Science Friday Now Has Two Hosts: Meet Flora Lichtman!

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Before we get to our usual science news, I have some other really big news to share with you this week. And that is we are adding a host.

Flora Lichtman is joining me as host on Science Friday. Flora is here. So happy to have you here with me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hi, Ira. I am thrilled to be here with you.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, we’re thrilled to have you. You long-time SciFri listeners may remember Flora. Years ago, she was our video editor and often came on the show to do the video pick of the week, like this one.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– Time now for our video pick of the week. Flora Lichtman, our multimedia editor, is here. And I know what you have in store because I’ve looked at this video, and it’s unbelievable.

– I know, Ira. This is a video that I don’t actually think we could oversell if we tried.

– No!

– This is a run, don’t walk to your laptop or desktop computer video because your mind is going to be blown. It’s going to be great.

– OK. Now tell us what it is that we’re going to [INAUDIBLE].

– Now that you’re primed, it’s about cephalopods, which are squid, octopus, and cuttlefish, and it’s about how they camouflage.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes. Where’s the octopus? A classic.

IRA FLATOW: The Where’s the Octopus? film, if I remember it, that one is one of your most popular. I know it’s been seen more than a million times. And it starts out so wonderful with the octo expert, Roger Hanlon. He comes upon what looks like a rock on the ocean floor. And it just turns into something else, right?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, it looks like a rock. And then it becomes very suddenly an octopus. And it’s totally shocking.

I remember Roger Hanlon told us that, when he captured that footage, he screamed. He’s diving, and he screamed. And people thought he was having a dive accident because it was just like he knew when he caught it. I mean, that video I think at Science Friday, for me, it was my magnum octopus.

IRA FLATOW: Ooh. Flora, with puns like that, we’re going to get along just fine.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] Where do you think I learned them?

IRA FLATOW: [LAUGHS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: So that tape, I think, was from 2011, but I actually started at Science Friday as an intern in 2005, exactly 20 years ago. And, Ira, I’m sure you remember. But I started as a listener, and I think this probably qualifies me for superfan status because I remember. I emailed you out of the blue to see if I could work on the show.

And by some miracle, you didn’t file it in your phishing folder, and instead you gave me a shot. You gave me my first gig in journalism, so thank you for that. Not to be cheesy, but it did change my life.

IRA FLATOW: Ah, yes, I remember it well, to quote a song from My Fair Lady. So tell us about what you’ve been up to. Since your time with SciFri, what have you been working on?

FLORA LICHTMAN: So in a lot of ways, I think Science Friday set me on my path. And my whole career really has been about making science fun and accessible and human. And one of the projects I’m really proud of is a series of short films that appeared on The New York Times that I co-directed, and they were about seminal scientific discoveries. But there’s a twist. They were all animated with paper puppets that we made in our living rooms.

IRA FLATOW: Love those puppets.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, I know. I mean, despite the DIY element and the fact that they were put together with glue sticks and construction paper, the project got nominated for an Emmy. In fact, we lost to Oprah, which I’m only saying because it’s my crowning achievement in life.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. You share that with a lot of people, so that’s very high honor, actually.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Losing to Oprah?

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: But the thing is these films taught me so much about the history of science. And I know you know this, too, Ira, how much resolve it takes to make and stand by big discoveries because–

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: –discoveries that challenge people’s assumptions about how the world works, often, I don’t know, maybe almost always are met with some skepticism. So let me give you an example. Ira, have you heard of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek?

IRA FLATOW: I remember. That was the guy with the microscope, right?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, the guy with the microscope. Exactly. So he was born in 1632. He was actually a haberdasher in the Netherlands. But he had this side hustle making microscopes.

And they were like these little handheld single lens devices. No one really knew how he made his lenses. But they were better than anyone else’s at the time. And so Leeuwenhoek saw things no one had ever seen before, microorganisms that people didn’t know existed. So here’s a clip from that film.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– Leeuwenheok called them in Dutch diertgens, And diertgens, that’s an diminutive of the word “dier.”

– Dier, D-I-E-R.

– Which is the Dutch word for animal.

– What Leeuwenhoek called them was little animals.

– This was all so new. The word microorganism did not exist at the time. The word bacteria is from the 19th century.

– And that strikes me as Adam in the Garden of Eden, who, in Genesis, named all the animals. It was just a brand new world. And he was the first person in it.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

IRA FLATOW: Wow, love that, microbial zoo you had going there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I know. This is like microbiome 0.001. And of course, people didn’t believe Leeuwenhoek at first because it was so shocking, this idea that we were surrounded by animals no one had ever seen before.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Being a pioneer can be a pretty lonely existence at times, can’t it?

FLORA LICHTMAN: I think so, and that was one of the things that I picked up doing these stories. But another project that really sort of shaped my experience was working with Bill Nye.

IRA FLATOW: Bill! Just won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Congrats.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes. Congratulations, Bill, if you are listening. Have you worked with Bill?

IRA FLATOW: Yeah, I worked with Bill for a while on various projects. And I think one of the most famous moments on the show was when Bill came into the studio, and I asked him to show us how he tied a bow tie. And somewhere, somewhere we have a video of him doing that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: His bow ties are on point. He always looks dapper. So I worked with Bill as a writer on his Netflix show Bill Nye Saves the World, which was kind of one part geeky science demos that we know Bill Nye for and one part late night talk show. And it was extremely fun and very different from my public radio roots.

IRA FLATOW: It’s not quite like the set you work on now, right?

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] slightly different. But, Ira, I want to tell you about one more project that I’m really proud of. It’s a podcast I created at Gimlet Media, and the show was called Every Little Thing.

And it ran for five years, which I know in SciFri years is short, but it’s long in podcast years. And that show, no coincidence, shares a lot of DNA with Science Friday. One of the things I’ve always loved about SciFri is that this show centers listener voices. And so we did the same thing on Every Little Thing.

Every episode was built around a listener’s burning question. And then we found kind of the world’s top experts who could answer that question. And we called the listener back and told them what we found. And the questions ranged from, why do auctioneers talk like that–

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– [INAUDIBLE] $30, [INAUDIBLE] I get $35, [INAUDIBLE] $40– $5, and $45 [INAUDIBLE] $50, [INAUDIBLE] $55 [INAUDIBLE] $60.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: –to what really lives in the New York City sewers.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– But then we started looking around the room, and the wall is kind of moving and shimmering.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: I don’t know. You may not want to know the answer to that.

IRA FLATOW: Pretty brave, pretty brave subject, Yes.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes. Picture a dark, dank room wallpapered with cockroaches. But maybe our most famous episode was this story that honestly blew my mind, too. I learned that, for all of my life, I have completely misunderstood the flamingo.

IRA FLATOW: The flamingo. Of all the things in your life, it’s the flamingo.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’ve misunderstood a lot of things, Ira, but this is one of the things [INAUDIBLE].

IRA FLATOW: I mean, but what is there to misunderstand about the flamingo? You see it standing there with its legs in the water and stuff like that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, OK. So when I say flamingo, what adjectives come to mind?

IRA FLATOW: All right, so as I said, they have long, scrawny legs. It’s got its beak in the water. It’s pink. It’s kind of weird looking, from another planet.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yes, OK. So they’re a little bit goofy. They’ve got these gangly legs. And yes, critically, they are pink, a color that historically has not had a lot of power, paging Barbie, the whole subtext of that movie. But, Ira, buckle up. Feathers will be ruffled.

IRA FLATOW: Well, I have some pretty tough feathers, so I’m waiting for this. Go. Go for it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, so flamingos seem maybe dorky, delicate, but that is not their lane. Flamingos are tough.

IRA FLATOW: It takes a tough bird, a flamingo, they’re tough?

FLORA LICHTMAN: A tough bird. This is Felicity Arengo from the American Museum of Natural History.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– Flamingos are adapted to some pretty extreme habitats.

– I think of them as tropical birds, but they can also live in these high-altitude wetlands, like 17,000 above sea level, where it freezes at night.

– They’re in these high-altitude lakes, and the flamingos can freeze inside the wetlands.

– What? Their legs are actually frozen–

– –into the ice, yep. And as the sun comes out and it begins to warm up, and eventually the ice around their legs melts. And they’ll get up, and they’ll just walk away.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

IRA FLATOW: No. Who knew?

FLORA LICHTMAN: I know. It is surprising. And that’s not all. So these wetlands, they’re not just icy. They can also be extremely salty and even filled with toxic chemicals.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

– Some of the wetlands have even arsenic in them. I’ve also known of researchers that have had some of their skin peel off and react to these extreme chemicals.

– It’s caustic enough that human skin might slough off in this environment.

– If you spent a lot of time there, I suppose that that could happen.

– So yeah, they can withstand toxic ponds.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Last one, my personal favorite, “flam” fact, “flum” fact, flamingos can drink boiling water. They live near these hot springs where water is near boiling temperatures, and they can guzzle it down.

IRA FLATOW: And without a teabag, I’ll bet.

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHS] They’re fierce. They’re formidable. They are freaking tough. And I think they get underestimated– this is my theory– because they’re pink. So the flamingo became a little bit of a mascot for ELT, and I hope we can keep the flamingo love flowing here SciFri.

IRA FLATOW: Well, Flora, now that you’re here, I’m looking forward to keeping that love flowing. So glad you’re back with us.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m very glad to be here, Ira. Thanks.

IRA FLATOW: And you’ll be hearing more from Flora later in the hour and on every hour of Science Friday going forward alongside me as SciFri’s two hosts.

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