialogue in which anybody's invited, in the case of the Austin Group, it's everybody, actually in the case of any of the efforts around Unix, it's an open process, it's open involvement, and in the case of the Open Group, again another Open, it's vendor-neutral. So their goal is to find a vendor-neutral solution. And I think that the foundation of Unix, even going back to the original development, but certainly since standards came about, is that one word, open. Well, great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. Thank our panelists today for joining this discussion about the enabling innovation through Unix on its 20th anniversary. Congratulations to the Open Group and to the Unix community for that. And also look for more information on Unix at the various sites on the Open Group. They have many landing pages for work that's progressing still. And thank you all for your attention and input. Thanks, Dana.


So, with the last class, I have shown you the efficacies of transmission electron microscope, in which I discussed about the resolution and the depth of field. I have discussed how to use microscope to obtain different kind of images. Today, I am going to show you the real microscope. This microscope is in housed in the department of materials science engineering of IIT, Kanpur. We have been using this microscope for the last 5 years. So, I am going to show you first actual microscope, different parts of the microscope and then describe how we can use it. So, in a transmission electron microscope is basically and versatile in equipment, in the sense that we can use this machine for many such analysis of materials and get information from starting from the diffraction to composition or spectroscopic analysis to highlights and microscopy. So, obviously microscope will have a basic features and lot of attachments to get information on the spectroscopic related things and also the other aspects which I will discuss slowly. So, in a real microscope, we start from the top. Basically, in an electron microscope, the source is electron. So, electrons are to be generated by certain means. Electrons can be generated by many means. One way of generating electron is to use thermo ionic emission of tungsten filament or the lanthanum hexaprolet filaments. Otherwise, we can use field emission guns. So, all the modern day highly lucid electron microscope has field emission guns. In this microscope, the top part is basically the gun. You can see there is a power cable coming and sitting on the gun and that assembly actually contains a hair fin tungsten filament. This is nothing but in just like a tungsten filament in a incandescent bulb, we see in the real homes. So, tungsten in the form of wire less than about 0.1 millimeter is bent to create a hair fin like structure. Then, if you apply a voltage or if you heat up the tungsten filament, it emits electrons. Therefore, that is the main source of electron, but problem is in thermo ion incandescent is that because it is a tungsten filament. Therefore, the electrons which are coming on the surface may have different energies. So, that is why many times we use another kind of hair fin filament known as lanthanum hexaprolet. Lanthanum hexaprolet crystals are actually grown along 110 directions and these crystals then can be used to get emission from the by heating. So, they are much better than tungsten in the sense that the emission is much more stable. So, the emission is less and the brightness of the beam is higher and in modern day technologies we use the field emission guns or called FEG. So, field emission guns are again tungsten filament grown or single crystal tungsten grown along 1110 directions and then we have a very fine tip less than about 0.01 millimeter and if you apply a very high electrical field of the order of 10 to the power 6 volts per centimeter between this filament and another electrode. So, they are not then we can actually force electrons to tunnel through this electrode and come out as a electron. So, these are the sources which is normally used in this microscope we use tungsten filament or lab 6 depending on our uses. So, in FEG we need to have a very high vacuum system because FEG filaments needs to be very clean, contaminant and free. So, therefore, if you want to use FEG filament these top portion of the gun needs to be evacuated to a level of 10 to the power minus 10 torr. So, that is basically additional cost that is why many of the microscopes normal center microscope do not have FEG column otherwise one can actually heat up the tungsten filament in a FEG microscope. So, that any oxide which form the surface can be removed what are may be the way the cost is very high for tungsten filaments. Now, once the electrons are generated they need to be focused they are focused by set of condenser lenses which are situating here. So, normally a normal microscope there will be two condenser lenses and in a microscope square you need to have a convergent electron diffraction you can you need to have three lenses what is known as a extra lens is nothing but a condenser mini lens which can force the electrons to get converge into a small spot and that is required for scanning tungsten electron microscopic purposes. We have built in here and in a microscope normally the most important part followed by these the illumination section that is the condenser lenses source and the condenser lenses is the objective lens and you can see here this is a sample holder and this is the objective lens and the objective lens is basically just like a twin lens here it is a alter twin lens or in twin lens if sample is inside it between these two twin pole pieces and then the the beams which falls on a sample are passing to the sample they are actually focused by the objective lens to either generate an image or generate the diffraction pattern by a set of lenses which is sitting here they are called intermediate lenses and the projector lenses. Obviously, electrons cannot be seen in a microscopes so one needs to have a viewing skin and you if you look at any microscope this is the viewing skin with the binoculars and viewing skin is nothing but a frozen screen made of zinc sulphide on which if electron falls can create light and our eyes human eyes can only see light cannot see electrons if the electron falls in eyes if you in fact will be blinded. So, that is why this is fully protected there is there is a glass lead based glass which is not allow anything come out of the sample so remember this is very hyzerosic equipment unless and until it is protected so that is why all these things are actually nicely covered and you only you cannot temper about you only view the skin and do all kinds of analysis and in a normal modern day microscopes the panels are like this they are very small in which you can have very less number of buttons which can allow us to control the microscopes and it is attached to a computer computer controls all the mechanisms in the in the microscopes. In fact, microscope control like the valves vacuum systems and the height lens and everything is controlled by that. So, let me also tell you that as a electrons comes from the from the source they need to be accelerated for any electron microscope because that only energy of the electron can be increased this is done by a high tension tank. So, high tension tank actually steps up the voltage from normal supplied voltage 220 volts in a in in our country to about 200 kilovolts in the microscopes this microscope which can like actually use higher voltages like 300 400 or may be 1000 volt kilovolts. So, depending on the the kind of microscope which you have you need to have a very large tank in this microscope which is basically dedicated high resolution microscope you have a the object lens which is separately cooled. So, that temperature of the lens cannot be increased so much that focal length can be changed. Other than this lenses we have apertures apertures basically used to select a particular you know beam or basically to the the size of the beam. We have aperture here just in below the condenser lens first condenser lens which can actually make the sparse size very precisely. So, one can change aperture and set at different level depending on the intensity level of what you want then you have aperture in the objective lens column which can allows us to select the the basically the whether we can we want to image using transmissible transmitted beam of or we want to image using the diffracted beam or we want to do high resolution electron microscopy which I will show just within few minutes time. Then you also have a aperture in the SID or called selected a diffraction basically if you want to select a particular region of sample and do the diffraction analysis you need to use and this aperture there are actually three or four apertures depending on the kind of investigation you would like to do one can select this apertures and then get a diffraction information remember in electron microscope diffraction pattern forms of the back focal plane of the objective lens. So, depending on the your wish whether to use the diffraction pattern or the image you can actually adjust the intermediate lens more or less and to get either diffraction pattern on the skin or the image and that is normally routinely done by the microscope system we do not need to bother we just sit upon the microscope and do it other than that this microscope has basically you know to make the vacuum system clean we need to have a liquid nitrogen cooled setup where there is the liquid nitrogen chamber which can take care all the contamination on the sample because most of samples will have contamination not only when the electron falls on a sample it can generate contamination those contamination cannot be allowed to go to the vacuum system or it can actually create the system vacuum system there to be you know contaminated. So, to get it anti-contamination free we have anti-contamination device like a liquid nitrogen cooled trap which can take care all the all these contaminations. So, this liquid nitrogen tank needs to be refilled intermittently to get a very good vacuum inside the column of the microscope. Well, there are several attachment to this microscope the first one is this attachment which is known as an algebra disperses spectroscopy or EDACS which is again basically free the ultrathin window EDACS. So, we can use the as the electron falls and I have discussed in the last class it generate X-rays and this X-rays can be used to basically quadratively and quantitatively determine a particular electron an element also figure out amount of the material that particular element present in the sample. So, this is done by the EDACS which will be which have already been discussed in your material characterization course. So, I will also discuss after what is called sometime in the course also. Another important thing which you have is basically here is known as hard if or high angle annular detector which is sitting over there this detector is basically mean to get jet contrast images as I discussed in the class the electrons which as it falls on the sample very thin transparent sample it get diffracted and diffraction pair power of the you know material depends on kind of element present in the material. If the sample contains very heavy element they will diffract strongly on the other hand light elements like lithium, aluminium, silicon as compared to palladium, bismuth they will diffract very slowly. So, therefore we can actually get this different diffracting different we can actually get the diffraction beams which are kind of sample collected by this detector at an annular space or at an annular space from the transmitted beam and by using this detector one can actually see the actual you know jet contrast image on the sample this is just like in a scanning electron microscope as we use basket and imaging mode, but here we do not use the same technology or same concept like in scanning electron microscope whether we using a diffraction contrast imaging which is basically governed by the atomic number of the element. So, that is attached to this microscope other than that one can have other many other things which includes energy loss spectroscopies analysis which can be attached at the bottom of these microscopes or one can have different video ports to do in-situ microscope. Remember we do not have in-situ microscopic stage here, but one can attach this to this microscope in-situ microscopy means we can put the sample inside the microscope then we can heat or cool it down and observe the sample what are the kind of changes happening in the sample and this can be recorded in a video by attaching a video port or this can be recorded in normal mode also which I am going to discuss in a next time. So, therefore depending on our use we can attach different kinds of things in the microscopes one can actually even attach other things like people sometime use what is called the cold stage microscopy where the holder itself is a cold stage and this kind of stage is actually used for biological sample viewing. So, depending on the use or depending on the need a transmit electron microscope can be used for any purposes. Now as far as the recording is concerned because images needs to be recorded or the whatever you are viewing on the skin needs to be recorded earlier days people used to record using a photographic plates just like a normal photographic plates we do, but these plates are very big and long. So, they can be pushed at the placed at the just below this viewing screen and because transmit electron microscope has a very large depth of field. So, therefore whatever will be focused on the screen can be assumed to be focused on the photographic plate and on this photographic plates are exposed by the electron beam they can be just developed and images can be obtained. But those days are over now normally nowadays we use a digital camera which is there at the bottom of these things this is basically digital camera from Garten incorporation and this digital camera actually very sensitive to electron beam. So, depending on the imaging conditions we can actually collect this images directly on the digital camera and then view it on the screen. So, depending on that so, I cannot show you one such image which is we have collected in the microscope. So, you can see here there is an image which is collected by this from this microscope. So, there are many features. So, one can actually do this image collection directly from the camera and camera technology has improved extensively for the over the time scale as per the resolution of the camera sensitivity of the camera also the exposure to the camera all has been developed to the optimum level. Nowadays we can have a very high-resolution camera which can even grab the high-resolution images to the exact resolution what you see on the screen. So, but still many people use both the imaging systems and for day to day life. The another kind of imaging system which has been developed nowadays which are used is called photographic plates which are sensitive to light. So, those photographic plates can be used for recording and then image can be transferred on a computer from the photographic plate and then this images can be erased or the photographic plates the memory of the photographic plate can be erased and they can be reused. They are very sensitive to the lights, but they are not used for the normal microscopes only for very exceptional cases where you want to record diffraction patterns which are energy filtered that can be done well that is basically the basic future of electron microscope here, but normally in electron microscope there are many other instrument behind as you can you may not be able to see from the from the video, but there will be UPS the emulator power supply that is needed or there will be chillers because these lenses which are basically used to image the sample in the microscopes need to be water cooled because they are electromagnetic lenses and this water cooling is done by a chiller which are normally kept outside this microscope rooms and then you can also have sample cleaning system before you put the sample one can clean the sample using a plasma cleaner nowadays we have we also have a plasma cleaner which will show you just within after just a finish the discussion here. So, using the plasma cleaner one can clean the sample very nicely so that one can get a very nice region of sample and view it well the these are all background things what one is to have for a microscope. So, that is why other than that the microscope needs to be kept in a very neat environment free from any kind of vibration free from any kind of magnetic field also free from noise as probably we will see sometime down the line if I have the opportunity I will show a microscope which is the best with best possible resolution called Titan which will be installed in our in the IIT Kanpur in a normal Titan microscope even the person who is sitting in the front of microscope cannot speak a word or even cannot in the cannot even you know beyond by doing so you can actually create the problem in the image because the vibration which is generated by that can actually reduce the resolution of the microscope that is why those microscopes are remotely controlled you can insert the sample then go out a separate room and remotely controlled. So, but here that is not the case because the resolution of this microscope is not that so in those cases not only the microscopes are to be kept in a very clean and neat environment, but also the environment has to be free from all kinds of noises even the noise from the air conditioner can create problem. So, these are the these are the way high resolution microscopy has developed over the time scale from 2006 onwards the Titan microscopes has come up in this world and it has changed the whole concept of electron microscopy all throughout in the class I will show the images of the microscopy. Now, let us switch on the beam on the microscope and just see that light of the. So, I just take on this chair and just switch on the beam here by using the computer which you may not be able to see and once I switch on the beam once I switch on the beam in the microscope I can clearly see that the fluorescent scheme lights up that means I have the beam aligned in the microscopes remember the for normal microscope and high resolution microscopy electron beam needs to be aligned properly. So, I just then bring the sample in the microscope into the field of view and then I will just set up the microscope. I will not show you the basic features of the microscopic investigations we have already a sample inserted into the microscope and I am I want to show you most of the things on the screen. So, so that you can observe because seeing here is always difficult task on the screen this is small arena. So, I just what I did is basically I put the sample in and focus the beam and just put the apertures both the object aperture and the on this electric apertures using that I can form a bit fill image which I will show you in a moment's time. So, please view it on the screen here. So, you can see basically the image on the on a screen. So, this is a typical bite fill image in the electron microscope at the field of the beam is bright and one can see that there are different features on the on the microscope on the on the image. So, the features actually tells each feature will tell us some contrasts are basically this kind of image is based based on the diffraction contrasts in the electron microscopes as the electron falls of the sample the it undergoes diffraction. So, by using this the diffraction information we can form different kind of images. So, the first kind of images form as it known as a bite fill image in which the transmitted beam or the furrow scatter beam is used to image that. So, whatever intensity information is there in the furrow scattered image will be seen on this on this image. On the other hand if you use a diffracted beam then we can see the information regarding a dark field. The most important thing in a microscope when somebody sits is the diffraction pattern because diffraction pattern is basically formed by the diffraction of the of the crystals in the sample during as the electron falls in a sample. So, electron getting diffracted can lead to this kind of diffraction patterns and they contain all information regarding the sample type regarding the features present in the sample whether the defects are not or not even that depending on the orientation of the crystals this diffraction can be changed. So, that is why the diffraction pattern is is something which is known as the most important thing in a micro in a in a transmission electron microscope. By using the diffraction pattern subsequently one can generate either a bite fill image or a dark fill image or even one can use this as a highly selected electron microscopy. So, this is the very powerful process. So, that one can actually analyze almost all features which are present in the sample at the at the fine scale to the level of I am strong or some I am strong nowadays possible one can actually gather informations. That is the reason I have told you in the last lecture or this lecture that transmission electron microscope is basically a versatile equipment can be used for many many kinds of analysis of the sample. So, let me just now go back to the microscope and try to figure out a diffraction pattern and this. So, this is very in a microscope very typical they can now one day nowadays everybody grab the images on the computer scheme. You do not come into picture you see that. So, we can actually gather diffraction pattern by using the selected aperture select the particular region of sample and this is one such diffraction pattern we can see on the screen. So, diffraction pattern has a transmitted beam or the forward shutter beam and diffracted beams sitting on the sample say different places. So, if I put the aperture here on the transmitted beam then I can basically a great they buy filmage the one which is so new there here. Now, if I select any of these diffracted beams and put the aperture in the diffracted beam object aperture in effect when I can get the dark filmage. On the other hand if I select the large number of diffracted spot along in the transmitted spot by using a bigger aperture I can get basically I can make them interfere and get the interference pattern which is nothing but higher resolution image. Nowadays one even do not need to do that because the lenses in the lens are so good actually it generates the high resolution image in the very high magnification. So, this is a dark film image which can be actually obtained by using one of those diffracted spots in the microscopes and it will light up the regions which are diffracting strongly in the microscopes. So, this dark film image can be obtained even in that is called scanning transmission electron microscopy a stem mode also and the dark film image stem mode will give you again some kind of jet contrast if we use hard disk in a dark field. Let us call high angle angular dark film image which can be done. So, routinely in the microscope nowadays but one is to insert this particular detector inside the column to gather the information. So, other than that one can actually select these any of these regions of the sample and then do the any of the regions of the sample here and do the spectroscopic analysis using the EDACs or one can use another law of spectroscopic features to basically do the composition analysis of the sample. But those are very involved techniques to show them in the microscope requires lot of time. So, I will not be able to show you in front of in the microscopes, but I will discuss in the class in subsequent lectures when I discuss about the yields and the stem. I will show you the basic features and when I will show you some examples of our own study which we have done in the process of our own research even using this microscopes or maybe some other microscopes which I am going to show in the class. Modern day electron microscope requires sample preparation. Sample preparation is the one of the biggest bottleneck of the getting highlights in microscopic images. So, that is why sample preparation technique has seen a sea change over the time. So, I will not be able to discuss exactly different sample preparation procedures, but off late even after TM sample is perforated and thinned down to the electron transparency level. The sample surface can have oxides or other contaminations to make it contamination free this for the normally for the analytical microscopic purpose also for highlights and purpose. The machine which is used is known as a plasma kinam is generated the plasma using a gas or gas mixture like hydrogen oxygen inside this machine and we can actually load the sample in a TM sample holder and inside this one and clean it using the plasma. This is very fast and very what is called authentic technique to get sample contamination free. This is very important for many analysis as I said not only high lection, but also compression analysis and also in stem because in the stem we use a focused beam or a converge beam rather not a converge beam and as if the sample has contaminations the converge beam will interact the contamination and sample will be basically more contaminated as the investigation goes on. That is why in all normal days all the microscopic samples needs to be first cleaned in a plasma kinam before you can inside the TM column that also saves the vacuum system of the TM column. So, this has been a new feature. In fact many people nowadays use something known as a nanomail where even after the normal thinning of the sample the sample is cleaned by using very low energy argon beams in a nanomail very precisely. So, the surface oxide layers are removed and very controlled manner and so that we can get a actual high lection image in the microscope. So, following that this machine can actually remove all the further contamination at all there, but nanomail is very expensive very few people in this world can buy it. So, we do not have. So, many people in this world actually use the plasma kinam to clean the sample.


Ginko Biloba is one of the most popular natropics on the market. But is it really helpful? Well, let's find out. Hi friends, welcome back to my channel. My name is Greg and I'm a brain hacker creating content that will help you upgrade your brain performance. If that's interesting then subscribe below and join our amazing community. Today we're going to talk about Ginko Biloba. I'm going to tell you about my experience with this natropic. I'm going to talk about benefits, side effects and at the end of the video I'm going to tell you who should supplement Ginko Biloba and who should probably avoid it. So if you're ready let's just begin. Now Ginko Biloba has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries basically especially they use the leaves and the seeds of this interesting tree. Now most recently we can see lots of research being done using Ginko Biloba extracts. As a matter of fact even my ex-girlfriend who is a daughter of a pharmacist used Ginko Biloba many many years ago about 12 years ago for the end exams in high schools because she wanted to have better memory during the exams. So yes I've known Ginko Biloba for quite some time. But recently I decided to try it out again for a bit longer period and see what happens. Now the recommended daily dosage is about 120 to 240 milligrams per day. So I decided to stick with the higher dosage 240 milligrams per day. I always took the capsules in the morning after eating food because that's the preferred way of taking Ginko Biloba especially if you want to avoid any kind of side effects. Now according to studies I expected the following benefits reduced anxiety more brain power and better well-being and also improved memory. Of course there are many are benefits of taking Ginko Biloba if you want to learn about them check my video up here. Now firstly it's hard to say that my anxiety reduced during the time when I was supplementing Ginko Biloba. There were days I felt really good I wasn't anxious at all my stress levels were quite low but there are also days that I can remember that were quite anxious and stressful. However what I noticed is the longer I was taking Ginko Biloba the better I felt and the less often happened that I was anxious or stressed and I think this happened because Ginko Biloba is a very powerful antioxidant and the longer you take it the more effective it basically gets at fighting the free the damaging free radicals in your brain. By the way guys if you like this video please press the like button below. Now Ginko can also improve blood flow which can result in better brain function and better memory. Now sadly during my test period I didn't experience any kind of calling to benefits my memory kind of stays the same I didn't notice any kind of benefits at all even though it's usually kind of hard to matter the effects of memory but yeah at least I expected something but this something didn't really happen. Also I didn't really feel that I have more brain power more cognition more brain energy everything kind of stayed the same as before. However I think that my well being slightly improved probably this was related to reduced anxiety and stress but it could also be because as I said before Ginko Biloba is a very potent antioxidant it contains flavonoids and terpenoids and this exact compounds fight free radicals and have many many potential benefits so after weeks and months of taking Ginko Biloba yes I can say I was in a bare mood and I felt that my well-being actually improved. However compared to some other nitropics like Rodiola or Ceph for example by the way you can watch my review of Rodiola up here the effects were kind of subtle and yeah there's no doubt they're more potent and more effective nitropics available on the market. Also the study is done on healthy population kind of a show mixed results. Now what about the side effects during my test period I had no issues with Ginko Biloba as I said I was taking it with food which you should do because most people that experience side effects such as headaches stomach pain diarrhea and so on they probably happened because people took a supplement without food on an empty stomach so take Ginko Biloba with food and I think you're on the safe side and if something happens do consult your doctor right away and stop taking Ginko Biloba. Also if you're taking any antidepressants or SSRIs or blood thinners like aspirin or even ibuprofen in this case I don't recommend taking Ginko Biloba. If you do before you do that definitely consult your doctor. By the way guys do you want to know how well does your brain work?  So my final conclusion is it worth supplementing Ginko Biloba or not? Well if you're slightly older and you're already in cognitive decline that in this case I definitely recommend supplementing Ginko Biloba because the studies for people in cognitive decline are very supportive and they show that supplementing Ginko can slow down cognitive decline. But if you're a professional, a young professional who want to have more brain power I think there are much better on tropics available on the market. To learn more about them watch the video on the screen that just popped up right now. Thank you guys for watching. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me. Follow your inception on social media and guys I hope to see you soon again. Take care.