. >> i want to introduce tonight speaker . -- nathalia holt. she has conducted research at caltech library and at harvard. she is a founder at massachusetts general hospital and m.i.t.. her first book is called cured, the people who defeated hiv. she has been published in the new york times, los angeles times and time magazine. in 2016 she published the work that is the basic of her talk tonight, entitled "rise of the rocket girls: the women who propelled us, from missiles to the moon to mars." that work was a bestseller and was widely praised by critics, including one who described it as immersive, evocative, and superbly written. her narrative should be required reading. another commented that when neil armstrong made his giant leap for mankind, there was womankind in the control room. it is a pleasure to welcome to the university of mary washington nathalia holt. [applause] nathalia: thank you so much. i really appreciate you having me here tonight and i am excited to talk to you about rocket girls. this is a group of pioneers whose careers shaped nasa and really made it what it

suggestion to a guy at caltech which is one of the world's leading bio experts and help me understand the microenvironment is the main character in the chapter on the subject. let me tell you a little bit about the micro biome that is not as an initiator. it is the biosphere of bacteria that lives inside of you largely in the gut, about half of your body cells or bacteria populating most of your gut. remember i mentioned that we are not at war with those bacteria's around us. so far from the immune system side, the bacteria certainly don't want to do any harm for us. we are there hotel, tent, youth hostel, go down the list. we are there home. they want to cooperate with us. a word of caution about the micro done under brian. just like i met, we talked about autoimmunity the micro biome research is maybe the most embryonic research of any field that is going to blow up in the extraordinary. it has the potential to tell us as much as we have ever known about human health. but, when you think of the collection of organisms in your gut, all mixed together, billions of different cells, tea

caltech campus, some of them were students and others were just young people who liked to explode things. so they did a lot of that on campus. they set off an explosion in the .ngineering building they also blasted off the side of the building, raining breakdown on students below. it was at this point that the administrators at caltech said, this is enough. you have to leave. this is where they went. this isolated canyon outside pasadena, where they could set off rockets. this important to note at time in history, the late 1930's, rocket science is considered a fringe science. no serious scientist or engineer would ever aspire to being a rocket scientist. their professors would tell them what they were trying to do was impossible. you would never be able to send a rocket into space. there was a woman who was part of this suicide squad named barberie can write -- barbie can wright. she was a computer. that meant a person who computes. the calculations for the experiments. this is one of the earliest was anomputers, he 18th-century french mathematician and astronomer. he was working

: caltech's rana adhikari there. finally, back on earth, you can take to the skies in a brand-new way. private flights were once reserved for the rich and famous, but all you need is a smart phone to hitch a ride with one of these aviation startups. imagine you want to take a quick flight for business. instead of shuffling through security lines and navigating terminals to board a crowded commercial airline, you can instead opt for the private flight experience with the touch of an app. blackbird and jet sweet acts -- and jetsuitex are two startups are pushing a private flight industry forward. rudd: we think of ourselves in the same they know is on-demand transportation companies like uber or lyft. we are a journey that goes farther. emily: blackbird is a small company that is focused on the 5200-mile journey. it recently announced a $10 million funding round. it is backed by enterprise associates. jonathan: aircraft is utilized for 1% to 2%, and it is a highly underutilized aspect, and it is an expensive asset. when you can advertise the cost basis, and enable a lot of pilots who want to fly

tell us more about this exciting new frontier we have a caltech professor and experimental physicist who joins us on the phone. you are hereed because i have been getting so many questions from my children about this blackhole. tell us why in particular this image is so exciting. think children have the best questions, so the reason that they are excited is the same reason i am excited. just aok at it and it is thing you would never see on earth. the laws of physics that are going on and making the kind of image are the kinds that you only hear about in harry potter novels or comic books. emily: here are some questions from my six-year-old son. where did it come from? where do black holes come from? rana: see this is what i am saying. these are the best questions. this is exactly what we talk about in astronomy conference. where do black holes come from ? and everyone has their own opinions. this is one of the observations that we think will help us figure this out. the only way to get a big blackhole is to put together a bunch of little things. and this thing is billions of times he