The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog - DTNSB Weekend Edition
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Hey, welcome to the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition. We got a special one for you this time. You might have heard our segment earlier in the week where Dr. Nikki told us about a book about silly science from Dr. Carly Ann York. Well, Dr. Nikki was able to sit down and chat with Carly Ann York a little bit more about this. So take it away, Dr. Nikki.

Dr. Carly Ann York, welcome to the show. We're here to talk about your book, your brand new book that launched yesterday, I want to say, The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog. I gave the listeners a bit of a sneak peek about it the other day, but we have you here to talk about it now. So welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Congratulations, by the way, for writing an entire book. Having read through like half of it, there's a ton and a ton of research that has gone into this, I can tell. So how has that experience just been in general, just living this journey?

this life. It's, it's been really cool. Um, so the book just came out yesterday. Um, my husband and I took a little trip to a Barnes and Noble to go and, um, like see it in person and it was there. And, um, so yeah, it's weird. It's weird. Um,

It's one of those like giant life things where you feel like you should like feel different afterwards, but then you actually don't really feel different. I mean, how long have you been working on this project? Oh, gosh, it was I probably signed the contract to start it a little over two years ago. Yeah. So long time coming. And it's nice relief. It's nice to finally be able to share it. I feel like I've been talking about it for forever. And like,

Yeah, well, we met in January at the Society for Integrative Comparative Biology, and we were talking about it then, and that's how I found out about it. And it is really right down my alley of stuff that I like about science. The stuff that I cover on DTNS is this quote-unquote silly science, which we call this segment, which is way more than just silly science, which is what the whole book is about. But all these anecdotes about how people think this is maybe not very interesting, like,

Like I was just saying, like the seals that play video games, but it turns out we learn a ton about it in the long run. And so this book is basically a compilation of all the fun anecdotes and the cool science behind it, which is just what I live for in science. I guess that's how we connected. Yeah, it was really, really fun to do the research on that book.

I was going to ask about this. Did you do a ton of interviews or did you just like deep dive into the Internet? How did you find all this information? Both. I did a number of interviews. So, yeah.

Oh, gosh. I would say more of the stories than not came with an interview. If it was someone doing research now. Yeah, because this isn't the stuff that gets published in the publication, right? Right. Right. Backstory. Right. Right. So I definitely spent some time with Sheila Paddock and David Hu and Patty Brennan talking about their whole experience with

being wastebooked, what that means. Yeah. Do you want to develop on that and kind of tell the listeners about this whole wastebook idea? Is the wastebook thing what really launched the idea of the book? Yeah. Oh, gosh. I'm so sorry. That was my email. Boop, boop.

We don't hear anything. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it was. And it was also just kind of like a personal need to justify my research to myself. I felt like I didn't have good answers when people asked me why this kind of work matters. Like, I knew it intuitively in my soul. And what kind of work were you doing?

At the time I was doing squid sensory physiology. So I was studying how they respond to predators. And I just wasn't good at articulating why this kind of research is important. So this was really helpful for me to sit down and like organize my thoughts on this and have a much better conversation about it in the future. Yeah.

And so these waste books, it's this kind of political way to, I want to say, put down science. And really, this is very, we're in a really special time for that kind of stuff right now, where a lot of people are trying to claim that science is wasteful. We're wasting government money. So I, unfortunately, but also fortunately for your book, you're right smack dab on topic for that. So how does this kind of stuff work? Yeah.

Oh, man. So the wastebook tradition, it got started in the 1970s, and it was actually started by a Democrat, William Proxmire from Wisconsin. It's bipartisan. Yeah.

And he started the Golden Fleece Awards, which were awards he gave to wasted government funding, at least perceived wasted government funding. And it wasn't just science projects. It was other funding situations as well. But a lot of it ended up landing on curiosity issues.

driven research projects, because those are pretty easy to twist and sound silly if you don't know why the bigger picture of that kind of research matters.

Yeah. Yeah. The, the, uh, one of the examples that I love is the shrimp treadmill, which is like famous from this. And of course you'd think, well, there's a shrimp on a treadmill. Why would we be paying for that? But if you sit and think for like five seconds about it, at least in my mind, like, yeah, we're studying locomotion. This is important. And also it turns out, like you say in your book, spoiler alert, the treadmill was like $50. So it's not that much of a waste. Right. Yeah. I think a lot of it there's, there's like, there's just a

there's a few different layers of this very stinky onion with the politics. And part of it is not understanding how funding works and not understanding how science in general works. Yeah, like, I think there's people out there who see like, oh, $300,000 to study duck penises. I bet they went out and got a fancy car or something with that money. And you're like, that's not how we're

That's not how these grants go or like seriously accountable for how every dime gets spent. Yeah. And you're not and you see that even right now. I mean, this is a story that that when was the waste book? It was like a decade ago or so. Right. Yeah. So it's still it's an ongoing thing. So William Proxmire, he

I think he went until around like 2000 and then it started to get picked up by different senators. So I feature some in there. Senator Jeff Flake and Senator Tom Coburn. Those have been biggies, but there's been other ones, too. It's as recently as I want to say last week when there were those NIH hearings, one of the senators said that we should have a competition for senators.

getting grants. And that is in fact how the system works, but they're just not quite informed about what's going on. But yeah, this comes out at a time. Hopefully, well, those people are probably not going to read it, but hopefully they get their hands on it and people can see that. Like, I don't know, for me, the silly science is the stuff that brings me joy and that makes me want to do the actual work. All the nitty gritty stuff is less interesting. But do you have some fun examples of some tech things,

silly science in your book. When you're driving, nothing's better than binging on a podcast.

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I think my favorite stories that lend themselves well to a tech conversation come from the biomechanics standpoint. I just read that chapter. The cockroach one? Yes, the cockroach. I'm so glad we're talking about this. I think that's my favorite one. So...

This was done by a researcher who was studying the biomechanics of cockroaches and basically how squishable they were, how they fit through those itty-bitty tiny little cracks and how they're able to move so fast. And it turns out they have a pretty unique anatomy and that shell that we think is just a shell actually has joints in it and it allows it to be really smushable. And that

surprisingly ends up being a good model for an itty bitty little robots that could potentially go in very small spaces, like in, um, like a search and rescue situation, rebel going through that kind of stuff. Um,

So the cockroach lends itself to that. And then also the snake locomotion as well. That's another one where search and rescue robots potentially came into play. Since snakes can slither and climb and apparently fly. Yeah, flying snakes. Yeah.

Yeah, I, when we're like, it's difficult to see it from the other side, because like you said, you work on squid biomechanics or squid sensory systems. I work on head-butting goats, like initially when you hear this story, oh, it's funny, but like, why would we do that? And for us, it may be a little bit more instinctual to be like, oh, obviously this is going to have some applications, but like, we're not, we're like 30 years away from those applications or like, I'm not a biomechanic person. Someone else can do that part. But...

for the general public, this is not something that's pretty obvious. And the fact that we're having so many funding cuts, I've been bringing it up on the show, like, yeah, maybe you don't think about the NIH or the NSF every day, but the internet comes from them. And like, you know, a lot of, you know, their electricity and like all things like this are things that the NIH and NSF have invested in. And if you don't

get to the root of those like basic science findings and you don't maybe get the future applications like your search and rescue cockroach. Yeah, absolutely. Like it does require you to trust that knowledge will

pay off in the long run. And it has historically, it absolutely has like, I think I have a stat in there that's like for medical research. If you look back at the origin of, of most drugs, like 80% of them started with some kind of a basic research project that had nothing to do with a medical application at all.

I also bookmarked this line that says that about 30% of the U.S. gross national product is based on inventions that come from this kind of basic type of science. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't...

We don't know it. We don't know. We don't know it until we know it. And if we had started working the other way around, it maybe wouldn't work. Like if you start out saying like, I want to study this to get a better helmet, which is a lot in the case of my research. And that research doesn't pan out because they're not thinking about the stuff they don't know yet. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And if you switch to like simply applied research, trying to solve a problem at hand, you're

your knowledge base is just, it's going to keep shrinking and shrinking. Like the pool of information that you have to solve that problem in the long run, it's going to keep shrinking. And we've seen historically that sometimes the solution to that problem is just so out in left field. Like you just never, you never would have looked there. It just happened to happen. And I love that in a lot of these stories, like,

the diversity of the scientist plays a role. For example, someone will have this like background of, oh yeah, I saw this cockroach or whatever and it inspired this robot. I mean, there's a ton of stories like this. You probably know the examples better, but yeah, I love that. Some of these examples do really come out of left field. Is there, which one of the tons of examples and stories that are in your book just like blew your mind the most or maybe your favorite one? Oh man, well...

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This is so nice. Had a feeling you'd want 3% cash back on dessert. Ooh, tiramisu. Earn unlimited 3% cash back on dining and entertainment with the Capital One Saver Card. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. Heather is a nurse practitioner from UnitedHealthcare. We meet patients wherever they live. During a house call, she found Jack had an issue. Jack's blood pressure was dangerously high.

It was 217 over 110. So they got Jack to the hospital and got him the help he needed. He had had a stamp placed in his heart preventing a massive heart attack. If it wasn't for my guardian angel, I wouldn't be here. Hear more stories like Jack's at UnitedHealthcare.com. Benefits, features, and or devices vary by plan, area, limitation, and exclusions apply.

My favorite one to write up was the chapter Felician, friends. Have you gotten to that one yet? I don't think I've gotten there yet. This is about the ferret that...

Okay. So the story is, yeah, in like 1970, they were working on building the largest particle accelerator that had been built to date. And it kept failing. This is CERN, right? The Swiss one? Yeah, yeah. But what they found was that in construction, they had left some metal shards there.

in the tubing, and that was causing their magnets to fail. But this thing was like four miles long, so you can't just like...

snap it apart and back together and clean it easily. And they decided, they had actually brought someone on specifically for keeping them in budget and keeping this project going because they were hitting some hard deadlines. And he suggested a ferret. He's from England and they use them when they're rabbit hunting. They'll go down burrows. Tunnels? Yeah. Yeah.

So they got a little ferret. Her name was Felicia. And they trained her to run through the tubing. And they basically put a little harness on her that was attached to a string. And then behind her, there was a cleaning rag. So she just like cleaned as she went. And she had a little diaper on. And

And yeah, it ended up like saving the project. It was really successful. She did it a few times and then they found a less fun way to get it done. But she saved that project. Yeah. And then I also in there talk about the hero rats, which I think my absolute favorite character.

Yeah.

Oh, so you have probably a chapter in common with John Green and everything is tuberculosis book. Probably. I actually haven't read it yet. But it's also on my TBR. Anyway, anyway, we're not talking about that book. We're talking about your book. Yeah. So these are giant pouched African rats. So they're like three feet long. They're really big.

And they, yeah, they're big. They train them to be really discriminatory in their, their sense that they pick up and they, they're really sensitive to begin with. And they,

It turns out they're much better at detecting TB in samples than even like our best technology is. Yeah. And it's way cheaper to train a rat to detect these than it is to get the most current equipment and to maintain it. Um,

It's like, yeah, magnitudes of thousands cheaper to train the rat. So hopefully they're developing tests based on the rat noses or something. Yeah, it's really cool. And then the landmine part is fascinating as well because they're trained to sniff out these landmines.

And they're the perfect animal to do it because they're not heavy enough to actually trigger the landmine. So like a dog, that wouldn't work so well. But they're just light enough and they do like weekly weigh-ins to make sure that they stay underneath that goal. That's incredible.

I love them. This book overall has actually gotten me out of this rut. I love popular science books, but I never end up like I buy them and then I never end up reading them because I get home after work after reading science all day and I don't want to read them. But this one, I'm like, it's again, it's like my favorite stuff. It's all these fun stories. So it's gotten me out of that rut of reading popular science.

I'm very thankful for that. I'm so glad. Has the book changed how you view things? Like, are you always thinking like, oh, did this bagel come from an invention from some science thing? Yeah, totally. I mean, like, you can look around at anything and just, you know, be that annoying little kid that's like, yeah, but why? Yeah. But why? Like, how did we even get to this point? And the questions are...

you know, they're endless. They're bottomless. But it's a really fun way to like go through the world too. Like being curious and also just recognizing that,

how incredible the technology that we have today actually is. Like, I can't really even totally wrap my mind about what we've been able to do with the knowledge that we have now. It's incredible. And all that is little grains of people's contributions who had brains who were able to be like, well, why don't we make humpback whale fins into wind turbines? Why not? Let's go. Why not?

Oh, I love it. And I think if you're the type of person who loves sharing fun facts about science, which is literally if you've met me, almost the only way that I talk, I just speak in fun facts. This is the book. This is the book for you. So I highly encourage everyone to buy it. And yeah, I don't know anything else you want to say about the book that

that you want to share? I, I hope that people will find it fun. Um, mostly educational, but also fun because I, my, my, um,

I guess is, is really that you can get a lot of information into fun things without it being so painful. And so I just, I hope that people can enjoy it while they're absorbing stuff. That's a really good point. The writing is really accessible. It's, it's a, it's not like you're reading a manual or like a, an academic paper or, or like big book. It's like casual. I read this over breakfast. And I,

I just like I'm loading my brain with all of these fun facts. So it's great. And I'm so happy we got to talk to you about it on the show. Where can people find you and where can people find your book? The book is available pretty much at all the major places online. Barnes and Noble, Amazon, probably your local independent bookstore, Amazon.

In terms of me online, I am active on Blue Sky and I am at Carly. Nope, that's not it. At Biology Carly there. And I'm also Biology Carly on Instagram and the app formerly known as Twitter as well. Even though I'm not particularly active on there, I still do exist.

Okay. And once again, that is the salmon cannon and the levitating frog. And I highly recommend it. Thanks, Carly.

Good luck with your book. Thank you. Appreciate it. Big thanks to Dr. Nikki for doing that. And thank you, Dr. Carly Ann York, not only for writing that book, for talking with us as well. Thanks again for that. That is it for the Daily Tech News Show Weekend Edition. We'll be back on Monday with a regular show. Thanks for being a patron. If you're not a patron, get these shows ad-free. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Talk to you soon. The DTNS Family of Podcasts.

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