This week, Brian Kraus subs again for These Vibes are Too Cosmic in a live-radio, middle-of-the-night special. The science topic is the Earth’s atmosphere, with all its layers and
A weather balloon being released for transit. Credit: US Navy. Found at kids.britannica.com
peculiarities.
First he talks about the regions you might encounter climbing up into space, from the troposphere–our watery, weathery home–to the exosphere, where space weather from the Sun interacts with our satellites.
Then, the focus moves to the stratosphere, which protects us from dangerous UV radiation: it’s a battle between ozone and chlorofluorocarbons/volcanoes, where our climate hangs in the balance! Big science again comes into play, with hordes of satellites and weather balloons taking regular measurements so we stay informed.
Finally, Brian goes into depth about weather balloons (which you can buy yourself!). How do we make weather balloons? How do we recover them when they all inevitably pop? And what scientific instruments are used to keep track of temperature and pressure as they float up into the stratosphere? I close with a public service announcement: if you find a downed weather balloon, you should follow its instructions and mail it back to the National Weather Service for analysis.
First, Gloria takes us through the research and development process – the timeline and the costs. That brought us to drug pricing and the role of the pharmaceutical industry. You bet we discuss Martin Shkreli and his company’s price hike of the drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750. Gloria explains what Daraprim is and how this kind of price hike is not only possible, but totally legal. It all has to do with drug patenting, which we discuss a bit, especially in reference to something called “evergreening” (aka “me too” drugs) – a technique used my drug companies to extend their exclusive patent past the 20 year mark.
In the final part of the interview, Gloria walks us through how this structure could be changed to obtain a better, more efficient pharmaceutical system that works for the public rather than the drug company share-holders. She discusses how the incentive structure needs to change, using a “push, pull, pool” mechanism.
In the show I quoted two articles that do an excellent job explaining these topics:
Big Pharma, while of course contributing to innovation, has increasingly decommitted itself from the high-risk side of research and development, often letting small biotech companies and the NIH do most of the hard work. Indeed, roughly 75% of so-called new molecular entities with priority rating (the most innovative drugs) trace their existence to NIH funding, while companies spend more on “me too” drugs (slight variations of existing ones.)
But if Big Pharma is not committed to research, what is it doing? First, it is well known that Big Pharma spends more on marketing than on R&D. Less well known is how much it also spends on making its shareholders rich. Pharmaceutical companies, which have become increasingly “financialized,” distribute profits to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks designed to boost stock prices and executive pay.
(2) Vox article explaining the news around Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical head recently arrested for securities fraud – though that’s not why the public hate the guy. I guess he’s also an a-hole on Twitter and bought some singular copy of a Wu-Tang album, but we have other beef.
But really the hatred for Shkreli comes from how unapologetic he was about the price increase [of Daraprim by 5,500 percent]. Other companies have pursued similar pricing strategies without stoking so much backlash.
…As Forbes’s Matthew Herper wrote, “Questcor Pharmaceuticals raised the price of its drug, Acthar Gel, from $40 to $28,000 a vial. The reward? It was one of the best-performing stocks in America until Mallinckrodt bought it for $5.6 billion last year. Valeant Pharmaceuticals has done big price increases on numerous drugs. The stock’s up 740% over five years and its founder, Michael Pearson, is a billionaire. Only Shkreli has drawn the American public’s rage.”
Additionally, we touched on the history of the drug industry. Below is just a snippet from an excellent infographic that takes you through the key events in the 80’s that created the system we have in place today.
And of course there was music.
Playlist:
Artist
Song
Album
Label
Shilpa Ray
Shilpa Ray on Broadway
Last Year’s Savage
Northern Sky
Intro to the show
Fatoumata Diawara
Alama
Fatou
World Circuit Limited
Neutral Milk Hotel
Holland 1945
In An Aeroplane Over the Sea
Domino Recording
Bob Dylan
Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
The Cutting Edge Sampler, 1965-1966 (Bootleg Series Vol. 12)
Columbia/Legacy
Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood
Roked
Junun
ATC Management
Interview with Gloria Tavera, Pt 1
Drug Research and Development Process
Dan Auerbach
Trouble Weighs a Ton
Keep it Hid
Nonesuch Records
Beat Happening
Red Head Walking
Look Around
Domino Recording
The Beverleys
Visions
Brutal
Buzz Records
Interview with Gloria Tavera, Pt 2
Drug costs, the pharmaceutical industry, and patents
Abner Jay
I’m So Depressed
One Man Band
Subliminal Sounds
The Sadies
Hold on, Hold on
In Concert Volume 1
Yep Roc
Beach Slang
Hard Luck Kid
The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us
Polyvinyl
Palehound
Molly
Dry Food
Exploding in Sound
Interview with Gloria Tavera, Pt 3
How to fix it.
Adult Mom
Survival
Momentary Lapse of Happily
Tiny Engines
Just want to listen to the interview? Don’t have time for the music? Here ya go.
For this week’s show, Brian Kraus subs in to do a New Years’ special of These Vibes Are Too Cosmic. He highlights some of the best science and music of this last year. He began in our solar system with an overview of successful space flights of 2015, from the New Horizons Pluto mission to Dawn. Then he covered developments in materials science, first explaining superconductors, then the new super-hard phases of carbon. Finally, he hits health science and medicine with the successes combating the Ebola virus, even as we learn more about the disease’s prolonged effects on humans.
Happy Christmas, listeners! In this rockin’ show Lucianne Walkowicz called in to WPRB from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, where she works on NASA’s Kepler Mission as well as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (a telescope currently being built down in Chile). In this interview we focus on the Kepler mission’s search for exoplanets – these are planets outside of our solar system. We discuss questions such as: What makes a planet habitable? How does a star’s properties influence the planet’s habitability? How does Kepler go about finding these planets when they’re so much smaller and dimmer than their accompanying star? How could we know if there is life on these planets? And much more!
Towards the end of the show I played a short interview with particle physicist Stephane Cooperstein on recent findings out of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland – and what they could mean. More information here. In the interview we mention the plot below.
Extra resources:
Recent TED talk by Lucianne Walkowics entitled “Let’s not use Mars as a backup planet”
Past TED talk on “Finding planets around other stars”
In this episode of These Vibes Are Too Cosmic I speak with Simone Sneed, board liaison at the Environmental Defense Fund and professor at NYU in Civic and Social Organization, on the troubling statistics of women and minorities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. We get deep in to this topic, speculating on how it came about and what can be done about it as well as current initiatives working towards getting more minorities in STEM fields. Additionally, we discuss the analogous trends in arts and business/non-profits.
In this show Brian and I discuss what’s called “Big Science.” What we mean when we use that descriptor, and some of the amazing examples across the science fields including satellites to undersea observatories to particle colliders and fusion reactors. We also discuss some of the overwhelming obstacles to big science — from funding to choosing a project a whole field agrees on to getting thousands of scientists across the world to collaborate smoothly. There are positive and less so examples of these, and we mention several. Additionally, we dig a little bit in to how we got here. How big science projects became necessary, when they weren’t just decades prior.
And interweaved with all of that is, as always, music.
Discussion begins at about 3 minutes in.
(Cover image of the recording is from the ALICE experiment (one of the four detectors at interaction points in the Large Hadron Collider) at CERN.)
Update: The Rosetta Mission (where we landed a probe on a comment) was mentioned a few times during the show. It was/is pretty baller. Learn more here.
In this episode of These Vibes Are Too Cosmic I speak with Gloria Tavera, MD/PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. We discuss the general mechanics of our immune systems and malaria’s effect on it. We get in to why malaria is so difficult to treat and why so many children die from the parasite. Gloria explains the new malaria vaccine – both why it’s exciting and how it is far from a full solution (or even a full malaria vaccine), but rather an important step along the road to eradication.
In the last portion of the show we discuss another deeply important topic, and a great passion of Gloria’s: equal access to medicines worldwide. Gloria is president of the board of directors for UAEM (Universities Allied for Essential Medicines), an organization that uses a muti-tiered approach to leveling the access to affordable medications across the world, and particularly in developing countries. Gloria uses the example of insulin. In Sub-Saharan Africa people commonly die of diabetes due to the fact that insulin is rare and, when available, unaffordable. The system is stacked against them.
So, listen up, learn about our world, and get fired up!
Some extra info on malaria immunity (from Gloria Tavera):
The figures above (found here) show how an antibody, along with a set of molecules called complement, can bind a malaria parasite and keep it from invading a human red blood cell, which keeps it from surviving and reproducing.
The second figure above on that page shows how the set of molecules, called complement, bind to antibodies and make the antibodies even more effective at killing the malaria parasite and keeping it from entering human red blood cells.
More information on the fight for access to medicines (from Gloria Tavera):
Related to that video, is a petition to the World Health Organization (WHO) that we have created. We are calling on World Health Organization member states to fund a pool of money (prize funding) for researchers to create drugs, diagnostics and vaccines that are targeted to help solve diseases of major public health importance, that will be available royalty-free.
If you’re interested in going even deeper, read the recent LA Times piece from Economist Mariana Mazzucato, on problems and solutions regarding our current, global biomedical research and development system.
Aired on WPRB 103.3 FM from 2 to 4am on Thursday, November 19, 2015.
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, but this one is just me, some music, and some chat about Enceladus (moon of Jupiter that’s getting scientists all excited) and sound waves in the early universe. Because yolo.
I talk a lot about Enceladus and why it’s such a promising moon for us to study. It turns out that there’s geothermal activity! Geysers and volcanoes and stuff! This is due to tidal effects with a bigger moon nearby – Dione.
Additionally, during a later mic break I discuss Baryon Acoustic Oscillations – these are sound waves in the early universe that pushed matter around and greatly affected the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters in our universe.
Quinn Gibson is a doctoral candidate in chemistry here at Princeton University where he works in a solid state chemistry group, the CavaLab. From what I gather, they’re all about looking for materials with new and interesting properties. First they make predictions based on physics and chemistry, then they synthesize the materials — metal crystals — and characterize them. In their lab, one edict is “don’t be a baby about blowing stuff up.” So, kids. If you want to blow stuff up without living a life of crime, chemistry may be for you.
Just how the invention of the transistor has revolutionized every aspect of our lives, the new materials that Quinn creates, like these weird things called topological insulators, could change everything. He explains it all right here in this show.
Also check out Quinn’s music at qfolk.bandcamp.com. We play a couple tunes on the air and he tells us how they came about.
P.S. Check out Jack on Fire’s new songs on their soundcloud (this show features the excellent tune, Beat the Rich)!
The featured image is from a scanning tunneling microscope. It’s used to image the surface of a 3D topological insulator in order to better get at its properties. From: http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~yazdaniweb/
In my second interview with Gloria Tavera, MD/PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, we dig deep in to drugs. (
Happy Christmas, listeners! In this rockin’ show 
In this episode of These Vibes Are Too Cosmic I speak with Simone Sneed, board liaison at the Environmental Defense Fund and professor at NYU in Civic and Social Organization, on the troubling statistics of women and minorities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. We get deep in to this topic, speculating on how it came about and what can be done about it as well as current initiatives working towards getting more minorities in STEM fields. Additionally, we discuss the analogous trends in arts and business/non-profits.
In this episode of These Vibes Are Too Cosmic I speak with 
These Vibes Are Too Cosmic 