And that is a very dangerous thing.

In my graduate years I worked with my colleague and mentor and friend, Steve Schneider, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, working on global change issues.

Astrid, let's look up labs in the area that do research with animals and

Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something.

So, wonderful things and grim things.

I'm just going to talk about two things.

And also start with a little bit of statistics.

Zoology deals with the study of animal life.

Wow. (Applause)

And the last is that these bold, new ways that we are exploring as a community will transform the way we look at our planet, our oceans, and eventually how we manage probably the entire planet, for what it's worth.

I have told people that MlT is the closest thing on this planet Earth to Hogwarts, to Harry Potter's wizarding school.

What kind of shit research are you doing?

Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate.

I would also like to tell the world that animals love.

Think of the AlloSphere as a large, dynamically varying digital microscope that's connected to a supercomputer.

This is cancer research the world over.

And so we actually need them to be scientists studying problems here down on earth as well.

Archeology is a science that studies the activities of human beings and their changes through the study of the traces left by them.

Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet.

looking back as to what I did

There, about 45 scientists from the University of Wisconsin, the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and others have been working to answer a central question about global warming.

He was trying to explain what happened.

The Laboratory

All of it? The research, the blogs.

While your cholesterol level has remained the same, the research findings have changed.

Even so, the Earth moves!

So I'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification.

A meteorologist

From the Institute of Polar Research Sent over as the ice scientist

But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth.

Is E.T. out there?

Craig Venter's tremendous and brilliant attempt to DNA sequence things in the ocean is great.

Now we study this, as the nerdy, laboratory, university based scientists that we are, by engaging the brains of animals like rats, or monkeys, or of this particularly curious creature one of the more bizarre forms of life on earth to engage them in learning new skills and abilities.

This is honestly the most exciting period ever for the study of unknown life forms on our planet.

And this is the terrain it appears over, and we know from geological studies that these regions are the oldest regions on Mars.

How many masks do you need?

The laboratory, Wilma.

Merrick Institute.

Crazy house.

Ectoplasmic research.

In the lab.

I'm doing research for an article...

Hold your breath and count to ten

It shoots up and it keeps going up.

They're emotional. They're aware.