January | 2010 | Welcome to Lisacast

Select, related slides are Slides from Georgia Institute of Technology.

BlogTalkRadio

Lisa Padilla: Good morning. It’s 08:32 AM Pacific Time on Friday, narrowly escaping Friday the 13th today so 12th 2008 and we are talking with Dr. Zhong Lin Wang today who is Regents’ Professor of the School of Materials Science and Engineering for the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. And he is joining us today to give us his thoughts and ideas about biomimicry and the future of technology. And I see on my switchboard that Dr. Wang has called in so let’s see if I can bring him in. Dr. Wang, are you there?

Dr. Wang: Yes. Can you hear me?

Lisa Padilla: I can hear you just fine. Thank you very much, it works out very well that you can call me. We are actually doing a dual live broadcast because the phone call is another audio technology that doesn’t do live videos but does fantastic audio and I just have to give some — to those guys just. This is going to be a show about technology and I am comparing Ustream versus the audio platform BlogTalkRadio. And Ustream has some very attractive features to it and you can see the UI feels comfortable and they are meant for live broadcast but definitely more on the video side. So Dr. Wang, enough about that, let’s talk about you because I know we are riding a little bit late and I want to be sure that if we run past let’s see what is noon your time that–

Dr. Wang: Okay I have till 2 o’clock.

Lisa Padilla: Okay no problem. One second, okay. So are you on the Ustream site now?

Dr. Wang: Yeah you mean the video right?

Lisa Padilla: Yeah the video. Why don’t we go ahead and start the broadcast?

(Informal Talk)

Lisa Padilla: Okay. So let’s start with you introducing yourself and then I can just step through these questions with you. How does that sound?

(Informal Talk)

Lisa Padilla: Okay so go ahead, let’s just get started. Why don’t we start by having you introduce yourself.

Dr. Wang: Okay. My name is Dr. Zhong Lin Wang, people normally call me by my two initials ZL Wang. I am Regents’ Professor at Georgia Tech, and my expertise is in nanotechnology nanomaterials. My personal background is in physics. I received PhD from Arizona State University in 1987 and I have been a professor at Georgia Tech for the last 15 years, and my main research is on nanotechnology and some related to energy research in Biotechnology.

Lisa Padilla: Fantastic. And you are widely cited as an expert in this field and involved in many projects globally and there is a couple that we will get into. And maybe it will be most natural to talk about those two projects that I mentioned earlier after we sort of investigate the question about your inspiration for studying in this field and your work in biomimicry?

Dr. Wang: We have several projects going on and the first one is related to energy holistic and the second project that is biomimetic applications, and let me come to the first project for the energy. I have been involved in nanotechnology over last 15 years, we build all kind of nano-devices for biological sensing, gas sensing, chemical sensing, and various devices. One key challenging question came to my mind a few years ago that if you build those devices, how are you going to power that because these devices are very small, power consumption is extremely low. So the key question is that can we have energy from environment so that we don’t need to use a battery so this little device can be sustainable working, wireless remotely for whatever time you expect it. So with this in my mind we started research in energy harvesting and that’s one of my major research project today. The second project is related to biomimic. We utilize biological species to fabricate new materials and let me probably use a couple of photographs to show you our research. And what I have here is if you can see this is a butterfly wing, right. Do you see the butterfly wing? And if you see this picture here, this is a scanning electron microscope image of the butterfly wing. This has unique colors and what we try to do is that can we replicate these butterfly wings to make new photonic devices. And biological species have the most advanced, most unique and most optimized structures that have photonic, many, many different properties so I will go can we replicate this to make new photonic devices that we are unable to fabricate by our own. So that was one of the inspiration to do this biomimic studies. So that would be a very brief overview of the two topics we do now, and let me elaborate a little bit on the energy side. Why do we need a small power source for applications involved? If you have a biological (Indiscernible) sensor, cancer detections, biological species detections, you are unable to have a battery to run in your body to drive these devices. Over a big scope, can you replace the battery that run the pacemaker by the energy generated from your heart beating, from your blood flow, from your body movement, your muscle movement. If we can have this energy, you can power some biological sensors, and this is one of our motivations to develop this energy harvesting technology.

Lisa Padilla: And Dr. Wang can you elaborate a little bit on application of being able to replicate how replicating the colors in those wings and in optical splitters might switch us from computer chips that are predominant today? [Full article]

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Transcribed from a previously recorded interview.

BlogTalkRadio

You are listening to Lisacast on BlogTalkRadio.

Hey welcome to the show the second one today. If you are a host on BlogTalkRadio, this is a new feature that not only can you do more than one show a day but also you can do longer shows. We have been responding to some future requests and we will continue to do so. It’s a big week for us. We just launched our revenue and sharing program for host which shares a piece of the advertising that runs on host profile and show pages. A big week for us and a big middle of the day for Lisacast. Today we have AirCongress gentleman Danny Glover is with us today. Danny, thanks for joining me.

Danny Glover: Thanks for having me on the show.

Lisa Padilla: And this is not your first time on BlogTalkRadio, right I didn’t bring you on first, right.

Danny Glover: No, I have actually been on Ed Morrissey’s show a couple of times, the most recent time was when we were talking about BlogTalkRadio’s partnership with AirCongress a few weeks ago.

Lisa Padilla: Okay very exciting for us and the BlogTalkRadio platform in general is very interesting to political talk-show hosts and listeners interested in that programing. As that as Ed Morrissey’s is well aware his sight Captain’s Quarters and headingright.com we also do headingleft.com and if you look under political categories on our website you will see hundreds of shows there on politics so these things seem to go together pretty well. So Danny, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the background of AirCongress and then with the present day state of poling and voting nomination, candidate races and so on and then we will ask you a couple of other questions.

Danny Glover: Okay sure. Well AirCongress is kind of an outgrowth of another blog that I started a few years ago called Beltway Blogroll for nationaljournal.com and when I was dealing with Beltway Blogroll I was tracking the impacts of blogs on politics and policy issues. And that was a big thing back in 2004. I started Beltway Blogroll in 2005. By 2006 the world was moving toward audio and video so it just seemed to me a natural outgrowth to start tracking audio and video and I decided to launch AirCongress this particular one is a private venture of my own I am doing in my spare time and it’s really just to track audio and video in the political and policy scene that includes videos by law makers who are producing them, our think tanks by campaigns by journalists and by bloggers who like it more. See anyone who is producing content out there I want to find it and create and views AirCongress as a portal for people who want to come to one spot and find all of the best audio and video. And I am trying to bring some of my journalistic instincts to bear there by basically saying I follow this kind of news for a long time now. Here is what I think is the most important.

Lisa Padilla: Right and by following this for a long time tell our listeners a little bit about your background in journalism and your experience in DC?

Danny Glover: I have been in Washington since 1991. I started Congressional Quarterly as a reporter. Congressional Quarterly coincidentally National Journal was started by people who used to work at CQ and they are direct competitor with Congressional Quarterly. So now I work for the competition. But I worked at CQ for about 6 and half years then I went over to an Internet publication that was kind of their op-ed page on the web it was IntellectualCapital.com. Worked there for about 3 years, 3 and a half years before it folded amongst the many dotcom folding in 2000 and then I came on at National Journal and I have been here at Technology Day ever since. I was the managing director at Tech Daily for about 6 years and then became the editor last fall.

Lisa Padilla: Okay and speaking of new media in Washington I have a clip from the last presidential radio address that I am going to play for us here.

Audio clip:

“The AMT was designed to ensure that the wealthy paid their first year of taxes. But when Congress passed the AMT decades ago, it was not indexed to for inflation. As a result the AMT’s higher tax burden is creeping up on more and more middle class families. To deal with this problem Congress has in recent years passed temporary legislation that prevented most middle class tax payers from having to pay the AMT. But this year Congress is yet to pass this legislation. A failure to do so would mean that 25 million Americans would be subject to the AMT, more than 6 times a number that faced the tax last year.”

Lisa Padilla: Okay and you know I played this quickly for two reasons. First is it’s interesting that the president is podcasting. Second because you can’t get the presidents radio address as a feed on the way out what say. But also secondly because we can talk about the democratization of media and I am sure you do often and the wide and less biased and more transparent distribution of news and opinion. But it’s a sweet and sour situation and so also is hoping that you would touch on some of the barriers, these conditions you know face now and in the future with regard to politics and the contribution of you know everyday job.

Danny Glover: It is interesting that the president’s podcasting, he is actually been doing a quite a while and the weekly radio address that you played a portion of that’s not the only thing he does. They have the White House Press Briefing, they put up as a podcast.