Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi. I’m Louis Noel, Longitude fellow and graduate of Rice University in Mechanical Engineering.

We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, communication, and decision making.

For this episode, I spoke with Dr. Jacob Beckham. Jacob is a post-doctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A chemist by formal education, Jacob’s work also involves many other fields, like material science and biology. Join me in a conversation about his path in academia, communicating science, and leveraging creativity. Enjoy listening!

[music]

Louis
You earned your Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Georgia, and then advanced to Rice University for your PhD in chemistry as well. As of September 2023, you have been a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Could you describe what led you on a path in academia, as opposed to other scientific careers?

Jacob Beckham
Well, thank you, Louis, this is a question I get a lot, but it’s a really good one to start off with. And thank you so much for having me on, it’s real honor.

First off, I wanted to kind of set the stage for people by describing the different options people toss around when doing a PhD in the sciences. Generally, and there’s exceptions to this, there’s more options than just these three but if you want to continue doing research or scientific lab bench work, you kind of have three options: You have industry, national labs, and academia.

Industry is where the majority of graduate students in the sciences end up working. And there’s sort of a huge diversity in the jobs that people end up doing in industry, some are still in the laboratory, some are even doing a chemical synthesis. I’m from chemistry so that’s typically what I think of when people are going to these pharmaceutical companies. Some are doing product development for technology companies, some are in strategy, some are in sales. You get a really large diversity for the people going into industry. And it used to be that a lot of leading basic science research was done in the industrial sector as well back in the era of like Bell Labs in the 90s. I heard Dr. Rowland Pettit, in a previous episode actually mentioned this, some basic science still does happen in industry. But by and large, a lot of it has moved back towards academia. Really, the only sectors doing really impactful fundamental research on the industry side now are AI companies and some parts of the biotech industry. And even then a lot of companies would rather acquire a startup developing a new technology rather than develop it themselves.

Then there’s the National Lab side. So national labs are actually just this awesome middle ground between academia and industry that I feel like not enough people really appreciate. You get incredible work life balance, because everyone is working on a team. By and large, and they’re a full-blown adult, professional, they have their doctorate, they’re not a graduate student or a postdoc. Because of that, it’s a better place to keep organizational continuity, you don’t have to replace everyone, every five years. You have huge amounts of resources and money being handed around to tackle big challenges that sometimes aren’t tractable in places like academia or industry. So, I am pretty passionate about national labs, I spent about a year working at Lawrence Livermore, out in California during my undergrad. I consider that kind of the place that I fell in love with science. There’s really something wonderful about that national lab environment that I enjoyed. The tradeoff for the culture and resources, of course, is that you’re a little bit more limited as to the problems that you can work on. So, if things don’t have direct ties to national interests, or lab objectives, it’s a bit harder to justify what you would like to work on.

Then there’s academia. And frankly, when you make the pitch as to why you would want to be an academic over the other two options for logical types of people, I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense. You make less money, especially at first, unless you start a bazillion companies off of licensed patents. The work life balance is worse. Most of the time you’ll have to move multiple times before finding a position that can be permanent. So, to be honest, when I started my PhD, I did not think I was going to end up in academia. Eventually, though, I think a few things clicked into place for me. One of my biggest strengths I consider about me as a scientist is my creativity and academia is the place where I feel like that can shine the brightest. Second, I really like being the person coming up with the ideas, the one that’s furthest upstream in the idea, you know, bog through commercialization. Third, I actually really enjoy teaching. And obviously, you get, you get to teach in multiple ways as a professor, which is what I want to do, you get to teach in a class, which I think I would really enjoy. And you also get to teach your graduate students every single day. I’ve started realizing that I really enjoyed watching my fellow graduate students encounter problems, and then find it in themselves to overcome that. I also loved like being relied on during that process. So that whole process of academically growing up and helping people to reach their full potential. I feel like I got a small taste of that at my PhD, and it made me really crave more of that. So, when I found myself like, volunteering to edit people’s papers for like, no reason I was like, Huh, okay, I think it would enjoy being a professor. Yeah, so sorry for the long-winded answer. I just wanted to make sure people understood the options, and that’s why I want to be in academia.

Louis
That was an excellent answer. I really couldn’t have thought of a better way to describe it. I mean, first of all, I didn’t even really consider national labs and it’s really interesting to learn about that middle ground.

Jacob
It is underrated as heck.

Louis
Yeah. And it’s open to a lot of people. I mean, as an undergraduate, like you said, that is a really good way to put your foot in the door, try things out. And as you know, the way we first met is you were trying something out. You went on the Rice Ignite Entrepreneurship track to learn more about commercialization of these research projects, and I’m really happy you landed on such an exciting journey in academia, and I know you’re going to be excellent teacher. You’re super creative, which we will discuss more in this.

Your published papers indicate a multidisciplinary approach converging the fields of chemistry, nanotechnology, material science, and biology. You have a significant emphasis on the synthesis and application of graphene-based materials, and the innovative use of nanotechnology for biological applications. Could you share two examples of your work that best illustrate the breadth of your research for lay audiences?

Jacob
I feel like your questions are so well crafted, like you can really tell that you dove into what I did. I just really appreciate that attention to detail.

Louis
I really appreciate you pointing that out. It takes a little work. So glad you recognized. Thank you.

Jacob
So, as I mentioned in my previous answer, I think I realized one of the things I really like about academia was that I can express my creativity and doing different kinds of projects. So, you covered it perfectly. It’s graphene-based materials, innovative use of nanotechnology for biological applications. So, I started with graphene, and then I sort of went into biomedical cell signaling and I sort of ended up doing a lot of neuroscience adjacent stuff, which is where I currently am in my postdoc.

The lab that I did my PhD in was the Tour lab at Rice University and Tour lab describes themselves as a carbon nanotechnology lab. That is super broad. But basically, if you can think of it, if it’s nanometer size, and it’s made of carbon, we’re interested in it. I joined that lab because I became fascinated with graphene. So, if you’re unfamiliar with it, graphene is a two-dimensional material, meaning that it’s literally a single atom thick sheet of carbon. You get some fascinating properties from these 2D materials. One of the big problems to graphene though, and the thing thus far that limited its commercial viability, it’s really difficult to make large amounts of material. So, our lab set about making new methods of making graphene, and we eventually came up with a pretty good one: joule heating. So, we found that if we took a carbon sample, and we float electrical current from a large capacitor bank through it, we generated heat. And even the direct passage of the electrical current plus that heat could drive chemical transformations. These transformations happen in milliseconds, and in carbon materials, they drove carbon to its most stable form, which was graphite. But since the material also cooled very rapidly, when the reaction was stopped, you could trap the carbon halfway through the formation of graphite, which resulted in graphene. This method was really interesting, for two reasons. One, you can make very large amounts of graphene very quickly, we were routinely making gram scale when other people in the world are struggling to make milligrams. And two, you can make it from almost any material, including waste materials, like rubber tires, plastic waste, and even food scraps. At one point, we had an undergrad literally just burn olive oil in a pan, bring it into the lab, and we made graphene out of it.

So, the second example, I promise, I’ll be shorter on this one. The second example was the use of molecular motors to control cell signaling. This was what you said about using nanotechnology and creative ways for biomedical applications. One of the earliest projects in the Tour lab sought to make molecules that work similarly to macroscale objects. Lately, we’ve been working on molecular motors. So, these are just molecules that spin when they’re exposed to light, and they exert mechanical force on their surroundings. So, there was a lot of work done in the 90s that showed that you could stimulate a signaling cascade, called a calcium wave by tapping the cell membrane with a micropipette. So, my work showed that you could do the same thing with a molecular size motor. This is really cool result because fundamentally, every drug in the field of pharmacology works by driving or inhibiting a signaling cascade using a chemical force. And here we are triggering a signaling cascade with a mechanical force. Functionally an entirely new paradigm in drug design. And this sort of added to a growing sentiment, especially in the field of what we call photo-pharmacology now, that you can do medicine with drugs that act by mechanical force, rather than chemical force.

Louis
That is just remarkable. I mean, the fact that you have the range, first of all, to go from just purely chemistry, but then go into material science with very physics heavy, and then apply that to biology and biomedical applications. It’s just, it’s really cool to see engineers and scientists like yourself, be creative about how they can maybe apply their work to several different types of fields. So that was a really good breakdown.

Jacob
I appreciate that.

Louis
It could be over a few people’s heads, but that’s great. I mean, it’s tough to distill this down any more simply. Yeah. Since 2020, you have authored nearly 40 papers published in world leading journals, which have amassed almost 500 citations in total. How do you manage involvement in multiple projects simultaneously? And what are your strategies to maintain your prolific output as a writer?

Jacob
Well, first off, I was, I was really lucky and really blessed to be in a productive group and surrounded by very talented peers. So, I do write a lot but I think I was only first author on maybe seven or eight of these papers. So, I mainly helped the other ones. I was just editing them or gathering data or coming up with ideas or experiments, or otherwise contributing to, you know, the novelty of the projects and making an intellectual contribution. So, a lot of that is because I had talented friends. And I do think that it’s important to manage collaborations well to invest in the people around you. So typically, I try to manage my involvement in that I have two to three projects of my own, and then a few deliverables for different projects going on all at once. So, kind of that’s really useful, because when I hit a roadblock on one, I can just work on the other and kind of keep the other one in the back of my mind, eventually, I’ll figure something out and come back to it. But both my ability to complete my own projects, and my ability to help others with their own work is fueled just by my ability to connect with my peers and coworkers. I consider it a core value for me to care about people intrinsically. And I hope I continue to be helpful, even if I didn’t benefit professionally from it. But as it turns out, I have benefited massively from it. So, in talking with people about the problems they encounter with their projects, I will very often see a way that I can contribute and take something off their plate, which will land me on their paper. And in talking to people about my own problems sometimes they do the same for me, which takes something off my plate makes me faster. So, this collaborative spirit, I think, was one of the key ingredients fueling my productivity and the productivity of the Tour lab as a whole. We talked about our work, maybe a little too much but that much dialogue and knowledge transfer overall into a really efficient group when it came to overcoming problems, there wasn’t a whole lot of waste, where we tried to reinvent the wheel. And there was a lot of helping. And I also think the last piece of that puzzle, honestly, was Dr. Tour, which was my advisor. I always like to tell this story. I was working on my thesis, and I was kind of trying to get Dr. Tour off my back, for like one of my last projects. So, I finished the draft thinking, Okay, this will buy me a few weeks. I emailed it to him at 9pm. He had it back to me fully read through and commented at 9am the next morning! I was just exasperated. So, I once thanked him for this efficiency actually. I was like, this is awesome, and thanked him and he said, don’t thank me, it’s my job. You would think it’s really easy to stay this focused and just keep your eye on the ball this hard, but it’s really not. There’s a lot of things that you have to keep track of doing science as a career. And it’s very easy to get lost in all the complexity of each project and funding. Everyone else just feels like they don’t have enough time in the day. Dr. Tour never makes you feel like that. I think it’s because of his ability to just keep his eye on the dang ball.

Louis
That’s so cool. It sounds like an incredible man. And you had a lot of great points in there. And I appreciate your perspective on collaboration. I think that’s really powerful for us for a lot of fields. And having that insight into how it works in academia is great. Do you ever experience difficulty in putting your ideas into words? Is there a structured or creative process you follow to break through writer’s block?

Jacob
I definitely do. I do experience difficulty putting my ideas into words. But I don’t think I really have a structured process. I think there’s a simple rule that I’ve told a lot of my friends: if you have writing to do, it won’t get done until you make it the only thing that you have to do. So, if I have like a big grant or a fellowship coming, I will just lock myself in a room until I have at least made progress with it. I’ll still try to do maybe like one or two simple experiments in a week. But complex things like learning new techniques where I feel like I have to use my whole brain, expend a bunch of willpower, I typically table them until I’ve at least made progress on the writing. And when I really have to do writing, I will make sure to set just a few days aside where I do nothing but lock myself in a room and write. And this probably doesn’t work for everyone. I know, career writers often describe like, Oh, I need to take a walk, I need to go do something else and then come back to it. That honestly, I think it’s kind of a reaction to a common mistake I feel like PhD students make. They just put off writing as long as possible because they stay in lab doing experiments. And like generating data is like a comfort thing for them. And I totally understand that. But you’re doing yourself a disservice if you’re not like trying to plan and structure your work because it has to go somewhere eventually. And I think this is gonna often lead to a lot of waste. So, I think it’s better to begin with the end in mind, which sometimes means writing before you’ve even begun, like doing certain experiments, just identifying goals. And I also think this process sharpens the link between your thinking and writing brain and it makes it easier to write a paper when it actually comes down to it.

Louis
Yeah, I like that analogy. And I can see that you have a lot of discipline, and some people may lean on some of their other characteristics to you know, get through that wall of writing. It can be difficult and It’s really interesting learning about how each person deals with that.

Jacob
Yeah, I think it’s important to know yourself for sure.

Louis
Speaking of writing, in January of 2019, you posted your first blog on a website you created, named Distilling Science. Since then, you and several other contributors have also posted blogs aligned with its mission statement, which is to, quote, “improve communication between scientists and the public. To highlight exciting new frontiers and technology, and to empower non-scientists with information on problems of great societal importance.” At Longitude dot Site, we share a similar mission with this podcast. I’m eager to learn about the inception of Distilling Science and your philosophy regarding the importance of science education and communication.

Jacob
Man this just brings a smile to my face seeing you’d like quote, my, the website, really the mission statement. I love it. 21-year-old Jacob was so cool. I miss him.

So, first of, this podcast is a really, really cool idea. I really enjoyed the episode with Rowland obviously, because I love Rowland. You guys have some really interesting guests coming in and dropping like a lot of valuable knowledge. I really like to tell the story about Nathan Zohner, when it comes to like, describing what led me to start Distilling Science.

Nathan Zohner was, I think like 18-year-old kid in 1997, who was doing a science project. And he walked around telling people, have you heard about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide? And they were like, No, what’s that? And he would say things like it’s been found in the body of every single dead person ever. And the Nazis used in their camps. And if you know anything about chemical nomenclature, you’ll know that dihydrogen monoxide means H2O, which is water. And Nathan Zohner just walked around telling people true facts about water and got them to sign off on a petition banning water. Just the fact that like this kid could walk around telling people truths, and dangerously mislead them made me think a lot about what about people with an agenda? What about people who aren’t being truthful? What about people who will just flat out lie to your face? What can they do? And the internet does not help because false information spreads faster, more prolifically than truth, true information online. So, all of this led me to think that in an era of growing mistrust, scientists need to talk directly to people. So Distilling Science is built on the idea that the best people to share and talk about scientific discoveries with scientists themselves. It never quite became a viral hit. And it’s been kind of dormant. But I think it peaked at the right time, I think we were able to actually do some really good work, and communicating first, some essential truths about Coronavirus and second, diving into the actual data behind both the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines. So, I think, at first, it was just a cool way to talk about my research and things that I wanted to study in grad school. And then it really became sort of a tool for combating misinformation. I think that the best people to communicate with the public are scientists. And I think that that link is almost maybe weaker than it has ever been. I think that social trust in general is still very low. And I think that scientists need to be asking themselves, what can we do to help this? What can we do to change this?

Louis
Well, I think you’re an excellent mouthpiece for the scientific community, because your curiosity is just overflowing seems like and you’ve had this drive to just figure things out, and the fact that you took matters into your own hands, and then shared with everyone, it’s not easy and doesn’t, you know, happen in the blink of an eye, it takes time.

Jacob
Oh, yeah. 100%. I’ve thought about various ways to bring it back eventually, but I think that Longitude Sound Bytes might take the space for me. You guys keep bringing experts on just to talk directly to the people.

Louis
Yeah, we can fill that. We can help build up. Some things, they run their course and, you know, they have their time to shine and then it’s time to shelve them, you know, hang them up a good note, and that’s totally okay too.

Jumping to question number six. Some might think fields like science, technology, engineering, and math, lack of creativity due to the black and white nature of their governing laws. However, creativity often drives breakthrough innovations in those fields. What are modern methods of incorporating creativity into research? And could you share an example?

Jacob
Absolutely. So, Louis, have you ever heard of a guy named Dan Pink?

Louis
I have not.

Jacob
So this was actually the first ever research project that I did. I watched this YouTube video in high school, called The Theory of Motivation. It was a TED Talk by Dan Pink, who has a book called The Theory of Motivation. And he basically set out to make the case that modern incentive theory so the idea that if you pay people more, they’ll do better work does not work for what he called 21st century problems. And 21st century problems encapsulate everything that you put in this question, science, technology, engineering, math, also, literally just anything that requires above base level thinking. And to make this case, he talks about some science that was done in the 1950s called the Candle Problem. You’re presented with a box of tacks and a candle. And you’re told that you have to adhere the candle to the wall. So, people will try various things. They’ll try to melt the side of the candle and stick it to the wall, it doesn’t work. And they’ll try to tack the candle to the wall, it doesn’t work. The solution is to overcome a cognitive bias called functional fixedness. And see the box not just as a receptacle for the tacks, but an actual holder for the candles. You put the candle in the box, you tack the box to the wall. That’s how you solve the candle problem. So basically, the idea is to solve this problem, you have to think about it in a little bit out of the box way you have to think creatively, to overcome a cognitive bias.

Every problem in science, technology, engineering, and math could be encapsulated as a candle problem. You need creativity to overcome it. You need to think out of the box. Science is not this like straightforward thing. You are literally trying to discover something that no one has ever done. So, you need to think a little bit out of the box. So, in science, this can be looked at as who has the intellectual fearlessness to try something new, try something creative, and approach things in ways that like they’re intrinsically motivated to approach. That fuels creativity and I think that fuels great advances. I honestly think that most 21st century jobs require creativity. Otherwise, we’re all gonna get replaced by AI pretty soon anyway.

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Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was how passionate Jacob is about his work. The novelty of his research, and his encouragement to be intellectually fearless.

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To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

 

 

 

Joanna McDonald
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.
Hi, I’m Joanna McDonald, a Longitude fellow from Rice University, studying music composition. In this podcast series we are exploring the approaching of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and communication in scientific and creative fields. For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Nina Kraus.

Dr. Kraus is a professor and biologist at Northwestern University (https://brainvolts.northwestern.edu/) and in our interview, we talked about her book, “Of Sound Mind”, which she describes as her love letter to sound. We started our conversation off with Dr. Nina Kraus telling me about noise, defining what it is and how it affects us biologically and emotionally. So, without further ado, enjoy listening!

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Joanna McDonald
I read your book this summer. And as a sound artist, as someone who works with sound all the time thinking about how to shape it, how to tell a story with it, learning about the external and internal processes of how we hear was so interesting. But there was one chapter, particularly chapter 11, where you’re talking about noise and sound inundation and sound pollution. And I wanted to talk to you about noise. So, could you give like a brief summary or description of what noises?

Nina Kraus
Sure, Noise is a huge, under-acknowledged, issue and problem in our lives. Sound is invisible. We often don’t realize that it is such a pervasive and such a huge force. So, for example, as we think about noise, there might be a truck sitting outside your window, and you don’t even know it’s there. And at a certain point, the driver will turn the ignition off. And suddenly you’re aware of the silence. And you often take a breath of relief. Even though you weren’t aware consciously that this noise was going on. It was affecting your body and your biology. And so this is what I think is really important to think about. You asked me to define noise and how I think about it. By now, most people know that very loud sounds can damage our ear. But I’m not talking about that. We know that. I’m assuming that people know that. But I think what people really don’t know is that moderate level sounds really do affect us biologically in all kinds of ways. I think of noise as unwanted sound, often unnecessary sound.

So, if I back up for a minute and think about the biology of sound processing in the brain, and one of the points that I think really comes through or I hope it comes through in my book is how holistic the processing of sound is. When we think about sound processing, it engages multiple biological systems in our body. So our cognitive, what we pay attention to, how we remember, how we think. Sensory. How we process the information from each one of our senses, how we combine the information from our senses, our emotions. Sound is enormously important for engaging us emotionally. Movement. So, our motor system. By definition, sound is movement. It is particles in motion. And we create sound by moving as I’m talking to you now. I have to move the air and create sound. And also, our viscera, our gut. You know, have you ever noticed that your appetite is a little off when you’re in an airplane?

Joanna
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Nina
People thought for a long time, they assumed that the reason for this is that the air is drier. So scientists who like to measure things, and did some very controlled experiments. And what they discovered is, it was the sound that affected our appetite.

Sound has always been an organism’s warning sense. It’s our alarm sense. Sound is our alarm sense. That’s also one of the reasons that sound and memory are so tightly, tightly aligned. Let me stick for a minute to this idea of sound as our alarm sense. Do you sometimes feel stressed? Do you sometimes feel anxious?

Joanna
Sure.

Nina
Well, these are important psychological feelings. And we know that anxiety, and depression are mounting in our world. Again, I’m a biologist so I think of things in terms of biology and biological evidence. I do believe that our noisy world in part is responsible for the feeling of disconnection that we have. You know, in the same way as when that truck turned off as ignition and you relaxed. I think we’ve all experienced sitting in a kitchen and having the refrigerator cycle off or having the air conditioner cycle off. We don’t realize that these sounds are there until they’re gone. Because we don’t realize these things, we need to make a conscious effort to reduce the sounds that we do have control over. You know, do I really need to know, every time my neighbor locks and unlocks their car door? Every time that happens, you know, I have a biological response and it affects my ability to concentrate, and it makes me feel more tense. It’s harder to keep things straight. Because you know, ideas need space, they need quiet, to form and materialize.

Joanna
What you said about ideas needing quiet to formalize is actually a big part of what our podcast series is about. And I’m so glad you mentioned that because I know for me as an artist, as someone who’s creative, I have to have quiet to create or to have a creative flow. So, how important do you think that quiet or silence for contemplation is? Or maybe completing a project or creative project or collaborating, or maybe just like getting work done? Can you talk about that?

Nina
Yeah, with pleasure. I think there’s really something to the idea that quiet and silence can help us but I don’t think of quiet as the absence of sound. You know, because we can be in a backyard or woods, I think I do some of my best thinking outside where I can hear animal scurrying, and the wind blowing, and there are all kinds of sounds. So I think it’s important to think about: what are the sounds that are the most distracting and upsetting?

Joanna
So, it seems like there are sounds that are healthy and sounds like noise that are unhealthy.

Nina
Well, also does the sound have meaning? You know, part of having a sound mind is when we make a lot of sound to meaning connections. Sound to meaning connections are, in fact, tremendously important and many of the sounds that affect us biologically and that get in the way of our ability to sleep and to think our sounds that have very little meaning, like the sound of an engine or a sound that doesn’t have a particular message. It’s often an industrial sound, or a technological sound, or a sound of fluorescent lights, or computers, all of these things have this inherent sound that we don’t realize consciously is there but is affecting us.

But let me get back to your question about really thinking about being creative, and your oral environment. First of all, people really differ. We all have very different brains and our sound minds are really different. I know this is a fact. I measure people’s responses to sound biologically every day in the lab. We’ve done this to 1000s of people. And you know, everyone’s response is different. We all have a different signature. We have made different sound to meaning connections in our lives. So, some people are able to concentrate into work and to be creative in places that another person might find objectively noisy, and that’s just the way it is. But I think that it’s important for us to be introspective and to think about, well, what is it that we need? I know some of the things that I need are like, I need sleep, and sleep is a very, very important part of, I think, the creative process. At least I know for myself, when I sleep well, a lot, or enough, I think better. This may not be true for everyone, but sound and noise can get in the way of a healthy night’s sleep. The fact is that we are primed to make connections with sound, and especially if you are a developing organism, you know, you’re making these connections, you know, children learn to make sound meaning connections very, very quickly.

Also, I know for myself, some of my best ideas come to me, while waking. You know, like, as you kind of go between a dream sleep state, sleeping state and waking up, and one of the things that I really learned during the pandemic, was, you know, I, unless I really need to, I don’t use an alarm clock, because again, who wants to be alarmed awake? Right? And, you know, it turns out that you train your body really well, I wake up more or less the same time every day anyway. But I’ve learned, if I don’t want to deprive myself of that time, as I am just waking up, and there are no other distractions, so it’s quiet for me. And I am in between dreaming and wakefulness, and that’s a time when, when ideas and connections just come to me. So, I’ve learned that and I’ve learned to change my life in a way that enables that.

I started out saying that our hearing system, our hearing brain, and body, you know, this is a huge, interconnected process. Of course, if there is unwanted sound, or meaningless sound, or disruptive sound, alarming sound, that is going to affect not only your appetite, but your ability to think and to remember, and to combine information from your senses, to hear the details and nuances and sound that you may want to as you’re playing back a recording that you have created. You know, all of these things are so very, very important. And I think that the very first step, and I hope that your podcast is a step in this direction, is people need to become aware, they need to realize that this is an issue. You know, I mean, I live in a neighborhood where the lawn machines that go on in the fall in the spring. We can hear when a neighbor’s a block and a half away with their leaf blowers or whatever. It’s not the company’s fault. It’s, you know, it’s us, you know, we pay for these services, and we should not be paying for these services. There are ways of keeping a lawn, however you would like it, in ways that are not so noisy. And people just need to know that it’s an issue, that it’s a problem. And so, becoming aware of this, I think, is something that I hope that your podcast will do.

And I try my very best to pull together information, what we know about other species and how they depend on sound, to do their creative activities. I think most people really want to do the right thing for themselves, for their health, for their ability to think, the ability to create for their environment, but they don’t know. And so you know, having information and biological information about how animals and creatures including plants, and trees, know, vibration, this is this is a very important part of natural life. So being aware of these things is, I think, is a really important first step.

Joanna
Yeah, I love what you’re saying about people wanting to do what’s good for themselves and for their health, but they don’t know how. And I’m kind of curious. My generation, like Gen Z generation, we are an anxious generation, for lots of reasons. I wonder like, how much the sound inundation that we’ve grown up in has also affects that. Could you maybe talk about what might happen or what might be some results physiologically, emotionally, of a generation of like my generation for example, growing up with way more noise than people my age might have grown up like 200 years ago?

Nina
Yeah, I think it’s a real issue. And it’s one where I just kind of feel like, I want to get out in front of the bus that is going to kill your generation with noise, with technology with…Don’t get me wrong, I depend on technology for the work I do, I have huge respect for the medical advances that we have made. But again, it’s a matter of thinking about how we spend our time. So, if I know nothing else, as a biologist, it is that we are what we do. How we spend our time really, really matters. And if we spend all of our time on our electronic devices, for example, we are less connected to each other personally. And there is much more to connection. I mean, you as a composer and a musician, you know that a live performance is a very different experience than a recording.

Joanna
Absolutely.

Nina
So we are depriving ourselves of these live performances with each other. And we also we need to practice. So, your generation isn’t practicing. You’re getting more anxious about even being with people and talking to people, because you don’t have very much practice doing it.

Joanna
That’s so true.

Nina
Talking to each other is tremendously important. And I think that we are depriving ourselves of the development of the biological systems of the whole generation and of the generations moving forward.

Think about this; our technology is stealing our thoughts. If we are in line at the supermarket, or at the airport and so right away, you’re checking your phone, and you know, say, oh, I can get some work done while I’m standing here. And so you’re interacting with this thing. So you have lost what can go on in your mind when you think. You know, what if you just sat there and thought. You know, I mean, these technologies are stealing our thoughts. I could be thinking about this next book I’m working on. Or I could be just looking at the interactions between this and that person next to me. Or I can just be letting, you know, you said before the idea of letting your mind go where it needs to go. So, creating environments for yourself, where you’re letting your mind go. And you’re not letting some technology steal that time and steal your thoughts and steal your privacy in terms of your creative and non-creative ideas. I mean, letting your mind just work.

[music]

Joanna
I hope you enjoyed our conversation about noise. What was helpful for me to learn from our interview was what noise is: noise is sound that is absent from meaning.

I also learned how much noise is connected to the technology we use and how both noise and technology can distract us, stress us, and steal our internal dialogues, all of which are crucial to incubating creative ideas and problem solving.

Dr. Kraus said something I think is important when she mentioned how many aspects of everyday noise we encounter have solutions if enough people first become aware of the noise and hear it, and second, understand its harmful effects. So, I hope this episode can be the start to realizing how much noise is really around you and then what role you might play in reducing unnecessary, unwanted noise in your life, and consequently, in the lives of those around you.

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site. Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.

Suggested articles by Dr. Nina Kraus:

Leaf blowers – A small part of a larger movement Evanston should lead:
https://evanstonroundtable.com/2023/05/17/guest-essay-leaf-blowers-noise-mental-effects/

Keep it Down: The dangers of human created sound:
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20211012/281762747437865

Hearing Too Much in a Noisy World:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hearing-too-much-in-a-noisy-world-11631296563

 

 

 

 

Keegan Leibrock
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I’m Keegan Leibrock, Longitude fellow from Rice University studying economics and political science. I will be your host for today.

Today, we are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation and communication in scientific and creative fields.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Dr. Scott Solomon, a specialist in evolutionary biology and science communication, and a professor of Biosciences at Rice University.

We started our conversation with Dr. Solomon telling me about an expedition he is about to embark recreating Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. Please enjoy listening.

[music]

Scott Solomon
This is super exciting. So, I was invited to participate in part of a two-year voyage that is recreating Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, which, of course, was the trip that Charles Darwin did as a recent college graduate, that, in many ways kind of inspired his theory of evolution by natural selections. The expedition that I’m joining, it’s called the Darwin 200 project. It is, as I said, it’s a recreation in a sense of his voyage on the Beagle. And what that means is that there is a ship and it’s actually a historic tall ship, built in 1918, called the Oosterschelde, up from the Netherlands. It is this beautiful wooden sailing ship with three masts. It’s a schooner, it’s not exactly like the Beagle, it’s actually about twice as long as the Beagle. A little more spacious, and it’s got all the, you know, modern navigational equipment and safety stuff, which I’m grateful for. But they are, over the course of two years, traveling around the world and visiting most of the major ports that the Beagle voyage visited almost 200 years ago. I will be joining the expedition in Uruguay, and then sailing along the coast of South America for about a week, down along the coast of Argentina, to a place and Patagonia called Puerto Madryn.

My sort of reason for wanting to join this expedition, I mean, there’s a lot first of all. It’s going to be an incredible adventure and incredible experience but I’m really excited about the opportunity to kind of reflect on what Darwin’s experiences were like, and get just a small taste, you know, of what Darwin may have experienced at that time. And to really think about sort of how the world has changed in those almost 200 years. I mean, not only do we have, obviously a lot more technology, bigger and fancier and faster boats, but we also learned a lot about evolution, about natural history, about biology, about the world that we live in, and how we’re connected to it, and what we are doing to it. And so actually, a big part of this expedition is about conservation efforts. So in each port, that the journey visits, they’re partnering with local groups and local researchers to basically support conservation efforts that are taking place in each of these places. So I’m really excited about getting to help with those and learning a little bit more about the projects that will be happening in the ports that I’ll be visiting. But another aspect of it is outreach. And that’s something that I, you know, I’m really passionate about, I think it’s really important to not only do science, but to share science as widely as possible. And that’s a big part of what they’re doing on this expedition, as well. So they’re, you know, reaching out to schools around the world, creating free resources for teachers and students, to kind of help to inspire young people to be excited about exploration and discovery, and nature, and wildlife, and science. And all of these things that back in the Age of Discovery was something that you know, people paid a lot of attention to, and today, you know, it kind of, can be forgotten, I think sometimes. So, I’m excited about that aspect to to kind of help to, you know, share the wonder and awe that we experienced as biologists when we go out to these wild places, and try to learn something about this incredible world we live in.

Keegan
Your work extends beyond traditional research, and you’ve been actively involved in different avenues of science communication. So, can you expand a bit on what sparked your passion for communicating science to a broader audience?

Scott
Yeah, absolutely. I think part of it is that, you know, when I was young, I would read books or magazine articles, watch, you know, nature documentaries, and was part of what got me excited about nature and biology and science in the first place. During my education, I like most scientists, I think, you know, we tend to sort of learn the science and learn about how to communicate to each other, through peer-reviewed research publications and presentations at scientific meetings. And that’s super important. We have to be able to share our science with each other. But at some point, as a graduate student, it occurred to me like, you know, maybe there is a way to share this beyond just my small circle of colleagues and peers. You know, I’ve always liked writing just as a creative outlet. And I thought, you know, maybe I can write about science in a way that would connect with a broader audience, but I had no idea how to do that. And so for lack of any better idea, I just walked into the office of the student newspaper at the university. This was at UT Austin, where I did my PhD. And I just asked them Like, hey, you know, do you guys have anybody here that’s writing about science? And they said, no, why don’t you do it. And so that was sort of how I got started writing about science in a way that was, you know, accessible to a broad audience. So they matched me up with an editor who kind of trained me on how to write articles in a way that was appropriate for a newspaper. And off I went on my first assignment, which was really fun. It was an expedition that I joined, that was looking for cave salamanders in the caves in the hill country near Austin. And so I joined some people that were, you know, putting on their wetsuits and snorkel masks and swimming into this cave in search of these rare, endangered salamanders. And then I got to write an article about it. And I was like, Alright, this is great. Like, how can I do more of this? So that was how I started. And you know, since then, I’ve kind of explored a wide range of different ways of trying to share science, share the excitement, the wonder, the just, you know, things that are so cool about science, and about the scientists that are doing the work. I think it’s really important to kind of help people understand. Science isn’t just this like thing that happens, it’s people are doing science. And those people’s stories are often really fascinating.

Keegan
When communicating these complex scientific concepts to lay audiences, what approach do you find to be most effective throughout your work? And how do you tailor your message to make it accessible without oversimplifying the science behind it?

Scott
Yeah, no, those are good questions. So, I mean, what I find, and this is what, you know, I think I’ve learned it’s not like my own discovery, but you got to tell stories, right? So, you really want to tell stories about the science. And it’s really at the end of the day, it’s going to be stories about the people doing the science. You know, if you can tell a good story, everybody likes a good story. And so, figuring out what the arc of the story is going to be, can be a challenge. But it’s a challenge that I enjoy. I think that’s part of the fun, creative process of writing. So, that’s the number one thing, but then you asked also about how do you make it accessible, understandable without, you know, without kind of being condescending about it, I think it’s really important to have respect for your, for your audience. And so it’s important to know who your audience is, and have a sense for what do they already know and understand. And so, you know, it’s really important to not use too much technical language jargon, explain things as you go. But at the same time, you know, treat your audience with respect and recognize that they’re smart, intelligent people, they just don’t know what you know. And so, trying to find a way to, to explain things, and not people like to say dumbing it down, you know, I always try to shy away from that, because just because you don’t know something doesn’t make you dumb. It just means that it’s not what you work on. So, you know, I think there’s always ways to kind of tell a story, explain the science, but do so in a way that is respectful.

Keegan
Absolutely. Were there other specific experiences or moments that influenced your decision to bridge the gap between academia and the general public?

Scott
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a number of things. I think what I’ve learned is that, you know, I started off writing, and then that kind of naturally led to opportunities to do other things. Like for example, giving talks. That is something that I’ve really learned to love, because when you give a talk to a general audience, you have that opportunity to kind of see their reaction to have conversations make it a two-way, form of communication. I think it’s really important to not see science communication as a one-way street, right? It needs to be a back and forth, it’s a dialogue, we need to listen as much as we speak or write, I really enjoy kind of getting to have that give and take and hearing what other people think and just sort of seeing the reactions, hearing their reactions. So some of my favorite things that I do now in science communication involve directly interacting with the public or interacting with different audiences.

Keegan
Your podcast, the Wild World show gained attention for its engaging exploration of different scientific topics. So, what sort of brought you to start the podcast?

Scott
My podcast, Wild World or Wild World with Scott Solomon, is really, it’s a way of trying to, again, share that excitement of discovery of exploration with people who maybe you know, don’t have much experience with this. And in some ways, it really came out of the pandemic, because a lot of the teaching that I do here at Rice involves taking students out into wild places, whether it’s just right here on campus, we can do a lot with our amazing, you know, nature that we have on campus. So we do that in some of my classes, but often will go to state park or a National Preserve, or I even take students in the summer to places like Belize, about to start a new class in Tanzania. And it’s some of my favorite, you know, things that I get to do in my job, largely because of the impact that I see it having on students. I mean, it really can be, you know, what they’ve told us, it can be a life-changing experience. And during the pandemic, of course, we couldn’t do any of that. And so, I really was missing that opportunity to take people out to wild places and show them how exciting it is to be a part of the process of learning and discovering about all different sorts of things. So I thought, you know, hey, maybe there’s a way of, of doing something like that with a podcast where, okay, we don’t get to go there ourselves but we can kind of take a virtual trip someplace and hear from people who are working in these wild places about what it’s like. And so, that was what I set out to do in the podcast. So each episode is about a different place in the world and I interview a guest who’s doing some kind of fieldwork there. You know, one of my goals is I hope that that could be something that would be interesting, inspirational for young people who are maybe trying to figure out what their career path might look like to just learn about some of these less well-known, you know, ways to live your life.

Keegan
Can you share an example or experience related to one of your ongoing projects?

Scott
So my research background is on insects, and specifically ants. A pandemic project that I did was a series of lectures or talks about insects and why they matter. So it’s called Why Insects Matter: Earth’s most essential species, and it’s 24 part series that looks at all of the many reasons why insects are essential for life, as we know it, the ways that they impact us directly, the ways that we depend on them for things like food pollination, you know, the ecosystem services that they do that we don’t even think about, like breaking down waste, or, you know, dead plants and animals, but also fun things like how are insects, a part of our culture. I have a whole lecture on insects and art, literature and film. And it’s fascinating, when you start to look into it, how integral insects have been, to so many different cultures around the world throughout history. You know, so one of my goals for that project was really to try to help, maybe people who don’t think of themselves as bug people, you know, I mean, a lot of people who are like, oh, you know, ants or, or insects, yeah, I’m not a big fan. And, you know, or they might even be stronger than that, they might really be scared of them, or really, you know, just kind of grossed out disgusted by them. And that’s fine, I get it, there’s, you know, I don’t like finding a cockroach in my house either. And I definitely don’t like getting bit by mosquitoes. But what I try to say is like, like, my goal here is to, you know, help you to kind of see that most insects are not dangerous. Most insects are not doing anything negative to us. And in fact, a lot of them are doing things that are really helpful. And then just recognizing that, like, a lot of them are just doing amazing, interesting things. And so, I feel like the more that you kind of learn about this and hear about this, that kind of less gross or scary or weird insects are and the more that people can kind of learn to not just appreciate them, but to also kind of live with them. Because at the end of the day, you know, like so many things out in the natural world, insects are declining, and that should be a cause for concern for all of us, because we actually depend on them for life as we know it.

Keegan
Absolutely. You’re someone who has a lot of commitments to a lot of different things, whether it’s teaching or research or science communication. I’m sure it can be difficult balancing these different commitments that you managed to stay active. And all these areas, and how do you find that each of them enrich aspects of the others?

Scott
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, honestly, it’s a constant struggle to try to, you know, keep my head above water, so to speak. Yeah, I mean, what I tried to do is I tried to just compartmentalize, you know, when I’m teaching my class, I’m teaching my class. And that’s the only thing that I’m focused on. When I’m meeting with students, they have all of my attention. But when I have a moment to, you know, sit and work on a podcast episode, or to you know, write an article or the moment I’m working on a book, you know, I try to focus on those things. And so really, what I’ve learned, the older I’ve gotten is, I feel like the any sort of wisdom that I’ve achieved, I think it’s you know, about being able to accurately predict how much time something will take me. I was not good at that when I was younger. I would get it wrong a lot. But the older I’ve gotten, the better I’ve gotten that saying like, Okay, I think I can take on this additional thing. It’s going to take me approximately this much time and here’s the part of my schedule where I can slide that thing in and be able to get it done.

Keegan
For individuals who are aspiring to sort of bridge the gap between science and the public through science communication, what advice would you offer?

Scott
My best advice is just get started and do it. I think there’s a real kind of activation energy so to speak, and that like it feels like you have to like really get out over that initial hump of like, Oh, I haven’t done this before, how do I even get started? Why is somebody going to, you know, let me write an article here? or, you know, whatever it is. I would say, there’s no project that’s too small to take on. And each thing that you do will lead to new opportunities to do something else. I think once you have, you know, one or two of those things under your belt, then you can leverage that to get other bigger opportunities. So in writing in particular, there’s sort of this catch 22 of, you often you have to be published to get published. So how do you ever get started? And that’s where I say you just, you just write something. You just go it doesn’t matter what the publication is, who the audience is, if three people read it, whatever, you’re gonna learn something from it. You get to practice your craft, and you’ll have something to show for it that you can then take to the next place and say, Well, I did this thing. Maybe I could do something for you as well.

[music]

Keegan
We hope that you enjoyed our episode. What stood out to me from this conversation was Dr. Solomon’s clear passion for accessibility of scientific knowledge. From his time writing for UT’s newspaper to today, it is clear that this passion has grown into a fully-fledged career.

[music]

To view the episode transcript, please visit Longitude.site. If you’re a college student interested in leading a conversation like this, visit our website Longitude.site to submit an interest form or write to us at podcast@longitude.site.

Join us next time for more unique insights on Longitude Sound Bytes.