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Hi there, I'm Keri Byron. You might know me from Mythbusters. I'm also the co-founder of Explore
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director of the National STEM Festival, and one of the myth fits on the podcast with Tori Bellici
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Today, in honor of Women's History Month, I'm going to be giving you a bunch of amazing facts
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about women scientists. So, you guys ready? Let's get started. amazing fact marie curie is the only person to have won two nobel prizes in two different
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scientific disciplines chemistry and physics another fun fact did you know that her notebooks
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are still radioactive your time on mythbusters and crash test world has been inspirational when
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it comes to getting people interested in science oh did you have a role model like that growing up
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For me, my inspiration was my dad. He was incredibly curious and always wanted to do hands-on experiments
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So my interest in science is because I had a dad who was really interested in my interest
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Harvard University computer scientist and Rear Admiral of the U.S. Navy Grace Hopper
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was the first to coin the term bug in reference to a flaw that causes errors in a computer system
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In 1947, her co-workers opened up Harvard's Mark II computer to diagnose the source of a consistent error and found a moth inside
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That was the first bug. It was an actual bug. Isn't that cool? What's one Mythbusters experiment that you want to redo
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I would like to do any experiment that we did during Shark Week in the Bahamas for a couple reasons
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One, love sharks. So many interesting shark facts that I just don get to use that are probably taking the place of where I have where my keys are or other things I should probably remember Number two when you were done doing work you were in the Bahamas with your friends So Grant and Tori and I like to go out eat dinner and have so much fun in the Bahamas
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On October 1st, 1847, 29-year-old astronomer, librarian and teacher Mariah Mitchell became the first American scientist to discover a comet when she spotted C-slash-1847T1
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aka Miss Mitchell's Comet. I really do think that Miss Mitchell's Comet is a way better name
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Are there any myths that you wish you got to investigate on Mythbusters? While we were on Mythbusters, there were a lot of myths that we couldn't test
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either because they were in bad taste, they were impossible to build
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The myth is that colonizers would go to countries that were into cannibalism
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And they would replace in the recipes human for spam because pork and human apparently taste the same
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We were trying to figure this one out because I had seen Fight Club recently and realized that they had gathered a bunch of liposuction fat to turn into soap
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And I thought we could totally do that. We could have fried that into pork rinds and got some actual pork rinds and done a side by side taste test
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but the ethical, philosophical problems behind, I don't know, ego cannibalism. Chemist Alice Augusta Ball pioneered a treatment for Hansen's disease, also known as leprosy
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And it was the only therapy for it until antibiotics were discovered
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All right, I've got another question. What is your favorite thing about explosions
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Oh my gosh. Okay, to this day, I still do black powder art because I've never been able to let go of explosions
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I love explosions. I love knowing the difference between different explosives. Like if you going to get like a pop of C4 or you going to get sort of a push of Anfo or that billowing beautiful cloud of like a propane boom which is really more of an ignition than explosion but if you watching a movie
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you're watching gas explode explosions don't really look like that they don't have that sort
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of big burning beautifulness they all have their own unique beauty um am i sounding way too excited
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about explosions. I feel like the bomb squad's going to be at my door any minute. Eunice Newton
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Foote developed an experiment showing that water vapor and carbon dioxide influenced the effect of
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solar heat in the 1850s, an early demonstration of the greenhouse effect. We've been looking at
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this for a long time. It's time for us to come up with more solutions. Question, what do you think
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is the key to getting kids interested in science? That is a very good question. If you're a parent
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You are the front line. If you're interested in science, they're interested in science. Do it with them. And if you are a teacher, it's all about enthusiasm and making it relatable
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I mean, coming as director of the National STEM Festival, I would say it's really, really cool to show kids how science can lead to their future
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I love connecting the dots between being interested in science and the creativity of it and future career pathways
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Leona Libby was one of the first nationally recognized women physicists and the only woman to witness the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction as part of her work on the Manhattan Project
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Fun fact, at most science events I go to, the Manhattan Project is always the name of a very good cocktail
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Was there any winner or participant at the 2024 STEM Festival whose story or personal experience stood out for you
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So many of them stood out. I just thinking off the top of my head Linda wow This girl had created a science fair project that was focused on mealworm farming and sustainability And she was trying to innovate a circular food system But what gets me about the
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National STEM Festival and all of these kids who are clearly like the best and the brightest and
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the kids that are really thinking about solutions for the future is that at the festival, they
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created a community and they made connections together. And I really think that there's going
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to be an exponential ripple effect into the universe when a kid from New York meets a kid
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in Kansas or Alaska or from Guam and the two of them get together because we know that collaboration
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is so important in science. Stephanie Kualik discovered Kevlar by accident while working as
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a chemist at DuPont in the 1960s. Her work led to so many lives being saved. You've been going
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Going through your garage recently sharing some Mythbusters memorabilia. What's one memory or behind the scenes story that's come up as part of that process
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Oh my gosh, I have a whole bunch of Polaroids that I took during the show that I'm sure
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someday I will share. But I love that they're just little snapshots in time that are just us
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In the process of going through my garage and finding all of the interesting memories
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Tori and I decided that we wanted to do a podcast because we have two decades of stories from Mythbusters to White Rabbit Project, all the way to some pilots of shows that definitely didn't make it onto air
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But we have so many wild and weird, bizarre stories. So we're starting a podcast called The Myth Fits
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I'm Carrie Byron, director of the National Sim Festival and soon to be a star of the Myth Fits podcast
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If you like Mythbusters, you're going to love that. It has been really, really fun to be here
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This has been Amazing Facts with Mental Floss
