PBS
Summer 2010 Press Tour
NOVA
“Making Stuff Stronger, Smaller, Smarter, Cleaner”
David Pogue, Program Host and New York Times Technology Columnist
Dr. Donald Sadoway, MIT
Chris Schmidt, Producer
Paula S. Apsell, Series Senior Executive Producer
August 5, 2010
The Beverly Hilton Hotel
© 2010 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). All rights reserved.
All TCA Press Tour transcripts are prepared immediately following press conferences. They are provided for your convenience
and are not intended as a substitute at press conferences. Due to the speed with which these transcripts are prepared, complete
accuracy cannot be guaranteed.
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PAULA S. APSELL: Good morning. My name is Paula
Apsell, Senior Executive Producer of NOVA and NOVA
scienceNOW and Director of the WGBH Science Unit.
When the idea first arose of a miniseries on materials
science, my first thought was, "Who will watch this?
Unlike chemistry, physics, biology, who has even heard
of materials science?" But as I came to see, it's
probably the most crucial science to progress. Your
computers, cell phones, all the technology we rely on
depend on materials. There's a reason, after all, why
great historical ages are all named for stuff, the Stone
Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. Learning that was my
personal "duh" moment.
Today we'll share with you some highlights from our
four-part miniseries, "Making Stuff Stronger, Smaller,
Smarter, Cleaner," and talk to you about some of the
remarkable inventions of today and tomorrow all based on
materials.
But first, a brief highlight from other aspects of the
ever-expanding NOVA franchise. Returning this winter
will be our popular magazine spinoff, "NOVA scienceNOW,"
with host Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. This upcoming series
looks at six big questions, and each week will tackle a
really big scientific question, such as: "How smart are
animals?" "Can we live forever?" And "Where did I come
from?" This September, our Emmy-nominated web series
"The Secret Life of Scientists & Engineers" returns for a
second season with more than a dozen delightful new
scientists' profiles, from an ice skating physicist to a
female pro wrestling biochemist, and even a cheerleader.
And while you're at it, check out our entirely
redesigned website designed to be the "start here first"
site for the best of science on the Web.
On NOVA, there are a number of upcoming premiere
programs I'm especially excited about. We'll be
unraveling new clues on some enduring mysteries, the
building of the great European cathedrals, the fabled
King Solomon's mines, and the ever-intriguing Stonehenge
where NOVA has gained exclusive access to some brand-new
discoveries.
And you may think your dog is smart. But how much do we
really know about man's best friend? Surprising new
science on K-9 intelligence and the remarkable bond that
dogs have with humans is revealed in "Dogs Decoded"
coming this fall.
Now on to today's featured program.
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"Making Stuff"
explores the materials that have defined human progress
and will take us into the next revolution. It will be
materials that will solve the energy crisis and will
lead to new advances that we can barely imagine. And
for this special four-part series, we chose the perfect
tour guide to show us the kinds of incredible invasions
and gee-whiz ingenuity that will shape the future.
Let's take a look.
(Clip shown.)
Now I'll introduce our panel. To my left is Dr. Don
Sadoway, Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT. And
he's here to offer the big picture on materials today
and through history. He's an expert in the portable
energy sources explored in “Making Stuff, Cleaner” and the
only guy in the room who can turn moon rocks into
oxygen, which I actually think is pretty cool.
Next to him is our program host, David Pogue, our
engaging and tech-savvy tour guide who is the personal
technology columnist for the “New York Times,” well-know
author and voracious Twitterer with over 1.5 million
followers.
And furthest to the left is Chris Schmidt from
Powderhouse Productions, and he is the series producer.
Your questions, please.
QUESTION: For Dr. Sadoway, one of the first things I
was looking at when they were talking about the shark
skin avatar -- I'm not sure what the term is -- in
repelling the bacteria, one of the problems with many
antibacterias is they form super bacterias, and that
brings to mind, what about unintended consequences of
screwing around with all this stuff? I'm sure some of
it is really great and will be really helpful, but
nanobots going after tumors could also be going after
our brains.
DR. DONALD SADAWAY: This is always part of the research
endeavor, to make sure that the unintended consequences
are tolerable. And it's up to the people in research to
make sure that the view is worth the climb. And so I'm
confident that people in the development stages attest
for this, to ensure that the undesirable side effects
are minimal.
DAVID POGUE: Can I just jump in on that since you
brought up literally my favorite story from this entire
four-hour thing? It's this guy we interviewed at the
University of Florida who discovered that nothing grows
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on shark skin, no bacteria, no barnacles. Nothing
grows. And his colleagues were all like, "Well, dude,
they move too fast, no wonder." He's like, "No, but
there's nurse sharks and whale sharks. They just sit
there." Not the regular microscope, the electroscope, he
saw what you saw in that clip is that a shark's skin is
made up of teeny weeny -- it's not really the technical
term -- tiny, tiny little walls, and they're too small
for more than one bacteria cell at a time to wedge into,
so the bacteria send out these chemical signals to the
other bacteria to say, "Find somewhere else. There's no
room for a colony."
So the navy gave him this grant to see if they could
coat the ships with it. Wouldn't that be cool if
they never had to clean them, if they didn't have to use
all the fuel to shove all that stuff in the water,
and just after we got to this guy, they had pulled a
panel out of Pearl Harbor 8x8 feet, covered with a
synthetic version of the shark skin that this guy made.
Looked like clear plastic, but under the microscope it
has those same ridges. They let it sit in the water for
six months, and with the navy brass looking on, they
pulled it out. Nothing on it. Looked like this
[referring to plastic water bottle].
So then this grad student is like, "Dude, that's all
great, shipping, everything, billion-dollar industry, but
there is a trillion-dollar industry that would be even
more interested in it," and you put your finger on it.
Healthcare -- the guy's like, "Oh, my God. People go
into hospitals. They come out with new diseases they
didn't have because of bacterial infections they pick up
at the hospital. Imagine if we covered everything with
our fake shark skin where bacteria will not grow," and
this is the best part. It's not killing the bacteria,
this stuff. All it does is make the bacteria go
somewhere else, so this material does not breed
superbugs. That's the genius behind it. He's patented
it and bringing it to market in big roles. It's called
Sharklet, and if you could invest in it, you should.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: You know, one comment about that, the
unintended consequences idea, you know, in all four
shows, there's a theme that keeps recurring again and
again and again, which is that there are man-made
materials that have been around a long time, and
materials scientists are now beginning to discover that
natural systems, animals, like the shark skin and so
forth, have devised microscopic and nanoscale structures
to accomplish various things. There's a story about how
geckos climb based on these nanoscale little hairs that
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are in their feet, so in terms of unintended
consequences, a lot of these materials in some sense or
another have been tested over millions -- hundreds of
millions of years, and they are themselves, perhaps, the
result of unintended consequences.
So by -- I think some scientists feel that by copying
these structures or transposing these structures onto
materials that we ourselves control that may be more
durable, plastics, metals, things like that. They're
sort of end-running the unintended consequences problem
because they're kind of co-opting something that's
already been proven to exist be benign, et cetera, in
the environment.
PAULA S. APSELL: I would just like to add one thing to
this, which is I really understand. I think what you
may be referring to is the concern that's been raised
over nanoparticles, which are in so many of the things,
even now, that we use, like sunscreen. And these are
particles that are so small that they actually can get
through the blood, brain barrier, and there is a lot of
concern about that, and that concern is, indeed,
legitimate, and it's something that we certainly mention
in the series.
One thing about NOVA. We inform about science. We
explore science. We're excited about science. But
we're journalists. We're not cheerleaders for science.
So when there are issues that are raised by these
materials, when there are potential dangers that we
present, when there's controversy about them, in the
series we certainly acknowledge that, and we will have
even more information about this on what will be a very
robust and information-filled website.
QUESTION: One other question for Mr. Pogue, kind of off
the subject, but could you talk about the connection
between opera, classical music, and your love of tech
stuff?
DAVID POGUE:
What?
QUESTION: As I understand it, you've written books
about opera -DAVID POGUE:
QUESTION:
I have.
-- even have one
DAVID POGUE: I wrote "Opera for Dummies" and "Classical
Music for Dummies." Could you all excuse us for about
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15 minutes.
(Laughter.)
You know, my thing about science and music and -- like
Dr. Sadoway was a choral conductor, and I was a Broadway
conductor, and what is that about? Here's my theory in
one line. I think that music and science are similar in
this way. They're both rigidly rule-based but creative
within the rules. So that's how I see it, and that's
why I think there's so many doctors who are musicians
and Broadway actors who are also microbiologists -- no.
I made that part up.
PAULA S. APSELL: And our show on materials science will
be opening on Broadway with David having written -DAVID POGUE:
Nano!
Nano!
[Singing and dancing.]
PAULA S. APSELL: And Don will be conducting, so we're
very excited about it. We hope you'll all buy advanced
tickets.
DAVID POGUE:
won't you?
You will edit that thing out of the video,
QUESTION: Dr. Sadoway, over here. Can you talk about
some of the things that are in the pipeline that will
benefit the environment and that are covered in the
series?
DR. DONALD SADAWAY: Well, the first one that comes to
mind is energy storage. You saw in the little clip
there the comment I made about reducing the need to
increase the number of power plants by making better use
of the energy that we're generating right now but have
to not use due to the fact that in the wee hours of the
morning the demand is low, so if we could capture
energy, the electrification of our fleet, zero
emissions, reduce our dependence on imported petroleum,
well-paying jobs right here in the United States for our
own people, so these kinds of even social implications,
jobs and so on, while making things better for the
environment, are all advanced by discoveries in materials
science.
QUESTION: Are there any other things that would not
harm ecosystems and benefit man, but new products that
you can see -PAULA S. APSELL:
Tell her about your battery.
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DAVID POGUE: So just on Monday, we interview this guy
who's pioneering -- and he just got a $122 million grant
from our government. This is how important his work is.
He's developing artificial photosynthesis. And this
thing blew my mind. What plants do is they take
sunlight and convert it into energy and oxygen that we
breathe. Like, wouldn't that be cool if we could do
that? It seems so obvious. The thing is, plants are
very inefficient. They get but 1 percent efficiency.
So what this guy has developed is a system to take
sunlight and convert it into -- it breaks up water into
hydrogen and oxygen, H2O, and the oxygen goes into the
air, and we breathe it, and the hydrogen is stored as
liquid hydrogen that you can then put it in your fuel
tank or run your house's electrical system, or whatever,
and I'm like, "Dude, are you telling me it's free,
unlimited, pollutionless, costless energy, abundant
forever?" And he's like, "Yeah. Pretty much." And
he's got it working. It's crazy stuff.
So I'm so happy. I mean, I always thought there had to
be a catch. I always thought that kind of thing is
impossible, and he's doing it. It is amazing. The
government just set up -- and I didn't know this was
going on. There was a proposal to set up eight great
national centers for energy technology, and one would be
about batteries, and one would be about fake
photosynthesis, and one would be about, I don't know,
hydrogen -DR. DONALD SADAWAY:
Solar.
DAVID POGUE: Yeah. Right. You're a scientist. And
ultimately -- you know how Congress works -- three of
them made it through alive. So only three of them
survived, but one of them is this guy's center -- will
be starting next year -- with 200 scientists and all the
great universities working together on this artificial
photosynthesis thing that I'd never heard of, but it
really could be the answer.
PAULA S. APSELL: But not the battery center.
us what you think of that.
Don, tell
DR. DONALD SADAWAY: Well, energy storage is the key to
expanding our ability to drive cars that are
pollution-free, and as I say, harness the grid, and the
other area is in renewables. A good example is
photovoltaics for converting sunlight into electricity.
This right now is on the periphery, because the sun
doesn't shine all the time. And I'm not just talking
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about nighttime. If a cloud passes over a solar farm,
the collection drops down to a few percent of peak.
But even so, this photovoltaic conversion of sunlight
into electricity is just going to be a pit player. It's
never going to make it to center stage in terms of
energy generation unless we can level out the
intermittency so that's where, again, batteries come
into play. And also the other advance that we're
looking at is much, much higher conversion efficiencies.
David mentioned 1 percent in plants in photovoltaics
somewhere in the teens, but there's all this energy
coming from the sun, and we could convert it into
electricity, and that makes no harm for the environment
and reduces our dependence on imported energy stocks.
Wind is another example. Conversion. What happens when
the wind doesn't blow? How are we going to get wind and
solar in the base load? Unless we have storage to level
out the lows, it's never going to make it. So again,
advances in materials can make these things move from
the laboratory into your home.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: And, you know, just one quick
comment to that. First, the scientist that David
is talking about with the artificial
photosynthesis is Nate Lewis at Caltech, but the
other thing I just wanted to just say is I'm going
to quote Don here because he said something to me
that just was so amazing when we were researching
the shows. “You know, we've been in a lot of labs,
and we've seen a lot of amazing things, and then
there's always this question, are they going to
be able to get processed from the lab out to the
marketplace?," a whole other set of restrictions
and obstacles to overcome with that stuff. And
when I first started to talk to Don, and I knew he
was working on battery technology, and lithium ion
batteries are a big deal. They're in all the
stuff that we use. They're going to be in the
Volt. They're going to be in cars, et cetera.
And Don said, "Well, you know, the lithium ion
batteries depend on lithium, which we have to get
from South America and other places. So in a way,
by getting off of Middle Eastern oil, we might get
on South American lithium, which is not
necessarily a better thing." And his line, which
I love, he said to me, "People want to make
materials -- we want to make materials that are
cheap and are abundant at home. They want to make
things that are dirt cheap. So why don't we start
with dirt. In other words, don't look at the
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periodic table and find the most archaic,
hard-to-find, complex, expensive material that
does cool things. Start with the stuff that's
right in front of you. Just say, 'How can I make
a battery out of this dirt?'"
DR. DONALD SADOWAY:
CHRIS SCHMIDT:
Out of American dirt.
Yeah, out of American dirt.
(Laughter.)
So, Don, we're waiting for the dirt battery, but
I'm sure these guys are going to want to know
about when it hits the market.
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: That's coming down the pike.
That's not in the series, but that's -- you know,
the series foretells of more to come, and what's
beyond lithium? What I do is I start with what
are the most abundant elements in the earth's
crust. And which of those are found on the
territories of the United States. And those
become the design constraints for a new battery,
not really cool electrochemistry, and it's made
out of “unobtainium.” That's no good.
(Laughter.)
So instead, we start with, you know, "What's the
hit parade?" Oxygen. That's gas. You've got
silicon, electrochemically active aluminum,
iron. Those are cheap. We make all of our
infrastructure out of steel. We make beer cans
out of aluminum. It's cheap. So that's what we
have to make our batteries out of, and we're
developing the materials science to the point where
we can predict the properties of materials that
haven't even been synthesized in the laboratory.
Thanks to materials advances that have enabled
computational capabilities. So, you know, the
science is all there. Everything that you're
blogging on and listening to, we could have built
that back in 1970. There's no new physics. The
only difference is we figured out how to make the
stuff cheaply enough. You know the Washington
Monument, it's capped with a pyramid of aluminum
because in 1886 and around the time of the
centennial, alluminum was a precious commodity,
and by the invention of a new process, the price
of alluminum came down so much, we can make
cookware out of it, beverage cans out of it and so
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on.
It's all this excitement.
QUESTION: For the professor, with materials, I'm
fascinated by both structure and scale, and how do
you change as you change the scale? Could you talk
about that. And could you talk a bit about
graphene and why I would rather have an engagement
ring out of graphene than out of diamond? Yes, I
was listening to your lecture.
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: Okay. Well, I can't make
that decision. That's a personal decision.
(Laughter.)
About the diamond versus the graphite, but I'll
give you a simple example. I'll give you a pine
board, one inch thick, and I'll give you a sheet
of plywood, one inch thick, both made out of pine.
The difference is that the plywood, the pine has
been cut into little sheets about one-eighth inch
thick, and they've been laid down cross-grain.
And I could walk up to the one-inch piece of
plywood and even a weakling such as I, I can break
that if I hit it along the grain. But the
plywood, same material, but different structure,
and I'm not even talking down at the nanoscale.
I'm talking macroscale, and it changes the
mechanical behavior completely, gives it strength.
So the lesson here is that if we change the
atomic arrangement, same composition, we can have
dramatic improvements in performance. In this
case, it was mechanical strength. In other cases,
it could be its ability to convert light into
electricity or transparency or corrosion
resistance or what have you, all of these
properties desirable in certain locations. And I
can't help you on the ring.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: That is also one of other themes
in all four shows is that we continually see
taking materials that are commonplace and changing
the structure and dramatically increasing or
improving their strength. In the first show,
"Stronger," which was playing in the hotel over
the last couple of days, the rough cut, we have a
story where we compare chalk to the shells of
abalone sea animals, and it's 95 percent chalk,
but it's far less brittle and breakable than chalk
because of the microscopic structure that the
animal had engineered into the material to give it
these kinds of properties. So it's fascinating.
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DAVID POGUE: So you mentioned how the properties
of things change depending on the scale, I don't
know what you guys know about nanotechnology, but
that is the principle is that when things get that
small, all the things we think about them at
regular size are different and weird. Like gold,
do you know what color gold is when it's that
small? It's not gold. It's red. Like if you
look at it really little, it's red. And Chris
found out that actually we've been using
nanotechnology for a thousand years. We just
didn't have a cool word for it. We went to
England for the show and to Canterbury Cathedral
and looked at the stained glass windows that have
been there for 1,100 years, and it turns out the
red in the stained glass windows is made from
gold, and the pink is made from copper. That
doesn't make sense. Copper isn't pink, and gold isn't
red, but at that scale, the particles change
color, and they were actually mixing this stuff
into their glass.
CHRIS SCHMIDT:
were doing.
Yeah, they had no idea what they
DAVID POGUE: Exactly.
Nobel back then.
They could have won the
QUESTION: Actually, a serious question, though,
what is making graphene sort of the wonder
material of nanotech?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: What you're looking at is
when you get down to super-small dimensions,
there's a physical phenomenon called the quantum
limit, and so the material starts behaving more
according to the individual atom, and just as
David said, if I give you one atom of copper, it's
not a -- it's doesn't look copper-colored, and
it's not even a solid. It will be a vapor. So
the question is how many copper atoms do you have
to put into a glob before you start getting the
properties of copper, it's color, its electronic
connectivity and so on? And the answer is some
tens of copper atoms. So what would happen if you
had a layer of copper, but it was only two atoms
thick? Then the direction across the two atoms,
you get properties that are very different from
bulk copper. So the graphene is an example of
when you get down to really, really small
dimensions, it's dominantly interface, and there's
no bulk. There's no air there. It's all just
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surface.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: Let me try to bust this out. So
graphene electrons move along the surface of
graphene relativistically, and they're controlled
by the Dirac equation.
PAULA S. APSELL:
graphene is.
CHRIS SCHMIDT:
Not everybody knows what
Graphene is basically --
DR. DONALD SADOWAY:
Let alone the Dirac equation.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: But I can bust it out for you. So
graphene, this is what we've learned. Carbon
comes in several different natural configurations.
One of them diamond, which is a crystal structure
where each carbon atom is bonded to four other
carbon atoms around it. Graphite is basically
made up of layers of carbon that are one atom
thick, and they're all stacked up on top of each
other. When you write with a pencil, you're just
laying down these graphene sheets.
PAULA S. APSELL:
That'd be pencil lead.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: Pencil lead. And the amazing
thing about graphene is it turns out that you can
isolate a single layer of carbon, one sheet of
graphene, by putting some graphite on a piece of
scotch tape -- and we do this in the show -- and
you keep taping and untaping and taping and
untaping, gradually exfoliating or peeling off
layers, and then you put a piece of silicon on it
and you rub it a little bit, and you come off, and
there's a pretty good chance you're going to end up
with a layer of carbon atoms that is one atom
thick. And the most amazing thing is you can see
it with the naked eye because it absorbs light,
and it looks like a black sheet. If you hold it
this way, you can't see it (indicating), but if
you look straight down at it, you can see it. And
it turns out, you do it in your kitchen if you
want. It's ridiculous. And they're learning to
make -- it's an incredible conductor, but they're
learning to create -- to make it act as a
semi-conductor to be used as a switch, a
transistor, but it's almost -- it's a different
sort of switch. It has three positions almost
instead of two positions.
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PAULA S. APSELL:
computer.
So that would be a faster
CHRIS SCHMIDT: Faster, and lower energy
consumption, shorter distance between connections.
DAVID POGUE: And super strong?
strongest in the world?
Isn't it the
CHRIS SCHMIDT: Graphene and nano tubes which are
rolled up graphene. The carbon atom is the
strongest bond basically, the covalent bond, one
of the strongest bonds. So the material, for its
size, is the strongest stuff.
DAVID POGUE:
In the world.
PAULA S. APSELL: And that, of course, carbon is
the stuff we are made of and every living thing.
So you've got to love it, don't you think?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: The other important piece,
when it comes to electronic devices, is that we've
got the density of devices so high that I'm sure
you're feeling, when you're using these things,
the heat generated. So these new materials give
you the ability to pass enormous amounts of
electric current and generate minimal amounts of
heat. Otherwise, you end up having -- you've got
the miniature device like this (indicating), and
you've got a giant fan like this. It kind of
defeats the purpose. So high conductivity is
good.
PAULA S. APSELL:
So more questions?
Yes.
QUESTION: Let me ask Dr. Sadoway about the history of
your field a little bit. How long have you been
in the field? And how has it changed since you
started?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: I've been in the field since I
was a student, and that was only about three years
ago. Actually, no. It's going back to the 1960s,
and the field was really an accretion of discrete
branches of materials science. So there was
metallurgy, and I was formerly educated as a
metallurgist. There were people that worked in
ceramics, people that worked with polymers, and
the emerging field in the '50s of semi-conductors,
which was essentially silicon. And what's
happened over the years is that the rules that
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govern the properties of materials, particularly
with respect to the question that was raised
earlier about the atomic arrangement, not just
chemical composition, but how atoms are arranged,
people started recognizing that similar structures
gave similar properties in materials of different
chemical composition. So some of the rules that
governed the behavior of metals and their alloys
were coming up in polymers as people starting
inventing newer and newer polymers. And so -PAULA S. APSELL:
long-chain.
Everyone knows polymers are a
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: Plastics. Plastics, as the
line goes in "The Graduate." So those properties
are common across materials classes. And then as
Chris pointed out, people started looking at what
nature teaches us, and we start seeing that nature
has developed and optimized, not just the chemical
composition, but the structures. And so this
super discipline of materials science emerged
where it didn't matter if you were focusing on
metals or focusing on some of the biological
materials. This common set of rules about, if I
want to make something, say, mechanically
flexible, I know what structures to ascribe to and
what structures to avoid. On the other hand, if I
want to make something that's very stiff, I know
which kinds of atomic arrangements to strive for.
So that's sort of the -- in a nutshell, a history of
the discipline.
QUESTION: David, how did you get the million and
a half “tweeter-tots”?
(Laughter.)
And why is that important today?
DAVID POGUE: I don't know whether I should tell
you the good story or the real story. I
accumulated a million and a half followers, I thought,
because of the genius of my tweets, the
astonishing wit, clarity, my up-to-date concise -no. What happened was when Twitter was founded,
people would sign up for it, and they weren't
following anyone. They weren't receiving anybody
else's comments. So it was a lonely, desolate
place. So the founders of Twitter thought, "Here
is what we'll do. When you sign up for Twitter,
we'll start you off with a list of 20 people that
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we think will be funny or interesting." So for a
year, I was accumulating tens of thousands of
followers a week just because I was on the starter
list. It has nothing to do with my genius.
(Laughter.)
So eventually, they ended that program, and so I'm
stuck there. But what is this significance? For
me, Twitter is remarkable because it's just the
first of its kind in that it's realtime, it's
two-way, and it levels all separations between you
and the movie star or you and the President or you
and Oprah. And it's kind of cool that when
something appears on your cell phone, you're like,
"Wow, Ashton Kutcher just typed that, and it's on
my phone." And I use it a lot for crowd-sourcing.
I ping my followers for answers, for jokes, for
the title of this show. When we were trying to
think of a title, I asked them, and they came up
with this huge list of title suggestions, some of
which were terrible, but a few of which were good,
and I passed them along to the NOVA folks.
QUESTION:
Twitter?
How much time a day do you spend on
DAVID POGUE: About a minute. That's the great
thing. It's not like e-mail or phone calls where
there's a social obligation to answer and reply.
You can dip in and dip out as you get busy. I've
been traveling for the show. I haven't done
anything in Twitter for a week. So it's just -QUESTION:
(Gasping.)
(Laughter.)
DAVID POGUE:
It's okay.
QUESTION: For the professor, given the
integration of physics and chemistry and materials
science, do we need to rethink the training of
students and young scientists because now physics
and chemistry are taught as such separate
disciplines?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
This has profound implications on our education
system, and there are people that talk about -Leon Lederman has said that you should start with
materials science as the form of a starting off
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point in high school science and then lead with
materials science and thereby excite the students.
I find that students are eager. They're curious
about the world around them. You tell them that
what I'm going to talk about today explains how
your iPhone can capture a very, very weak signal.
You got them. You got them. So I think that it's
time now to reexamine. But, you know, it's a
question of we're going to have to have the
textbooks, supporting materials, the teacher
training, et cetera, et cetera. It's an enormous
enterprise, but I think it's worth trying perhaps
on a experimental basis in a defined area to see
just how far things can go and just what the
retention rate of students is so that some of that
material they're taught in school actually sticks.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: I think, for the average person,
it's probably the most important science. They
just don't know it because it's one that has the
greatest impact on all the stuff they love.
DR. DONALD SADOWAY:
something.
Everything is made of
PAULA S. APSELL: Of course, you know, there are a
few shows that we've done in the 37 seasons of
NOVA that the touchstone is more familiar to the
average person than this one, but, Don, what about
the commitment to materials science is so important
for the energy crisis, et cetera, on the part of
our government and the funding agencies?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: Well, it's, in a word,
insufficient. Just -PAULA S. APSELL:
Is that like "sucks"?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: It's bad. Just to give you
an example, if you look at, say, the period from
1979 to 2006, the government funding for energy
research in the United States, when you correct
for the difference in the dollar, is down to
one-sixth. One-sixth of what it was in 1979 is
what it was in 2006. You might, yeah, but, you
know, research is being reduced everywhere.
During that same period, the funding for the life
sciences went up by a factor of four, and what do
we have as a result? Remarkable advances in
molecular biology, the genome, et cetera,
et cetera, because we had sustained funding. We
attracted the best minds. Students thinking about
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careers said, "I want to work in the life sciences
because I know I'm going to be able continue to be
funded. I can make an academic career in it."
And in energy, it's light-switch funding -- on,
off. And so I think that, when you look at what's
in the series and you see the remarkable advances
that have been made under these paltry funding
conditions, imagine what we could discover if we
really put some umphff behind it, financial
umphff.
DAVID POGUE: Lewis the other day said -- sorry.
It's a one-liner. Nate Lewis, the other day, said
that as a percent of revenue, the energy industry
spends less on research and development than the dog
food industry.
(Laughter.)
QUESTION: Here's my question, I remember sometime
ago, not very long ago, in the "New York Times"
actually, I read an article about oil companies
going and buying all the lithium fields. I'm
wondering, what do you think that effect on big
industry is going to be for the kind of discoveries
that you guys are working on?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: I'm sorry. You dropped out
just a little bit. Oil companies were?
QUESTION:
Buying up all the lithium fields.
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: Lithium field. Well, I
think, you know, lithium -- I don't know if that's
true or not, but even if it is, I think it's time
we invented our way out of this mess. So let's
get out of dependence on lithium. Let them own
all the lithium fields, but we're not going to
build -- if we want all electric cars, we're not
going to make them out of lithium. It's far too
expensive. The technology is just off -- I'm not
talking about 20, 30 percent. It's off by
about -- depending on whom you believe, and when
you're talking to battery suppliers, hold on to
your wallet -- it's probably off by a factor of
10x and, don't forget, lithium technology was
rolled out in the 1990s. We've got almost 20
years of commercial experience with lithium
batteries. So we're on the bottom of the cost
curve right now, plus we've got to make them
crash-worthy and so on. I think let's make a
battery out of alluminum.
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CHRIS SCHMIDT: One thing I think is amazing is,
in the “Cleaner” show, we went and spent -- David
went and spent some time with Jay Leno, who it
turns out, is one of the foremost authorities or
historians of cars, and they drove around in an
electric car from 1909 which was manufactured
in -- at the time it was manufactured, there were
charging stations all over New York City, had a
range of about 40 or 50 miles. It sounds sort of
familiar to what people are talking about today.
And, you know, one of the things that Jay points
out and others point out is that, you know, a
pound of gasoline holds about as much energy -- is
about a thousand times more efficient than a pound
of the best batteries. So, you know, there's this
tremendous discrepancy in the power of this
energy-storage medium. It's been demonized, but
what if you can make gasoline without pulling
carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the
atmosphere? What if you can take carbon that's
already in the atmosphere and bind it into a
molecule that can run? And, in fact, in the
“Cleaner” show, you met -- did you meet Jake
Heasling [phonetic]? I'm not sure if you were there for
that episode or that segment or not. But there's
a scientist who has an amazing story. He found a
molecule of -- there's a molecule in a plant that
can cure malaria. This guy figured out how to
tweak bacteria to produce the same molecule, then
realized that the molecule was very similar to
diesel, further fiddled with the genome of the
bacteria and now has a bacteria that will bind
carbon out of the atmosphere to make diesel fuel.
And it doesn't have to be refined. It can just be
skimmed right off the top of the water substrate
that it's produced in, put in the tank, and
burned. Zero cost to the environment in terms of
carbon. So it's those kinds of people who are
willing to think outside the box and say, "Maybe
gasoline isn't so bad. Maybe the problem is where
it comes from and how we use it and so forth."
These are the people, like we say, "dirt cheap" and
where are the efficiencies, that I think have some
of the most exciting stories to tell.
DAVID POGUE: Yeah. Leno's car was amazing, and
part of it was the fact that, holy cow, the first
cars were electric. Like, “oh, we're inventing the
future. We're going to have electric cars. No,
dude, you're going way back to the past.” It's a
very cool car. It's kind of like a horse and
buggy without the horse. It looks like a buggy,
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but I have to say, the sound system, uh-uh.
(Laughter.)
CHRIS SCHMIDT: Jay Leno said -- a funny thing he
said to you was -- you know, he said that the car,
because it didn't have to be cranked like the
gasoline cars, was very appealing to women drivers,
who didn't want to have to exert themselves,
because you could break your arm if the thing
backfired and all these things. So the car would
be designed to appeal to a woman, and so it was
very -- he said, "Froo-frooey." So, of course, no
man is going to buy the car at that day, thereby
further undercutting the market for those cars.
It's just crazy.
PAULA S. APSELL:
here.
Two more questions.
One back
QUESTION: While we're moving away from gasoline
and looking towards electric cars, why are people
ignoring the compressed air cars or vehicles?
There are two companies in the world who produce such
vehicles, but nobody seems to be talking about it.
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: The compressed air vehicles
are -- they have their role for short range, but I
think that, in terms of -- it's an infrastructure
question. You know, the thing about liquid fuel
is you can go anywhere and find a fuel station.
With the compressed aired, it's the infrastructure
and also range questions.
QUESTION: But with the compressed air, they're
saying, basically, you pull up and instead of
inflating your tires, you just put it into the
compressed air container. So there's not a
problem.
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: In principle, it's the same,
but the pressures are substantially higher, and
the vessels, in order to contain the compressed
air, it's a question of also safety,
crash-worthiness. The level of complexity involved in
putting something on the road and making it
litigation-proof -- the costs are quite high.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: There is a design for a compressed
air motor, if I remember this correctly, which is
sort of like a hybrid. It runs on gasoline, but
it has a compressed air tank, and it captures --
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you know, it uses the tank to help with braking,
and it captures air and uses the compression to
increase the efficiency of the engine, but that's
the only one I know of.
QUESTION:
Any more questions?
QUESTION: At this point, Dr. Sadoway, I wanted
you to explain your lithium comments a little bit
more as far as the effects of immediate time,
because that's what we're talking about, right now
is meant for the Volt, and so forth, for the
electric cars are lithium batteries. Is that
right?
PAULA S. APSELL:
The volt.
DR. DONALD SADOWAY:
Well --
QUESTION: If you could kind of explain a little
bit more about what's the problem with lithium
batteries? And is it possible to be at least a
temporary solution?
DR. DONALD SADOWAY: Absolutely. Please don't
misunderstand me. I'm all in favor of
electrification, I'm simply making the point that
lithium technology is not cost-affordable enough
for widespread adoption and complete displacement
of petroleum fuels, and let's not forget, when the
Toyota Prius was first put into the market, it was
not lithium ion technology. It was nickel-metal
hydride technology, and that was the technology
that enabled the laptop computer to come into
being in the late '80s and early '90s. So nickelmetal hydride is cheaper, and it's much safer than
lithium ion, but it's about a third less
energy-dense.
It's about a third less energy dense, and so people now
feel obliged to move over to lithium to get the range
extension, and they are essentially taking the hit on
cost. I mean, I can build you an electric car today, but
I can't build it to a Chevy price point. I can build it
to a NASA price point, and that's not what we need. All
right? And so you mentioned Tesla, a fantastic vehicle,
but the price point is a little bit steep for the average
American. So what we are talking about is an energy
storage technology that will allow for electrification at
a price point that the average American can afford
because, otherwise, the impact on the environment is
imperceptible because the only people that can afford the
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car are the rich, and the rich drive late-model cars that
minimally polute anyways.
PAULA S. APSELL:
So here, one last question, quick.
QUESTION: Yes. This is fascinating, and it wasn't
touched on. I first want to say thats so fascinating,
Paula, obviously, a show like this will inspire,
hopefully, youngsters just wondering what they want to do
with the rest of their lives and maybe go to MIT and
explore these sciences and be these great people who will
invent stronger, faster, cleaner stuff. But the people
that you have gone into the lab with, with this show, are
they home-grown scientists, or did you go to places like
India, or were you outsourced?
CHRIS SCHMIDT: Mostly, I mean, 90 percent home-grown, I
would say. We went -- we were in Switzerland. We were
in the U.K. But those weren't -- the U.K., we were not
actually in any lab. So I would say 90, 95 percent
home-grown.
PAULA S. APSELL: So, just in ending, I think that's a
very perceptive question. One thing that I've discovered
through this is, of course, in all of our seasons of
NOVA, we work with a lot of scientists who very admirably
are studying things because they are truly curious to
find them out, and that's very important. That's done
great things. But I have noticed in this field with Don
and other scientists, it's really very inspiring that
they really want to use their science to build a better
world, and you can feel it. It's palpable, and you can't
help but think that if there is a support and if there is
the funding -- and I'm -- you know, as I say, I'm not a
cheerleader, but you just think we are in such a tight
spot. There's such a crisis going on. Funding three out
of eight of the centers, it would be great to spend 1
percent less time on Lindsey Lohan and to see 1 percent
more attention to this kind of thing where Congress is
not understanding the importance of science. And this
field, it's just been very inspiring to work with and
watch on the screen and tell the story of scientists who
really care about the world they live in and want to use
their brains and their talents and their students in
order to do that. Thank you.
DAVID POGUE: And the last inspiring thing is that over
and over -- how many -- 50 scientists -- 50 labs we
visited, the one thing that I kept noticing is they've
all got funding. They are all so excited that -- they
kept -- it's a presidential administration, I think.
There's a new focus on science, and over and over, "Yeah,
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we just got this grant. We are going to develop this.
We are going to bring this to market." It's so
exciting.
CHRIS SCHMIDT: It's public and private funding, too.
It's not just public funding, not just private funding.
PAULA S. APSELL: So thank you all very much for your
interest, for your great questions today, and for coming.
And the show is on in February, "Making Stuff." Watch
for it. Thank you.
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