psychopaths, , schizophrenics, manic depressives and suicide artists. i loved them all. i didn't begin to love myself. without the feminist movement i would've had a career, but not necessarily a a calling. i still would've written my books, but they would've had much smaller audiences and are less impacts. .. "underbug: an obsessive tale of termites and technology". in the course of researching her comprehensive history of fossil fuels, lisa margonelli learned of a theory that

would turn termites into gasoline that led not to revolutionary biofuel but lisa margonelli's long obsession with termites. in her astounding book, he follows researchers to namibia, australia and arizona as they study termite behavior and investigate how these creatures who do $20 billion of damage a year in the us can be enlisted not only as a source for fuel but as a model for life. along the way, margonelli who writes a small science column for public square also explores what these teachers can teach us about engineering, climate change, cooperation and cognition. please welcome her to politics and prose . >> thank you so much for coming and thanks to politics and prose for having me . termites can eat books so it's kind of a leap of faith

to invite the termites into the bookstore. i got interested in termites in the summer of eight and i am not totally sure that i, well, i definitely had no idea what i was doing and the termites kind of captured me. i was having a bad summer and someone brought termites of the state here to show, a book. so i was having kind of a bad summer and some researchers who i had met doing a story for the atlantic asked me to come out on a termites safari and i said sure and i went out and started sort of fanning across the arizona desert looking for termites which means essentially way down to the ground trying to find them and you carry a piece of tubing that has a test tube on one side and a

little tube out here so that you can suck up the termites and between your mouse and the test tube, there is an air filter so you don't suck up a termites or a cow patty or something worse, some kind of terrible thing so i was there with a whole bunch of geneticists who were very hyper educated and also with an entomologist who could lead us to where the termites were. so i'll leave you a little bit and then i'll skip through the book and tell you more about the story. i finally found termites on my own in the coronado national forest where i wandered far from the road in the desert. the light was pink and flat and the air smelled lightly of sage. rudy said to look for termites under rocks because they'd be orienting themselves thermally. termites have no eyes, that's why they orient thermally.

so i got down on the ground to capture the termites, i had an aspirator, that homemade contraption can consisting of an air filter and tubing and under the first rock i saw beetles, white spiders, millipedes and at area and i looked up i saw a light homeland security truck. in the goalie were old sneakers, flattened mylar part hydration packs and evidence that someone had come through from the border with mexico. i hated to think of someone hiding dehydrated in this no man's land . my phone delivered texts that said i'd crossed into mexican telephonic space. the scrub here was more barren and others spot. i wondered if it was secretly occupied.

i didn't so much feel eyes upon me as i felt an uncanny tingle. landscape made me feel dominant clumsy and if i was going to be clumsy, i wanted to be systematic so it again i began turning up over every practice in my path . termites leave behind erie wooden galleries, ghost towns with dicky dust webs wondering like tattered lace curtains. i'd almost forgotten i was searching when i lifted a rock and saw a length of exoskeleton. i dropped to my knees and began sucking on aspirator, a discussing access that stimulates to live up production and made me dizzy. two minutes later there were no more termites on the ground and i had 25 in the test tube attached to the aspirator. after the long hunt, my pale termites were disappointing. when i separated one from the clutch, it was less potential than a baby fingernail clipping. it weighed the antenna on its head and is only translucent body i could almost see it coiled gods and presumably whatever it had eaten for lunch. antibodies with three sections highlighted by narrow wastes like pinup

models. termites which are no relation to answer arby's, they are actually highly evolved cockroaches have round eyeless heads, the next and teardrop shaped the bodies and they long ago lost the cockroaches to repulsive dignity and gleaming armor. i put the termites back in the test tube. what had i sucked up my little gang was incapable of doing much of anything. without a colony had nowhere to bring food to. without a crowd of soldiers, they couldn't defend themselves and without a queen theycouldn't reproduce . 25 termites are insignificant . meaningless. what's more, they were clinging to one another, making it a key role of termites heads, bodies and legs reminiscent of the game barrel of monkeys. in this, i couldn't even see a single termite reedit look like a clock, not a group of individuals or maybe i found a single individual who happened to 25 cells. i stumbled onto one of the

big questions that termites pose which is roughly, what is one termite, is it an individual termite, one termite with all its symbiotic microbes, all the creatures who live in its guts. that entity can eat wood, but can't reproduce on its own or is a termite a colony, a hold living, breathing structure occupied by a few million related individuals and are gazillion symbiotic bacteria who collectively constitute one. each one is profound in every direction with evolutionary ecological and accidental implications. the word used to describe this many 15, not a super organism but at the time i didn't know much about the concept reedit end of that day i still couldn't see termites the way and apologists did i have a basic idea that the fewer i saw, the more termites there might be. where i thought of landscape as a product of growth, they inverted to become the opposite. remainders left behind by the

forces of persistent and massive chewing. the sky was no longer the sky but theblue stuff visible after the screening brush and cacti have been eating away. termites made the world by making parts of it, they are the architects of negative space, the engineers of not . so that was my first time really spending a little quality time with a termite . and that began 10 years of hanging out with people who were looking at termites. and what really fascinated me about termites is there are a lot of scientists who are really interested in doing what termites do. like, we want to eat wood so we want to make biofuel so we want to eat wood the way termites do. termites also sworn, coordinate themselves autonomously to move as a group but there is no mastermind controlling so we would also like to build robots that can do that.

or even simply understand how that works to build sort of out rhythmic waves of thinking through software. that's not a scientific word, algorithmic ways of thinking. and then the other thing is that ecologists and people who do agriculture also are looking at termites the cause of their influence in the landscape. they have a huge influence and all that comes later in the book. but 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. when we took all the termites, we had about 8000 termites and took them back to the lab and froze all the sordid and clean them, stuff them into's and froze them on dry ice that they could be 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 i had tostart trying to find biology's underlying rules . they're doing it with jeans and ecosystems reedit their seeing nature in new ways and at the same timetrying to reinvent it and put it to work . for most of the time that we've been alive, the idea of the future was to harness the big forces of nature to tie the globe together into low-level big power lines, pipelines, refineries, satellites and cables, all the big forces. that are on earth that wanted to switch them all together but that i think is all the old future and in the next future we will harness nature's finest life forms, microbes and insects, boost their organization and control and their genes in the chemical capability. this paradoxical desire to have a lighter footprint on the earth while having greater control over its processes. termites i came to understand are the poster bug or the 20th century. a little guy with really big ideas. one of the issues that comes up with termites is that at

the core of it it's idea is the stream of changing biology into a predictive science, much the way physics started observing things like apples falling in gravity and then gradually change to become something for making bombs. that sort of deep understanding of the sort of principles which led to being able to predict and do other things. so i think one of the questions here that lurks in the back of the book is will there be termite bombssomeday and whether the answer to that is yes, sir no , our grandchildren will laugh at the innocence of our question, i think. i understand that sound like a ridiculous question but as you get deeper into the situation, it gets more complicated. once i was on termites i ended up doing another story for a magazine, going to namibia to follow a biologist who was studying how termites build their big mounds in

namibia they don't these mounds that are 13 or 15 or 17 feet high. there are other termites that build them up to 30 feet high. i've never seen a 30 foot high mild. with a 20 or 15 foot mountain, the only way to knock it down is toget a big tractor tractor with a bucket loader and ran it, basically. so these are mammoth , very substantial things and when i first saw them, they kind of shock to me. i was in eight you and you rent a car and you get on a road going north. exactly straight as if it were drawn by a pencil across the landscape. so i got on that and drove in my thrifty rental car. and after an hour or so, a spire of dirt appeared on the road. it appeared to have been tossed up from below the

earth's surface the way bugs bunny tunneled after he took a wrong turn at albuquerque. i knew this was a mound home to several million termites and i knew below themounds that a big fungus that the termites tended and the fungus is nine times the size of the termites . something's going on between the termites and the fungus. what i did not expect is the top of the mound would lean over. more mounds of beer beside the road. their shape was not accidental. if a fist made of dirt crunched through the surface and extended one finger to point at the sky, it would account for the mounds aggressive posture and wide base and narrow spire. then there were dozens of them and their colors shifted with the dirt around them, creamsicle orange , then solid homespun brown. all these dirt fingers appeared to be pointing north directing me to my destination.

soon i could see nothing but termite mounds to the horizon on both sides. i've been traveling for about 30 hours at that point and i began to play with them in my mind. were they a troop of thousands of mournful munson road . each dancer holding her straw hat aloft with the same inviting angle in the direction i was driving, come with us so i didn't have time to stop and investigate because i had to go where i was going before dark as the wild game would apparently jump into the roadand you didn't want to hit them . so as i drove north, i kept thinking about the weird band in the top of the termites and this strange straightness of the road which was riddled but started me off on a series of other riddles. very quickly, i ran to the researcher who i was looking for and he took me out to look at the mounds that night. quick's he had been, his name is scott turner, he's been sent the last 20 years or so tricks in the mounds and trying to figure out how termites building. he pours beads into the

mounds, dive into the mounds, then in half, cut them off at the bottom and let them regrow. he waters them, doesn't them, anything you can imagine doing to amount, he's done to it. and he brought me to an open shed with something white glowing under the roof and it felt like a shrine area near scott had one still termite mound with plaster of paris and washed away the mud and what was left was an eerie sculpture of white pillars of carrying thicknesses reaching about 12 feet skyward to the end of the same rakish angle that i have observed on the mounds while driving up. this new thing was the exact inverse of the termite mound, present where the mounds had removed the dirt and absent where they had built it up. it was a beautiful object with large sinuous plaster shapes revealing smooth tunnels the termites had excavated in the amount area surrounded by laces smaller ones. the sun was setting, and i was tired and twinkles were skittering across the white

not mound and it seemed to animate slightly in plaster forms echoed bones and blood vessels with a vague but undeniable personality. the mounds scott explained looks like a fixed structure but is a dynamic process. it's 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 and as with our bones, the mounds structure is organically coupled with its function. the rain and animals knock down parts of the mound and the termites rebuild with a preference for the sunnyside. got spent years taking photos of mounds at the same time, run together like an animation, the photos revealed these moving mounds wiggling and waggling that finger of dirt towards the sky and the four or five years it took for termites to form a colony and don't dismount, that process of summarizing came to approximate the average zenith angle of the sun at his latitude, 19 degrees from north. the mound then became

something totally amazing. it was a computation of its own position in the solar system.a relative to the earth's latitude in mud with termites as a calculating agent so here was the answer to the first riddle of the north pointing mound. so to me, these riddles were very satisfying and that's what kept me going for 10 years as i'd suddenly understand one thing and then the next thing would open up . and one of the other mysteries was why was that road so remote and took all the way to the angle of the border and it turned out it had been built to carry munitions during a very long war between south africa and angola. and the much of the book is really 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 decides what the technology is, what does it do? what does it do that we anticipate and don't anticipate but if we look 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. as i mentioned, termites are social cockroaches. cockroaches don't have queens . termites were sometimes 150 or 200 million years ago, running around in the dirt and they started picking up cockroaches running around in the dirt and they started picking up microbes that allow them to digest wood and that meant they could use something that was very available and had very little nitrogen in it, they could process it and turn it into fuel which gave them an advantage, it meant they could survive but the microbe, they would shed their intestines frequently which meant they lost their microbes so in order to keep

those microbes with them, they began to somehow collect for living in a group. so they gradually pooled their resources so that they will, they're constantly -- it's called wood shake politely but there drinking these dollops from each other's butts and that's the way they keep the microbes going around. and then they sort of began to distribute their other tasks as well so reproduction became the queens thing. there's a king and some of them, there's a lot of different ways to be a termite so there's not always a king and queen, sometimes there's many means, sometimes there's twokings which doesn't even make any sense . and they also had soldiers and the soldiers have very elaborate heads area some soldiers shoot things out of their heads. they have a nozzle on the head, some soldiers block passages and some have

amendable they can snap or pull apart . the evolution in termites is a crazy thing. i want toread you a little bit about the queen . the queen is in the bottom of the termite mound inside anything that about a capsule of dirt the size of asquash soccerball . eugene cracked the soccerball open, he was an entomologist. revealing the king and queen in the hollow space. the chamber had holes on the sides allowing air andsmaller termites to pass through. the king was large and dark compared to the workers. the kings about this big and the queen is the size of my finger . her legs and upper body waggled like little waggling like a bobble fish. but barely but the huge fluid-filled sac of her lower body which directly as though she was a two-faced student squeezed by an unseen hand. first seamless and the facts

insiders world like pearly green. coffee. everyone shuddered. the queen is viscerally propulsive, she offends our sensibilities and she's monstrous. i think the first stimulus to shutter is a reflexive reaction to revise bullshit swirls in a more intellectual sense of her kicks in. she not queen, she's a slave. give up her body and her children and the structure of the mound she conspired to build and even then the queens more shocking aspects are hidden. for truly stupendous fragility treating millions of eggs as long as 20 years. some species of termite queen and clone themselves by producing eggs with no entryways for sperm and then mature those into sexual queens with only their mothers , zones located inside the egg nuclear's . to give them kind of a whole set. imperfect copies of the queen means knockoffs are good enough to get the job done. so part of the new genesis allows the queen to live in

but years close to forever. and yet, we do refer to her as the queen and i wondered why. eugene had when european naturalists looked into beehives, they saw the monarchies they camefrom with workers and soldiers and kings and queens and it was misleading and it kept us from understanding what was going on with termites at all. this is absolutely true and not only did they misinterpret what they were seeing , they or see them as sort of many insect states, the early naturalists looking into beehives assumed that thequeen was a king because they can only imagine a king as a head of such a magnificent insect . so then that kind of evolved and then up until pretty recently, termites and social insects were seen as utopias. tiny humans and insects living the way nature intended them. so people said that looking at termites, explained the rights of kings and why we needed aristocracy that needed to be fed by the workers or also marvelously,

charlotte perkins gilman's looked inside and said this meant that the whole world was meant to be run by women and we were just in this temporary troughof being run by a patriarchy . and the socialists looked in and saw a socialist utopia and then when the 20th century, things got much darker. looked into the termite mound and saw eugenics and eugenics societies with forced extermination. this is in the 1920s, not like the anticipated things. they also saw them as totalitarian workers, the world was based on termites and they also saw them as factory workers. which kind of comes up later because we and having the concept that termites are factoryworkers, when we look at termites, people tend to look to see that they are all

doing the same thing and they're all at work . so i'm going to skip ahead a little bit. and a bunch of people who study robots at harvard showed up at the mound another year. and they had all sort of marvelous things to do. they made little tiny test for the termites and tried to test them again and again they could then build robots and algorithms and ideas based on modeling the termites. they, their idea was that the termites were at some level kind of a brain. that's not explicit but they saw them somewhat as working together in a network style that could do something that we don't yet understand. but they also saw them as, they wanted to model the termites with automatons. so they wanted to have them have no memory, no personality and the rest of

that. and then they have since then build autonomous constructing and swarming robots that are very interesting but i wanted to give you a little bit from what they were trying to do . one night, i had a vivid termite dream. i saw a string of sausages moving across the ground and my picnic had been stolen by insects. i watched them read my sausages all through town and the boxes they stolen where they were hiding the sausages. i woke up feeling bothered and ripped off when i told roddick, one of the principal investigators at the visa institute at harvard about the dream, shesaid sympathetically , collective transport. as though she had that dream all the time. of whatever frustrations i felt were transient, i was merely vacationing in the robot-assisted nightmare, finding the termites modus operandi and out of the other self organizing systems was a lifelong project, not a project with a completion date. justin warfel had been living

this way for years, justin was a researcher at harvard. austin explained later there's a joke in complex systems that were all waiting for car now. this is a reference to back explaining, waiting for ghetto in which two guys wait for you know who never arrives locarno is a french engineer and physicist with 1820s first observed and described how he introduced and predicted the work laying the foundation for the laws of thermodynamics before carnot there were observations of the behavior but his theories transformed early steam engines and influence the design of gasoline engines, power plants and our whole modern world is based on ideas that come from pardo. the field of complex systems is still in the stage of gathering information and insights into biology while

waiting for something to appear with that unifying theory. coming up with a viable theory for the way termites build could change the way how networks run and how disasters get responded to. the emergent equivalent of thermodynamics could up in the world but the reality like the plague is ultimately absurd us. 15 years earlier, justin had gone to school to study physics and consciousness only to wake up in effectively termites that might not end in his lifetime. it was adapting well considering. so these people very generously allowed me to keep visiting them in the field and in their laboratories and watch things get screwed up. one of the things that team of researchers discovered was that all the termites were different, they are not factory workers. been a couple years ago the tractor where they can see what individual termites were doing and discovered thatthey were , some were charismatic leaders, some were just running around like mad termites. some would just stand and shake. some would do what others were doing, just to be part of the fund, they'd all come and jam into a whole.

and then they would all grab a ball of mud and run itover somewhere and build a little stack . they were by changing their, as they changed their ability to see the termites they were able to completely change their idea of what made a termite termites and also realize i had memories, in addition to personalities. the idea of amount filled with 5000 termites, 1 million termites with different personalities, all with a fungus nine times their size, it's fairly complex. if you want to talk about complex . 30 years into my termite problem, where i was taking time off from work, i work for a think tank in dc and lived in california, i would take time to go totermite things and escape the energy things that i was doing . i realized the door in my apartment in berkeley didn't shut right anymore so at first i jammed it shots and

yanked it open and i did that for a couple of months, it was like my thing. and it turned out that i actually, my house was infested with termites, my apartment. so my landlord called the carpenter who entered my studio and pointed to the origin of the problem, the wall behind my bed but when he peeled the siding off, i could see termites had chewed through the beam and what remained was collapsing like old cardboard boxes left out in the rain. my bug roommates and left a set of shabby ruins and here i was living on the edge of the fall. the goodshiver of an earthquake could have brought the house down on the as i slept . the revelation was. and the fact i saw the termites in my walls is interesting rather than horrible showed me how deep into the bugs world i've gone but what most people know about termites is the fact that they eat houses and i completely missed the fact that they were eating mine.

i began to admit that all these insect vacations were more about an escape from oil and work. they were giving me some kind of purpose and joy.and then as that developed, the termites led me into other things. how are we doing on time? i guess we're fine. >> .. i'd forgotten what i was looking for but i learned while i was searching on the ground with my aspirator as many as three predator drones had been flying above me controlled by pilots in air-conditioned trailers from 25 miles way. predators look like the

offspring from a mosquito and rippling. they have no window so they appear to be eyeless but from a height of 22,000 feet they can see where the person eight miles away is carrying a backpack. i had not been alone for my first termite support. the landscape had been engineered into something like a termite mound, zone of total sensory awareness, a space to detect invaders. comprehensive but i'm interested after years of being confined to places like afghanistan, yemen and pakistan, the drones had come home. by 2014, ten of them were flying along the border. without any democratic discussion we made a choice to have more control over space through these unthinking constant presences, that is really one of the essences of termites, the very soul of the organism. the definition of a human was we

would never give up her individual liberty for the group like termites do but by becoming a bit bugged through technology were losing so the essential qualities that make us humans. and then he goes into some of the implications of drones. i'll just go ahead to the end. i always described this, my termite problem in the book, first as a termite problem than a termite book i was doing, and in the last two days i realized actually maybe i had, termites were my midlife crisis. they were my point out. they would all thing. because through my obsession, chasing this silly story at totally change the way i saw the planet as well as myself. the mound sticking everything that matter to me. the meaning of life, the key to the future, parable about the

interplay between organized narrative of the stories animals and later data process. what were the mounds but that dirt impression of the solar system scolded by a few million eyeless bugs? a map by the universe and yet they were also the building blocks of our world. termites make the world, make the whole fertile world that we live in. more personally, mounds seem to be the human brain turn inside out. we can only approach their weird glorified stories about queens and all of our hopes and anxieties about her own society. leaning over at a 19° angle they are at ongoing meditation on the complexity of dumbness in the dumbness of complexity. i was really lucky to find amount at the moment when we can still see them as an old-fashioned super organism. which is not scientifically useful concept.

right now the termite mound is a thing, a construct of fungus and termites in natural history but someday we will live in it with all of its symbiotic byproducts, paradoxes of abundance control and its peculiar self organize construction. when we do we won't be able to see the way we do now. and i also to save the mounds are hopeful because they have an incredible tolerance for failure and individually to adapt and termites are just nuts. it's actually very hopeful beacon in the biosphere that is changing rapidly. so that's the end of my reading. [applause] >> if you have questions you should come appear to this microphone. -- up here. yes. >> thank you. so how much time do we have left

before the termites take over? >> well, you mean a washington d.c. specifically? they are moving northward in the u.s. and this wonderful stuff, actually it's horrible stuff but amazing stuff is happening in florida where two distinct forms of invasive termites have begun to form super termites and super colonies that are extra hard to kill an extra fast-growing. but termites are also pretty good. i mean, they will help us fight climate change to some degree. scientists in australia found that using termites and set of conventional fertilizer in wheatfields increased the yield by 36%. maybe your next loaf of bread comes from a termite. >> what is the relationship between the termite mound and the fungus? how do they relate?

what does the fungus do for the treatment? >> or what do the termites do for the fungus, that's the of the question. the mounds on this bake and underneath there is a big fungus in the termites and the fungus had been living together for at least 100 million years. the termites run out into the ground around the mound, all the roundabout in a giant hexagon until he hit another mound. they grab grass and they chew it into little balls and a stack it up in this crazy sort of piecrust construction aye graham cracker crust it looks like but it's also looks kind of like a vain, brain, sorry. it's a strange shape and it's kind of vaguely similar when you see it. then they inoculate each ball with the fungus and in the fungus dissolves the sugars that are in that dress. the termites come down, slurp

them off and then they go running around the mound feeding them to their brothers and sisters. and they come back in and they tend to the focus. so the fungus metabolism is roughly nine times the size of the joint metabolism of the termites in the mounds so the question we would assume, okay,, the termites must be the brains of this and fungus must be the brawn. there's kind of a question like maybe the fungus is telling the termites what to do through chemistry of some sort. >> thank you. >> i wish i could ask you a deep philosophical question relating to termites because i enjoyed listening to you talk about that aspect of the book, but the best i can do is just asked for a few little factoids i didn't quite understand about termites. >> all right. >> one of those i just was the armored or the soldier termites.

are they there to battle other termites? is there a predator that is there or to the take part in sort of the eugenics exercise? >> no. >> calling out the week. so that was one. i'll give you the whole, , free, i'll give you three of them. the other was, well, the geneticists, where they studying the genetics of the termites or by chance the bacteria? >> i can answer that one. they were studying the genetics of the bacteria in the guts. most interesting to me is the one about nitrogen which i totally didn't understand picky said that at one point that the fuel or the material that the termites sort of create is nitrogen free and speedy no. the fuel that the eat, the word, it has nitrogen in it but it's

not bio available. the microbes in the termites guts do things to the nitrogen to make it bioavailable. some back to the question about the soldiers. >> right. >> the soldiers defend, the soldiers are blind just like the workers, and they have this weaponry on their heads and they counted orient themselves by sniffing the air, the puffs of air, since in the air current or maybe getting the clicking from other termites. the only themselves when whatever they think the threat is. evan at eater or a bucket loader come smashing into a termite mound, french airports in, all bunch of worker termites will turn around, one back into the mound clicking, setting up a fuss is all of the termites grab a a ball of dirt and run towards the whole following that little sniff of the fresh air. and the soldiers run along with

them and they all get to the edge of the known world which is sort of the edge of the mound and then they begin to launch themselves. and so if they have mandibles, they launch themselves and snap or they might just a squirting the little nozzles. it's really nuts. what the soldiers do is they are defending against everything from a bucket loader to win aardwolf to some ants come in on a raid. but the workers also will defend against things like bad funguses and that all grew each other all the time so that, i mean, they have than just against animals. >> i also had -- totally coincidentally -- termites of the state. >> are you familiar with that. >> was i'm not there gets on my

list of things i need to read now that i'm not just reading papers about termites. >> thank you for this. two question. when was, i was wondering if you could talk briefly about the biofuel three that sort such on the staff to begin with? and others how is the brave new world based on termites? >> answer the second very shortly. the brave new world author brother was termite scientist. they take -- the concept of prophylaxis, this business of drinking from each other's butts. i don't know, feel like i should do one of these for toddlers. [laughing] but back to the biofuels, in 2007 -2008 we had oil prices will go up and we had a growing

belief that we're soon going to bipartisan consensus on climate change we have not gotten there yet. there were some scientists believed the we could leapfrog the political process and kind of replace the gasoline with a biofuel that would solve our climate problems, it would be like insurance from whatever the political system could not handle it doing something about climate change. so it started off with tremendous bipartisan support and we have a couple of national labs and we also have the joint bioenergy research institute, and there's a whole bunch of programs all across the country. termites were an early candidate. because termites can eat the wood they thought let's go in and sequenced all the genes in the microbes, the five for different microbes in the guts of the termites, these are termites that didn't use the

fungus looks a whole suite of termites, i mean of guts. and then we'll get all these genes, like a million, and try to forget which ones code for some enzyme that might break up would. they did all this computer analysis of it and they tried to take these codes and thrown it into e. coli cells and trying to see if the e. coli could dissolve some would. that first round didn't work. then he started looking for, let's figure out how the process works in the termites, and eventually one of the people in the book is a physicist who came and in these discussions and said you need understand the principle. he sort of took this in a different direction of trying to understand the principles rather than the specifics basically, what the termite does is look up a kid they don't think you understand for at least 20 years. and termites have, we know so

little about what's going on some of the termite genes that we don't know, but at the same time the price of oil fell. they were making progress on making biofuel at the price still, gasoline isn't four dollars a a gallon is going toe really hard to make gasoline that is competitive in the marketplace. they ended up making two two biofuels that about $20 a gallon. they both ended up being used by the military as far as i know, i think other industrial application. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. any other questions? >> i understand scientists have also looked at how termite mounds been delayed. did you run across that and just any interesting stories about how that works? >> that was really fascinating. there's been sort of an ongoing controversy about how those termite mounds in africa

ventilate. early on it was thought that acted like the chimney. there was a lot of heat made by the fungus in the termites, and that would sort of rights of through the top of the mound and come out. sometimes there was a discussion that it might be eventually affect, a hole in the top, and went across an apple thinks up like a a perfume spray your po. and scott, the researcher who i followed, tried injecting propane gas inside the termite mounds about 20 years ago, and you discovered they did do anything predictable. sometimes they sloshed around. sometimes it went straight up the top. sometimes there were subtle mixing things going on. and also from termite mounds, from species of termite or termites that it evolved in

different places they may also create mounds that two very different things. so recently a bunch of physicists from harvard have been studying termite mounds in africa and termite mounds in india and it found that the indian termite mounds had a different sort of heat exchange pattern that they sort of got very hot during the day and then there was a moment when the air went out of the termite mound which is pretty amazing and they had like beautiful, like heat photography, and you saw it kind of change. and then, but the african termite mounds work, they seem to work like a long in some ways. they have both diffusion of the air to the mound answer sort of pockets in the mound -- lung. it's sort of a -- i think it's

kind of all under discussion. there's also this wild magnetic mounds and australia. they are really flat and they go way up, and the australian scientists have tried, and they'll face north-south, and australian scientists have tried hitting them with range rovers and knocking them out of alignment and found that the temperatures inside changed dramatically when they do that. so more questions? >> can we get one more round of applause? [applause] >> thank thank you, everyone, fr coming. please leave your chairs with our and the signing line will be basically right in front to make. >> thank you so much for coming. [inaudible conversations]

>> booktv is on twitter, facebook and instagram. follow us @booktv for behind-the-scenes videos a picture some book festivals and events all over the country as we celebrate 20 years of nonfiction authors and books. we want to hear from you, post your favorite booktv moment from the last 20 years using the hashtag booktv 20. >> host: robert whaples we're showing the book you edited "pope francis and the caring society." what are we going to find in here? >> guest: the book is written mainly by economists and when writing in response from three years ago. it's cannot as the popes environmental encyclical but it's economists were trying to gauge the pope