- Hi there, I'm Frank Graff.

What we can learn from the effects of music on the brain.

What is precision metrology?

We'll watch cocoons that jump and learn how cypress trees stand the test of time.

The wow of science, next on Sci NC.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.

- Sci NC is supported by a generous bequest gift from Dan Carrigan and the Gaia Earth Balance Endowment through the Gaston Community Foundation.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Hi again and welcome to Sci NC.

There's an old saying that says music soothes the savage beast.

Well, it's safe to say that music has a definite effect on us.

And as producer Evan Howell explains, scientists are using music to learn more about just how the brain works.

(upbeat music) - How do you listen to music?

Do you listen to it to match your mood?

Or to change it?

Maybe you dance to it.

Or maybe just relax.

It turns out we can see what happens in our brains when we listen to or play music.

The waves go from this to this.

- So as we're disengaging from the outside world and turning our focus inside, for example, the rhythms start to slow down.

As we're planning to move, engage with the outside world, the rhythms like for example here, start to speed up.

So those transitions, those switches that we see here in real time, we believe they're some of the most fundamental properties of the brain.

And if we understand them better, we can develop these targeted treatments for illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and others.

- But let's back up.

Whatever your taste in music, your brain reacts to it in a certain way.

And watching what happens in the brain while it listens or plays may help unlock how the brain works.

- So Doc, can you give me just a snapshot of your research and why music, really?

- Brains are rhythmic.

Brain's function is via electrical signaling and those signals are rhythmic signals.

Now there is a strong parallel to music which also has rhythm and structure.

So we're taking here a radically different view by thinking about the brain and where those symptoms come from as an electric system.

- Frolich says some brains are out of rhythm.

He says that since brains are essentially electrical systems themselves, we can use technology to let's say, bring that beat back.

He says brains are like an electric symphony.

- In fact, we can do something very similar to what the conductor would do in orchestra.

We can use what is called non-invasive brain stimulation, which is using minute amount of electricity to help the brain shape and crystallize those rhythms to help patients with psychiatric disorders.

- He says by understanding the brain's electrical language, we can have what he calls a dialogue with it.

And to demonstrate that, he invited violinist David Binanay to help him.

Binanayruns Door to Door, a UNC Hospital Arts program that brings music to patients and staff as a form of therapy.

- Now every year it's gonna fit really snug, kind of like a swim cap.

- He's agreed to wear a headdress of sorts that will read the signals in his brain.

Conductive gel is carefully inserted into each node on David's head, which takes some time, but it's important to have each node have a good connection to give a full picture of what's going on.

- It's seeing what the effects of the work that we do and the impact of the music to the people.

- So what we're looking at here is a live stream from David's brain.

And what we're detecting are tiny, minute electric signals.

And as you see, there's a lot of rhythmic structure to it.

Traditionally, we thought this is the brain thinking, but now we know this is the brain putting effort in to organize different parts of the brain as a function of whatever's going on in the moment.

- I guess we can let 'em play?

- Right, yep.

Signals look good.

We're ready to start.

Yes, if you'd like to get started, David.

(violin music) - By recording how the frequencies are alternating, Froelich and his team can use this data to determine what kind of help is needed.

In a clinical trial setting, the small electrical signals are sent to the subject designed to regulate or steady them.

- Yeah, so relative to the size of my thumb.

- More clinical trials are planned to review their version of a battery-powered portable device a bit like this one.

By attaching these clips to the earlobes for around 30 minutes a day, an individual would receive small electric impulses depending on their clinical needs.

- Another great session.

- Frolich is a trained electrical engineer and says what makes this research unique is that it's dependent on input from a wide range of disciplines to make it successful.

(violin music) One demonstration recently was born out of a partnership with Carolina Performing Arts.

- Psychology is my background.

- Co-research coordinator Savannah Finger here in fact volunteered to be part of it.

She sat in front of an audience while music was being played for her while her brainwaves were displayed for all to see.

Amanda Graham says simply that they are interested in how music impacts the brain and their audiences.

- It's possible that our brainwaves are moving in similar patterns which brings us together as an audience or could bring musicians together as an orchestra which is interesting to think about that this is a networked experience and not a solo one.

- And it's that creative coming together of all this amazing talent, the trainees who are so passionate about advancing the development of new treatments in mental health that make all of this possible.

(violin music) - Did you ever measure something for a project and say, "Oh, it's about that many inches"?

Well, about that many inches isn't exact.

It might work for some things but it won't work for researchers at the University of North Carolina Charlotte who study precision metrology.

- Metrology is the science of measurement.

Hi, I'm Ed Morse.

I'm the director of the Center for Precision Metrology here at UNC Charlotte.

When they were building the pyramids in Egypt, they had the cubit which was a length of stone marked to a particular length.

That was the reference for building the pyramids and that's one of the earliest popular known instances of metrology.

There are three main fields of metrology.

There's legal metrology which you might recognize from the sticker on the gas pump or the sticker on the meat scale at the grocery store.

There's also metrology to support scientific research.

But the real impact that metrology has on society is in support of manufacturing.

Everything that's made, whether it's your car, a phone, a jet aircraft, if you don't have accurate measurements of these components, you'll never know if you're making them properly.

UNC Charlotte is really the only university in North and South America that has a program dedicated to dimensional metrology.

There's a real need for younger people who really understand the fundamentals of metrology, not just using the equipment.

What's great about metrology at UNC Charlotte, for me, has been primarily the people.

We have some of the best faculty that are generous with their time.

The resources that they have here are amazing.

I am standing inside the measuring volume of our largest coordinate measuring machine that we have.

This measuring machine measures two meters by three meters by 1.6 meters and measures with an accuracy of 10 micrometers, which is a tenth the thickness of a human hair.

There's no other university in the US that has a machine of this volume with this accuracy.

Our students do take internships both at national laboratories, such as NIST and Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and work with various companies.

And these are companies that make aerospace, as far as making planes or making engines, chip makers, fiber optic cable makers, all sorts of manufacturing industries, but it was very large and very small.

- I think one of the really, really good things is the connection between the industry and our department.

You always can see your real application.

You always can see how your work can affect the industry.

No one grew up wanting to be a metrologist.

Everyone has a story about how they bumped into it and then became fascinated with either the technology or just the ability to measure more accurately than everyone else.

I love the precision of it.

I like to know things.

It's like one of those children books, the metrologist who wanted to know.

So it's that pursuit of lower and lower uncertainty.

That's what excites me.

- You can watch more Sci NC episodes anytime on our website or through the PBS streaming app.

- Nothing says wow more than metamorphosis, the process by which animals undergo extreme rapid physical change.

Think tadpole into a frog.

Entomologist Adrian Smith at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences gives us a whole new look at metamorphosis.

- These are insect cocoons and they're special 'cause they can do this.

The parasitic wasp that's in them can throw itself into the air and come back down to bounce and roll away from danger or into a better environment.

I think they're extraordinary because I've filmed a lot of insects jumping, hopping, and even flying, but I've never captured something getting into the air quite like this before.

Inside that jumping cocoon is a larval stage of a wasp.

Now, a lot of insects in their larval stage are legless, but they still need to get around.

So some of them have come up with some incredible strategies for doing just that.

For instance, here's a lance fly, which is legless.

It's curling itself up into a loop and building up energy.

When the loop slips free, the movement launches it into the air.

A bunch of different types of flies do this in the larval stage.

This is footage of a gall midge larva I filmed using the same legless jumping strategy to get around.

Of course, the most famous jumping larval insect is probably the Mexican jumping bean.

These moth larvae flick themselves against the inside of the seed pods they're in in order to move and jump out of harsh, potentially harmful environments.

Inside the pods, the larvae spin silk threads to line and connect themselves to the seed walls.

But the outer shell of the seed is what they use to roll around in.

With the wasp, the ball-like structure they're in is something they make all by themselves.

It's made mostly of silk that the larvae spin and then glue together to give it some structure and hardness.

In this shot, and in the last, this is a cocoon with my finger for scale to show you just how small these are.

The wasp larvae spin these cocoons after they emerge from their hosts, which you see here on the left, the larval stage of an alfalfa weevil.

This is what an adult alfalfa weevil looks like, but the wasps leave the adult stage alone.

The wasp larvae are technically parasitoids because they completely consume and kill their hosts.

On the left here, that's the husk of a weevil host, and the parasitoid wasp larvae that emerged is on the right.

Once they're in their cocoon, this is what they do to jump.

Lighting it from behind, watch this dark part, and you'll see the larva move inside.

It rapidly throws its whole body against the upper wall of the cocoon, which sends it popping up and off the ground.

Unlike the fly larvae you saw in the beginning that curl up and then release, these larvae are laid flat across the whole length of the cocoon, and then they have some mechanism by which they can rapidly shift their entire bodies up.

They don't just jump once or twice.

Here, you can see in time lapse how active they can be as they try to move into some preferred environment, or in this case, out from under the light of the camera.

Once they do find a good spot, they'll enter the pupal stage.

Here, you can see the eyes of the pupa through the slightly transparent cocoon.

In this stage, they don't jump.

All they can do is a small little wiggle, which you can see this one do if you watch where the eyes are.

At this point, I really wanted to film a time lapse sequence of the adult wasps emerging.

I spent like two weeks watching and filming the couple of cocoons that I had, and though the wasp was alive inside them, they never emerged as adults, and I ended up with hours of footage like this where absolutely nothing happens.

So instead, to see the adult wasps, I went down the road to the NC State University Insect Collection.

This entomology collection is the largest in the state with around two million preserved specimens, and amongst these, there is one drawer with one tray with wasps in the same genus.

This is them, parasitoid wasps in the genus Bathyplectes.

These specimens aren't the exact same species as the jumping ones, but they're as close as I could find.

These wasps are in the Ichnemontid family, of which there are thought to be more than 60,000 species, and each one of them is parasitic, usually targeting another insect host.

In fact, as I was filming these jumping Ichnemontid cocoons and making this video, I came across a research paper from 1975 that reported a different species of Ichnemontid wasp that targets these cocoons as its host, making it a hyperparasitoid, or a parasite of a parasite.

So for now, that's what I could gather of the story of these wasps.

I still have these cocoons in the lab, and I'll still try to film the adults emerging, but that footage will have to be for a different video.

Thanks for watching.

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- Seeing the stars on a dark, clear night is also a wow kind of moment.

You get a sense of infinity in just how small the Earth is compared to the Universe.

Light pollution makes it tough for people to see stars.

It also makes it difficult for animals to survive.

As researchers at UNC Chapel Hill are learning.

(waves crashing) - Whenever we've gone out there, the waves are crashing, and you can hear them, but you can't see them, and there are crabs running around everywhere.

So it's a bit of a process taking these measurements in the pitch black.

The Outer Banks are really developed in a lot of places and continuing to develop, and that comes with a lot of artificial light at night.

We don't really fully understand the impacts of it.

There's a lot of research being done that's showing that it really can mess up the behavior of animals because you don't have those natural cues of the daytime and the nighttime anymore 'cause there's always light.

- The Capstone Project this year is focusing on artificial light at night and what some of the social perceptions are and how artificial light has changed with regard to extent and how intense it is.

- We have what's called a sky quality meter, which is what we use to measure the light at night.

And we pretty much just like stick it up in the air when we're facing the ocean and take a measurement with it.

It gives us a number.

We record it.

We do that four separate times facing different directions.

We also are kind of observing what's happening around the area that we're taking measurements.

So if there's any really noticeable light sources, if there are any cars in the area.

And we are also looking at constellations, what stars we can see, and then also cloud coverage 'cause clouds reflect light.

So that can also impact our measurements.

- The Capstone topic is something that Lindsay and I sort of land on before the semester starts, but it's original research.

So we don't know the answers and we don't know necessarily how it's gonna go.

It's not like a traditional class in that sense.

And so the students have a lot of agency over what we do for second and third and how much of the different methodologies they choose to do or where they might do their data collection.

So while we've chosen the topic and we have a sense of what the methods might be, the students have to make a lot of decisions about a lot of the details and research is all about details.

So they do have a lot of say over what happens and how it happens.

- A skill that I've gained from being a part of this research project would be learning how to take your ideas from being a concept and actually practicing them and making them into something that could be tangible.

- I've never created a survey like this before.

So having those kinds of skills, going out and actually doing research and then analyzing the measurements that we're getting and comparing it to other data has been a really useful experience for me.

- I hope that students leave the program with not just skills related to the particular method, but I really hope that they leave with skills around critical thinking, like how to approach a problem and think through a process.

- I see the Outer Banks as a place where students can learn to be stewards of their environment and also the community around them.

The tools that we teach and the way that we teach students to be observant helps them to become stewards elsewhere when they leave this place.

- I've always been interested in conservation and natural resource management.

Being here just further cements, that's the field that I want to pursue.

And I feel like I've gained more confidence in what I want to do by being part of this.

(upbeat music) - Follow us on Instagram for beautiful images of North Carolina and cool science facts.

- And here's your last chance to say, "Wow."

Let's continue our series of forest walks and discover how an old cypress has survived for centuries.

(water splashing) - We're in Southeastern North Carolina, roughly 30 miles from the coast.

And behind us is a bottomland hardwood swamp.

(soft music) Just remember, boots don't keep you dry.

They determine at what depth you get wet.

(laughing) These trees are all growing together.

So here we have what looks like a hickory and a cypress knee growing up among this cluster of, oh no, these are black gum.

So we've got one species of tree here and it's got its root network.

And we know from this that there's a cypress root network blended in with it.

- The knees Andy is talking about grow straight up out of the soil from the cypress roots.

No one's really sure exactly what these knees do.

There are theories.

They could add structural support to the tree.

Maybe they help prevent the soils from eroding.

Researchers are still working to understand more.

And that's science.

There's always more to learn.

Do you have any idea how far knees can extend from the actual tree?

I mean, is there any way to say that this knee belongs to that tree over there or would it be the closest?

- Typically it'll be the closest, but it is entirely possible that it's a knee, that knee could be coming off of that tree 25, 30 feet away.

One of the common myths about trees is that the root system extends out to the canopy of the tree.

In reality, the root system of a tree extends two to three times beyond the canopy.

So any of these trees could have roots that extend a hundred feet away.

- Wow.

- So this is a plant community above ground and there's a whole other part of that community underground.

- Even in winter, we find a surprising breadth of animal life around us.

- This swamp community is here year round.

On a warm winter's day, we'll find frogs, turtles, snails, lizards, and birds.

The year round biodiversity here is breathtaking.

You just have to look for it.

It's important to understand that each of these plants and animals is acting like a rivet holding together this ecosystem.

- Not far from this riverside path, developers are clear cutting tracts of land.

Does this nearby development affect this wetland in any way?

- It does.

There are lots of animals that use this swamp only during part of their life cycle.

They need uplands as well.

Turtles, for example, there may be an aquatic animal for most of its life, but turtles place eggs on high ground.

So they need that upland over there as well.

Raccoons will visit this area, bears will visit this area, but it's so wet.

They need dry ground as well.

So the interface between upland and wetland is really important for us to be thinking about.

- With that development, we're creating more impervious surfaces.

So does that put a greater load in terms of acting like a flood plain?

- Absolutely.

In those upland areas, when we pave them over, every square acre of pavement contributes roughly 25, 27,000 gallons of water with every inch of rain.

We're diminishing our underground aquifer and creating greater potential for catastrophic flooding.

- We're here at the iconic cypress tree, which Andy says could be more than half a millennium old.

Because it's winter, there's no foliage.

A massive opening at the trunk's bottom adds to the ghostly feel, but this tree is very much alive.

- So it's a little chilly.

In the summer, what kinds of creatures would be up inside here?

- Lots of spiders.

- You okay?

- No, I'm good.

- Summer.

(laughing) - This is a sentinel tree.

What is it telling us right now?

- That the ecosystem is still intact.

That's the really good news.

This tree is able to survive here in an environment that it grew up in, and if this environment had been changed radically, this wouldn't survive.

It couldn't adapt.

In other words, if we drained the swamp, this tree would die.

And it has to have all of its cohorts, all of these trees that are with it, they all have to live together.

If we clear cut everything around this tree, it would be exposed.

It made it through the last clear cut, but I don't know how many more it could survive.

These trees are all kind of taking care of each other, helping hold each other up in these loose, mucky, unconsolidated soils.

- They're taking care of each other, holding each other up?

What a lesson from the natural world.

And we hope you've enjoyed our WOW show.

That's it for Sci NC.

If you want more Sci NC, be sure to follow us online.

I'm Frank Graff.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) ♪ ♪ - Sci NC is supported by a generous bequest gift from Dan Carrigan and the Gaia Earth Balance Endowment through the Gaston Community Foundation.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.