>> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies. and today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events in washington, d.c., and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. >> so we are here of course to listen to lica margonelli for her new book underbug, a successive tale of termites and technology. margonelli learns of a theory that would turn the wood that termites consume into

gasoline, that led to a biofuel in her compelling and astound book she follows researchers as they study termite behavior and investigating how these increases who do 20 billion plus dollars of damage a year can be enlisted as their source for fuel but as a model for robotics. along the way, margonelli who writes for a small science column also explores what these increases can teach us about engineering, climate change, cooperation, and cognition. help me welcome her to politics and president. pros. >> thank you so much for coming, and thanks for having me. termites can eat books so it's a leap of faith to invite the termites to the bookstore here.

i got interested in termites in the summer of 208, and i am not totally sure i definitely had no idea what i was doing and the termites captured me. i was having a bad summer, and someone's brought termites of the state here to show a book. it i was having a bad summer and some researchers who i had met doing a story for the atlantic asked me to come out on a termite safari and i said sure, and i went out and started fanning across the arizona dessert looking for termites, which means you're bent completely over, way down to the ground trying to find them. you carry a piece of tubing that has a test tube on one side, and a little tube out here so you can

suck up the termites, and between your mouth and the test tube there is a little tiny air filter so you don't suck up a termite or a dried cow patty or something worse. some kind of terrible thing. i was there with a whole bunch of geneticists who are very hypereducated, and also with anent mawlings who could lead us to where the termites were. i'll read you a little bit, and skip through the book and tell you a little bit more about the story. so i findy found some termites on my own in the coronado national forest, when i roamed far from the road. the light was flat and the air smelled lightly of sage. rudy said, to look for termites under rocks because they'd by orienting themselves thermally. termites have no ideas, so i threw over a flat rock and got down on the ground to capture the termites i had an asperter,

that home-made consisting of a test tube, finey air filter and tubing. i saw only beetles, millipedes and ants, when i looked up i saw a white homeland security truck with a cage on the back roaming the land. in the gully where old sneakers flattened miler hydration packs and evidence that some persons had come through with the border from mexican moch i hated to think of someone hiding in this land. my phone chuckled delivering texts that said i crossed into mexican space. the scrub was barer than other places we stopped. i wonder it if it was jetly occupied. i didn't feel eyes as i felt an uncanny tinging. the landscape made me feel dum and clumsy. i began turning over every stick, rock, and rotten contactish in my path, termites had chewed the underside of most sticks and left behind eerie wooden

galleries, ghost towns with sticky dust webs fluttering like tattered lace cutsance. i lifted a rock and saw a glossy exoskeleton flowing into some tunltz. i began sucking on the asperter, a disbrawflg geck process. two minutes later there were no mow termites on the ground and had 25 in the test tube. after the long hunt my pale termites were disappointing. whether i separated one from the clutch it was less substantial than a baby fingernail clipping. daughterring around blindly it waved the flimsy antenna. in its stubby body i could see its coiled guts and presumably whatever it had eaten for lunch ants have nazi bodies with three sections, termites, which are no relation to ants or bees, they're actually cockroaches,

highly evolved cockroaches have round eyeless heads, thick in connection and tear drop shaped bodies, and they long ago lost the cockroaches dignity. i put the termite back in the test tube. what did i just suck up? my gang of 20 was incable of doing anything. without a colony they had no reason to forage. without a crowd of soldiers they couldn't defend themselves and without a queen they couldn't reproduce. 25 permites are insignificant in the scheme of life and death with reproduction. middle east, they were clinging to one another, making a game barrel of monkeys. in the scrum i couldn't see a single termite. they looked like a clot, not a group of individuals, or maybe i found a single individual who happened to have 25 heads. i stumbled annual onto one of the big questions which is roughly, what is one termite?

is it an individual termite? is it one termite with all of its gut microbes, all the increases that can live in its guts and eat wood. or is it termite one a colony, a whole living, breathing structure, occupied by a few million unrelated individuals, and a lot of bacteria who collectively constitute one. issue is one is found in every direction with evolutionary and exostoalings implications. the word used to describe this is super microorganism. but at the time i didn't know much about that concept. by the end of that day i still couldn't see termites the way thent mawlings did but i had a basic idea the fewer i saw the more termites there might be. where i thought of land sceaps is the product of growth. they invrtd to become the opposite. the ray massive chewing. the sky was no longer

the sky but the blue stuff that is visible after the screening brush and cacti were eaten away termites have made the world by unmaking parts of it, they are the architects of making space. the engineers of not. so that was my first time of spending quality time with the termite. and that began ten years of hanking out with people who were looking at termites. what really fascinated me about termites is that there are a lot of scientists who are interested in doing what termites do. like they want to eat wood so we want to make biofuel so we want to eat wood the way termites do. they also swarm, coordinate themselves autonomously, to move as a group but there is hoe no mastermind controlling it so we would also like to build robots that can do that. or even

understand how that works to build algorithmic ways of thinking through software. that's not a scientific word. and then the other thing is that ecologists and people who do agriculture are also looking at termites because of their influence in the landscape. they have a huge influence. and that comes later in the book. i'm just going to read a little bit more about where the book starts from and then get a little more into the details. so when we took all the termite we had about 8,000 termites. we took them back to the lab and froze all the, sorted and cleaned them, stuck them in tubes and froze them on dry ice to be consensus sequenced for their genes and that night we sat on the border between natural history and an unnatural future. we weren't alone. all over the world scientists are trying to find biology's underlying rules, they're doing it with ecosystems genes,

they're seeing nature in new ways and trying to reinvent it and put it to work for us. for most of the timener the idea of the future was to harness the big forces of nature to tie the tbloab together into a web of pipelines, satellites, and fiberoptic cables, all the big forces on earth we wanted to stitch them all the. but that i think is all the old future. in the next future we'll harness nature's tiniest life forms, microbes and insects, their systems of organization and control, and their genes and chemical capabilities. this sits with our paradoxical desire to have a lighter footprint while having a greater control over its processes. termites are the poster but for the 21st century. a little guide to really big ideas. one of the issues that comes up with termites is that it at the core of this idea is this dream

of changing biology into a predictive science much the way physics started observing things like apples falling and gravity, and gradually changed to something into making bombs. that deem understanding of the can principles which led to be able to predict and do other things. i think one of the questions here that lurks in the back of the book is will there be termite balms someday, and whether the answer is yes or no our grandchildren will laugh at the innocence of our question. i understand that sounds like a ridiculous question but as you get deeper into the situation it gets more complicated. once i was hooked on termites i ended up doing another story for another magazine going to -- to follow a biologist who was studying how termites build their mounds. here they build mounds 13-15, 17-feet high,

other build them up to 30-feet high. i haven't seen that but with a 12 or 15-foot mound the only way to knock it down is to get a really big tractor and ram it. these are mammoth, very substantial things and when i first saw them, they shocked me i was in new mibbia, you get on a road going north that's exactly straight as thee it were drawn with a pencil, just across the landscape. so i got on that, and drove and my thrifty rent a car, and after an hour so sore a spire of dirt appeared besides the road. about 15 feet high it appeared a to be tossed up below the ground's surface. i was excited to see it. i knew from reading the papers that

this was a macro termites mound i knew below the mound sat a big fungus that the termites tended it was about nine times the size of the termites. so something's going on between the termites and the fungus. what i didn't expect was that the top of the mound would lean over. more mounds appeared besides the road, the shape was clearly not accidental. if a first punched from the earth it would account for the mounds aggressive posture and distinctly wide base and narrow spire. there were dozens of them, many dozens, and their colors shifted with the dirt around them. all of these dirt fingers appeared to be pointing north as though directing me to my destination. soon i could see nothing but termite mounds to the horizon on both sides. i'd been traveling for 30 hours at that point, and i began to play with them in mine mind. were they a troop of

thousands of monks, so i didn't have time to stop and investigating because i had to get before i was going before dark because the wild game would presently jump into the road and you didn't want to hit them. as i drove north i kept thinking about the weird bend in the top of the termites, and the strange straightness of the road which was riddles that started me off on a whole other series of riddles. very quickly i ran into the researcher i was looking for, and he took me out to look at the mounds that night. he had been -- his name is scott turner. he's spent the last 20 years doing tricks in the mounds and trying to figure out how the termites build them he powers beads into the mounds, dye into the mounds, he slices

them in half, cuts them at the bottom, he waters them, he doesn't water them. anything you can imagine doing to a mound he's done it. he brought me to an open shed with something white going under the roof, it felt like a scrieng. here scott had filled a termite mound with plaster of paris and washed away the mud. what was left was an eerie sculpture. reaching 12 feet skyward i to the same angle i observed on the mounds driving up. the new thing was the exact inverse of the termite mound. present where the termites are hemoved the dirt. it was a beautiful object with large sinuous plaster shapes revealing the smooth tunlz the termites had excuvaitd in the middle of the mounds. the sun was setting and i was very tired and greenish twinkles were twitter across the surface and it seemed to aninate slightly in the

plaster forms echoed bleached bones and blood vessels with a vague but undeniable personality. it looked like a fixed structure but is a dynamic process. always falling down and rising up at the same time, much the way our own bones are disassembled and repaired as we stand on them. as with our bones the mound structure is organically coupled with our function. the termites rebuild with a preference of the warm sunny side. scott spent years taking time lapse photos of the mounds run together like an an imagination, the photos reveal these moving mounds wiggling and wagging that finger of dirt towards the sky. that process of rain-driven and sun driven rising came to approximate the average zenith angle at the sun, 19 degrees from north at this latitude. the mound then became something totally amazing. it

was a computation of its own position in the solar system, relative to the earth's latitude in mud with termites as the calculating agents. so here was the answer to the first riddle of the north pointing mounds. so to me these riddles were very satisfying and that's what kept me going for ten years i'd suddenly understand one thing, the next thing would open up. one of the other mysteries was why was that road so straight from to the angle of the border t had built to carry munitions during the very long war between south africa, and angola. much of the book is really very spending a lot of time with scientists and with termites, but some of the book is thinking about all of the history that we have with technology and what does it mean to build new technology. who is it for? who decides what the technology is? what does it do?

what does it do that we anticipate? what does it do that we don't anticipate? if we looked at history we can make guesses about how we use it. i think one of the most amazing things in the termite mound is the queen. most of us -- as i mentioned termites are social cockroaches they don't have queens. termites were sometime 150 or 200 million years ago termites were running around in the dirt and they started picking up cook roaches they started picking up microbes that allows them to digest wood that meant they could use something very available and had very little nitrogen in it, it wasn't nutritious, they could process it and turn it into fuel. that meant they could survive. but the microbes shed their intestines, which meant they lost their microbes. in order to keep those microbes with them, they began to somehow

select for living in a group. so they grawl pooled their resources so they will constantly -- it's called wood shake, they're constantly drinking these juicy dollops from each other's butt's and that's the way they keep the microbes going around. and then they began to distribute their other tasks as well. so reproduction became the queen's thing, there's a king, there's a lot of different ways to be a termite. there's not always a king and a queen. sometimes there's many queens. sometimes there's two kings, which doesn't make sense. they also have soldiers, and the soldiers have very elaborate heads. some soldiers shoot things out of their head. some soldiers have big heads used to block passages, and some soldiers have mandibles they can snap or pull apart. the evolution in

termites is a crazy thing. i went to read to you a little bit about the queen. the queen is in the bottom of the termite mound inside a thing that's about a capsule of dirt about the size of a squash soccer ball. eugene cracked the soccer ball open. he was anent mawlings. revealing the king and queen the size of a cough drop tin. the chamber had holes on the side the king was large and dark compared to the workers. the workers are this big, the king is about this big, and the queen is the side of my finger. her legs and upper body waggled. but barely budged the huge fluid-filled sack of her lower body which pulsed erratically as though she was a toothpaste tube. her skin was shiny had the fats swirled like

pearly cream. everyone shuttered. the queen is viscerally repulsive. she offenders our sense pbilities is monstrous. her body's pulses and swirls, but a more intellectual sense of her horror sets in, she's not a queen, she's a slave. even then the queen defendant's more shocking aspects are hidden from us. here truly suspendts fertility creating millions of years over many years. some species can clone themselves by producing eggs with no entry way from sperm. and mature those from sexual queens with only their mother's chrome swroams. to give them a full set. imperfect copies of the queen these knock-offs are good enough to get the job done, so part of the genesis allows the queen to live in bug years, pretty close to forever. and yet, we do refer to her as

the queen and i wondered why. eugene said when european naturalist, looks into bees and termite mounds they saw the queens and it kept us from understanding what was going on with termites. this is true. not only they they misinterpret what they were seeing. or see them as mini-insect states. inearly naturalerallest looking into beehives assumed the queen was the king. they could only imagine a king. that evolved and up until pretty recently termites and social insects were seen as utopia's tiny humans and insects suits living the way nature intended them. so people said that looking at termites explained the rights of condensation and why we needed something fed by the workersion

also marvelously, charlet perkins gillman said this looks like the whole world was meant to be run by women. and we were in a temporary trough of being run by a patriarchy. socialist saw a socialiest utopia, and in the 20th century things got darker, people saw eugenics and eugenic societies with forced external nation. this was 1920 they also saw them as totalitarian workers, brave new world was based on termites, and they also saw them as factory workers. which comes up later because we -- in having the concept that termites are factory workers when we looked at termites people look to see they're doing the same thing and they're all at work. i'm going to skip ahead a little

bit. a bunch of people who studied robots at harvard showed up at the mounds another year. they had all sorts of marvelous things to do -- they made little tiny test for the termites and tried to test them again and again so they could build robots and algorithms, and ideas based on models the termites. they're idea was that the termites were at some level kind of a brain. that's not explicit. but they saw them as working together in a network style that could do something we don't yet understand. they also saw them as they wanted to model the termites with automatons. they wanted to have them have no memory, no personality, and the rest of that. they have since then built autonomous

constructing and swarming robots that are very interesting. i just want to give you a little bit from what they were trying to do. one night i have a vuive udtermite dream. my picnic had been stolen by insects. i watched them parade my sausages all through town in a box they had stolen where they were hiding the whole town's sausages. i woke up feeling borrowed and ripped off. when i told -- one of the principal investigators at the institute at harvard about the dream she said oh, collective transport. as though she had that dream all the time. [laughter] whatever frustrations i felt were transient i was merely vacationing in the roboticist nightmare. finding the modus operandy was a lifelong project, not a project with a completion date. justin was a researcher at harvard. justin explained to

me later. there's a joke in complex systems that we're waiting for car no. this is a reference to a play waiting for gudough who never arrived. but car no is a physicist first observed and correctly described how hate heat energy is relatedo work. there were observations of heat's behavior but his theories transformed early steam engines, power plants and basically our whole modern world is based on ideas from him. so the field of complex systems is still in the stage of gathering information and insights into biology while waiting for someone to appear with that unifying theory. coming up with a viable theory for the way termites build and it could change the way computer measures won, and how wars with fought. the emergent equivalent could upend the world, but the reality like the play is

ultimately absurdest. 15 years earlier justin had gone to school to study physics and consciousness team wake up in a play of termites that might not end in his lifetime. he was adapting well, considering. >> so these people generously allowed me to keep visiting them in their fold and laboratories, and watching things get screwed up. one of the things that that team of researchers discovered was all the termites are different. they are not factory workers. it took them a couple of years to build a tracker to see what individual termites were doing, and they discovered they were some were charismatic leaders. some were running around like little mad termites, some were just standing and shaking. some would do what others were doing to just to be part of the fun they'd come and jam into a whole like pigs at a trough, and they would grap grab a ball of mud and run it over somewhere and build a stack.

they were by changing -- as they changed their about to see the termites they were able to change their idea of what made a termite and termite, and they. .

>> so they were chewing all this time. the ventilation was very amateur mates in my wall was interesting to show me how deep i had gone. they eat houses yet i miss the fact they were eating mine. [laughter] as a carpenters began their work i admitted it was more

than just an escape they were giving me a purpose and joy. but then is that developed the termite lead me into other things. now i will skip ahead. one night while procrastinating i have sensibly gold right had gathered termite my first safari in 2008. it wasn't what i was looking for. and controlled by pilots in those air-conditioned trailers.

they were unmanned and the wings were long the height of 22000 feet they can see if i was carrying a backpack. i was not alone the landscape was engineered like a termite mound of sensory awareness from this complex feedback. comprehensive but in interest uninterested like yemen and pakistan by 2014 i was flying around the border. there was more choice to have control over space with those constant presence but that was the essence the very school of the technological.

we never give up our individual liberty but losing the bugs we are losing the essential qualities that make us human. then it goes into the implications of drones. i will go ahead to the end. i always describe my termite problem first is a termite problem but in the last two days i realize maybe that was my midlife crisis my way into it and out of it the whole thing. because through my of session this change the way i saw the planet the mountains became everything that mattered to me

parable between the organized narrative in the multilayer data process. what were the mounds but the dirt impression of the solar system with some bugs with no eyes. we had also the building blocks of our world they make the whole fertile world that we live in. the human brain turned inside out with weird stories of queens and hopes and anxieties. at a 19-degree angle ongoing meditation of the complexities i was lucky to find the amount at the moment you find them as the old-fashioned super organism.

right now it is a thing but someday we will live in it with those byproducts of control in the secure peculiar self. and when we do we cannot get in the way we do now. also the mounds are hopeful because they have an incredible tolerance for failure and they can adapt. actually it is a hopeful beginning that is changing rapidly. that is the end of my reading speeseventeen >> so come up to the microphone if you have questions. >> so how much time do i have

left before the termites take over? [laughter] >> in washington d.c. specifically? they are moving north but amazing stuff is happening in florida where they have been forming super colonies that are extra hard to kill an extra fast growing their hybrid but they are also good they will help us fight climate change to some degree. scientist in australia found that using termites instead of traditional fertilizer increases the yield 36%. >> what is the relationship between the termite mound?

and what does the fungus to for the termite back. >> or what do the termites do for the fungus? the mound is the state underneath is a big fungus they have been living together at least 100 million years. they run out into the ground around the mound like a hexagon until they hit another mound and a grab grass they chew it into little balls and stack it up in a crazy piecrust like a graham cracker crust construction but it looks like a brain. it is a strange shape and vaguely familiar when you see it. they inoculate each ball with the fungus that dissolves the sugars in the grass. they slurp them off than they

run around the mound feeding them to the brothers and sisters. then they come back and tend to the fungus. so the metabolism is nine times the size of the termites so they must be the brains that there is a question maybe the fungus tells the termites what to do through chemistry or some sort. >> i wish i could ask a deep philosophical questions. because i enjoy listening to you talk about that but the best that i can do is act about helen -- ask about the factoids. one of those is the soldier

termite are they dared to battle other termites? is there a predator or is this a eugenics exercise? >> the other? >> and the geneticist was at the genetics of the termites or the bacteria in the guts? they were studying the genetics of the bacteria in the gut. >> the most interesting one to me that one point the fuel that the termites create is nitrogen. >> no know know the fuel that they eat it is not bio e-mail

of -- available and that can make it available. but back to the question of the soldiers. they have a weaponry and they orient themselves by sniffing the air current or from other termites and orient themselves to whatever they think the threat is if it is an anteater in the work permits will turn around set of eyes. then they all and the soldiers run with them and then they

all get the edge of the mound begin to launch themselves. if they have mandibles and then they snap or they may squirt their nozzles. so the soldiers are defending from a bucket load or to two ants coming in on a raid but the workers also defend against fungus and they groom each other all the time. [inaudible]

is on my list of things to read. and i thank you. talk about that biofuel theory and also how is the future of the world based on termites? >> second answer brave new world author brother was a termite scientist. also the business from drinking from each other. if you like i should do one of these for toddlers. [laughter] but in 2007 oil prices were

going up with a growing belief we have a bipartisan consensus on climate change we have not gotten there yet so sometimes disbelieve if you could leapfrog the political process to replace the gasoline with the biofuel that would solve the climate problems it would be like insurance or whatever the political system can handle about climate change. it started off with tremendous bipartisan support we have national labs. joint bioenergy research institute and programs all over the country they were the only candidate because they can eat the wood they said let's sequence all the genes

these are the termites that did not eat that fungus. so we will get all the genes, like 1 million the code for enzyme to break down the wood. they did this computer analysis so the naked them into the e. coli to see if that would dissolve some void. that first round did not work. so let's figure out how the process works. and then a physicist said you need to understand the principle. p took in a different direction to understand the principles they think it is so complicated they don't think they will understand it for 20 years.

we know so little about their genes that the same time they were making progress on biofuel gasoline is not four dollars a gallon it will be hard to make gasoline made out of grass that is competitive. so to biofuels are around $20 a gallon. now they are used by the military but have also other industrial applications. >> so i understand dave's also have looked at other rates? how does that work? >> that was fascinating. with an ongoing controversy how the termite mounds in

africa. early on it was thought they acted like a chimney made by fungus and the termite and sometimes there was a discussion with a hole in the top like a perfume sprayer. but then scott to try to inject propane gas about 20 years ago that didn't do anything predictable sometimes it sloshed around her went straight up the top there were subtle mix is going on. and also from the termite mound they have evolved in different places so they

create mounds that do very different things. so recently a bunch of physicist from harvard study termite mounds in africa and india and the indian termite mounds had a different heat exchange pattern it got very hot during the day that then a moment when the air would swish out of the mound and had beautiful heat photography and you can see it change. but the african termite mounds work like a long that it has infusion of the air and the pocket with another mechanism

but it is all under discussion. also wild magnetic mounds in australia that are flat they go way up. the australian scientists have and they all face north and south. they tried hitting them with range rover's to knock them out of alignment. spee17 [inaudible conversations] thank you so much for coming

>> i go to my room and have a dictionary and a bible and a bottle of sherry and a yellow pad. [laughter] and i get in there to treat myself into a place. but i can suspend all of this

belief and then i go to work. >> good evening everyone. i have the honor to be the executive director. thank you for coming also please stand to join me to the pledge of allegiance in honor of our troops. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america. and to the republic for which it