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Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors, especially in names. Click any timestamp to jump to that moment in the audio.

0:47So you start, Linda. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us. My name is Linda Hernandez -Duran. I’m the host of Science Behind the Glass. I hope that you can hear us. Thank you for joining us. And also, please let us know if you feel more comfortable. We are speaking in English or we translate both languages. That’s the idea, like a closing the gap. And then I throw the ball to Rafa. Hello, everybody. My name is Raffaele Giordano. I, yeah, I’m part of the team as well.

1:25So I look after all the technical aspect and all the media and marketing for it. So, yeah, happy to be here. Yeah, and I’m Daniel Esguerra. You know me as well as your co -host of Science Behind the Glass. Thank you all for joining us in this little… live presentation that we are putting together. So I guess this will be a really cool experience because the podcast is in both languages. So maybe we are going to be flipping in some kind of Spanglish and talking about what the podcast is all about. For people who are joining us today, maybe you already know what we do, but the idea of the podcast is to present science and people in science and their work and their way of doing science in a very human way. So I guess today we are going to recap a little bit what has been this last year for us in terms of personal accomplishments and in terms also of what our guests taught us as well. Yes, it’s a pleasure for us to do this. I’m going to talk a little bit about where this project was born, at what moment, and what inspired this project. I was chatting with some friends. As

2:55biologists, we always think that people that work in different areas or in different fields know everything about what we do, but actually… having some drinks and then I’m telling them I work with spiders and behavior and they have crazy strategies and people were like, oh, that’s very crazy. I never thought about that, the spiders. So having a chat with Danny, I told him like, oh, it would be really cool that actually we try to convey to people what other researchers, not only researchers, but people that is working behind the scenes is doing. to make science possible.

3:32And this includes NGOs, people that work in NGOs, not necessarily they are biologists, filmmakers, like, for example, Rafa. But then all the effort and all the struggle, challenges, but at the same time, rewards. And what we decided to choose this area, but also how we take all this knowledge that some researchers and everyone has and take into the public. In that way, we are… Like people can be more aware that we are not a Sheldon or like as the people usually think about us.

4:06And that sometimes as a biologist, we feel even more uncomfortable talking about our own challenges or like if we think about the health. sometimes difficult the path is to achieve for example a job or getting our experiment run or just moving to other country but i know that everyone has different struggles in different fields but the idea is that the is a human science that we are taking in yeah to take into the public and now in spanish You want to recover all the things that we already said in Spanish? I don’t know.

4:52Go ahead. But the most curious thing was to realize that as biologists, many people who work in other fields, for example in economics or different fields of study, did not even have the slightest idea of what one was doing. And what is that for? And what is that for? So talking about taking some drinks, one realizes that what one really does is quite curious and actually has a lot to do with this world in which we live, right?

5:41So with Dani one day I told him, hey, it would be cool to make a podcast and take the people, the general public, connect the people with what really are the scientists, like the human part of the scientists, but not only the scientists, there were also those people behind the foundations, without the spirit of profit, the foundations that work to protect biodiversity. of people who are not necessarily scientists, but make science possible. So we have gone around the world trying to contact people, people who work in different areas, but they are characters who are usually not seen or that people do not know about them. And we have also learned a lot from them. So we got into the task of putting this podcast. both languages, Spanish and English.

6:36We know that Spanish has a huge audience and English, the majority. But it is a great effort that we make bringing you the podcast and showing you that human side of all the challenges that go through. científicos para llegar como a un descubrimiento hay veces como las frustraciones y que como toda persona tenemos las mismas frustraciones y los mismos retos de alguna de una forma diferente y el mudarse de casa a otro país conseguir incluso trabajo entonces son todas esas pequeños como retos y todas esas pequeñas como recompensas que obtenemos como científicos y por eso es que pues venimos acá a compartirles y no ha sido una tarea fácil As biologists, I think it is quite rare to speak in public, at least for me it is. But, well, the idea is to communicate these two worlds, not only of science and the general public, but also to break language barriers.

7:45That’s right. Yes, and as you say, and we have been talking, the intention is precisely to close barriers in many ways, right? And from there… that we have also chosen the name of the podcast of science behind the glass because many times science has as in the general public a veil of glass as they think that science is something unreachable as behind an academic world a kind of mystical aura as if scientists are a certain type of very special or very rare people, and the idea is precisely to close the gaps, both in languages, as Linda said, but also to show that that veil is something rather fictitious and that scientists are also ordinary people who have their difficulties, who sometimes fail, who sometimes get it right, right? Who have a lot of things that any other person from any other profession has. y pues la idea de este proyecto es justamente cerrar todos este tipo de brechas y hacer más accesible, quizás más amigable, el acceso a la ciencia y a las personas que están detrás de la ciencia, ¿no? Entonces, pues todo surgió de ahí, ¿no? De esa idea y del hecho de que, pues como decía Linda, pues nosotros somos hispanohablantes, pero pues hemos estado recorriendo diferentes lugares y hemos… I have

9:16had to face different challenges that all those of us who are in science face to present our work in other languages, specifically in English, right? So from there that we are also doing this exercise in this way, right? So it has been very interesting and today’s broadcast is part of that, right? Like an experiment. We want to thank you a lot Rafa because having you in the team has enabled a lot of things that we wanted in the beginning of the podcast. Yeah, no, it’s a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I’m not my background is not scientific as per size.

10:16I become more in the filmmaking side of things. But I’ve always tried to, you know, translate scientific visions. So some of my early work was in like, documentary filmmaking and how to make it appealing for the general public, especially for like, topics as global warming as per se very important that are affect us as a mass so it’s been quite rewarding on all the different guests that we had for all the different topics but of course the podcast has brought some challenges because of the bilingual aspect of it but challenges are interesting right so we’ve made them work and the project has it’s ever evolving uh i guess um for the three of us so which uh brings different challenges and different uh great things so it’s a pleasure to work with both linda and yourself yeah yeah cool yeah and in that sense brother was also one of our guests in the podcast. So I guess that was when our relation in this project began. So how do you feel that first time that you were our guest in the podcast? And what was the things that you liked to join this project?

11:49Well, I got to say, you guys made the process really easy and very smooth. I felt very comfortable talking to both of you, which was, yeah. Thank you, Danny, and thank you, Linda, for, yeah, the ease process of it. But why I was interested in it is just to showcase a little bit. There’s a lot of, like, from my side of things, I usually work a lot behind the scenes, especially, like, Even for, let’s say, in the scientific aspect, I’m trying to collaborate with scientists and trying to realize a very perhaps technical topic and how to translate that and make it appealing for a general public. So I was really interested in letting people understand the whole process.

12:42uh of taking a really like specific topic and bringing it more appealing in a conceptual way so and you have a different ways of of uh i guess speaking to your audience which is visually uh and through language so um and what happens like in the conceptual level of it is quite interesting but that comes from more somebody that has been trained in the arts so to try to showcase to some to the audience you guys have at the early stage i thought you guys audience was quite scientific uh so it was a little bit um yeah but i guess it’s more of a broader audience now that i’m seeing and then the appeal of reaching out to uh you know spanish speaking speaking community was quite interesting as well and so that was like quite captivating for me uh because linda was kept on early on on this project she kept on coming to me with all these different uh questions on how to do stuff and i’m like okay i was trying to problem solve and i’m really much into problem solving things and linda used to come here like because creating a podcast there’s a humongous uh ordeal of tasks involved The technicality of making sure you’re recording high fidelity sound is one. So how to capture that. And I was trying to help Linda to understand what are the physical equipments that you need? What are the

14:14software equipments that you need and the knowledge base of that? And then after that, the post -production aspect is to edit. So it’s a humongous task. And after you do that. I mean, Linda brought in another interesting variable into all this, which was, this needs to be in another language. And I’m like, okay. And I was like… We scientists are always bringing variables to the equation to make it harder and harder. Yeah. That’s part of our job, right? As audiologists, getting harder and getting… Yeah, which is… Which is cool because in filmmaking, why I really liked and I worked so many years in the filmmaking industry, like you have the problem solved on the spot and you have pressure of time, money, and everybody’s looking at you to deliver. So I was like, and I’m used to working in that kind of environment, which is quite, quite cool. And I thrive in it in one way or another. So when Linda was like, oh. we need to do this in another language i was like oh we can train uh on tts on llm model with it so that’s what we’ve been doing behind the scenes so there’s a lot of um yeah we’ve been enabled to train an ai model for voice in both in english male english female um and then vice versa spanish male spanish female so to create all that is quite computation intensive

15:47and my I’m not by trade a data scientist or computer engineer. So I’ve been learning on the rope, which is kind of cool. Yeah, and I like this project. And that’s what I’m trying to bring across is that, yeah, the essence of curiosity. If you’re curious and you have kind of a vision, you can make it happen. yes now i’m summarizing it now in spanish now i’m like a short summary it’s like well one of the things is like i didn’t have any idea about video editing even less about video like a edition in audio edition so it was through a friend of mine that recommend rafa to help me out and then i went there and he was really really nice showing me how to do things it was very very tricky danny was doing it with we we have been doing using like a free tools other ones are not free but then we have it was like a learning process from scratch and then a lot of work in the press production because if you remember some of our first focus um we have to translate uh ourselves and with our funny accent and some people are like i don’t understand what you said But it’s like I’m really trying.

17:19I’m trying to be really impartial with my English. I know that I have an accent. I know that maybe the pronunciation is not great. But trying to make it engaging and trying to close it up. So this is one of the kind of things that we bring here. And now in a small summary, what he said. Bueno, yo me acerqué a Rafa en la universidad y él fue el que me enseñó a hacer la edición de audio. Dani es muy autodidacta y él aprendió por su lado utilizando herramientas o software libres. Pero yo quería ir un poquito más allá, entonces yo empecé con los videitos, tratando de hacer como promociones con los videos y utilizando softwares que no cobraran. Now we use some keycodes, but it has been a long process. Rafa has a lot of experience with this audition, he is a cinematographer, a filmmaker, and well, Rafa has helped us a lot to improve aspects such as translation, so he has been training artificial intelligence models with female and male voices, but it has been quite difficult. but now we have improved it a lot. We had a small suspension of Eleven Labs,

18:49which is an application that translates into different languages, and it was only for three months. It was a lot of help, but from there Rafa started training a model to train both voices. complicated, but well, he is a genius, he is not an engineer, he said, he is not an engineer, he is not a sound engineer, but we have been gradually improving, trying to bring them a better quality to transmit and communicate this in a simple way, something that I always when I contact the guests is that I tell them, well, you have to translate in a simple way what they are doing.

19:34And it’s also very cool when they share things that are very much theirs, challenges that they come up with. For example, now entering what are the episodes, our recent guest, Dr. Valeria Pizarro, told us about the challenges and she said, well, I cry almost every day working with the choirs because it’s a race against time.

20:00and it is like testing one thing to the other to try to save coral colonies. They are that kind of things that many times as a public one does not realize and it is very easy to see it from, for example, a documentary, but the other is to see it live and treat them live and try to save like these animals, which is not only because they have an importance, but that they have worked with them for a very, very long time and all the dedication and love that each one of them gives. but it is also part of the community, right? So we have been with other guests, such as Dr. Leanda, such as Professor Sean Ong, who is an anthropologist and archaeologist, and he has a different background, and he has a more approach towards the indigenous community for many years, and he says that science has to…

20:58because if the scientists are very lost in the way we communicate things and they get lost, the information is totally lost. So that’s one of the things that the podcast brings, trying to provide that bridge between those two worlds that are a bit lost, because yes, there we have the scientists, we live in a world, in a bubble.

21:27and people come to another one that unfortunately don’t connect. And well, that’s the idea. And now in English. In English it’s like something that inspired me to walk this path is that as a biologist I have a lot of challenges because in Colombia it’s not free study or doing the like a Well, you can get the university by free.

21:57There is a public university, but there is like a limited access to that. If you don’t pass certain exams, you’re not admitted. So I have to pay. And it was very challenging. But then I loved, with passion, what I was doing. I jumped from marine biology. That’s the way I met Dani, to environmental biology. I don’t regret that jump, though. sometimes no i’m kidding and and then in that moment i start i remember a subject that was zoology and then i remember that i was afraid of spiders and insects but then when i started discovering how cool these animals are and how incredible and all the strategies that they have like a hunting mating, all spiders are crazy mating. So I remember that when I attended a conference and this researcher, her name is Anita Eisenberg, she was studying the sexual selection in tiny little spiders, like at the size of 1.2 centimeters. But there are really good strategies, the mating strategies, because in spiders the females control all the mating. And then the females make like a, like a plug, like they cover the genitalia and then they assess the male, how good or how bad the male is. And of course they can kill the males. And I was like, oh my

23:28God, this is amazing. All the strategies, like a mating plug. And how other males trying to get rid of that plug to mate with the female and the females become more aggressive. They mate more and more. So that was mind blowing for me. And these strategies can vary between species, habitats, because the spiders explode in different ways. The habitats, they are amazing, adapting, but there are also some spiders, like the ancient spiders, are really susceptible to environmental changes. So I would say that I should thank the spiders that I… I traveled a lot. I traveled to Costa Rica. I had the chance to work in Costa Rica. And I discovered, I don’t know, maybe being arrogant or thinking that I knew I was going to run experiments and everything was going to be okay. I was testing how sensible were the spiders or the males when they touched the genitalia. This is spider form, right? So I wanted to test, like, how the males were stimulating the females. But then I had to shape the females, genitalia and these tiny little spiders. So I had to come up with these crazy ideas of, like, bikini walks with the spiders. But that wasn’t even the challenge. The challenge was, like, the spiders didn’t want to meet. And that was

25:00because we have a tropical, I think, depression at that time that I was in Costa Rica and any animal. didn’t want to do anything so I started reading like crazy asking people reaching out like what’s going on and then it came to my mind like ah maybe the female don’t like only one male maybe she wants to see five so I put two males and the female were watching or feeling they don’t have good eyes the performance of two males and then when the males they didn’t heal each other so um and when the males were fighting for the female and access the female the female decided to mate so that was the strategy of feeding the females beforehand so there was all these kind of things that actually make you feel really humble because there’s so many environmental conditions that you we can’t control and you don’t control the behavior and that was very crazy because at that time i was working at the botanical garden and decided to quit and i had the chance to go to costa rica only for three months and then after what yeah i was unemployed but it was such a cool this is a cool experience and then i went to finland and i worked with mods and that oh that was amazing it was completely different but yeah it has been like a a mix of different experiences and at the same time as i was measuring like danny and rafa like an imposter

26:31syndrome that you don’t believe about your own achievements and success so this is extended everywhere yeah so this was a little bit about what i have been doing journey as well as an academic journey and and Exactly. Now that you mentioned the invertebrates and the zoology, I think this has been like a common point that brings us together at the beginning of this communication enterprise. with Professor Gonzalo Fajardo, you remember? He was our first guest in the podcast.

27:15And he was our teacher in these particular subjects when we were studying our graduate studies. And so it’s very interesting and it has been, as you said, challenging emotionally and personally. and to bring all these personal experiences that we had maybe from the first years in our graduate studies and now with our specialties and everything.

27:49And we kind of begin this project. going back to our roots so so i think that that that is very interesting and for the people speaking spanish or listening in spanish so so and he gave us classes and inspired us both, both Linda and me, and we started this podcast with him.

28:20So he was our first guest and we gave him a different approach. We didn’t focus on the issue of the invertebrates that he works with. This recap that we have today is also to go back to these roots of the podcast, to remember these first guests and all the things that we have learned so far. So it has been very interesting so far and we hope to continue doing this for many more episodes and having many more guests. We have also expanded our range of subjects. Maybe we started a lot with biologists because it’s Linda’s and my specialty. But now we have also anthropologists, we have also economists, we have many subjects in our episodes. So it has been very interesting so far. So how do you see this progress that we already have made? Rafa, for example. Yeah, I think it’s quite interesting. I think like one of the, upcoming guests that we have it’s

29:50like we even expanded to like more privacy and how a privacy is quite important for and that of course goes through like a political aspect of it and it affects the people of like mass surveillance um so that was an interesting one that’s coming up so i’m quite captivated of the broad reach that we’re we’re going at you know like the anthropologist that we we um that we interviewed which was sean holmes like his work is with like aboriginal communities and like um i mean i’m a foreigner to australia and to be honest most people overseas view of aboriginal people is is quite limited so it was i think it’s an interesting uh uh yeah aspect for us to explore different realms to to bring knowledge of on those topics to an international audience um yeah i’m quite yeah i’m quite content of everything that’s coming up but i think it would be quite interesting like to touch base is how we choose uh the guests that we’re going to interview like linda what’s the process that we go on to and how do we choose who’s next well i’m going to make a short summary in spanish because i don’t know if there are some people there um and of

31:31the journeys that we have carried out with Dani and with Rafa, which in a certain way have been carried out out out of curiosity. So, as I explained to you in English, I work with spiders. Spiders for me have been an explosion of creativity. First I was in marine biology, then I went to environmental biology. But I think that all these things are the ones that took me to… not only to be curious but to try to understand a little more about the world in which we live and this is what we are bringing to you. I have had the opportunity to travel to different places, I was in Costa Rica where I had too many challenges with the environmental conditions or that the spiders did not want to reproduce or that they simply did not like males but I also jumped to Finland and well with Dani Dani, as he explains it, we had Gonzalo Fajardo, who for me was my thesis director and who has supported us a lot to try to transmit this knowledge, but not only from biologists, this knowledge also comes from other fields of research. And something that we have had, for example, an artificial intelligence engineer, who is Ryan Tajani. and he explained to us all the resources that are invested in artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence models are trained and how wrongly many people think it is that it will solve everything, but

33:03in reality he explains that you do not have to train the model appropriately or what happened, for example, in Canada or in the United States, I do not remember, in selection processes where they trained a model where the profiles were white men. So what the model did was simply discard women and people of color. So that happens if you don’t train a model well and it’s not perfect, right? So it’s the same when we’re doing this, when we translate. How do we select the guests?

33:40We select the guests based on curiosity, I say, but we also try to see that science is not only biology. which it is, and it is like the basis for me, the basis of everything, and from there they come off as a matrix or as many little phrases that go towards many elements, from there comes engineering, from there comes, for example, photography, from there comes, for example, what is artificial intelligence, and everything goes towards the same knowledge, towards the same base. But we have, for example, anthropologists, we have…

34:12For example, Dr. Rachel also works in education and she worked in what is food in urban gardens. That was also super cool because she knew how she got to work or how she got to relate to food and how she completely changed her diet because she grew up in a place where they provided everything and they grew everything. But when she moved to the city, she became vegetarian because they say, no, I have no idea where that comes from.

34:47So she starts these gardens, urban gardens where her own food grows and COVID showed us, taught us the bad things, that food does not fall from the sky and in the supermarkets. So they are things that we have to be conscious of, but also that our guests have taught us. We also have economists, but everything is also related to nature. This that Rafa was talking about is also more at a political, economic and social level, which is going to be our next guest, who is Yaya, Dr. Yaya. And we also had the honor now to expand a little to Africa, Nigeria. with Rachel and she is a super woman. She is one of those women that you admire and you say, wow, how tough.

35:46She is the director of a non -profit organization that has managed to place, to protect, to extend protected areas. and work with the community, hand in hand with the community, with all the risks and all the crazy things that can happen, because Nigeria is one of the most populated countries in Africa. And all the challenges of the world, because there is oil extraction, there is deforestation, but thanks to the work together with her, together with scientists, they realized that there was a… a primate on the way to extinction and they managed to extend this protection to them and educate the population. So we have guests who are not necessarily biologists or scientists, but who in one way or another contribute to this social change. And one of the guests that we also have, he is an educator and he is also a tourist guide, he said that that the way he approaches people is more than showing him a photo where a person, a photographer, took days standing still to see wildlife, he tries to approach from another point of view and it is with Legos, with Lego, using Lego, so it is like different perspectives that educate him even to one. And now in English.

37:28So we begin as we were speaking before, maybe with people we know and people that inspired us in those first episodes and people that we admire as well, like Professor Gonzalo, like Doctor Osiris. you know the those first episodes that were that were most maybe from the heart but that we were talking about the scientist families and this kind of things and we progress to to maybe some topics or some guests that that have topics that interest us like for example the economic topics the the artificial intelligence topics and and this this is very nice because because we we learned a lot from from those guests that maybe are not um acquaintances of us or that are so close to to us personally but we reach to those guests because we have like this curiosity and we want to learn about their science and we want to learn about the different perspective that they have from their fields, right? So also we were driven by our… as linda said our political

39:00interest our social interests right because many of our guests are are talking about ways to to change maybe um establish frameworks in different parts of society and that that may maybe maybe are you know like very very vanguard right now things that that not many people is is putting putting in in practice today and and that is what science is all about you know try to to break the the molds try and trying to to move forward to to new ways to do to do things so in that way we had this this guest that talked about inter in artificial intelligence, different ways of doing economic science, different ways of doing anthropological sciences. So, for example, the people that we interviewed that belong to NGOs that try hard and work hard to overcome political restrictions. Maybe also the loss from their different countries that may be hard to overcome to protect the environment or to help

40:31the indigenous communities. And these kind of things has been driven our focus on the podcast and the guests that we are looking forward to be interviewed in this project. So it has been quite a journey. Well, and then also we want to make sure that we are not biased, but we are always biased. But then with our conversations, we always ask the guests, like, okay, we have a set of guidelines of what we want to talk about based on the knowledge that this person has.

41:18But then it’s an open conversation. We have agreed with most of them, I could say. And then also like a biggest issues that maybe for scientists is that the publications. So that’s, it takes me to a really controversial topic that is publications in scientific world. So for people that don’t know or haven’t heard about our podcast with Dr. Anna Cheto. So she explains how all these publications. like at the rise of the publication for scientists start from the industrial revolution.

41:58Unfortunately, although it’s important sharing the information and doing the research and the way that we communicate or share the information with the scientists is through the publications. And this is a long process because it’s not only carrying out the experiments, but it’s also… managing the data, analyzing the data, writing the paper. And then once the scientists finish or the authors finish this, they send it into editorials. There’s bigger editorials there.

42:34There’s like a prestigious editorials and you try to publish there because there’s a coin in science that is the prestige or the impact factor, I could say. and unfortunately that’s like a race that because of the number of depending on the number of publications you can apply for a certain job or they can consider you for certain positions unfortunately but then what she was exposing is also that this has to be a free science and it has to be a way that we communicate these ideas no constraining the scientists because we pay for this. It’s not like as a regular publication that you obtain revenue for when you publish a book. No. All the work that has been done for four or five years or even more, you send all your work to your son. It’s like a baby that you have been working on. publishing and then you send it for publication to share with the scientific community into these editorials and what they do is that they send it to a blind reviews or reviewers and these people don’t get paid and they review your paper sometimes they smash you many times or they send comments back but these people they don’t receive any payment and we don’t receive any payment so as others of these publications and then once the editorials

44:04are like oh okay perfect it’s ready for to get published you need to pay three thousand dollars for the publication so we end up paying them and they get the copyright all your work to for the distribution so this is something that like i push me to the point to say like i don’t want to continue doing this this is not right so the doctors Anna Cetto says, like, there’s another way. And this is what she is, for example, with Latinx and with other organizations and other universities is pushing these editorials like, no, no, that’s enough. Enough is enough. And the idea of the scientific publication is sharing information is that we can collaborate, but not at the cost of, for example, a position. Or, for example, all the funding or half or one third of the funding of the researchers. So some of the universities have stopped that way of the publications or like a pain for these editorials that are even wealthier than Google and Microsoft.

45:12But other ones are still continuing this race. But yeah, so that was one for me was one of the biggest highlights that we have and we continue. with this issue. But then, yeah, the idea that people know is one of the biggest struggles that I think that the scientists have, that they don’t receive any sense for these publications. It’s just a coin that is the prestige of this coin.

45:38I would say that. And they put like a point on the impact factor. So for me, she was one of amazing guests. And the other one was Dr. Michael Kazumovic. I love games. And the way that he’s using games to do science and then showing how we are so similar based on the study, the animals, models that he used in the past, like, for example, spiders and other animals. But moving all that into humans and studying all the behavior in humans using games, that is amazing. And the way what we learn based on the gender. how we learn in a different way and how actually we have to convey the information to obtain a reward or how kids can learn in an enjoyable way using games. That is really cool for me. Sí, y en ese sentido, pues, esa también ha sido la intención del podcast, ¿no? Tratar de amplificar o de dar micrófono y de dar un espacio a estos científicos que están tratando de hacer las cosas un poco diferente, ¿no? Como decía Linda, pues, este tema de las publicaciones en ciencia es algo, pues, crítico y que hemos estado criticando, yo por lo menos conozco muchos colegas que lo

47:09critican. Well, yes, as Dr. Cheto explained to us, that indeed there are some publishing houses that are profiting from scientific knowledge when there are, let’s say, in ethical terms and in terms of how science has been founded throughout history, some… some priorities that we are fulfilling, which is to spread science above anything else for the progress of society, for the progress of people, for the common good of people. And what is being prioritized, as she mentioned to us, and as we have discussed with Linda and with other colleagues. is the commercialization of this knowledge through these publishing houses and that has been a topic that we wanted to highlight and that we wanted to give a voice that there are other alternatives and also from the different points, from listening to us and from ourselves, we have to start pressing in different ways to present our knowledge. Ha sido, yo creo que bastante perjudicial este sistema de difusión del conocimiento hasta este momento. Entonces, pues con el podcast buscamos eso, ¿no? Dar micrófono y amplificador a este tipo de ideas, a este tipo de discusiones

48:40que pues van más allá de la ciencia, que es lo que busca el podcast, ¿no? Tenemos discusiones filosóficas, tenemos discusiones de… Yes, and also we want to also highlight the point that with the podcast the idea is doing like a networking or like creating a network like a spider web as we call it to try to contact like the guest using an app platform an existing platform that the people is interested in a particular topic and they can be in real time contact these people or for example if they have papers or they have like information or they want to know or like i try to contact or communicate with this um with these researchers that the idea is like a we are it is a working process that we are doing with danny and with and with rafa but the idea is creating this big connection um through a live chat or and that the way um yeah like that they can contact the the guests and then they have different topics if the people is interested

50:11in them or even like for example students that they want to apply with them or help or volunteer with organizations so that would be a really it’s a it’s a good opportunity to try to get this networking working and helping each other not only with english or in english But yeah, so the idea is taking advantage of that. And moving from different countries, we also have had guests from Mexico that are working in a different way. For example, Dr. Aritz de Leon, she’s working with the Mayan communities, but then she was explained that she didn’t went there with a project. that she pre -designed, actually.

51:00She went there and they have a project that the communities have certain needs and she will start working with them in their project. So that was like a different approach that we have to change. And this is what Dr. Leanda Mason was saying, that the edgy ecology that she created this concept is like thinking in a different way, out of the box, for an ecology that haven’t been, in a way, like having to… conservative or to westernize society where only there’s a privilege but then also then where we dismiss the knowledge of the communities or indigenous communities is putting all like a equality um and equity in the same grounds that all have the same like a relevance but then it’s mixing all together and coming all together to work hand by hand that so that’s that was very insightful and also well she was also like in the conservation of spiders and how other animals are less charismatic have received less attention but when they start disappearing is when they because it’s when when this ecosystem start really like a going in decline And then not only the bigger mammals or the bigger animals or big vertebrates are more appealing, doesn’t mean that they are not important. They’re really relevant, but it’s not like diminishing the less

52:33characteristic animals. So this is like the other point that we have been learning, like trying to convey all this information, but not only from what it’s, for example, Australia researchers doing, but it’s also, if it’s possible, combined. forces with the Latin America and for example people working in Europe and that they can know what each other is like a talk each other and also that the people knows what are the challenges but also like oh that’s very cool like oh the spiders do that and really they’re really cool but it’s not like scolding people because they don’t know about this or like getting frustrated because they don’t know about this or like oh they don’t care about the forest and therefore maybe they don’t care because they don’t know really well how this connection that we should have with the forest right maybe they don’t care about what the indigenous communities think or thought or have suffered because actually they don’t know the story the history about this or the background of them right so that’s the idea it’s like a like a closing the gap between these worlds And closing the gap, I know that is challenging in the sense that it’s a lot of work, but with this community and hopefully with all the support of the public, we can continue doing this and closing this bridge. Yeah, perhaps I can reiterate

54:05something that Linda just said. I think it’s like what we’re trying to build, like what’s coming ahead as well is for us to foster a community. So foster a community, not just of scientists or specialists in those different fields, but also with people that are curious about the subject. So it’s like a multilayered community based. So we’re looking to for this to be like real time. So for people to come in and to talk and just to ask questions or even for experts to just bounce ideas with other specialists on the field. so um uh yeah that’s what we’re kind of looking forward to like science behind the glass is an umbrella of different projects but what we’re looking to do is foster curiosity and different information to the general public uh in a friendly manner i suppose so the podcast is our avenue for us to transcribe that with the public and to go into finer details. But we’re also looking to produce and to utilize each other’s skills sets on how we can foster the different means of communicating with people. So, yeah, I just wanted to put that to what Linda beautifully said. Yeah, yeah. In that way, I think we have growth a lot because with our community of guests

55:35growing, we we have learned a lot and we also learned about the these ways of communicating their ideas or putting together these interviews in a way that people can understand the message. Also putting our own input on the interview and how we see the projects that the guests are working on and this kind of thing. So it has been great.

56:08to to build this community because it has helped us growing in in so many ways so so yeah i think this is one of the of the most valuable things that we are doing with the podcast yeah because as Rafa said, Science Behind the Glass is a umbrella where it is a network that the idea is that we connect not only scientists, but also people who are interested in a particular topic and who can address, for example, the person or the guest we had. to obtain more information or establish a communication or, for example, if there is a volunteer or if, for example, they can establish a connection. But the idea is to lose that fear and also those barriers of language. And it is also to see from another perspective, like, well, I didn’t know about this, I want to learn more about this, I want to get closer to this, I want to know about that topic. And that is something that we must emphasize, that when we do the translations, I know that many times, well, we recently received a comment that being in artificial intelligence, it is not so striking to listen to the podcast, but in reality what we are doing is that first it is neutral, a neutral accent with ours. when

57:42we translate from English to Spanish, Spanish to English, because it depends on the guest, but the idea is that people who do not speak that language have access to that podcast, have access to that information, to that first -hand information, to what this guest said and how to contact that guest and that it is not over there. in a magazine just because of the giant find, which is what many times focus on, many science podcasts, which is very cool to learn about things that we don’t know and that teach us very relevant things or very simple things, but we also set aside what is behind all that science, what is behind all those people who do that science and how it can actually be done.

58:27how the general public can contact these people, how a network can actually be established for communication between different languages. So I think that one of the advantages of artificial intelligence has been that, to be able to translate from one language to another. As we saw in our first episodes, we put ourselves to the task of translating what the guest said. But as you can see, well, one has accents or many times we had to summarize the interview, but now with this tool that Rafa has worked with, it allows us to literally translate what was in the interview and we only say, for example, the questions.

59:12That is why it is so important that you help us by subscribing, sharing. That if you have comments, that if you have doubts, that if you have something that can be like a contribution that you can make to us, not only supporting us, but also commenting, making suggestions on how we can improve this or what guests we could invite. or if you know guests or know someone who is doing something peculiar, not necessarily magnificent, but that is not really seen, because that is what we also focus on. We are like those characters behind all these prestigious scientists who are working behind them. Behind them are those who actually are the ones who build all that science, right? And that is not seen. como muchos de los entrevistados que hemos tenido.

1:00:10Algunos que son magníficos y son increíbles, todos son increíbles, pero todos, algunos ya tienen su prestigio, pero otros no son tan visualizados como, por ejemplo, los que están detrás de un descubrimiento de arañas, pero no son tan visualizados porque, por ejemplo, estudian como videojuegos, o no son tan, no sé cómo se dice eso, como catchy.

1:00:37As a fashion topic. Exactly, as a fashion topic. For example, Mónica Puyana, who works with bioprospection, she explained to us how it has actually been a big challenge to do bioprospection and obtain all these bioactive components from the natural world to create something that we use, for example cosmetics. And how that is actually one of the big problems is that the fashion topics, for example, going to space or for example, those who publish in Science, in Nature, that these are magazines of a super giant size, but in reality it is only prestige that if one does not have a fashion topic, it cannot be published there and does not get funding. So she explained that having a continuity. de un proyecto es relevante tener una continuidad le permite a uno y a nosotros entender que está qué procesos se están llevando a cabo qué diferencias están ocurriendo en un organismo por ejemplo corales o por ejemplo con animales que son estésiles es decir que no se mueven mucho pero que necesitan un periodo muy largo para estudiar entonces estos son como cosas que uno aprende con todos estos personajes que que están de verdad detrás de las escenas haciendo ciencia con las uñas, diría yo. Sí, sí, es cierto.

1:02:10Ha sido muy gratificante realmente todas las entrevistas que hemos tenido y pues toda la experiencia que hemos ganado con el podcast en términos personales nos ha ayudado yo creo que muchísimo por lo menos desde mi punto de vista en habilidades comunicativas.

1:02:41The tools are for using them. How to use the social media. no nos entrenaron para eso nosotros no nos dieron ningún curso sobre esto entonces hemos estado trabajando desde cero en aprender todo esto de la mano del apoyo de Rafa y pues ha sido ha sido muy interesante la verdad entonces pues nada esta recapitulación ha servido mucho pues para ver eso como un ejercicio de todo lo que hemos aprendido en este año de transmisión That’s true. For example, I usually don’t like social media. I feel a little bit trained after posting things. But it’s a big effort to post a little bit of my concept. ignorance with for example social media how to post and how to put like a stickers and so Rafa was showing me the other day how to put the stickers and I feel the most ignorant person like but how do you

1:04:13do that so this is simple things that for us we never were trained to convey the information in this way we never were trained just like a just for the scientific public of a scientific audience and know usually know for the public or how think in a simple way or how for example being really effective with a social media communication they have to be shortened and they have to be in certain format on certain keywords like that has been very fun blowing for me because i’m very bad at this I’m selling myself and I think that that’s one of the other things that is like with the imposter syndrome that’s like a that’s you don’t believe in what you do and all the effort that you put on this but actually yes you have to recognize what we have done but like all the effort that you put yourself in every task and then yeah that has been pushing Dani to use the social media that has been fun too yeah yeah i have to acknowledge it um i might just yeah come in and just say like uh we live in a society where there’s information overload uh i’m not really a social media person i work in media but i happily happily stay behind the scenes i’m not really on the posting thing But

1:05:43we have to also acknowledge we’re in a, it’s called a creator society, a creator economy. So we are first time that people are able for creators like of media creation that we’re able to sustain ourselves, a sustainable economy. It wasn’t possible when I first started in this field. It was bigger teams. much more expensive like assets i remember the first editing software um it was like twenty thousand uh dollars a year for a license and that was avid so when uh when apple came out with uh came out in the early 2000s it was revolutionary for the creative industry because with two thousand dollar asset that you bought you got a nine linear editing software so that kind of sprung the ability for people like what we’re doing today, where this is live.

1:06:39So this is being done with just computers, normal computers that you can have at home. And it’s giving us the ability to broadcast internationally. When I first started in this field, there was no way you needed an infrastructure of millions of dollars to do that. So it’s pretty cool that we’re able to do this. And I think as… we have to be like uh versatile and uh and we just have to take the technology that’s coming and embrace it and just try to adapt with it so um yeah it’s ever evolving ever morphing but we’re able to to broadcast right now just with really special simple tools so pretty cool to see it from myself where i started uh from back in the days Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing, actually, what we can do and that we can have this possibility of exploring this curiosity of ours that we have to communicate science and to put in discussion these kind of hard topics. And this wouldn’t be possible, as you said, if this technology wasn’t available.

1:08:01a few years ago so yeah yeah it’s amazing the the things that that we are able to do now yeah and this recap is is also one of those things that that are amazing to to put together with this basic infrastructure as you said yeah yes now nanny is going to be in every social media and we are going to publish over this chat and that’s another thing that we have to mention that like we’re really we’re trained for example to get a job that’s one thing like to sell ourselves that’s the other thing to be exposed to other people and trying to explain simple words and secondly and using the technology and then Rafa is a witness of the academics how bad or how dinosaurs they are. Like I tried to combine information and not only using like a slides and with thousands only like words there and then the students don’t understand absolutely anything and now after COVID they had to put everything online that was Jorge Molina that is another guest that we had that he was explaining about different senses.

1:09:29more than with different animals and he said that one of the challenges that he had was during going trying to convey the information and trying to get the people engaged when you are not seeing like a face -to -face right so learning all these technologies haven’t been easy it’s very challenging it’s like a coursework but it’s very like as you said like we have to embrace the technology Yeah, very much so. Especially the youth right now, how they absorb information is through many different outlets, right? So it’s like university models need to be adapted because there’s a wealth of information out there free of charge. Yeah.

1:10:18So that’s one of the part of the… the guest that we have that is going to talk about the centralized technology and security that is like a very exciting and then i think that um a our next guest for this week is uh economist so we after just speculating about different topics and about nature and how it’s measured and the whole value a catastrophe, how expensive it can be after a catastrophe, for example, a cyclone damage. We have this special guest that is working with communities and how all these social aspects are not considered in this assessment of damage.

1:11:06But he explained to us with a specific community and also he explained to us different models, economic models. um what is currently uh working now what we have now and what actually we have to in theory well we have to we can continue we want to continue living in this world to move or transcend too so julian ruiz is our next guest uh for for this week and we invite you all the guests and also the public to comment if you have new guests or you want uh any changes or you want you have any feedback that will help us heaps and use the comments use the comment section yes please use the comment section and also yeah so basically well we are This is a new year. This podcast turns one year in October, pushing against all the probabilities with a lot of effort, with a lot of passion, with a lot of, I would say, tears. It hasn’t been terrible, but yeah, so pushing slowly, bit by bit, building on the ideas with your support. will continue

1:12:40spreading the word and making this richer and richer. Yeah, yeah, I think that covers it, the whole recap. It was great to do this live today, to remember the challenges and the learning and everything that we have been through during this year. So, yeah, it was great. And thank you, thank you both. It was really nice. So we are going to leave. we are going to leave this recording also available for whoever wants to know more about what we have been doing who we are or the challenges that we have gone through and also um if you have comments and as i said like a each of us put from our own effort and our own time we work in different things we And then it’s in our spare time that we dedicate ourselves to do this and translate this. And then now in Spanish, muchas gracias por escucharnos. Esto ha sido una conversación bastante enriquecedora.

1:13:50Si ustedes tienen comentarios al público, si tienen alguna retroalimentación que dar, si saben o conocen de nuevos invitados o de personas que ustedes crean que podamos entrevistar. Please leave us your comments, share, subscribe and help us a lot by sharing and subscribing. That’s like a giant part. We are trying to reach other countries, other places, bringing you better quality content, improving quality and promotions.

1:14:24If you like the promotions, if you think they are cool. Well, Oli is also part of the group, but I don’t have her here. She is the face of the podcast. So, together with Oli, Rafa and Dani, we are going to continue bringing you these interviews. What I was saying is that we have an economist invited. His name is Julian Ruiz. He is going to talk about environmental evaluation, but focused more on the cost of natural disasters and how they should actually be evaluated. and also aspects that have not been considered on a social level, for example, psychological and social, after a natural disaster. And he has a particular example in a community in Colombia, but we also talk about what the current economic models are, what are the alternative models that we have to what is the gross domestic product in global growth of a country. and also what the new trends are and how we should be moving to continue to achieve a sustainable world. So he explains to us from his point of view all this. We are also going to have Clara who is going to talk about the decentralized economy and about Bitcoin and all these things that were very difficult for me to understand. pero ya lo hablan en palabras simples. También vamos a tener Rachel. Rachel trabaja para una fundación

1:15:58no gubernamental en Nigeria y todos los alcances que ha hecho esa mujer increíble contra todas las posibilidades, porque literalmente ya está en línea de fuego para proteger áreas y para proteger la biodiversidad de Nigeria. And we are also going to have a special guest who is another Valeria, Valeria Castañeda, who talks to us about language barriers and she is Colombian and what it is to have a language barrier and as a scientist, how to break those barriers and what tools we have and how her part is a conversation that is quite… not only to think a little further beyond the other, or how the other feels, or how the student from another country feels, where their native language, for example, is not English.

1:17:00It is not necessarily Spanish, but it can have another language. And all the frustrations that this entails, but also the tools that it offers us to look for something more equitable. Entonces los seguimos invitando a que nos sigan viendo, sigan compartiendo, nos dejen comentarios, vayan a nuestra página oficial, apóyennos si a ustedes les gusta esto, síguenos en todas las redes sociales, en Instagram, en YouTube, y bueno, estaremos ahí pendiente. Rafa, do you want to say something else? Yeah, just thank you to everybody. It’s a true pleasure to work both with Linda and Danny.

1:17:44And I just want to suggest to everybody to just go to the website, sciencebehindtheglass.com. And we got a little support button there. Click the support and just help us in any way you can. We really, really appreciate it. So just support. And it’s simple as that. Anything. Yeah, all your support will help. This is self -funded. for myself, Linda and Danny. And there’s a lot of time and a lot of love from the three of us to bring content to you guys. So, yeah, we really do this from the bottom of our hearts. Yeah.

1:18:21Thank you. uh Thank you very much to everyone who has followed us throughout this year. Eso y lo otro que quería decirles es que no se olviden que muchas veces dejamos referencias en cada entrevista que tenemos y las referencias les van a servir a ustedes para no solamente saber más de esta persona, sino también para saber más de dónde obtuvimos esta información, de dónde estamos siendo inspirados. so don’t please don’t forget that we always leave most of the time we leave the references from each guest and that

1:19:51you want to know more about this person about the organization that this person is working on and also from the references and from the point of view of informations from the scientific papers also like the curiosity or from where did that interview comes from so just go to the references and then you can know more about that and also the social media is there yeah like subscribe on on youtube this video right here so yeah just give us a like and subscribe too thank you thank you gracias feliz año feliz año happy new year