Science Friday - Music And Technology, Social Critters, Sleep And Genetics. Oct 19, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Mark Ramos Nishita, more popularly known as Money Mark from the Beastie Boys, has created the “Echolodeon.” The custom-built machine converts original piano rolls, created from actual performances by greats like Debussy and Eubey Blake, into MIDI signals routed through modern-day synthesizers. Step aside, honeybees, there’s a new pollinator in town. We talk about the intricate life cycle of bumblebees, whose queens spend most of their life cycles solitary and underground, but then emerge in the spring to single-handedly forage for food, build a nest, and start colonies that eventually grow to number hundreds. Researchers study the behavior of bees and other social insects, and why ant, bee, and spider societies are more than just an amalgam of individuals—but collective behaviors that emerge from the masses. How did you sleep last night? If you’re one of the estimated one in three American adults who gets less than seven hours of sleep per night, you may not want to answer that one. As researchers cement the connection between sleep and health, others are still asking why some people have fewer problems sleeping, and others recover more easily from lost sleep. We'll talk about where our genes come into the picture when it comes to sleep.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato coming to you from the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks, California. I'd like you to consider Beethoven's piano sonata number five. This beautiful piece of music may not seem on the face of it to have much to do with technology, but the development of the piano forte, as they called it back then, was a hugely influential techie innovation, allowing pianists to play expressively soft or loud and to fill a hall with the sounds of the keys. The innovation, of course, didn't stop there. For example, Dr. Robert Moog brought whole orchestras

and strange space-age sounds into people's homes with the Moog synthesizer, which you have right there on our stage and we'll be using it in just a little bit. And my next guest is a musical innovator in his own right, a tinker and maker who rips apart keyboards and electronics, and then rebuilds them in brainy new ways, and he's going to show us one of his creations tonight. I know you've heard his music before, too.

He opened up our program today. He scored David Chang's new TV show, Ugly Delicious. His sounds can be heard on Beck's single, Where It's At. Yeah. And he was, most famously, part of the Beastie Boys. Please welcome. You know him as Money Mark. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hello. It's an honor to be here. How did you get into this stuff? Music and combined with electronic. Okay. Easy story there. My mother is from a family of musicians, and my father was an electronic engineer, and I came out like this. See, we're born with a soldering iron in your hand. That's right. A keyboard in the other hand. Let's talk about music and technology, specifically piano roles, which inspired your latest project. and you brought this machine here tonight, the Echolodian, right? That's what I'm calling it, yes.

And we're going to hear from it a little bit later, but first tell us what it does. Well, this is a piano roll. A few don't know what a piano roll is. It's a piece of parchment, paper, and it has holes on it. And a tracker bar reads the holes, and it's all pneumatic. There are little hoses, and each one of these dots is a note on the piano. And eventually all that air pressure makes a bellow move and the hammer will hit the appropriate key. Better than you talking about it. Let's go show it.

I'm going to come over here with you. So the piano's on, digital piano. So in this version, I thought that an old piano roll, music that we really can't hear or listen to without the interface, I thought to make a digital interface for it. So this will read the piano roll. And it will play out of that synthesizer and out of that synthesizer. This beautiful Polymog, one brand new synthesizer. If you remember, Wendy Carlos made this beautiful Switched-on Bach, right?

I have that album. Oh, yeah. I have two copies so I can beat Juggle with him. So, yeah, let's turn it on and listen to... This is a role from U.B. Blake. These are roles called Reproduction Roles, and they were played by the composers. and so many of these exist.

You should have George Gershwin actually playing Rhapsody in Blue and creating the holes in there, and when you replay it, it's actually how he played it. Exactly. It's actually a MIDI file, musical instrument digital interface. So MIDI was invented not in 1979 by Ikataro Kakehashi and Dave Smith. It was invented by some authors.

I don't even know who those authors are. There were so many people, their minds are, put together and they were coming up with cool and crazy stuff way back then 100 years ago. Speaking of cool let's see how it works. Okay so the air pressure I use a vacuum pump back here. I cheat a little bit there so now there's air pressure inside this whole system. There's valves, a bunch of valves in there and the holes are going to go by the tracker bar and it's going to play through these synthesizers. Let's hear the piano sound so we can hear how it kind of just sounds as a piano. Let's hear it, please. Uh-huh. There you go. See, when the holes go by, the

tracker bar, it informs this brain, it kind of processes it and sends it into a MIDI cable. And there's a little sweep that U.B. Blake did. This is kind of the intro of the song. Fun. So now, from here, we can change these sounds. Let's listen to U.B. Blake playing How about a Fender Rhodes? How's that? And that's a beautiful thing about it is I can go back and forth with it. Because it's tactile, I can touch it. Now let's hear another sound here.

How about a wild synthesizer sound like this? Well, that sounds so wild, but let's listen to it like that. It's going to be beautiful. So technically you can make the beauty play, you know, electronic synthesizer with this thing. Exactly, that's the point. So my idea was to, let's fade out here, my idea was to get these rolls

and put them through this machine, and let's make some new music. And also, let's make a public space project out of it. Now, this idea of using punched roll is not really a brand new idea, is it? No, it really isn't. Mechanical music goes back a couple hundred years. There were music boxes, beautiful ones.

But the punch card idea came from Jaquard, who made a loom, like this rug would have been programmed with punch cards, with holes in these cards. And the cards would be a program of the design that he would create. And that same design could be created over and over and over. Let's go sit down and talk some more. So then you had the punch cards that sort of morphed into the piano rolls and into other kinds of things. Yeah, right. and computers and stuff like... Yeah, hopefully I can get the crowd

to help me find roles and I'm going to publish the plans of that machine so people can make them. It's not very hard to make them. And all my projects are going to be open sourced and that's my... I mean, I feel like that's the only way to go. You brought a couple of little music toys with you tonight

for all the young makers out there. Yes, a couple of things. One that has a rhythm and then one that makes a melody and it's super simple. Show us what you got there. My father wanted to be part of my music life. I was kind of taken after my mom's family, like, becoming a musician. But he was insistent on being involved here.

Like, he gave me this record, and it's a, like, how to code the easy way. And it's like, there's some good beats on this record right here. A lot of dots and dashes and dits. It looks like about 1962 that has covered and had to play Morris Code. So he actually got me a paddle. So you have a Morse Cope? You know when you were into electronics back then, you were really kind of into ham radios too

because they kind of put everything together. Yeah, the ham's in the audience. See that? Three people clapping for that. It's enough. No, I'm going to hang out with you guys afterwards. So he made this pocket radio. This isn't the actual radio,

but I use this to demo it because it won't run out of batteries. It's a wind-up radio. Yeah, it's a wind-up radio. And you kind of just have on and off right here. Right? I mean... Cool.

That's cool. There's my beat machine right there. I was never bored. You don't need a fancy instrument. And then this microphone that you might just find at a thrift store. Right. A little microphone, a battery operated amplifier. Create melodies with feedback.

And I know Jimmy Hendrix was famous for feedback, right? It's like a there you go. It's like a... Yeah, my binary. on and off is the switch right here. That's cool. That's cool. That's really cool.

I have a question from the audience on this side. How does the beat of a music note affect how you act to it? Oh, I tell you the kids ask the best questions. So the question is, how does the beat know? Like it has a brain, right? Oh How does it Control how you react to it

You know Dr. Mogue would say That all of the machines that he created Were his friends And it had Kind of its own life And When you interacted with it

You were kind of like with your friend And the energy that you were Putting into it Was coming directly back to you That's a really cool question Hmm That's an eternal question Right?

there. I'm going to have to put that in my book. Okay, let's see if we can get... But if you want to play the beat machine later, I'll let you. That's a good idea. Yes. I can't top that question, but thank you so much, first of all, for your appreciation of sound and your proliferation of the spirit of play with music.

I really appreciate that. Thank you. What is your experience and our interest in applying these kinds of things to therapy, especially as it goes for PHST and chronically traumatized industries. Absolutely. That's a great question. I have an amazing answer for that.

One of my music heroes was Harold Rhodes. It's a famous keyboard, the Rhodes piano. Before it became Fender Rhodes, Harold Rhodes invented that electric piano to do therapy for the soldiers after the war. He was doing piano therapy at his home, and then he realized it would be easier to put some kind of keyboard in his truck and take it to the person's home or whatever they were. And that's how he invented this electric keyboard. And this would be an amazing thing to actually kind of reinstate. And occasionally I find a broken keyboard and a thrift store and buy it. And I have a dozen or so just wading in the wings to give to people.

I do. I give them to people. And if I see somebody who is kind of wandering, I would just give them a keyboard. Say, hey, try to mess around with this thing. That's great. It's so great to have a geek like yourself. Musical geek on the program. I'm usually the lonely geek, but I'm very happy to have you on stage with the Money Market, musician, ultimate geek maker based in Los Angeles. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. It's an honor to be here.

After the break, the social lives of bees, ants, and even spiders, what it takes to be a queen. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks, California. Think about bees and ants and spiders. Tiny as they are, they're all vital parts of our ecosystem, whether as food or pollinators or predators. And they have another thing in common.

Complex social behavior. Think about the term hive mind, right? This idea that all the individuals in a group are working, together to keep each other alive in this crazy world. But how well does that actually work out? What factors make a colony more or less successful? And can individual behavior still tilt the hand of fate for the whole group? Or are the hives indeed legion?

My next guest looked at these questions. Hollis Woodard is an associate professor at UC Riverside, studying the lives of bumblebees. And Noah Pinterwoman is an associate professor at UCLA, looking at the social behavior of bees, ants, and even spiders. Dr. Woodard you know, if you ask everybody, they'll tell you that honeybees get all the attention, right? But you gravitated to bumblebees. Why was that? Well, I actually did my PhD in a honeybee lab, but I went rogue and worked on bumblebee instead. I started my PhD in 2006,

which is the year that the honeybee genome was sequenced. And when it was sequenced, we suddenly had this toolkit that we could use to answer all kinds of. kinds of really cool molecular questions and honeybees. And so I sort of fell in love with bumblebees and wanted to develop something similar for them. And compared to honeybees, bumblebees have a very different like cycle, right? How do the colonies get started? First, honeybees, they're what we call perennially social, so they're always social. There's never a point in their life, in the life of a honeybee queen where she's living on her own. But bumblebees are different. They have an annually social life cycle where queens in the late summer season new queens will emerge in the colony and these queens

will leave the nest on their own and they'll go off and mate and they overwinter all completely on their own and then in the spring these queens have to crawl out of their overwintering spots and start their own nests so they're spending most of their life living on their own and so even though they're social insects and they have queens and workers and this sort of complex social behavior, they're also, in a sense, living like solitary insects for part of their life cycle, too. And you brought a nest to show us what they look like. I did, yeah. So you'll notice from the get-go that it looks a lot different than a honeybee nest.

It's really interesting because, to the best of our knowledge, honeybees and bumblebees, they actually share a common origin of sociology. So we think that the ancestor to both of these bee groups, They shared an ancestor about 100 million years ago, and we think that that ancestor was social. But since that time, you know, a lot can happen in 100 million years. And so they've evolved these differences. And today they look really different, the way they nest, the way that they live. Dr. Pintuolman, meanwhile, honeybees are extremely social all the time, right?

Yes, they are. And we tend to confuse the two kinds of bees as having equals lifestyles all the time. We really, well, it's a bee. It's a bee. Right. Well, I consider honeybees as ants with wings. My lab actually studies ants. We do a little bit of work on honeybees, but mostly focus on the ants.

And so some of our work on honeybees is looking at how they forage and how different individuals in a colony contribute to foraging behavior of the colony as a whole. You brought some ants with you, a jar of ants? These are a harvester ants from here in California. It looks like stuff I see on the sidewalk. They're slightly larger than what you'd say. They are a little bit. They look longer.

They're a bit, yeah. and they're less squishy than the ones you'd see on the sidewalk. And why are you interested in them? So these are the true harvester and terseur and drag. And the nice thing about this particular species is that they tend to move between nest sites. So a colony of up to 10,000 individuals will just when they decide to pick up

and move from one nest site to another. And it turns out that the structure of the nest it determines how quickly they forage and how quickly they call their friends to a food. So another thing I brought here is a cast of a nest. You need to flip it over. It was on its head. Oh, so it hangs just like that. That's a cast of an ant's nest.

Yes. Is that like pouring plaster of Paris? It's exactly plaster of Paris from Home Depot. How far does that go down? Is this the whole length? No, that's just the top part. It's about six to eight inches long it looks. I'm just describing it for our audience, but it could go much deeper than that. Yeah.

So you can pour down other materials. We did one cast with zinc, which is a type of metal that when you heat it up, it's like water. And so it flows down much deeper. And then when it hardens, it's easier to dig around and it won't break like the plaster. And so we can see that it goes much, much deeper, probably a few feet down. And it depends on the environment, too. So in the environment where I study these, there's a lot of rocks. So that determines how deep they can go.

Hollis, there's so much focus on queen bumblebees. What about the drones and the workers? Can they make a difference in whether a colony succeeds? Not the drones. So the drones don't do too much for the colony itself. They don't do much work. But the workers are definitely important to you. We're focusing mostly on Queens in my lab

because they have this part of their life that they're living on their own. And we've done a few studies now that show that queens are actually very sensitive during that stage. So it's an important point to study. Something that when I was reading about this, that was really amazing is that when we talk about honeybees,

we know that to make a queen, they're fed what's something called royal jelly. But that's not what the bumblebees do. How do you make a queen? Well, for the most part, we don't know. What we do know is that it looks, we know what happens during larval development. So just like in honeybees,

there's at some point during really early larval development where a female larvae, she can start becoming a queen or a worker. And if you think about the implication, for that. What will happen to her and what she might do in her life is completely different, depending on this one or the other sort of trajectory. And we know it has something to do with food in bumblebees. We know that it's something that they're either getting more food or they're getting more food at a very specific point. But we think that there are probably also factors in the regurgitate just like there are in honeybees in bumblebees and people just haven't looked for them yet.

Wow, interesting. Lots of questions from the audience. Let's start right over there on the right side. Yes, go ahead, please. Hi. My mom is allergic to bees. I was wondering if there was any way that you could extract the DNA from the bees and use it to help her heal her when she gets stung. That is a great question. I'm allergic to bees too. Can I back that up for a second? You work with bees and you're allergic to? So I'm allergic to honeybees, but not bumble bees. That's a really great question. So the things that are in the venom that caused the terrible reaction that your mom would get if she were stung by a bee and me too, a lot of those components are encoded by the genome of the bees. And so if we sequence it and we learn more about what those factors are and how they trigger an immune response, I bet there are researchers working on that to try to figure out how we can understand how the two things, the immune system and the human and the venom and the bee interact.

Interesting. Great question. Yeah, great question. Noah, ants also live in big groups with a queen. How are their lives different from something like a honeybee? Well, there's a lot of species of ants, so there's different types of sociality. And there's some similarities and some differences. First of all, many of them live underground, whereas bees will put their hives inside of three cavities. And so that's one difference, for example. There are interesting similarities, for example, both honeybees and some species of ants will relocate from one

nest site to another. So honeybees will go and look for a new nest site and kind of the way, the shape of the entrance of the cavity that they find and the size of the cavity will determine whether or not they're going to go there. And certain other ants will, there's a species of frog ants that will look for certain crevacies that, again, have small entrances and are dark places. So there's some similarities and some differences. I think the size is one thing. There's some species that have in colonies that are only up to, you know, 50 or 100. And then there's some that are thousands, tens of thousands, and even up to millions. So a leaf-cutter colony can be up to a million individuals.

And just in time for Halloween, I know that you also study social spiders. What are social spiders? So of the about more than 40,000 species of spiders, only about 40 species or so are social. And what happens is they live in groups. And the reason we think they live in these groups is so that they can capture prey that's larger. than them. And so they cooperately build these kind of retreat structures where they live and they

raise their offspring together. So what you see behind me are a bunch of spider moms. They're actually, each one is probably the size of a centimeter or a centimeter half, so half an inch or so. It's just taken with a macro lens. And the small individuals are their babies that hatched from their egg sacks. And so they take care of all these babies together. What they're standing on is basically a little nest that they built, and then they build another web that's what we call a capture web, and so that can go basically on a whole acacia tree, and that's where they'll capture the food, and so usually large things get caught in these, and so you'll see a bunch of spiders all come out from the retreat, and each individual will take a different piece of the insect

that they're capturing and start injecting venom, and then they'll all come and just eat it together. You know, we don't see these. Are these around us but we just don't see them? So there is some in the southeast of the U.S. This particular species is from southern Africa, so from South Africa and Namibia. There are species in South America, but none that I know of around California. You know, it's hard to imagine individual spiders or insects having personalities,

but you're finding that some of them have individual personnel, like how? Right. So a big part of what my lab does is look at personality of insects and arthropods like spiders. So we find that spiders vary in how they behave. And what we do is basically we put them in a little box just like this one. And we puff air on them with one of these nose cleaning bulbs that if you had a baby, you would know what that is. Basically you puff two little puffs of air on them,

and they'll huddle and stop moving for a little bit. And we'll just measure how long it takes them to recover from this. And so the ones that recover very quickly, we consider as bold individuals, the one that take a long time, up to 10 minutes, we consider shy. And it turns out that if you look in a colony, most individuals are shy,

but there's a few individuals that are very bold. And so it turns out that these bold individuals have a disproportionate influence on what the group does as a whole. So we can take a grip of shy, individuals and we can test how quickly they attack prey. And attacking prey, the way we measure it is basically put a little piece of paper in their capture web and we vibrate it. And so they think it's an insect that got caught in it.

And so they'll start coming to it and we count how many spiders come out to it and how quickly they do this. And so a group of all shy will take a long time. They won't send as many individuals. But as soon as you put just one bold individual in the group, all of a sudden they'll be much more responsive to this prey. Is there such a thing as an alpha spider, you know? So we call them keystone individuals.

There is. That's what we called him, because they have a disproportionate influence on the behavior of the group. Wow. Let's go over to a question over here, yes. Back in the beginning, I heard you talking about feeding the larvae, anything you want in the future, and seeing which qualities make a queen. What would you do if you hypothetically found which food made a queen? I think what we want to do first is to really show in an experiment that something is triggering a larva to become a queen.

You really need to do experiments where you can take it out and separate it from everything else and just feed it to a larva and show that it becomes a queen. So first of all, we want to be able to do that. And then we imagine a possible scenario where we can create queens on our own in the lab. And one of the problems with bumblebees is that we really only intensively manage one. species here in the U.S. for pollination, but I told you we have 50 species. So we, it would be more sustainable potentially if we weren't moving the same species of bumblebee all over the U.S. for pollination. So it would be great if we could rear new species. But one of the limitations to that is it's hard for some species that you rear in the lab to make queens. And so

if we know how it works and we could control it, maybe we could develop new species for for pollination that are local, so we're not shipping them around and things like that. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Is it true that you want to build a barfing robot? We do. What does that mean a barfing robot? So bumblevies, you know, I think it's so incredible that they feed one another. And the behavior is really interesting. It's very sort of intimate and social. But if we want to study what it is in the food that influences development, we need a system developed where a bee isn't delivering the food. We need to be able to deliver the food.

And so the robot that we're trying to develop is something that would actually would almost have like a little arm, and it could move around, and it could dispense little bits of food to larvae to rear them outside of the nest in vitro. If we had a system like that, we could do things like test with large sample sizes how toxic certain pesticides are, or how certain types of plant pollen, impact the growth and health of bumble bee larvae. So there are a lot of questions we can't answer right now because we don't have a nice sort of standardized delivery system.

Interesting point. And just to wrap up, Noah, what's the practical use of understanding insect behavior? Would it help us understand something what better? Great. So one of the lines of research that my lab has been pursuing recently is looking how the architecture of the nest influences the way that the ants behave collectively. And so one of the things we find is that, you know, the way that the chambers are organized and the tunnels are organized actually influences how they forage in their foraging behavior. And recently I collaborated with some architects and social scientists who are also

interested in these ideas of how the built environment influences teamwork and how humans work together. And so it's interesting, even though, as we said earlier, humans and ants have very different perceptions of the world. Obviously, ants, you know, they live in these dark environments and don't see much and humans are very attuned to light. There are some similarities that we can draw between those. And ant system is a system where you can manipulate things and adjust and you can move ants from one structure to another, which is more difficult to do with people. And so potentially by using this more simple system, you can learn things about maybe how to design robots to work together and how to design spaces for people to build better teamwork and so on.

All right. We'll stay tuned. See what happens. Hollis Woodard is an associate professor at UC Riverside and Noah Pinterwoman is an associate professor at UCLA. Thank you. Thank you both for joining us today. And we have a video of Hollis's bumblebee research on our website at ScienceFrauday.com

slash bumblebees. After the break, we spend a third of our lives sleeping. Well, we hope we do because lose out on precious Z's and it's bad news for your health. But how much of that do your genes decide? Taking us to the break, our musical guest for the evening, Money Mark. You think no one understands the word you say. But I do your beautiful black butterfly. Black butterfly.

Black butterfly Without you There are no other colors It's true Yes, it's true My black butterfly Black butterfly This is Science Friday

From WNYC Studios You go Where the wind blow Return This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks, California. Back in the good old days of black and white television, which some of you may remember, yeah? Remember how the family gathered around that big boxy TV set? Everybody had one. They watched whatever they found on maybe five channels you had to choose from.

And then you had cable and you had an unlimited scroll of hundreds of channels. We've got cooking shows, we had reality TV, news, old movies. And if that wasn't in a variety along came YouTube and video apps, allowing the whole family to watch, but not together, right? They're not sitting around that TV anymore. They're on their smartphones watching a limitless number of items. But I want you to now imagine the possible future of video entertainment. Maybe instead of searching for something, someone else,

has made, you're going to just type in a few terms of interest, have your phone scan the photos of your loved ones in your library, and maybe you will spit out a completely customized video, a virtual world populated by people that you know, and they are the stars of the video. Sounds strange, sound intriguing, sounds scary. My next guest says it could happen, and he's designing some of the technology to get us there. Howley is the CEO of Pinscreen and Professor and Director of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Welcome, Science Friday.

Thanks for having me. Nice to have you. I want to go back a bit in history first, way back when Science Friday used to broadcast every show in the virtual world called Second Life. Do you remember Second Life? Yeah, I do. I had my own avatar named Ira Flatley.

I don't know why it came like that, but things have come away since then, and we are now in a whole different world. Catch us up on where we are. Yeah, I think in the past few years there's a couple of things that I've changed. I think, first of all, I think graphics performance has changed a lot. You can probably tell from video games that things get to look more and more realistic, and sometimes you can't really tell, is my TV on, or is it actually a video game, that kids are playing.

And the second thing is also this entire movement with virtual reality, augmented reality, where suddenly we're no longer watching a two-dimensional, you know, scene. We get immersed into it, right? So the idea is really to simulate the physical environment as if we were actually in there. Well, what first got you really interested

in virtual reality and CGI, as they call it? Oh, that goes way back. So, you know, over 30 years ago. So, you know, my dad brought back, you know, a computer. It was an old Commodore 64. I had one of those. Okay. Yeah, Commodore 64.

Get hooked up to your TV set. Right. Exactly. So, you know, I was like, you know, playing video games and then creating little programs. But then I think in the 90s, you know, I watched two movies, right? One of them is Terminator 2. The other one is Jurassic Park and then you suddenly get to see something that

you can't really tell the difference of real or not real. And this whole virtual content is really changing everything. And that's what you do now. You work to create photorealistic avatars, on-screen avatars that look like real humans. Right. One of the hardest things

actually to do when you're working in the field of computer graphics and computer vision is how do you create a digital version of your or of any humans. We are especially very sensitive to how we look like. We can tell if someone looks sick or not. And if you want to recreate a digital human,

that's one of the hardest things to do. And you use something called face swapping. Right. That's kind of cool. Explain what that is. Okay, so basically face swapping consists of the following. Imagine Mission Impossible where they had an actual physical mask. Here, everything is digital.

All you need to do is look into a webcam or your iPhone camera. And then what you can do is you can reenact as someone else, as me, for example. There must be a dark side to this. Unfortunately, there is. Although we didn't develop these type of technologies to fool people. I mean, we're trying to fool them in a different way like anyone in visual effects. But the initial goal was to develop these type of virtual humans to change the way we would communicate in the future, right? We want to see, you know, people could talk remotely as if

they were actually there. And the other applications are just gaming, right? Imagine you can play games with yourself in it or your friends in it. And one of the hardest things to do about making someone's face is creating the tiny little defects and pot marks and whatever on our faces. And you're working toward actually make a smooth face really look like a real face. Right. Actually, one of the hardest things to create, you know, about creating virtual humans is that you have to create all the digital models that are simulating how, you know, light interacts with the skin. You have to capture all the details of your face. And from a single picture, you don't have all this information.

You have to turn it into 3D. You have to simulate how it would interact with the light around you. The lighting is important because you could make light for many days. direction. Right. You could like the face. Exactly, because you need to look like you're in a new virtual environment. And the way we sold this is that we just have massive amounts of data about human faces and then train a model to simulate this. Now, I've seen some demonstrations of this and where it is so real looking, I mentioned the dark side a little bit, where you could actually impersonate politicians and have them really people believing that that's what they're saying.

That's right. And there's also. this problem right now, and a lot of people talk about it in the news as well, about, you know, all these deep fakes, all these technologies that are out there and also accessible to people in order to create, you know, malicious information that are manipulated. If I were smart enough, which I'm not, and I looked at one of your composites, your face recognition, could I tell if it was fake or real by going inside it? Yeah, you can definitely tell right now with the naked eye almost that's, you know, this has been digitally manipulated. But, you know, all these technologies are also very new.

So, you know, in a year or two, we might be in a point where it's impossible to tell the difference. Impossible. Yeah. Wow, that's scary. Another thing that's interesting about this is a few years ago, we were out here and we were talking with some actors. And we talked with an actor from Avatar, the movie Avatar. and he once said to us that he has enough scans of his face and body that were done, that they could make movies with him long after he was dead.

Is that true? Is that where we're heading with somehow how accurate this stuff is? For sure, right? I think right now the technology is not there to fully replace a human, but certainly, as I said before, in a couple of years, we'll be able to do this. And there are also examples. If you put enough resources and money, you can, you know, have a, sufficiently performant pipeline, especially in the VFX industry, where you have

deceased actors, one good examples in the movie, Furious 7, where Paul Walker died in a car accident. They were able to make hundreds of shots of him in the movie without having him being the actor. Oh, okay, very interesting. Let's go over here on the right. Yes. Pleasure to meet you. Me and my brother are a big fan of virtual reality, anything computer-related. I just had a question about, could there be any medical application? applications to this stuff, like facial reconstruction or virtual therapy to help people? Yeah, there's actually a lot of applications that are related to the face. One of them is basically just about analyzing the face, right?

So when you go to the doctor, when they look at your face, they can already tell, well, you know, how are you behaving, et cetera. In the long term, for example, for, you know, cancer treatment, you know, these type of areas, one of the things is you can have a quorum. quantitative way to measure, you know, pain and all these things. And as a matter of fact, at USCICT, one of the research areas is really about analyzing the behavior of, you know, war fighters who are coming back and suffer from PTSD. So if you have a quantitative way of analyzing your face, this is almost like the first step when we built the 3D avatars. We're basically looking at

the shape of your face, the movements. And by having the way, the ability to analyze this, you have a more accurate way of assessing if certain treatments work, if a person is healthy or not. I know there are already avatars on Instagram with over a million followers. The avatar has a million followers. We have one here on the screen. Little Michaela, tell us about her. Well, she's a mystery, right?

But Little Michaela is like one of the most successful CJ influencers. She's totally phony. She's a totally made-up figure. Absolutely. And she's got over a million followers. Virtual, right? And I think this is a really interesting new phenomenon where you have, you know, robots, virtual avatars that are emerging

and contributing to social media in a way that people would follow her, would want to interact with her. And I think this is really the beginning. At some point, we'll have chatbots that would react to people. She's already starting to, you know, carry, brands and so they're brand oh they're using her for advertising

right i understand that in japan they've even taken it a step further something called v-tubers that's a v-tuber v-tuber is basically imagine these anime style cartoons where you basically interacting with a cartoon on either

you know youtube or something that has live streaming capabilities and then they basically have you know an audience and one thing that is really interesting is that they also perform concerts and you have people who wear VR headsets and pay tickets and are attending, you know, a virtual concert with someone that is performing as someone else. Let's talk about the last question I have, which we always talk about when we're talking about

CGI or facial stuff. And it's something called the uncanny valley. And this is sort of an uncomfortable feeling that people get looking at something they see as a robot and it's human-like, but not close enough to be a human like? And it makes people feel a little queasy about it. Do you face that problem? Yeah, that's basically a way to measure our success in some ways. So basically the uncanny valley is when you try to replicate a photorealistic human and you try to get as real as possible.

And if you're not quite there, there's always something very disturbing about the person. It may look, you know, freaky. It may look like, you know, a zombie. And the Holy Grail is basically to cross the person. the Uncanny Valley so that you have the ability to generate a human that you can fool us and believe it's an actual person. Thank you, Hal. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today.

Howley is the CEO of Pinscreen, Professor and Director of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the Civic Arts Plaza in Thousand Oaks, California. Yeah. How did you sleep last night? Yeah, me neither. Something about being in the wrong time zone always catches me off guard. But I am not the only one I can see from the audience. Statistics about sleep in the United States, among other countries, aren't great. Fewer than two-thirds of us are getting the recommended seven hours per night, and you've probably heard by now that it's a bad idea to consistently lose Zs. Chronic health problems, acute cognitive. problems, the whole shebang. But it is our ability to sleep, more than just a product of our habits or schedules. Could there be genes at work? My next guest says the answer is yes. He's on the hunt for genes that regulate how well we sleep and how well we recover from lost sleep. And he's found

one of these genes in a surprising place nowhere near the brain. Welcome Dr. Katama Paul, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology and Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Thank you. Is that right? You need to get seven hours of sleep a night. That's what the usual requirement is? Yes, for the majority of long-term studies that have looked have found that if you get significantly less or significantly more than seven to eight point five hours a night, than that doesn't work out well for you in terms.

I'm in a lot of trouble. Because I get like six. If I'm lucky, I get seven. I know someone who gets two hours a night and seems to be doing fine with that, but you're saying that's not. Well, no, that's what I say. In all honesty, I'm in the six-hour crowd myself.

Why do we need to sleep in the first place? That's one of the biggest questions, actually, is why. It's one of the reasons I have a job, actually. What we do know is that if you don't sleep at a, that it impairs your health. So there are kind of two categories of consequences if you're not getting sufficient sleep every day. The first are what we consider short term. So many of you may stay up tonight after you leave here. You may go hang out to a party or you just may be up with the kids. Not get enough sleep tomorrow. Your memory may not work as well. You may have a harder time focusing on things. You may make more errors when you try to do things that you normally do. Those tend to be. be cognitive effects. There are more longer-term effects. If you continue daily on a regular basis, not getting enough sleep, then there are health consequences. It impairs your immune system,

which makes you at a higher risk for infectious diseases. And it also increases your risk for chronic diseases, like heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. I mentioned about genetics and sleep. What is there about genes? Are they involved in sleeping? Interestingly enough, I think genes are pretty much involved in everything we do. Well, what does it, about sleep, would our genes control? Would it be the hour, the number of hours, the quality? What are the genes doing? So that's what we're trying to figure out.

The interesting thing when you're talking about genes is you're not just talking about how genes are expressed, but you're talking about how they interact with the environment. So I always like to point out the study of genetics is the study of genes in their expression, but also the study of the environment. If you want to understand how genes work, then it's a pretty smart idea to try to understand how the environment works. I'm from a kind of line of research that has shown that genes play an important role in timing sleep. The time of day you prefer to sleep, the time of day you prefer to wake up. But they also play an important role in consolidating sleep.

We are awake most of the day. We're asleep most of the night. What we're trying to understand are what genes are responsible for the restorative properties of sleep. the things about sleep that preserve your memory and your ability to focus, and the things about sleep that improve your health. The genes that regulate these aspects of sleep are still largely unknown, and that's what my research is focused on. Now, what fascinated me about reading about your research also

was that these genes that help with or control sleep are not in our brains. They're not in our heads? Well, they're everywhere. Yeah. They're expressed in the brain. They're expressed in the body. The gene that I focused on in my most recent study, B111, is expressed in the majority of tissues in which we have analyzed.

So BMOA 1 is what's known as a clock gene. You have clocks in every cell in your body. Very real clocks. In order for something to be characterized as a clock, there has to be an input mechanism to set it. There has to be an endogenous timing mechanism, like gears. I talk to my students about gears on the clock. Most of them don't know what clock gears are.

So I talk about the electronic mechanism in their phones that keep time. And there's an output mechanism that allows you to tell the time. The majority of cells in your body have these clocks, and we know that these clocks regulate sleep. For a long time, we've been very interested in how these clocks have regulated sleep. So we've looked primarily in the brain because the clock that regulates most of your behaviors in the brain and most of the things that drive your sleeper in the brain. But what we found quite surprisingly was that, that the clocks in the skeletal muscle can speak to sleep regulatory areas in the brain and tell your

brain how to sleep. More importantly, how to recover from sleep loss. What do you mean how to recover? So the mechanism we study is sleep homeostasis. It kind of works like a thermostat. If you set a thermostat to a certain temperature, if it goes too low, it turns the heat on. Your thermostat turns the heat on. If it goes too high, your thermostat turns the air on. Your sleep processes work similar. There's a certain amount of sleep that you need to function correctly every day. If you don't get enough sleep, your body will try to compensate by having you sleep more. If you get too much sleep, it will go in the other direction. The clock is the same as the clock on your thermostat. In the morning, it sets to go to one temperature, and the evening it sets to go to another. It works the same

way in our bodies. In the morning, your clock tells you to wake up, and the evening your clock tells you to go to sleep. For a long time, we've suspected that the clock mechanisms are more involved in the homeostatic mechanisms that allow you to recover from sleep loss. And what we're finding in my research and the research of many that have come before me is that the genes that are like the gears on the clock, the genes that are responsible for timing also play a role in your ability to recover from sleep loss. So when you say the clock, is that the circadian rhythm we've been talking about? That's the circadian clock that It regulates your daily rhythms of behavior and physiology.

So we have a 24-hour light dark cycle. Sun comes up in the morning, goes down in night. Synchronizes your clock. But if you were in a consistent lighting environment, constant darkness or constant light, that clock would still continue to oscillate. It has an endogenous timing mechanism. And it would oscillate at a period or frequency close to 24 hours. Question over here.

Yes. I have a question about napping. As I'm getting older, I'm discovering that it's a really cool thing to have a nap. How might that play with the clock that you're speaking of in the cells? So napping is a very interesting phenomenon. Big fan of it, by the way. Do you imbibe it yourself, the nap? Oh, I do.

One of the great things about being a sleep researcher is if I take a nap in my office in the afternoon, no one can complain. You can write it off. I know what I'm doing. This is research. But you're saying napping is important? Napping is very important if you're not getting daily sufficient sleep. And most of us to have children or have jobs or live in a busy environment may not be getting sufficient sleep. So if you're not, then getting an afternoon nap, an hour is usually what's about recommended. But anything from a half hour to an hour is healthy.

However, if you are getting sufficient sleep and you're still napping, that goes into hypersomnia, which is, like I said, getting sleep too much. And that suggests that there may be an issue. However, in relation to the clock, my lab is currently conducting studies to determine if the ideal time for napping is driven by clock mechanisms, especially those of us that get sleepier in the afternoons, sometimes between one or three, which is currently the same time of the course I'm teaching right now. Oh, gosh. So I have to be pretty animated when I'm teaching. But you can't blame them either. Exactly right. That's why I don't try.

I understand, but that just means I have to work harder to keep them awake. Let me go to the questions on this side. Yes. Hi, my question is about the adolescent brain and sleep. Ever since I was in high school, we were talking about shifting the start time for high schoolers to be later in the day. Because, yes. And as a parent, I definitely want that to happen because getting my kids up in the morning, before noon is a challenge.

So how does your study affect our decision-making and forming our society in that arena? So the quickest way to answer your question is that my study doesn't affect that at all. But there's a good reason for that. And the reason for that is because the science behind adolescent sleeping and timing, the fact that adolescent masturbation is associated

with the delay in circadian rhythms is well known. since I first came into this profession, but what you bring up as a great point about the ability of scientists to affect public policy. You know, I can keep you here for a very long time talking about the mechanisms that drive adolescent sleep. But in answer to your question, there are very renowned researchers that have put forth myriad of evidence showing that delaying start times during adolescent maturation would improve the majority of outcomes in an educational environment. The trick is how do you convince the policy makers? Is there a gender difference in how people sleep? So first of all, sleep is a complicated process. You know, we like to think about sleep

as we go home tonight, we put our heads on a pillow, we wake up in the morning. But if you think about your entire life and how you slept at different stages of your life and how are you going to sleep in different stages of your life, you recognize the sleep is a very complicated process. For circadian timing, males throughout the lifespan tend to be a little bit delayed. But unfortunately, if you don't have enough timing, then we can't talk about it. Because one of the biggest issues with sex differences in sleep is that for the majority of the history of sleep research, women haven't been included in studies and clinical studies and females. There's been a small amount of females included in basic research studies.

So when you're asking about sex differences, you're asking about reproductive processes and how they occurred during the lifespan. And quite frankly, since sleep has to be so dynamic in women who have to sleep during pregnancy, during postpartum recovery, during a menstrual cycle, during menopause, and the fact that we haven't included cohorts of these women in the majority of clinical studies, we really are just, unfortunately, cracking open the egg of how women and men sleep differently over their lifespan. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're here. Yes, with Katama Paul of UCLA.

See if we have time for a couple more questions. Let's go over this side. Hi, thank you for your time. The question has to do with atypical sleep patterns and perhaps gene mutation. And is this studied in terms of people who don't have a typical sleep pattern, gene expression, gene mutation,

and what impact that may have? Thank you. Yes, on the majority of clinical studies. First of all, atypical is a word I try to avoid. I recognize its value. But what we're beginning to recognize is that some of the gene, I talked about B-MAL earlier, but some of its partners in the molecular clock that generates your rhythms have what we call polymorphisms, which are alleles that are expressed in different members of the population.

Exactly right. Or mutations that affect a variety of sleep characteristics. This is actually one of the. most active areas of sleep research right now. So it goes back to the question you asked at the beginning as to how much sleep is enough for each one of us. It's only been in the past decade that we've identified these genetic mutations and how they encode sleep amount and a variety of other sleep traits. So we're really only beginning to understand whether the amount of time you sleep is genetically generated if you're predisposed to sleeping a certain amount of time. And if

If so, how the environment interacts with that predisposition. So in answer to your question, there are several labs that are investigating those areas right now, but we're still at the beginning of answering those questions. I have one final question for you. I'm what I would call a night person. I like to stay up late, go to bed late. I know there are a lot of people who are morning people. You know who you are out there, right?

Is this a genetic thing, too? Is there a genetic, you know, about going to bed late, staying up? going to bed early? So this is something that we call chronotype. Chronotype. And yes, it is to a large degree genetically regulated. I'm a morning person. We're not getting along very well. I tried to do what Mark did earlier when I was

a young person, but the inability to stay of light kill that side of the career. So now I'm in the lab. But yes, the very genes that regulate your chronotype, whether you're a morning person or an evening person, are a lot of the genes that also determine a lot of your other sleep traits.

So when we talked earlier about adolescents delaying as they mature, it's those genes that regulate those mechanisms. Is there any kind of blood test yet that tells us about our sleep needs or what kind of sleeper we are or deficiency? Not yet, but I don't think I would be exaggerating if I said that that would be right now among the holy grails of sleep research. That is a simple blood test. A biomarker to determine whether you've sufficiently slept or not. If you can imagine when it comes to transportation errors and accidents, industrial accidents, accidents that occur in medical environments, the amount of errors that result from not gaining adequate sleep, if there were some method for us to determine whether or not you've had adequate sleep,

it would potentially lead to a dramatic reduction in errors, costs associated with those errors, and even lives. Actually, many of the major funding agencies have set a priority in trying to pursue a biomarker or a blood test. Sobriety test tends to be a word used for sleep. Fascinating. Thank you very much, Dr. Paul. Katama Paul, Associate Professor of Integrative Biology and Physiology at UCLA. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you. That's about all the time. We have our heartfelt thanks to Chris Kimball, Mary Olson, Duncan Lively, Andy Visoyan, Linda Fulford, Brian Steffam, and all the great folks at KCLU and California Lutheran University for hosting us. And thanks also to Michael Tachco, Sean Jones, and all the amazing staff here at the Civic Arts Plaza for making this wonderful evening possible. And we want to thank our Science Friday staff takes a lot of people behind the scenes to run this ship. And let's give one last round of applause for Moneymark, who's going to play us out tonight. Thank you all for coming in Thousand Oaks, California.

I'm Ira Plato. Drive safely and have a good night.