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The Geoscientific Method: Study Design and Mass Spectrometers · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:03
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:14
SPEAKER_01: Jesse Rymank, how are you doing today?
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Christopher, I'm doing well.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: What about you?
0:20
SPEAKER_01: Busted out to Christopher, huh?
0:21
SPEAKER_01: Feeling good.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: It's a fancy day today.
0:26
SPEAKER_01: How are you doing?
0:27
SPEAKER_01: Listen, I'm doing well.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing well.
0:29
SPEAKER_01: Um so let's jump right into this.
0:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, today's episode is an interesting one.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: It this episode idea came from me, really, because you were talking to me about Well, first of all, let me set the stage.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: You and I were together for like three days recently, and we did a lot of sitting on your porch, and you have a beautiful porch.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: It's like big solid wood beams.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, not really wood beams, like it's very log cabin-y kind of style porch, big wide porch, some good rocking chairs looking out over your rock collection and garden, and you know, the the nature.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: It's just a beautiful place for coffees in the morning and beers in the evening and great conversation the whole time.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite places.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
1:07
SPEAKER_01: We spent so much time on that front porch planning for three days planning how we're gonna move forward with this podcast and what we have coming up after that and all that.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: So super fun.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: Um, and anyway, you were talking to me because you drove from Pennsylvania to Michigan, and I was just asking you about what you were doing before you came to Michigan, and uh you were talking about how you're working with your mass spectrometers, trying to get your lab set up, and there was a problem with your mass spectrometers, and uh it was only on one part of the mass spec.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: And and you were describing like what you had to do, and I was blown away by this because you know, you had to fix a very expensive piece of machinery, or not fix it, but kind of like fine-tune it to do what you need it to do that's specific to your research.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: And uh that's what this episode is really all about.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: Is it like you know, something that a lot of people I don't think think about is really like how a research lab works.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, I know you have a disclaimer, so go ahead and insert that right now.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, this disclaimer is basically that this is just one person's opinion in one specific field of science, and then this is probably not the way that sums up our podcast.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: Two people's opinion, but that's a great point.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: But the yeah, I mean, this is I I agree with everything you just said.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: It you know, a little bit of insight into the way that this kind of science actually works is actually pretty interesting, I think, and something I didn't know even in throughout graduate school.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: But it is just you know, the way that I've experienced lab work and the way that my lab work operates in my field of geoscience.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: And so this is this might be a little bit different.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: That's the disclaimer is it's it's gonna be a little different.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: I you know, yeah, this is my idea, really gonna be just kind of me asking you questions and interjecting when I can, but I have a rough outline in my head, you know, as to where this is gonna go.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I think it's really a cool topic because it's just something that happens in probably every single science research lab that if you don't work in a lab or aren't closely related or to or you know associate with somebody that does work in a lab like this, that you just don't think about.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna talk about that.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna talk about how like science and the scientific method is kind of done in your field, and we're gonna talk about like mass spectrometers and exactly kind of what you're doing and what I found to be so interesting about this.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's do it.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's dive in.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: But before we do, let's start with some introductions.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: You are Dr.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: Jesse Rymink.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: You are one of my former high school students, one of the best, I might add.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: Um you went on to get your yeah, you went on to get your PhD um in geology and now work as a professor at Penn State University in the geoscience department.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: And you're Chris Bohuis, nationally recognized earth science teacher.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: You teach earth science, geology, field geology, astronomy.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: You teach tons of stuff, coach tons of stuff.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: You've been at it for a long time, I think.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: And uh, we've been friends for a while now, basically ever since I kind of got on the latter side of college.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: And this is Planet Geo, where we talk about geoscience stuff, interesting geoscience stuff and why it matters.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: All right, Chris, hit me with it.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: You ready to go?
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Ready?
4:29
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, you know what?
4:31
SPEAKER_01: First, Jesse, I think I want to start off with just uh if you can describe quickly, if you can, how a mass spectrometer like what does it look like and how does it work?
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think let me just set the stage for what the point of a mass spectrometer is, basically.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: It I mean, these are instruments that underpin a lot of geological data.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: Basically, all of geologic time is defined by mass spectrometers.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: We do geochronology with mass spectrometers, so they're they're really instruments that matter a lot to our field.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: Um what they look like is varies, but there's a lot of stainless steel and a lot of electronics coming off of them.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you've seen what they look like.
5:11
SPEAKER_01: All right.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: Can I just describe what a mass spectrometer, like what I think one looks like?
5:16
SPEAKER_01: And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but let's cut to the chase here because we only have like a half hour.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: So all right, keep me on the straight and narrow.
5:23
SPEAKER_01: Go for it.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: Gosh.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: So basically, it's a big tube, and you start on one end of the tube by ionizing whatever element or isotope that you want to count.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: Okay, you ionize it, you send it through this tube, and there the tube has a 90-degree bend in it.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
5:44
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:44
SPEAKER_01: And so at it at the bend is a magnet.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: And then at the other end, so you ionize it at one end, you send it through the tube, at it goes through a 90-degree bend, there's a magnet there, and then at the other end is a detector that counts the ions that hit that that hit the detector.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: Is that an adequate description?
6:06
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
6:07
SPEAKER_00: And so the point of the magnet might be sort of mysterious at this point, but basically the magnet is bending the ions along a path.
6:15
SPEAKER_01: You can think of Okay, so what why does a magnet bend an ion?
6:19
SPEAKER_00: Because an ion is a charged particle.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: It usually exists in our field, it usually exists as a plus one charge.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: So it's had an electron removed from the atom.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: So now it's a plus a molecule.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: So you strip off a negative charge, leaving the what was an atom, which is now a charged particle called an ion, but it's a positively charged particle.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: And it means that we can steer it with either magnetic fields or electric fields.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: It'll steer around in there.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so it bends in a magnetic field because it's a it's a charged particle now, and we bend it along this 90-degree turn in order to separate things out by mass.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: And you can think of this like a racetrack.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, if you got a horse is going around a horse racing track and you know, a heavy horse is harder to turn than a light horse.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Can you not talk about horses, please?
7:05
SPEAKER_01: Like so, does that offend you a little bit, the horses?
7:10
SPEAKER_01: I I just don't like what are you gonna talk about?
7:12
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, you know, a little Shetland pony and uh Clydesdale racing around it.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: Like, is that how this is gonna go?
7:18
SPEAKER_01: Can we just use automobiles, please?
7:20
SPEAKER_01: So let me give my attempt at this, okay?
7:23
SPEAKER_01: You take a little hot rod sports car, okay, and a semi, fully loaded semi, going around a racetrack, going at the same speed.
7:31
SPEAKER_01: A lorry for the people from the UK.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: Okay, sure, sure.
7:35
SPEAKER_01: Yep, you got so you have this this hot rod and a semi, a big loaded down hauler, going the same speed, and they have to go around the same bend in the track.
7:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: Now the smaller car This is a better one, Chris.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: Good job.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: This is better.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: The smaller car is gonna be able to take that turn much tighter and much easier than the semi.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: The semi is gonna be pulled to the outside much more than the than the low to the ground lightweight sports car, right?
8:05
SPEAKER_01: So they're gonna they're gonna take that bend differently, right?
8:08
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly right.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: So this is basically the heavier ion is the semi-truck.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't turn as easily.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: So actually it bends less.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: The lighter ion bends more.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: And so basically, after this 90-degree turn, before the turn, all the ions, no matter their mass, are flying in the same group.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: After the turn, the heavy ones are on the outside of the turn, the light ones are on the inside of the turn, and so we can put detectors in the way of those ions so that we can count the light ones and the heavy ones.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: Or actually, what we do is we shift the magnetic field.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: So we say a strong magnetic field will turn the heavy ones to our detector, a weak magnetic field would turn the light ones to our detector.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: So we can measure things like what we do in our lab is measure uranium, which has a mass of 238 atomic mass units, and we can also measure lead, which has an atomic mass of 206 atomic mass units or 207.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: So we can count those things by changing the magnetic field, but they're fundamentally ions flying through this tube.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: That is absolutely amazing.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: It's totally cool, isn't it?
9:11
SPEAKER_01: I mean, oh my gosh, that what a cool thing.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: That gets me very excited, you know, from a scientific standpoint.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: Like that's unbelievable that you're able to count.
9:19
SPEAKER_01: So, like a lot of people are familiar with carbon-12, carbon, okay, and carbon has like basically three common isotopes, carbon 12, carbon 13, and carbon-14.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: If you ionize them, okay, can you discern the difference between carbon-12, carbon 13, carbon 14?
9:37
SPEAKER_00: Yes, you can.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, this is something that's kind of interesting.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: Is carbon-12 and carbon-13, they're only one mass unit of difference.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: They're only one AMU weight difference there, right?
9:48
SPEAKER_00: But compared to the carbon, the total weight of the carbon, which is 12 or 13, that's actually a big difference.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: That's like almost 10% of the weight of the atom.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: The difference is large compared to the weight of the atom.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: It's like 10% of you know the weight of the atom.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: I never thought about it that way.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: That is unbelievable.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: So it's actually way harder to separate 235 uranium from 238 uranium because that's only a 3 AMU difference, but it's at 230 mass units of total mass.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: So it's actually harder to do that separation in a mass spectrometer than it is to do carbon from carbon.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: So I'm going on record, I have actually learned something from you today.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: The first time ever.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: No, seriously, it well, no, I won't say that, but it's not a common occurrence.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: But I I guess I would have thought it's much more difficult to discern the difference in carbon 12 and carbon 13 and carbon 14 versus U235 and U238, because that's a difference of three atomic mass units.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: But what you said makes perfect sense.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: It's a much smaller fraction of the mass of these isotopes, and so that makes sense.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: So basically, just to paint the picture, right?
11:00
SPEAKER_01: Let me try this.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: On the detector side of your mass spec, if you ran carbon 12, carbon 13, carbon 14 through the mass spectrometer, on the inside of the lane would be carbon-12, the middle lane would be carbon 13, and the outside lane would be carbon 14 because it has a higher mass and and it has a harder time taking that 90 degree bend with the magnet in the middle.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: That is exactly the way that is exactly right, Chris.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: Exactly the way it would be.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: And we can position multiple detectors in the back so we could detect all three of those isotopes at the same time.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: All right.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: Very cool.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: Now, moving on, I gotta ask, how much does one of these do one of these mass spectrometers cost approximately?
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Oh, great question.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: Too much.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: They the ones in our lab cost about uh three-quarters of a million dollars, probably, to get the the base model from the instrument manufacturer.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: So hold on a second.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
11:52
SPEAKER_01: The base model, like well, you can there's options.
11:55
SPEAKER_01: There are options.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: You you know, it's like a car, you can option your way up in price, uh, and it depends what you want to do.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: But uh, you know, they're like a half a million to three quarters of a million dollars, something in that.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: You could get much more expensive mass spectrometers too, but but that's sort of the ones that I'm using.
12:11
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this this is something that I have zero idea on, and I don't know how you're gonna answer this, but if you bought one with all the options, would that have solved what you're trying to do, which we haven't gotten to yet, we'll get to in a minute.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: Would that have fixed your problem or not?
12:30
SPEAKER_01: Could you could you custom order that?
12:32
SPEAKER_00: No, we couldn't, because it hasn't existed yet.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: So this is the I think the the crux of this episode is we're trying to design something because the commercially made instruments aren't doing what we want it to do.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Um okay.
12:44
SPEAKER_01: All right, so let's get into that.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: So basically, you're talking about a machine that costs anywhere from three-quarters of a million to a million dollars.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: It's not doing exactly what you need it to do.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is where I shut down the discussion on our front porch because I wanted this to be like a kind of a spontaneous like episode.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh, this is where the idea came from.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: So on the front end, on the beginning of the mass spectrometer, you have an ionizer.
13:12
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, real quick, and I mean real quick, try to describe an ionizer.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: What are you doing?
13:21
SPEAKER_00: How's this work?
13:22
SPEAKER_00: So there's a couple different ways.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, we need to strip off an electron for the most part.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: That's what we're doing.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: Um there's several different ways to do it, and there's many different types of instruments that do different things.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: The ones we use use either a plasma, so think of this as just a really, really hot fireball of stuff, which is at 8,000 degrees Kelvin or something like that.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: And that will strip off electrons from anything you put in it.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: So super hot plasma.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: You inject- It's like sun hot.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's extremely so we inject our sample into that plasma, and all the electrons are stripped off, and then we have ions, and we can then get those ions, try and get those ions out of the plasma and into this racetrack that we described.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: The other way to do it is the sort of older way, actually, the first max spectrometers were based on this method, is basically a light bulb.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: Is think of your light bulb, you've got that filament inside of your light bulb.
14:20
SPEAKER_01: Like an incandescent light bulb.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not like the new age.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: 90% heat and 10% light.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, okay.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: The old school light bulbs, um, you know, that have the wire strung in there.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: That wire glows, and that's because it's heating up.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: If we add our sample on top of that light bulb, it'll evaporate off.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: All those atoms will evaporate off because they got hot, and some fraction of them, usually a very small amount, like 1% of them, will actually have an electron lost and will be ions.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: So one percent, you said about one percent-ish.
14:50
SPEAKER_01: About one percent.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: Is this done with a microscope?
14:53
SPEAKER_01: Is this ionizer have like are you working with uh some sort of needle or or fine instrument and then put it under a microscope?
15:01
SPEAKER_00: We do, we don't use a microscope, but we do load that, load our sample in a very tiny droplet of liquid onto a filament with a pipette.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we load it right in the center, put that filament into the mass spectrometer, pass electricity through that filament, it heats it up, it starts to glow just like a light bulb.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: Our sample, most of it, 99% of it, evaporates off and is lost.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: 1% of it ionizes and goes into our mass spectrometer.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: So, real quick, let me back up to the plasma thing.
15:29
SPEAKER_01: If you if that was the way you're ionizing your substance, your element, like is that a part of what you buy?
15:37
SPEAKER_01: The plasma like creator.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: The back end of the instrument, everything downstream from the ionizer is kind of tailored to the type of ionizer you have.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: So if you buy a plasma instrument, you have a plasma mass spectrometry.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: If you buy a what's called a thermal ionization instrument or the light bulb instrument, you have a light bulb instrument.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: And the reason a plasma will ionize everything, but it's very difficult to get material out of the plasma into your mass spectrometer.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: So in that step, you basically lose 99% of your sample anyway.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: So either way, you're kind of losing a lot of your sample.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's the problem for us.
16:14
SPEAKER_01: When you say that you're putting an element on a filament, you're only getting 1%.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: Like how many atoms are we talking about here?
16:22
SPEAKER_01: We you know, like what's that look like?
16:26
SPEAKER_00: We're adding one one hundred thousandth of a gram of material or one millionth of a gram of material to the to the filament.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, that's a ridiculously a paper clip weighs about a gram.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: So we're adding like a tiny shaving off of that paper clip onto the the the sample.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: That's the weight of our sample that we're adding out of the filament.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: It's not visible, it's usually in a liquid, so it's dissolved, and then we load it on there.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: But that contains you know billions and trillions of atoms.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: So we're not analyzing a hundred atoms, but it's a useful number to kind of use with percentages, right?
17:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you're you're working with trillions of atoms, but uh that's the way you know chemistry works.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: But fundamentally, the precision of any analysis or the uncertainty bars that you see on there, those depend on the number of ions you count.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Really, that's the the at the basic level, that's what our precision is dependent upon.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: So the more atoms you count, the more precise.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Wait a minute.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: It's not the amount you started with, it's the ions that you're able to count.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: So we could start with a trillion atoms and only count a billion of those, but if we count 10 billion of those, we're going to be a lot more precise.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: Now that took a long time to get to this, but I think we needed to get to that to ask the question.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: Then this is really where it all started.
17:47
SPEAKER_01: What's the problem?
17:49
SPEAKER_00: That's a great question.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: That is the problem.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: The problem is that if we load in 100 atoms, we're only counting one of those.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: And so we want to be able to make more precise measurements.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: And again, these measurements that we're trying to make, these are measurements that are the foundation to a lot of our understanding of the timing of what uh events happened on Earth.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: So most of what we know about Earth history is based in geochronology or the dating of events on Earth.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: And these are the instruments that make those types of measurements, and we're trying to improve upon that.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: And so for my specific interest, we're using techniques that are focused on the first 500 million years of Earth history, like what was Earth like as a newborn baby.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: We need a specific type of geochronometer to do that, a specific type of element.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: And with the modern instruments, with the commercial instruments, we're at our precision limit.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: We cannot do better when we're only counting 1% of the atoms we put in the instrument.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: So we need more.
18:46
SPEAKER_01: Let me attempt this then.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: That what you're saying is that if we're only able to count 1% of the atoms or ions that we put in there, then your error measurement goes up.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: The error in the measurement.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: And so if you are able to what's your goal?
19:05
SPEAKER_01: How what percent?
19:06
SPEAKER_01: What's your uh what's your end game goal?
19:09
SPEAKER_00: So the goal right now is well our end game goal is to be able to understand the early history of our planet and other planets that we have samples from better, more precisely.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: What I meant was in the ionizer, what's your goal?
19:28
SPEAKER_00: What percent?
19:29
SPEAKER_00: Our goal is anything more than one percent, really.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: In the way that this scales, there's a counting statistics rule that it's your precision goes down by the square root of the number of ions you count.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: So if you increase your percentage your number of ions by if you go 25 times more ions you count, your precision gets five times better, if that makes sense.
19:52
SPEAKER_01: So it does make sense.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, okay, so if you went from one percent to 25%, your precision would be five times greater.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: Your precision would be five times better than the precision you got at one percent.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you need a lot more ions to get more precise.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: So your goal then is not really to go with what you're doing with the mass spectrometer.
20:14
SPEAKER_01: Your goal would not be to go from one to two percent.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: That's not going to give you enough.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Our goal is one to ten.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: One to ten.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay, good, good.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: That's what I want.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: That's what I wanted to know.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sorry.
20:24
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's really interesting.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: So that would then make your what would that be?
20:28
SPEAKER_00: Um which is three point three, three point something.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: Three point one, something.
20:33
SPEAKER_01: So if you went from one percent to ten percent, that would be real close to upping or to cutting your error down three times.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: Let me phrase it this way.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: We did a calculation where using the techniques that the modern techniques with commercial instruments, the types of analysis we do, they dated a meteorite.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: So said, how old was this meteorite?
20:56
SPEAKER_00: And the meteorite age was like 4.4 billion years, plus or minus 10 million years.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: With our new technique, if we could actually get it working the way we want it to, we could make that precision on that age, not plus or minus 10 million years, but plus or minus 600,000 years, which allows us to say this meteorite's older than this this meteorite and understand that stuff a lot better.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that's amazing.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: That is unbelievable.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: So that's a little bit pie in the sky because we haven't gotten there yet, obviously, but that's the goal, that's the target.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: That's the that's the carrot out there in front of us.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: So that leads to uh like really what led to this whole discussion that you and I had is you know, how do you do that?
21:41
SPEAKER_01: Um you're buying a million dollar machine.
21:44
SPEAKER_01: Now you have to make the ionizer in the machine better.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: But man, look, you're you're this uh you know highly educated PhD over educated.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: I was gonna say, but I don't I don't want to offend anybody else.
21:59
SPEAKER_01: I'm Totally good with offending you, but I don't want to offend the other PhDs that might be listening to this.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: I already prefaced it by this is one person's opinion, and I I'm overeducated by my one person's opinion.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: You're the only overeducated PhD I know.
22:14
SPEAKER_01: But the thing is that like the degree of training that you've had is is immense.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like they're it's impressive, okay?
22:25
SPEAKER_01: But none of it was in this.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: And so here you are trying to set up a lab, and now you have to learn the inner workings of a mass spectrometer.
22:37
SPEAKER_01: And I gotta believe that that happens in probably every single research lab in the country.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, when you brought this up, I kind of thought a little bit more about it, and I thought, yeah, hell yeah, that's ridiculous.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: We're buying a million-dollar instrument and then trying to make it better.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: Like, why the hell would you buy that instrument?
22:56
SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, that doesn't make any sense.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: Why spend a million dollars if it's not what you want?
23:01
SPEAKER_00: But actually, this is a lot, like you say, of what research is is just problem solving and troubleshooting and figuring out how to do things just that little bit better.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've described a big step function improvement, and that's the goal.
23:15
SPEAKER_00: But the odds are that we're gonna make things a little bit better than they were before, and then somebody else will build on them later.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that is just the the way it goes.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think a lot of these research labs, and my my own is no different than this.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: A lot of these research labs, you buy something, you have a goal for it, but you're ultimately pushing the limits, whether you're pushing the limits internally with the mechanics of the instrument, like we're doing and like our discussion is, or whether you're trying to run some new types of samples into the instruments that have never been put through those instruments before, and trying to get good, meaningful data out of them.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: Everybody's really trying to push the limits of the instruments that they have in various ways, whether it's data reduction things, or whether it's you know changing the actual operations and the in the construction of the machine like we're doing, or whether it's putting different types of samples in.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's actually a lot of the way that science works is more just problem solving.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's not like the you know, fifth grade version of the scientific process, I guess.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: Right.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the scientific method, yeah, which is makes me cringe.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: So listen, uh you know, I I look at almost everything educationally, I look at through the lens of being a high school teacher, right?
24:29
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
24:30
SPEAKER_01: And so this is really how science works.
24:36
SPEAKER_01: There's no roadmap.
24:37
SPEAKER_01: And I like I can't help but think about how science is done in a classroom setting, whether that be elementary, middle school, high school, and even collegiate level.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: You're given almost always a roadmap.
24:51
SPEAKER_01: Hey, do this lab, add this to this, and you know, put it in this in solution, and then this is what you get, right?
24:57
SPEAKER_01: And you know, I'm really good at following a recipe, I'm very good at that.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: And so I I took so many chemistry classes, I would follow the procedure and I'd end up with a blue solution, and I'd raise up my hands like, hey, I got it.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: Was I supposed to get blue?
25:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you got blue.
25:11
SPEAKER_01: Oh, awesome.
25:12
SPEAKER_01: I had no idea what the hell was going on.
25:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's not really how it works in a research setting, you know.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: And that's I guess that's the kind of the lens that I'm looking at this through in terms of what you do is very different from what is traditionally taught.
25:29
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's probably true of most scientific fields.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: I think that, you know, whenever you're sort of thinking about trying to push the limits in some way, you know, you're kind of always, like I said, problem solving to get to that point.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: Like you kind of have an idea of what you want to do, but you don't exactly know how to get there.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: You're kind of like a mechanic tearing into a car that you've never seen before.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what we're kind of doing with this instrument.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh one I want to add one thing to that is that geoscience is maybe even a bit more like that than other disciplines because we have no control group.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: Like when we do an experiment, we don't have like a control group where we don't do anything to, and then uh an experimental group where we do something to.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: The earth is too big and too complicated and too integrated to actually run those types of experiments on.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: It's much like macroeconomics.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: You can't really model or experiment on the economy because it's too interconnected and stuff.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: The earth is the same way.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: There's too many moving parts, there's too many connections, there's too many feedback loops to actually do that kind of science.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: So it's a very different style, it's a bit more descriptive, it's a bit more like go back to our Bowens reaction series episode, it's a bit more like cook and look.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, this would be cool.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: I wonder what'll happen if I melt rocks and then look at them.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Like, there's a little bit more of that.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: Now, there is hypothesis testing, there is scientific rigor involved in this, it's just a slightly different style.
26:50
SPEAKER_00: So I don't want to mean that we're like all just winging it out here, but right, it's a bit less structured, maybe.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think you you alluded to Bowens, and I think that when he you know designed the vessels and the his experiments, that you know, he didn't get the results that he hypothesized that he was gonna get.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: If I'm correct, I I think that he thought if you take basaltic rock and ground it up into a powder and then melt it and you know let it crystallize and let it cool off, that you were gonna get a bunch of basalt and then a little bit of granite at the end.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: But that's not really what happened.
27:26
SPEAKER_01: You know, he didn't get what he hypothesized actually.
27:29
SPEAKER_01: My point is like that he did have this hypothesis, but it didn't bear out.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: He came up with something else.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: That's right, that's right.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a bit it's a it's a slightly different sort of style than if I do this test and this happens, then A is true.
27:47
SPEAKER_00: If it if this happens, then B is true.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit more like, hey, I was expecting A, but I got B.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: Now I need to go explain that.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: Um it just makes me it's very cool.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: I I and I think I'm I I think to just finish my thought, it's a it's one of the great frustrations and the great pleasures of geoscience, I think, is that it's very hard to kind of pin something down, but it's also very exciting because there's problems everywhere.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: So if you like problem solving, there's problems everywhere you look.
28:13
SPEAKER_01: Which is what every research lab uh in the world does, which is not what happens in a traditional science class, which is what makes me think of you know, how am I gonna change this?
28:27
SPEAKER_01: How am I gonna change the way I go about things now?
28:31
SPEAKER_01: Seriously, this is the discussion you and I had on my front porch makes me think about the way I teach.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I'm interested in this.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: I mean, how how do you this is gonna sound like arrogant, but I really don't mean it to.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: How do you how do you teach problem solving if you know you're dealing with high school students who don't have the background to get to the point where there is a problem that needs to be solved?
28:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm kind of curious how you kind of okay you could project this.
28:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, I've lost sleep on this.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: Um so let me invent a problem, right?
29:05
SPEAKER_01: Or a uh something that we can do in an earth science class, let's say with the freshman level class, right?
29:12
SPEAKER_01: Where you talk about unequal heating and cooling of the earth.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: The idea that land and water they don't heat up and cool down the same.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: Meaning from sunlight coming in.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: You know, land heats up and uh way faster than water does, and land loses heat and cools down way faster than water does.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: So it's an important uh principle to understand because then that affects the temperature of the air above the water and the air above the the land, and it affects wind direction and local climates and things like this.
29:45
SPEAKER_01: It's a really cool phenomenon, right?
29:48
SPEAKER_01: So can you design an a lab or an activity for them to do this?
29:54
SPEAKER_01: Well, sure.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: Like you can give them a recipe, right?
29:58
SPEAKER_01: Take uh a heat source, uh some sort of heat lamp or something like this, right?
30:03
SPEAKER_01: And heat up sand and heat up water and at the same, you know, like eliminating all the other variables, right?
30:11
SPEAKER_01: So the heat source is the same distance away and so on, right?
30:15
SPEAKER_01: And you do this over time and you find that the sand will heat up much faster than the water will, and then you cool it off, and the same thing happens, right?
30:23
SPEAKER_01: But but what about like instead of this giving them a recipe?
30:30
SPEAKER_01: What about saying here's the problem?
30:35
SPEAKER_01: It's unequal heating and cooling of the earth, and define it, right?
30:38
SPEAKER_01: That land and water don't heat up the same way and they don't cool down the same way.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: Here's what I have in my lab, all the materials that I have available, figure it out.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Do it.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: Design it yourself.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: Like Yeah, so it's just give a little bit of ownership of how to solve this problem, even though the problem is that you design the problem is already solved by somebody, but they don't know that, and so they can just go and solve it on their own.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: We're not solving any new problems in any science class, you know, but it just made me think of things a little differently, you know.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: Like we need to change our approach to fit more of like what really happens.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I like you know, there's no roadmap to figuring out cancer.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, to the to the research methods that they use, there's no roadmap.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: There's no roadmap to figuring out how minerals crystallize deep inside the earth.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: You took me in a lab at Carnegie Institute where somebody was building it looked more like a shop than it did a lab.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: It literally did.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: It was an automechanic shop.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think this is this was the shocking thing to me is that the mass vast majority of labs I've been in look a lot more like an automechanic shop than a, you know, that you what you think of as a nice, clean, sterile chemical experimental lab.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: You can't buy, though, a device that uh replicates the temperatures and pressures that exist inside the earth.
32:07
SPEAKER_01: So these research scientists have to create it.
32:11
SPEAKER_01: And that is amazing to me.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's there's the again, there's not to like dwell on this, but there's no roadmap to figuring out problems that haven't been solved before.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: But that's what we're doing.
32:27
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a really you know, this touches on sort of a shift for me throughout my career up until this point is that like you, Chris, I think, you know, we both got into the geosciences because we liked outside, we liked going in the mountains, we liked being outdoors and looking at rocks, and the field work was really an attractive part.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: That was the case for me all the way through graduate school.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: And then when I went to the Carnegie Institute for my postdoc, you know, I was working in really top-flight geochemistry labs where the people I was working with are from the generation of people who built their own mass spectrometers, and they basically were opening these things up and looking at the insides and messing around with the insides at a regular interval.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: And so I really got exposure to the basics of these things, and I gained a ton of appreciation for how cool the lab stuff is because they're really fundamental to all of our field.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: Whether you're doing seismology research, there the top seismologists are often tinkering with their seismometers to make them better.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: The top geochemists are tinkering with their instruments to make them better.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: And I think as the geosciences moves away from the traditional sort of field-based research into geochemistry, into uh remote sensing, into more data and actual more hard data, I think instruments are becoming way more important.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: So I've gained a ton of appreciation for how cool lab stuff is and how important it is.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's only going to grow in the future.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, and and I'm I'm really excited about this project that we highlighted.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: And I hope it wasn't too boring.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: But um, I I'm I'm super excited about it, and it's the most exciting research I'm doing right now, I think, even though it's not really geology research, it's more engineering research.
34:13
SPEAKER_01: You know, and I was thinking too, you know, we interviewed Dr.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: Diana Roman, and she had to tinker with the the seismometers that they were putting in the ground and the way that they put them in the ground, and that's right, because that's a perfect example.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: They're like, oh, our seismometers are too hard to install, they flat, they stay for too long.
34:30
SPEAKER_00: We need to be able to pick them up and move them.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna make those.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: So they go and make those.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, how cool.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: It's so it is.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: But that's where like I this is the frame of reference for where why I was so interested in is because this is a big disconnect from what you do and what all these people that you're affiliated with do and what I teach.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's interesting.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: I think that's a that's a really interesting point that requires a lot of thought.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: It is, but that's where my like enthusiasm right away.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: I was just like, we gotta we gotta talk about this, you know.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: All right.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think you gotta bring the the Hudsonville Geology School or the Hudsonville Geology class to Penn State School.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: Well, no, we can call it that.
35:11
SPEAKER_01: That's a great name.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: Hudsonville Geology School.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: No longer called Hudsonville High School.
35:15
SPEAKER_01: It's a no no, it's just a geology school.
35:18
SPEAKER_01: That'd be great.
35:18
SPEAKER_01: That'd be amazing.
35:20
SPEAKER_01: All right.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: What were you saying?
35:21
SPEAKER_00: We gotta bring the Hudsonville Geology School to For a field trip to the Penn State labs.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like come check it out.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: How fun would that be?
35:29
SPEAKER_00: Get a little a lot of fun.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, do an actual research project.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: We could, you know, analyze some, you know, whatever, some dune sand or something like that.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: Do some kind of cool that'd be fun.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: This is you and I talking right now, but I think I could float this in a non-COVID year.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: That'd be totally cool.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: That'd be totally cool.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: I think we could I could do something like that and then integrate that into like a uh field trip in the Blue Ridge Mountains, you know, something like that.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that'd be totally cool.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: I could do that.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: We got it for fun.
35:58
SPEAKER_00: This is a great idea.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: Put it on the books, let's do it.
36:01
SPEAKER_01: It is on the books.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, is there anything we're missing?
36:05
SPEAKER_01: Did I not ask anything?
36:07
SPEAKER_01: Like, should you well I think okay, hold on.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: Let me just follow up because I I'm nerding out in this episode, but uh, we didn't quite get to the point of the light bulb.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: How are we improving the light bulb?
36:16
SPEAKER_00: And what we're doing to improve the light bulb.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: If anybody's stuck with us through this conversation up until this point, you're probably thinking, what about the light bulb?
36:24
SPEAKER_00: I want to go back to the light bulb.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: We're improving the light bulb by instead of having a filament where your sample just evaporates off into space, we're basically taking that light bulb and enclosing it.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: So we're making a what's called a cavity.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: It's like a little cave, you know, a tube with a hole drilled on it.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: And you load the sample in the back of that hole.
36:43
SPEAKER_00: So it's like in this cavity.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: So you've got a tube that is narrow and um hollow, and then it has one end where the back end is closed, and you just, I mean, this is a small tube, like the size of a pencil, even smaller diameter than a pencil.
36:58
SPEAKER_00: Think of a pencil with the lead taken out of it.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: And you load your sample in the back of this pencil and you heat the whole pencil up so that if an atom evaporates but does not ionize in the back of that, it has nowhere to go.
37:12
SPEAKER_00: It just hits another very hot wall of the cavity, another filament, another light bulb piece, and it has another 1% chance to ionize.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: If it doesn't do it there, it bounces to the next one, has another 1% chance to ionize.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: So your atoms that don't ionize just bounce around until they get ionized.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: And so we can do a lot more ionization in that.
37:31
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of technical challenges to doing that.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: We have to deal with a lot of different electrical currents to do heating and stuff, so it's very complicated to do that, but that's that's how we're trying to improve the light bulb in this instance.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: So I'm actually glad that you nerd it out there because that was a really interesting interjection and very visual.
37:49
SPEAKER_01: It was awesome.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: Who came up with this idea?
37:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I remember so so first of all, it's not a new idea.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: These cavity, what are called cavity ion sources, have been in the literature for a long time.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: They've been sort of toyed around with a little bit.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: Somebody works on them for a year, and then you know, they it doesn't really work the way they want it to, and so it goes away.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's happened periodically for the last 40 years or so.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: I think our or 40.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: 40 for zero or or even more than that, probably by now.
38:25
SPEAKER_00: But I think our push for it is we haven't really fundamentally changed that cavity.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: We haven't changed the pencil that's heated up.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: We just need it more now for our types of data.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: We've reached another limit in the standard mass spectrometer, the commercial one.
38:42
SPEAKER_00: We can't go further.
38:44
SPEAKER_00: There's been other improvements that have gone along the way, but right now we've kind of hit this wall.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: We have to go past the light bulb in order to get to the next level of data quality.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: So I think we're just at a level where it's more worth it now to spend a couple years working on it.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: And we've been working on it for going on probably we've been thinking about it for like five years, and then you write a grant, and it takes two years to get the grant, and then you work on it for a year, and then you get another grant.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: And so we're nearing the last part of it, which is we tested it on this old mass spectrometer.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: We didn't want to cut into the million-dollar instrument right away.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: So we tested it on an old one, and we're we're now putting it onto the new one, and we're we're actually hopefully this coming week gonna know if this thing is gonna generate better data than we could have done before.
39:31
SPEAKER_00: So we're we're near the last stages, and I'm super, super pumped about it.
39:35
SPEAKER_00: I can't wait.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: Very exciting, that's cool.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so yeah, all right, good.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think that's a wrap.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: I just want to, you know, once again, just hit home with there's a disconnect between the way science is done and I think the way science is taught.
39:51
SPEAKER_01: And that is really the whole motivation behind doing this episode.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: But I think also I learned a ton how a mass spectrometer works and and why this kind of work is really, really important.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's just uh I th I had a lot of fun here.
40:08
SPEAKER_01: So I did too.
40:09
SPEAKER_00: And I think I I want to wrap it up by just saying that mass spectrometers in general are used in all sorts of disciplines and all sorts of fields.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: Lots of biologists use them, lots of forensic scientists use them, people who are trying to figure out if other countries are enriching uranium, they use them.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: People who are trying to understand the past climate temperatures, they use mass spectrometers.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: So, mass spectrometers, it's a real if you take nothing else away, understand that mass spectrometers are really important in the basics of what how they work.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: It's an old idea, but they're fundamental to our understanding of the earth and a lot of other disciplines.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, they're super cool.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: I like instruments a lot, and and uh being in the lab is pretty fun.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: So the precision is amazing.
40:50
SPEAKER_00: So very well.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: Hey, good talk.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: You can follow us at Planet Geocast on all the social medias.
40:56
SPEAKER_00: Send us an email, planetegeocast at gmail.com, or you can visit our new website.
41:00
SPEAKER_00: That's planetgeocast.com.
41:02
SPEAKER_00: That's planetgeoca.com.
41:06
SPEAKER_00: And uh stay tuned.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: We got school stuff coming up.
41:08
SPEAKER_00: Talk to you soon.
41:09
SPEAKER_00: See you next week.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: Peace, Chris.