Science Friday - Champagne Fizzics, Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Vole Girl. Dec 30, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Keeping The Bubbly In Your Holidays, With Fizzical Science As the year winds to a close, you may be attending gatherings where a festive flute of champagne is offered. Champagne production starts out with a first fermentation process that turns ordinary grape juice into alcoholic wine. A second fermentation in the wine bottle produces the dissolved carbon dioxide responsible for the thousands of fizzy bubbles that are a distinctive part of the experience of drinking champagne and other sparkling wines.  In this archival interview from 2012, Ira talks with Stanford University chemist Richard Zare about the interplay between temperature, bubbles, the surface of the glass in which the drink is served, and surprising factors such as lipstick chemistry that can influence the sparkliness of each sip, and delves into the age old question of the best ways to keep an opened bottle of champagne bubbly for longer.     What Was It Like To Witness The End Of The Dinosaurs? 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid hit what we know today as the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Many people have a general idea of what happened next: The age of the dinosaurs was brought to a close, making room for mammals like us to thrive. But fewer people know what happened in the days, weeks, and years after impact. Increased research on fossils and geological remains from this time period have helped scientists paint a picture of this era. For large, non-avian dinosaurs like Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex, extinction was swift following the asteroid impact. But for creatures that were able to stay underwater and underground, their post-impact stories are more complicated. Joining Ira to discuss her book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is Riley Black, science writer based in Salt Lake City, Utah.   ‘I Will Not Be Vole Girl’—A Biologist Warms To Rodents The path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself: Filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way. Danielle Lee started asking questions about animal behavior when she was a kid. She originally wanted to become a veterinarian. But after being rejected from veterinary school, she found a fulfilling career as a biologist, doing the type of work she always wanted to do—but never knew was possible for her. Science Friday producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Danielle Lee, a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in Edwardsville Illinois about what keeps her asking questions, what rodents can help us understand about humans, and the importance of increasing diversity in science. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Coming up this hour, we're going to revisit some of our favorite stories of the year, including Riley Blacks look back at the last days of the dinosaurs, and that rodent biologist who had to, let's say, warm up to the subjects she studies. But first, as we head into the weekend's festivities, a dip into our archives for a classic sci-fri story about when science meets champagne. We've got some scientific advice on how to get the most bang out of your bubbly. Mmm, it tastes good.

Up next, we're pouring over the science of bubbles. Here are some facts to wet your appetite. Lipstick and champagne, they clash chemically. Frosted beer mugs? A no-no for flavor. And if you want to keep that open champagne fizzy, corking is not the answer. What is the answer? Well, here to explain is Bubblemaster, Dr. Richard Zee.

He is Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Welcome back to Science Friday. Happy New Year. Well, thank you. I, resume to you. Thank you very much. Let's go through some of these bubble oligy tips for us. Do you have any tips for getting the most flavor and fizz out of champagne? Well, it turns out that as it warms up, you get more volatiles that come off when it evaporates.

And that's, of course, very enjoyable because most of our taste comes from. smell, not actually from inside our mouth. So let it warm up a little bit before you drink that icy stuff. That's right. This also actually applies to beer, Ira. Let me mention some things. Many people drink beer just from the bottle. And while I understand how quickly that is to take in the beer that way, because as I mentioned to you, the smell is involved. You just don't get much smell when you put a bottle to your mouth, much better is to drink beer from a glass. Now, what type of glass? Well, many bars serve frosted glasses. They think that's quite fancy and wonderful. But actually, I think that's a bad idea, as does my friend Norman Metzker in Washington, D.C., who pointed

this out to me. It turns out that if you cool liquids that contain gases, they really, the liquids dissolve the gases better, and it is the gas coming off the liquid, which is part of the aroma, which makes, again, beer be so enjoyable to many of us. Now, I understand that on a very hot day, nothing like a really cold beer, but in terms of taste, sipping from a glass that's cool is really quite wonderful. Now, I understand, as I said before, I understand that as for lipstick, Lipstick will kill the bubbles? Well, the bubbles are held together by this sort of membrane of various things that surround the carbon dioxide that's making the bubble. And when you add something like too much detergent, somebody doesn't really wash out the glass will,

or some people even rub their nose and then put their finger down. And this kills bubbles. And the oils, any type of oil, including chapstick, Vaseline, et cetera, will actually cause the bubbles to burst. It really destroys the surface tension and makes it uneven in the bubbles burst this way. You've now opened our bottle of champagne. You want to save it a little bit for the morning after. What's the best way to save it? I know you have done experiments about the best way to keep the bubbles in a bottle of champagne.

and Physi Tibble next morning. Well, actually, Hal McGee and I, he's the curious cook, who wrote a column for the New York Times with that subtitle, I think, looked into this. And the truth is that the best way to keep gas dissolved in your liquid is to keep the liquid cold. Anybody who's played around with water knows as you start to heat it up, it really drives the gases off. and hot water is much flatter.

And so is any hot, any liquid. And it releases gas that way. So you really, to keep your champagne effervescent, you want to keep it cold. So returning it to the refrigerator or keeping it in an ice bucket, it's just the right thing to do. You don't have to put the cork back in it or anything like? You actually do not. There's enough carbon dioxide in the champagne to go on for many days. We've seen that.

There's something else that's interesting that happens if you leave the champagne uncorked. Just like with wine, you get a change in its taste due to some oxidation from the air. And that actually can be quite pleasant too. I'll bet you have spent many hours verifying this. Oh, it requires it. All in the name of science, I was. Of course. But what about that trick of sticking a spoon down the neck of the champagne?

Is that all just an old wife's tail? Well, from what I can tell, the only effect the spoon has, like a silver spoon, is if it helps cool the bottle down when you put it back in the refrigerator. Otherwise, I don't think it works. Now, let's talk about the bubbles in your glass of champagne or your glass of wine. Because there's a whole bunch of physics going on there, isn't there? Let me start with... Well, a lot of chemistry, too. Of course, you're a chemist. You would be saying that.

Well, let's consider how the bubbles get there in the first place or what goes on in. in champagne. I think it all starts with this Frenchman by the name of Dome Peringuong, who lived about 1639 to 1715 and developed this thing called the Method Champanois, where you take some type of wine and you bottle it again with sugar and yeast to cause a second fermentation. And this yeast converts the sugar into carbon dioxide and ethanol, the alcohol, we enjoy drinking. And you also, of course, have other things that are left over from this. You get a couple grams per liter of different other materials like glycerol and tartaric acid and lactic acid.

It turns out that champagne's actually acidic. It has a pH of about three. Wow. But if you look at the amount of carbon dioxide that's in the champagne, it's immense. You know, at sea level, the pressure of the air is one. atmosphere. The amount of carbon dioxide in the bottle of champagne when you opened it is something like seven atmospheres. It's loaded. It's super saturated. It wants to come out. And here's the problem. How do you get bubbles that come out? It's one of the same questions about how do you get clouds to

rain? You need some form of nucleation, something to happen. And now I need to tell you that most of champagne is actually just water. And water loves water. Water loves water so much that it crushes little bubbles. And you don't see bubbles ever form in the middle of a glass of champagne. The same way you don't see bubbles form when you boil a pot of water and you look at it. The bubbles do not form in the center of the liquid. Instead, they form on the walls, on the sides. Why?

Because they need to hide and grow to a critical size. And they tend to actually form on various forms of, well, shall I call it, Fibers, dust, scratches in the glass, places to hide and build up to be a big enough bubble so we can escape and not be crushed by the water. So that's why you see them forming in lines. They may be lining up in a crack on the glass or they're coming off the sides. And I guess you can revise or revive a stale glass of beer by nucleating it. Well, one of the simplest ways, but I don't recommend it, of seeing this effect, is to dump in a tablespoon of either sugar or salt into a carbonated beverage. You'll see a great deal of foam being formed. Wow. Sand will work, too. I don't recommend any of those three.

Well, does that explain why? And it's in soft drinks like root beer, which has a lot of fizz inside of it, when you make a root beer float and you pour it on the ice cream, it just explodes with foam because the ice cream, has all those little nooks and crannies in it? Yes, and ice cubes too. Let me talk about ice cubes for a moment. Please. Have you ever noticed that when you pour any carbonated beverage on ice cubes for the first time, lots of foam? Right. You drink it.

Then you say, I want a refill. The next time people pour on the ice, the same ice cubes, right? Right. Much less foam. It's not that the bottle has gone flat. It's that all the sharp spots on the ice. the asperities on the ice have melted away. And without these little nooks and crannies, again, the carbon dioxide doesn't know how to escape.

It wants to escape. It wants to go to one atmosphere. It just doesn't know how. That would explain why I've heard about bartenders sprinkling some salt in your beer to make it foam up again. It does. Try it. It works in champagne and beer, but I don't think that for a purpose of taste, it's the thing to do. Not at all. Now let's talk about one of, I once saw a video that you created about bubbles in a glass of beer that they don't always go up. The bubbles seem to be going down. And you tried this with what?

With actually with Guinness beer. Guinness. Famous for all those bubbles in there. And it's at first quite a puzzle. And you wonder, people reported that the bubbles on the sides of Guinness. a glass of Guinness beer were going down. How could bubbles be going down? Is it that they just had too much beer to drink? What's happening here? What's actually happening is that everywhere it's bubbling, but the bubbles in the center of glass actually have less drag, less friction on them, and they rise more rapidly, more easily than the ones on the side. And the result is they set up a circulation of the liquid. And bubbles are very slowly moving in beer. In fact, if you'll notice, champagne has much more rapid-moving bubbles than beer bubbles.

And we could discuss why that is in a moment. But anyways, the result is that because of the liquid circulation, the bubbles go down initially. Wow. In a glass of Guinness are some of the other very highly carbonated beers. Well, one last quick question for you, Dr. Zere. Why are some bubbles bigger than others, depending on the beverage? Is that what it is? Oh, I wish I understood all this.

Part of it has to do with the size of the crack or crevice that you have. And it's been a mystery to me as to what controls totally the size of the bubbles. I don't know the answer to that. Well, we hope you enjoy finding out. More to learn. I shall study this. Please do that. And maybe next year we'll come back and talk to you again.

Dr. Richard Zaire is Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. That conversation was from 2012, and we have indeed had him back over the years. Please enjoy your New Year's holiday responsibly. Coming up, we all know what killed the dinosaurs, but what was it like on Earth when the asteroid hit? We'll imagine those last days of the dinosaurs after this break. Stay with us. Hey, folks, you know, it has been one heck of another long year, and before it's over, I want to remind you that this is your last chance to make a donation for 2022. We still have the

dollar-for-dollar donation match in effect. So please take advantage and make your gift before midnight tonight. Don't wait. Science Friday is depending on you. Go to ScienceFriiday.com slash support. Each one of you can make a difference in our work. For everyone at Science Friday, wishing you a happy and science-filled new year. And thanks. This hour, we're looking back at some of our favorite stories of the year, and we're going to start by looking back even further. I mean, way back in time to explore what happened on Earth after that massive asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Riley Black's book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, traces what happened from the immediate aftermath to thousands of years later. The world changed literally overnight, if not faster.

As for we humans, says the author, we wouldn't exist without the obliterating smack of cosmic rock that plowed itself into the ancient Yucatan. Riley Black is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me back on. You're quite welcome. You know, I know you have written several books, many about dinosaurs. Why did you want to focus on the last days of the dinosaur in this book? Yeah, I realized that I hadn't really done justice to the story to borrow that Seinfeld line and kind of yada yada yada at this extinction, right?

Because a big rock strikes the planet. We assume that it's going to cause a mass extinction somehow. But there have been other impacts at other times. I had nothing to do with any major extinction event. So this seemed different. And I realized I didn't know as much about it as I probably should. And the more that I started to research on this, and I mean, paleontologies might beat. I write stories about some of these new discoveries.

I realized that I had the story kind of not entirely wrong, but I didn't understand how much we had learned about it. Yeah. Well, let's begin where you just left off there. You say in your book that there have been other impacts of similar or greater scale that did not trigger biological disasters. So what was it about this impact that did? Yeah, that's a really strange thing because it's not as if this asteroid Earth, whatever this body of rock was, we're pretty sure it was some kind of asteroid, a carbonaceous chondrite, I think is the best working hypothesis right now. It wasn't just hanging out,

you know, near Earth and decided to stop in. It had been traveling towards our planet for a very, very long time. And this was kind of like a galactic skill shot, in a sense. Like, you know, it could have just as easily missed or come closer, hit somewhere else on the planet. But the fact that it hit at an incredible amount of speed that was so very big, and it hit all this limestone. So basically these ancient fossil deposits. the ancient remnants of reefs that had existed millions of years before the impact itself that contained all these chemical compounds that contributed to the impact winter. So when you put all these things together, the size and the speed, the angle at which it hit, the sheer force of it,

all these things came together and basically the worst case scenario that nothing quite like this has ever happened before in Earth's history and certainly not at such sort of a vulnerable moment for life on Earth. And all these things came together, not just in the first 24 hours, we had this incredible heat pulse and all this debris, but in the years following. So it really was every single way that this could have gone wrong for life on Earth, just about that's how this played out. It's really spectacular, how quick and violent this was. Yeah, so it was the perfect asteroid storm, you're saying, is what it is. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Let's talk about the sequence of events, and that's what you do in the book. You go through

the first days, months, years, eons, thousands, million years. Let's look at the timeline on this. You're right that this calamity was as immediate and horrific as a bullet wound. Explain that. Yeah, so when we think about this mass extinction, or at least a lot of the visuals that I get or got growing up about this mass extinction, you'd see these emaciated dinosaurs wandering through this like nuclear winter kind of scenario that they made it through the first day, but it was really the debris clouds and the cessation of photosynthesis and all these big environmental changes. But we now know that they probably didn't even make it that far,

that basically all our favorite non-avian dinosaurs, T-Rex and Triceratops and Montesaurus and all those, were probably gone within about the first 24 hours because what happened in the minutes to hours following this impact, you had all this pulverized rock, so millions of cubic miles of rock that's been thrown up into the atmosphere, that start to spread, basically that starts. to spread all over the planet.

As they're coming down, each one, each little piece is creating a significant amount of friction by itself. Any one of those isn't very much. But you do enough of that. It's just so much debris and so much basically damage created by this impact that all that friction creates an infrared pulse. It raises the air temperature all around the planet to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit. So if you ever broiled a chicken, that's about what you broil a chicken at.

And T-Rex was more or less a broiled chicken with an. about 24 hours of this impact that if you couldn't get underground, if you couldn't get underwater in somewhere, had some other way to block yourself from this pulse. Wow. You're basically out in the open. It was so hot that some forests were spontaneously catching fire based upon some of these models that geologists and paleontologists put together. So it really was incredibly extreme.

And then we had a cold period. That's right. About three years of impact winter. So you had this terrible heat pulse that did most of the major initial damage. But in the years that followed, you not only had the soot from forest fires all of the planet, you not only had all the dust and debris thrown up by the impact itself. But all these sulfur-based compounds that we know from observations during our own history are really good at reflecting back sunlight.

So it's estimated that the sunlight reaching the earth was reduced by at least about 20%. And that was enough to curtail, if not stop photosynthesis over much of the planet. And if you take out plants, it's the basis of our ecosystem, It's the basis of our oceans. It's the basis of how we got our oxygen. It's something over those three years that not only temperatures dropped, but ecosystems almost entirely collapsed, and those survivors during those three years had to get by on scraps.

There was one factor that made this extinction not as bad as it could be, you're right, and that's a very unlikely source. I'm talking about volcanoes. Can you explain this? Yeah, so in the past, we've had at least five mass extinctions so far. We may be entering a six, but most of those five, or at least a significant number of them, prior to this asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous, were caused by volcanic activity. And in particular, prior to the asteroid impact, and after the asteroid impact, 66 million years ago,

it had incredible outpourings in what's called the Deccan traps in what's now India, just, you know, thousands of miles just covered by molten rock, and all the greenhouse gases that are being spewed into the atmosphere as part of it. those greenhouse gases, in fact, counteracted some of the effects of impact winter. This is not what we think of when we think of volcanic eruptions like this. We often think about them in terms of causing extinctions, but in this case, it kept the impact winter for being as bad as it otherwise could have been at raised temperatures, just enough to allow some forms of life to be able to survive, and otherwise it would have gone extinct

in the chill of that impact winter. So even though those volcanic eruptions were previously considered to be a contender for this extinction, it turns out that they kind of mitigated the effects of the asteroid impact and kind of came to the rescue for at least some forms of life. Yeah, that is really something new that we haven't heard before because we've heard of research that says the dinosaurs were already weakened by natural forces and possibly volcanoes. They were on their way out and the asteroid just provided that final push. But are you saying that's not true? That's right. It seems to be the opposite case that volcanic eruptions actually assisted some of these surviving.

animals. Most of the non-avian dinosaurs, if not all of them, were already gone by time, you know, this counteracting force would have come into play. But that's the other part of this, is that so much of what we understand about this extinction comes from Western North America. It comes from the Hell Creek Formation, the overlying rock layers in Montana and the Dakotas. There's so much that we don't know. So the decline that paleontologists previously thought they saw is because there are fewer rocks from the relevant time period. So just as an absolute level, we have less dinosaur diversity because there aren't as many rocks from the very end of the Cotaceous that actually preserved them as compared to 10 million years before. So we're really learning,

in a sense, how much we didn't previously know about this mass extinction and how it played out. And how long did it take for plant life to come back? Yeah, there's a seed bank, or there was a seed bank in the soil. So a lot of plants, you know, they spread their seeds. They spread nuts. They spread their fruits as far as they possibly can. And some of those already existed in the soil and would have been shielded by some of the heat effects. It really only takes about a couple of inches of soil to really shield what's in the soil from the effects of things like forest fires. We know for modern day forest fires that get about as hot as that infrared pulse. It doesn't take all that much. So that sea layer was there. It actually allowed beaked birds to survive. That's why we have dinosaurs

around us now is because beaked birds are able to subsist on the seeds and nuts that still existed. but it took at least about 100,000 years before you started to see vegetation make a real recovery. You have what's called us a fern spike where we see fossil ferns in their spores everywhere in the fossil record around this time. And that's because ferns are what we call disaster taxa. They're really good at coming into spaces that have been disturbed, that have been disrupted. And they're kind of the first initial signs that life is beginning to recover. And then by about a million years after impact, that's when you start to have these things. dense forest starting to grow up, that you have the rise of flowering plants and angiosperms

rather than conifers. So it took about a million years before anything recognizable as a forest started to reestablish itself. Very interesting. And one of the interesting topics you talk about in the book is the evolution of the bird life following the impact. In fact, I found it fascinating to learn that it was the evolution of a beak and not the teeth of the dinosaur birds. That's right. That allowed these birds to survive. What's there about a beak that nature likes? Yeah, we've had beaks evolve multiple times, you know, over and over again. And the case of dinosaurs, why beaked birds were able to survive, if you think about what birds and bird-like dinosaurs were doing prior to the impact, you had basically things like Velociraptor covered in feathers, you know, very sharp teeth. Right. We had toothed birds that were able to eat insects and the lizards and things like that.

And then you had beak birds that primarily ate seeds, nuts, plant material. They were already adapted to this kind of diet. They probably already had things like a gizzard or ways to grind up that plant food. So they, in a sense, were pre-adapted to life after impact. Whereas all those carnivorous species, there's nothing for them to eat because there are no more plants. Therefore, no more insects. there are very few small little critters for them to eat. So basically, if you were a carnivore, trying to survive through this impact winter,

is much, much more difficult, whereas beaked birds, they were already adapted to eating things that had survived. And that's why they're able to hang on. Interesting. So what else was different about plant than animal life post-impact? You see forest grow a lot denser. If you think about forests and habitats in the age of the dinosaurs, basically in those, that end-critical. potacious heyday, it would have looked somewhat similar to areas in like Eastern Africa today. So more conifers than flowering plants, there's certainly no grasses, but that kind of open,

habitat, an open woodland, because many dinosaurs were big. Where they walked, where they pushed over trees, where they fed, this all influenced the ecosystem. It shaped it around them. So you're going to have dinosaur-sized holes, basically through any ecology that you're looking at. But once they were gone, once you don't have things like Triceratops mowing down vegetation or pushing over trees anymore, forests could grow a lot denser. They could grow a lot closer together and they could grow tall. And that provided a multi-tiered ecosystem for their survivors, whether you were a bird or a mammal or an insect. Life could be different at the canopy than on the trunk of the tree than at the surface of the soil or down below that soil. So all these different new opportunities for evolution and pioneering new niches open up.

Right. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Riley Black, author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs. Really interesting. As I said in the opening, I read a portion of your book where you said, we, meaning humans, we wouldn't exist without the obliterating smack of cosmic rock. Why is that? There's no reason to think that the age of dinosaurs would have stopped without this. I mean, in a sense, we still are, because, because Brits are still here, but the kind of dinosaurs that we think about and see in the movies all the time, they would still be here. If you think about 66 million years, there's a very long time. But if you were to start from the day before impact, so T-Rex and T-Sartotops are still doing fine, project that backwards, 66 million years further into the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs are still around. They're doing fine. Like basically, there are more time, there's more time between Stegosaurus and T-Rex than there's been since T-R-X went extinct.

So dinosaurs were the dominant vertebrates on land. They're the most prominent vertebrates on land for so very long. And they'd survive so many different changes between the continents moving around, volcanic eruptions, climate changes, sea level changes. They would have made it through. It took something really unexpected and unprecedented to really change up life and what it was. And our ancestors could have very well gone extinct in this very same extinction. It's one of the things that blows my mind, honestly, is that there were primates around during the last day of the Cretaceous. this little animal called purgatorious is the earliest known primate.

And it was able to survive where the big and terrible dinosaurs weren't. So it's not just that we evolved as a result of this extinction, but our ancestors, our primate ancestors, actually eat right through it. That is cool. Are there other things we can see now that are direct remains of this extinction? You can look almost anywhere, basically, whether it's seeing all the flowering plants and they're pollinators. That's something that those interactions and those kinds of plants,

were around before impact, but they're much more prominent now. Or things like beans. I loved a good taco. I like to put refried beans on it sometimes. Beans only came about because legumes evolved about a million years after impact that plant life got this reinvigorated kind of evolutionary pulse after the impact. And basically plants like legumes that are rich in protein are part of that as well. So whether it's just our own existence or what we eat or the sort of vegetation we see around us, there are so many little hallmarks that we can draw back to this mass extinction. Who knew how important beings were? As you say, Riley, you've written a lot about dinosaurs and written many books. What surprised you the most about writing this book in your

research? I felt like so much of it was a surprise because I had so many assumptions going into it. I think what really struck me was how the way the world recovered after impact, how relatively quick that was. I mean, a million years has a long time, but to think that prior to the mass extinction, the largest mammals that we know about were about the size of a house cat, and then a million years later, the largest mammals that we know about, were about the size of a German shepherd, and that's quite a bit bigger. And we're starting to understand so much of how and why they evolved.

In the pattern of their evolution, there was a paper that just came out. I wish I could have included it in the book, but it's still fascinating to me about how mammals were getting big so quickly that their brains pretty much remained at the same size as they had been post-impact, so that you have much bigger-bodied mammals, but their brains are about the same size, and it wasn't until about another 10 million years or so after that, after impact, that you start to see a lot more sort of changes to the prefrontal cortex and changes in behaviors and interactions and things like that, so that life really really really, erased to fill in the voids that were left by this mass extinction in such a way that it was a

really formative and interesting time for evolution in general. Like it wasn't a sense of progress or mammals picking up the torch where dinosaurs had left it, but something entirely new happening and seeing and understanding some of these interactions that we never got to view before. So much of this research has come out in the past five or ten years. Even the last year, we've made a lot of new discovery. So this is rapidly changing and giving us this view, this timeline that we never really had before. Time for a new book, Riley. We'll have you back on that next one. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Oh, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much. Riley, Black, author of the Last Days of the Dinosaurs. Coming up, we'll meet a mammal biologist who tells us what we can learn

about humans from rodents. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Throughout this past year, we brought you conversations with some really impressive and thoughtful scientists. You know what? Sometimes the journey they took to get there is as fascinating as the work they do. The path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself, filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way. Sci-Fi producer Shoshana Buxbaum shared a conversation she recently had with a biologist whose career took an unexpected path to studying rodents. Here's that story. I got a chance to speak with Dr. Danielle Lee,

biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. I was first introduced to her work when she was featured in a book for tweens called No Boundaries, which profiled female scientists around the world. And since she was a kid, Dr. Lee has been asking questions about animals. Why do they do what they do? She originally wanted to become a veterinarian. So I started off by asking how she went from applying to vet school to becoming a research scientist. In pursuit of trying to go to veterinary school, I had applied and been rejected and had been still encouraged to continue applying and to improve my grades. And I was just taking classes at the University of Memphis.

I wrote a paper in my animal communication and cognition class that the professor said, this is a project. I was like, seriously, he said, yeah, you could do a whole project and be done in two months. I was like, really? I could just do a whole project over the summer? He's like, yeah, you should switch to thesis. I wasn't even a thesis student. I was just taking classes. Side note, it took longer than two months to do their project. He got me. It always does. It always takes longer. By the fall, when I was reapplying for vet school, I really realized I was really into the research. I was like, wait a minute, I'm really enjoying this. And I wondered why. And I was like, you know what? All the time I was a child, in school, in college.

I was always curious about animals. So I always loved animals. I was always interested in animals. And so my interest in becoming a vet was because of that. And to be honest, I didn't know that there was other careers you could do if you were interested in being, if you were interested in animals. I thought you could be a vet or you could be a zookeeper, which I'm going to be honest.

In my young mind, I didn't, I couldn't tell you the difference between those two things either. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I realized then, I like, wait a minute, this is how I get the answers to the question. I've been asking and no one has given me a good answer yet. Like I was always like, you still haven't given me a good answer. I was always asking, tell me why animals do that?

Why animals doing that? And I thought it was as simple as you can just give me a straight answer. And then I came to realize there are no straight answers. They just aren't. They don't exist. And a lot of the answers I was looking for hadn't probably hadn't been asked yet. And that's when I realized, wait, this is what science is. This is what this is.

I can have a career at asking questions and answering my own questions. I can finally just do the thing I've always been interested in since I was four or five years old. Tell me why that animal's doing that. The light bubble went off. I said, then that's what I want to do. But being rejected was the best thing that ever happened to me. And so you did it. And you got your Ph.D.

And you followed your dream. And so I want to talk a little bit about your research, which focuses on rodents, which are very underappreciated. creatures. So what led you, of all the different animals to study, what led you to rodents? So the professor who got me started at the University of Memphis, Michael Furkin, he worked with voles. And I thought he was mispronouncing moles. Like, I thought I was hearing him wrong. And I was like, he meant moles because, what is a vol? I never heard of this in my life. And then I realized, oh, no, he meant vol. I had never heard of the word in my life. So voles are field mites. They're little cute, cute little fill mice with little stubby, chubby bodies and short, short tails.

And that's important because what most people think of is mice like house mice. They have these scrawny necks. Like that's the thing that you really want to, squarney necks and long tails. So you have scrawny neck, long tail mice. And then you have little robust body short tail mice. Now the project that he convinced me to start doing based on the paper was with the metal vows. Metal vows, you can ask them really interesting questions about their communication. because during their breeding season, they're a little bit kind of everyone for themselves.

Like kind of everybody's on their own, they mate, and then they kind of go in their separate ways. And then they hope to bump into each other again when receptivity comes back around, which is about every three weeks for a particular female. And the females can be super competitive and like very, very, you know, disinterested in one another. Super, super disinterested in one another during the breeding season. But then once the fall comes and the days get shorter and they're no longer breeding, that all changes. They turn from, I don't want to see you to, hey, girl, what you're doing this winter? You want to overwinter together?

Come over. We can, we'll eat roots and just keep our body temperature together. It goes from that, like big time. It's weird. But it's fascinating. I was fascinated by that. So that's how I got started with rodents because that's what was in the lab. And I knew I was interested in these questions about social interactions.

I was really interested in, like, aggression. You know, like, how is it that some animals, you know, win? Always seem to win, seem to be on top. What's that about? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I started pursuing my PhD with someone else who worked with voles. Just on the vol track.

I was on the vol track. And the thing is, I had told myself, I will not be vol-girl. I will not be vol-girl. I got into this game because I'm not. I wanted to work on, you know, like lions and tigers and bears and wolves. I wanted to do sexy megafauna. Yeah, the sexy megafauna. That's what we all want.

Then I just, what happened is I realized I was good at it. And one of my early inclinations that I had a knack for it is that when I had to go trap animals and get more, it was at a time where everybody else was having a hard time across the nation, getting animals. And somehow I had gotten them. And so now I have a reputation among folks who study voles as if you need voles, call Danielle, like, caller. You know? Instead of fighting being vol girl, I just went for it. I was like, you know what?

I started seeing the benefit of working with a backyard species, working with something that was always there that was right up under our nose. And then I started learning about different species. And I was like, you know what, this gives us an opportunity to just start looking at how these different rodent species are negotiating life. not just in the wild, but in a while in proximity to people. And then for a postdoc, I got invited to do my postdoctoral research on the giant pouch rat of Tanzania and got into that research because it's not talking about sexy megafauna. You're talking about a rat that's the size of a house cat that has been successfully trained

to sniff out and detect landmines. And then also, they can also sniff out and help detect to diagnose tuberculosis. The rats were being successfully trained, but the breeding was still kind of hit amiss. So there was some basic natural history and etiology, biology questions about the pouch rat that still needed to be sussed out. And that's where I came in. So I got to apply all the things that I had learned with the voles, working with wild populations of animals, and then trying to ask very specific questions about their behavior and their

exploration and their behavioral tendencies. And so obviously rodents have interacted with humans since the beginning of our history. What does studying rodents and how they behave teach us about our world and our ecosystems? This is how I see it. Rodents, particularly the rodents that have made a living off of us and near us, tell us so much about ourselves. There's not been a single human culture across time, across geography, that has not had to contend with rodent infestations. So rotten nuisance are a part of the human history.

We're still dealing with rodent issues. Like they're the key to understanding what potential next disease is going to come out. Because they're the ones closest to us. They're the vectors. Things can spill over from them or they can carry them on their backs. And then that thing infects us. The black plague? The rat didn't give us the black plague.

They carried the fleas and the fleas gave us the black plague. And so understanding their behavior and their ecology helps us understand how to solve problems. We know their rodents are a problem for people, whether you live in the rural area, whether you don't live near a lot of people, or if you stay near a lot of people in urban areas, their problem either way. And what we see is that sometimes it's the same species that can make a really interesting living in both the city and the country and the wild. But then other times, some species do better than others. And so I'm finding myself really, really interested in the scientific study of city mouse and country mouse. I want to pivot a little bit because part of your work is also in diversifying science and who becomes a scientist. I want to talk a little bit about our educational system, the pipeline of how people become scientists.

So how does the inequity of our educational system fail black and brown and indigenous future scientists that want to, you know, answer some of these big questions that we've done. just been talking about and thinking of different questions and different ways to go about it as you have. So here's the first thing that I think most people don't realize. The cumulative knowledge we have in the world right now is all based on individual people's personal curiosities. There is no agenda. There is no agenda. So everything that we have that's been codified by this modern system is all because of a lot of people's personal curiosities. I study what I study because it's what I want to do. And so everybody else. Then think about who's overrepresented in those texts. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And what we're saying unintentionally, and I'm being generous, is that those are the peoples whose questions that matter. But it's also sending a message to black and brown and indigenous kids. Those are the only people who've ever asked good questions. And we know that that is a fundamental outright lie. Everybody, since the beginning of time, has been asking questions. Black, brown, and indigenous people around the globe have not only been asking good questions,

but have sussed out the answers to a lot of important foundational things. But they're not credited in those books in the same way. We could just do better at our citation practices and giving credit to the fact that groups of people, especially groups of people who we know have uninterrupted, contiguous histories for thousands of years that are solid, who have good histories and reliable and consistent analysis and data about how the world works. We know that the indigenous people of Australia, they told us things. Western science just finally figured out the age of a mountain that indigenous Australians have

been telling them. It's 65,000 years old. It's 65,000 years old. In other words, there's so much out there about the world that we either haven't been able to help get the word out about or inspire people to find those answers because we've been unintentionally, or maybe intentionally, but I'm going to be generous, saying there's only one way to science, and that's just fundamentally untrue. And there's only certain people who are particularly good at it. So we've been ignoring all this rich, fertile bed of questions.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In the book, you talk about how sometimes people are surprised to find out that, like, you're in fact the scientists they're waiting for because of these systemic issues that we've talked about that have prioritized mostly white men of being scientists. And that's like the stereotype that we have for who a scientist is. And, you know, as a black woman, you don't fit that stereotype. So how has that, how have these. experiences shaped your approach to the work that you do, especially because you also do outreach as well. It really makes me think about who I'm doing science for. So I'm doing science for me because I enjoy it. It's how I make a living. But I'm also doing science because I recognize deep down inside,

I am ministering to my younger self. That I want, I recognize that the younger me wishes I existed, that someone unlike me existed, that I can look up to and be like, this is real, this is who I can talk to. I see what it is and then that person or that type of person is accessible to me. But it's not just important to younger versions of myself. It's also important for all kids to see that. It's important for young white kids, young white kids from really well-out families to know that this is what a world looks like that's plural. so that they aren't surprised when they see someone in leadership who shows up who doesn't necessarily

look like them. It's about more than just simply getting some people to say, oh, we got a few that made it. We're trying to fundamentally change the fact that all of us can participate. We don't all have to be PhDs to be scientists, but we all absolutely can be scientists. We all can be artists. It's not an either-or. It's a yes-than. And I've even, you know, I hear when I go into communities and I talk to folks, especially folks, you know, who are like middle age or older, they were like, I always like science and I thought I wanted to do this. I'm like, you still can. Yeah, you still can. And I think that's the thing that surprises them. They're like, wait, what? I'm like, you can. You can do it literally right now, right this moment. You want to start

a project? We can do this, this moment. You don't even have to wait. And to close, what advice do you have for the next generation of scientists, whether that be people that pursue master's degrees, PhDs, or people that are rediscovering their connection with science or just other ways to get involved in science in their everyday lives? It's all right to start exactly where you are. There's this perception that you've got to go get something more before you can get started. Nope. You can start exactly where you are. It reminds me of a quote at Tuskegee University, lay down your buckets where you are. And that's because, you know, this idea that there's something to be done right here in this moment. You have everything you need right now to get started. And like any endeavor, you get started. If you need more, you go get it. Social media gives you direct access to scientists. Many of us are on Twitter or on Instagram. You can start following. and engaging folks right now, you don't have to do anything big and fancy all at once. It'll come to you.

That's usually how science is. It's not all things at once. It's one little thing at a time. And then, like I said, it's all these textbooks started with just people's personal curiosities. And it all accumulated. It will all come together. Yeah, I love that.

And I think that's a wonderful place to end our conversation. Dr. Danielle Lee, Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and to be on Science Friday. Thank you. I'm excited. Thank you. Dr. Daniel Lee is a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. And I'm Shoshana Bucksnow. Thank you, Shoshana. And thanks to all of you for spending 2022 with us exploring the world of science. We couldn't do this without you. And we couldn't do it without the science.

and we couldn't do it without the SciFRI team that makes it all possible. Annie Niro. Ariel Zich. Beth Rami. Charles Bergquist. Christy Taylor. D. Petersburg. Danielle Dana.

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Bitterable. Lois Parsley. Nahima Ahmed. Rasha Uridi. Sandy Roberts. Shoshana Buxbaum. full of Samirs. Thank you, everybody, for a great year.

And that about wraps up this hour. BJ Leatherman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, yes, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can email us the classic way, sciFri at ScienceFriday.com.

Have a happy and safe new year. I'm Ira Flato.