Science doesn’t always have to be in fancy labs with million dollar equipment and shiny beakers. Sometimes, science can be a bit more DIY. In this week’s episode, our storytellers take a hands-on approach to scientific discovery.
Part 1: Brittany Ross gets inspired when her high school physics teacher assigns a physics video project where she has to demonstrate a law of physics out in the real world.
Brittany Ross grew up in Alaska, Scotland, South America, Texas, Chicago, and Hawaii. As a result, she is very normal...Brittany is an actress, writer, stand up, and producer. She performs stand up all over town, and is a well-known storyteller, having won The Moth several times. Aside from the Choco Krispies commercial that not only starred a 5-year-old Brittany, but probably changed ALL of your lives, Brittany is best known for playing Courtney in ABC’s, THE MIDDLE. She can also be seen in Huge in France, Like Father, The Rookie, and more.
Part 2: Nothing will get in the way of Greg Pandelis’s dreams to be a zoologist, except maybe a giant cliff.
Greg Pandelis is the curator of the Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center of UT Arlington, where he manages the largest scientific collection of preserved reptiles and amphibians in Texas, while also conducting his own research. Despite thoroughly enjoying studying dead things, Greg’s other passion lies in studying animals in the field; he has been on several field expeditions to Central America, South America, Europe, and Asia in pursuit of creepy crawly things of all sorts.
Episode Transcript
Part 1
When I was in grade school, I visited NASA in Houston, Texas. And when that freeze dried space ice cream melted in my mouth, a world of possibilities opened up to me. I was seven years old at the time and I had already seen a lot of what Earth had to offer, but I had never seen space and I knew then I was going to be an astronaut and I was going to live my entire life on nothing but space ice cream.
Yes, I fell in love with science for the snacks, but when I fell, I fell hard. I was crushing on black holes. I was in love with Saturn. And all of my friends would play Wedding Day, I would play Launch Day. I asked Santa for telescopes and he delivered. He even stuffed my stocking with freeze dried cookies and cream because like he gets me.
Cut to I'm a junior in high school and I'm now a competitive cheerleader, because being thrown 30 feet in the air is the closest I can get to zero gravity. I'm a petite blonde named Brittany. What else was I supposed to do?
Brittany Ross shares her story at The Crawford Family Forum in Los Angeles, CA in June 2023. Photo by Louis Felix.
But I am like all astronauts, future astronauts taking Introductory Physics, and I know one day when I'm an astronaut, reporters are going to ask me who was your inspiration and I'll say my high school Physics teacher inspired my career.
I love Physics. It's applicable, it explains the world around us and we get to light as many matches as we want.
I love the smell of lit matches, so every day I get to class early and I stand on my lab stool, because that's just the kind of danger an astronaut is looking for. I light a match and I hold it up as if I'm the Statue of Liberty. And I wait for everybody in my class to see me and start laughing.
Then my teacher Mr. Russell walks in. Mr. Russell, he's humorless. He's not a fun science person like everybody here tonight. He just relies on the facts and so he has no idea what I'm doing. He doesn't get me but everybody else in my class does and I love it, the euphoria of hearing my physics comrades’ laughter echo through the lab. It makes me feel bigger than Jupiter, the biggest planet we got.
After I finished my bit, I sit down and I listen to Mr. Russell because, you know, physics is an important step in an astronaut’s career, just, with Mr. Russell, it's a very, very boring step.
Then, one day, Mr. Russell announces that we're going to be doing something fun. I'm like, “Something fun? In your class?”
And he says, “We're doing a Physics video project where we have to demonstrate a law of physics out in the real world, get it on video.”
And I am like, “This is what I'm here for. This is going to launch my NASA career, set me on a path to another dimension. And I also can put into practice my newfound Physics class comedy skills.” I'm like, “I'm going to make this video even more hilarious than my Statue of Liberty routine.”
Brittany Ross shares her story at The Crawford Family Forum in Los Angeles, CA in June 2023. Photo by Louis Felix.
I know exactly what my group needs to do. We're going to demonstrate Galileo's discovery about falling objects. All objects fall at the same rate of speed, no matter their mass. Something like that. Ask these people over here.
So, basically, you take two things. The chair, pencil, and you drop them off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, like Galileo and they will land on the ground at the same time..
I'm like, “Okay, what better way to demonstrate this than by jumping off a chair? No. Too low. A ladder? Lame. We are going to jump off of my roof onto the trampoline.” You know, all competitive cheerleaders have trampolines.
But my physics partners are not cheerleaders so they're a little nervous. And I'm like, “Guys, it's not that hard. We just like jump off the roof, all in the name of science.” And I'm like, “This is gonna be hilarious. Everybody's gonna love it,” so they agree to do it.
Now, it's the day before our project is due and we're like, “We should get started.” We're 16, so we save everything to the last minute.
My physics partners come over to my house in the middle of an ice storm. We go down in the basement and we film ourselves doing our weigh ins. We make graphs to show we are all different sizes. Then we state our hypothesis that all three of us are going to land on the trampoline after having jumped off the roof at the exact same time.
Now, it's 10:00 PM and my physics partners are starting to freak out because they're pushing curfew. I'm like, “We got to get outside and shoot this thing.”
So, we go outside in a blizzard and I set up my parents' new thing we got, a tripod. Nobody had one back then. We set it up and I start to pull the snow covered trampoline over towards the icy roof.
My mom comes out yelling, like, "Girls, you can't jump in this weather."
And I tell her, "Mr. Russell said if we do not jump off the roof right now, we will fail Physics."
Then I look back at the camera that I know is filming this entire thing and smile, thinking like, "This is gonna make a hilarious blooper reel."
And my mom is, like, “No way am I letting these two other girls jump off the roof.” She says I can do it because I'm a competitive cheerleader and she watches me put my life in danger on the regular. So I decide I'm going to turn this problem into comedic gold. I'm bringing the understudies, my sisters. I have one sister who's a year younger, also a competitive cheerleader. And, so, according to my mom's reasoning, competitive cheerleaders are allowed to jump off the roof in an ice storm and so she can do this.
I have another sister who's four, and I'm like, “This is gonna be great. It'll really show our differences in weight and it'll really drive our point home and it's gonna make everybody feel so nervous when they think a four year old is about to jump off the roof. And, at the last second, I'm gonna throw in a baby doll stunt double and just throw it right off the trampoline.”
I am so focused and excited. My physics partners are on the ground, waiting to clock our seconds. I'm on the roof, on the edge, with my sisters. Well, one of my sisters and a baby doll stand in, and it's a blizzard. I'm like, “This is the life of an astronaut.”
Brittany Ross shares her story at The Crawford Family Forum in Los Angeles, CA in June 2023. Photo by Louis Felix.
So my sister jumps, the baby doll jumps, I jump and we nail it. We all land at the exact same time proving our hypothesis to be correct. And I spent the entire night editing this video on the VCR, because that's how we had to do it back then. The next day, I am so excited to show it to my class. And as they're watching it, I realize I don't even care about the science. All I care about is the laughter.
And they are laughing harder than they laughed when Mr. Russell walked in with a train of toilet paper hanging out of his pants. Like, this is hilarious. The baby doll bit, it killed. It turns out tension is the key to big comedy payoffs.
I am just so happy. This feels better than the first time I tasted freeze dried ice cream.
Mr. Russell is the only one who's not laughing. He's horrified by my choices and he's pale white. He especially does not like the blooper reel when I mug the camera and say, “Mr. Russell said, we had to do this.”
I am standing there just taking in all of this laughter and being like, “I'm so happy right now. I love this.” That was kind of my first sign that I might not become an astronaut after all. And, yeah, I didn't become an astronaut, but that project, it did help me find my passion and my voice.
My 11th grade Physics project was the first of many sketches. I guess if I do trace it all back, I owe my career to my high school Physics teacher after all.
Thanks, guys.
Part 2
When I was a kid, probably about seven or eight years old, I knew that I wanted to be a zoologist. There was no doubt in my mind, no hesitation. I mean, there was a short stint for about a month, when I was four, when I wanted to be a firefighter, but I think all kids go through that one.
There was a problem with my zoology dreams, though. My family was Greek. I mean Greek Greek, which meant that the only acceptable career paths were doctor or engineer. That's it.
Greg Pandelis shares his story at Dallas Morning News in Dallas, TX in April 2023. Photo by Jason Hensel.
So, when one of my aunts or uncles would ask little eight year old me what I wanted to be when I grew up and they got a resounding, “Zoologist,” they usually said it was cute that I wanted to work in a zoo, chuckled a little bit. But then their smile would start to fade as they got a several minute lecture from an eight year old about why zoologists don't necessarily work in zoos and they realized I wasn't kidding.
Despite my other family, though, my actual parents were pretty tolerant of my obsession. They were happy I was happy even if they didn't fully understand it. And when I say tolerant, I mean very tolerant, because by the time I was in high school, I had started my own museum collection of animal parts. I had a colony of flesh eating beetles to clean skulls, and I had a ledger of measurements and numbers that corresponded to all my all my specimens. So, yeah, they're very tolerant.
When I went to college, I was absolutely raring to learn. Getting the chance to interact with real professionals in zoology for the first time was just unbelievably exciting to me. I was absorbing everything like a sponge. Pretty soon, I was working for my university's research museum, I was catching wild mice for research and I was taking every zoology class I could get my hands on.
The real thing that sealed the deal for me, though, was when I got the chance to go to the tropics to catch reptiles and amphibians in the wild on a real scientific expedition, using my actual hands to discover and unveil things. Just catching a rare frog here, a new snake there was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I was hooked. I knew what I wanted to do.
So, as I was sitting in the airport in Nicaragua waiting for my flight back to the US, I was just so bummed, because I was thinking, “Man, when's the next time I'm gonna get to experience this again, to feel this way about science again?”
Then it just occurred to me, why couldn't I just do this on my own? I was about to go visit my family in Greece for six weeks anyway. My entire family lives in Greece. And they live on this island called Kythira where there's many, many smaller islands that are not occupied by people. No one lives there. That no one's ever surveyed before. No one's ever done anything on them scientifically.
So, I was thinking, why not just go to those and explore them, collect specimens of reptiles and amphibians, and conduct the first survey anyone's ever done of some of those places?
So, I called up the Greek Ministry of the Environment. I got the permits. I talked to my mentor at the Museum of Zoology and I put together a kit of everything I need to preserve my specimens and I was off to Greece.
This is how I ended up on a little fisherman's boat, going toward a towering little lump of rock of an island off the coast of Kythira, Greece. And it wasn't just any island. This island is called the Egg in Greek, avgo. The reason it's called the Egg is that, despite the fact that it's so small, it stands a good 200 meters above sea level. It's shaped exactly like an egg, because it's so small but very tall.
And the only reason anyone ever went to the Egg, because it was uninhabited, is to collect these little yellow flowers that are very valuable and they don't lose their color when they're dried. The locals on Kythira, the island where my family lives, would use those to make tourist souvenirs.
I talked to some of the flower collectors, that they would go there just once a year to collect flowers, and they said they would see tons of snakes on the Egg. Well, this got me super excited because no one had ever officially recorded any species of anything, reptiles or anything from the Egg before. I would be the first.
As we got close to the shore, and when I say ‘shore’ I don't mean sandy beach. I mean more like a vertical rock face with a slippery little ledge that you could jump onto.
Greg Pandelis shares his story at Dallas Morning News in Dallas, TX in April 2023. Photo by Jason Hensel.
The fisherman told me, “When I get close, I'm gonna throw the engine in reverse so that I don't hit the rocks and you're gonna jump off.”
I'm like, “Oh, shit. Okay.”
So, I jump off with my backpack, I start clambering up the rocks there and there's this little goat path that leads up the cliff to the top where there's actually some vegetation and, I was hoping, snakes, so I start my way up.
The flower gatherers had told me that the path was marked by little yellow chalk marks and not to stray from the path at all because it was the only way up or down the cliff and up and down the island in general. It was the only access point.
I was just full of adrenaline at this point. I was about to discover a new population of snakes. The hike was tough but invigorating and the sights and smells all around me were just breathtaking.
I was thinking, “Man, this must have been what Charles Darwin felt like. Just go…” Okay, it's not the Galapagos but just going to a brand new unstudied place for the first time, everything you're seeing and documenting around you is just new. There are wild caper plants all over, those beautiful yellow flowers that the locals love so much just everywhere, and there were these falcons that it's one of the only breeding places in the world, that island, that breed in the cliffs on the sides of the island just flying over my head, dozens of them.
After about a 45 minute hike of that, I made it to the top. And once I was at the top, after I walked around for another 30 minutes, I saw a tail of a snake disappear under a rock. The chase was on.
It was kind of like down the side of like a valley of this island. I clambered down the rocks there, almost tripped over myself. I pulled out my little collapsible snake hook out of my pocket and I fished this thing out of a crevice where it had hidden.
And man, oh man, it was a Balkan whip snake, one of my favorite snakes in Greece. Just this beautiful, fast, speckled animal, non venomous, that's active during the daytime and mostly eats lizards and small rodents.
As I was holding this thing, a little bit of blood was running down my hand because it had bit me a few times, which I don't blame it. I don't blame it. I just fished it out of its hole. I was thinking, “I did it. I came to this place, discovered this cool snake, documented it for the first time.”
I found what it probably preys on, because I also caught the species of gecko here, Kotschy's gecko, another first documentation. And I was going to bring these specimens back to the museum at my university where they were going to serve as permanent records of my expedition and scientists from all over were going to get to come see my specimens, so it was very exciting.
There's this whole little ecosystem here. Just the snakes, the flowers, the geckos, the falcons, it was just incredible. But it was starting to get dark and I figured I better start getting down because if I'm not down at the meeting spot in time, the boatman's probably just going to leave me.
I had no way to contact him. I was way out of shouting distance as high up as I was. Remember, it's 200 meters up here and he's down there. So, I better get down.
But the problem was that from the top, there was no markers of where the trail started. Just imagine that the whole top of the island is like a plateau with sheer cliffs on all sides and there's not a whole lot of dips or anything that you could use to figure out where you might have come from.
But happy go lucky, adrenaline dumped me wasn't thinking of any of this. I was just going around catching snakes and I wasn't thinking anything about how I was going to get back down.
Finally, I found a spot that looked pretty good. It wasn't the trail. I started clambering down and I was thinking, “It can't matter that much where I get down from.”
The trail wasn't really much of anything, anyway. It was just a little goat path. Can't really matter that much.
Well, it did matter.
A few wrong turns later, I found myself on the side of a cliff with a backpack full of live snakes, no idea how I got there and no idea how to get back up or down. I was still 100 meters from the ocean and the sharp rocks below, and maybe another 50 meters back to the top.
I was sitting there and I was thinking, “Well,” I'm like, “maybe I should call a helicopter lift to rescue me from here. Would they mind having snakes in the plane?”
But the problem with Greeks is that they're very, very reputation driven, like really reputation driven. So much that my grandma, when she was pretty much dying, refused to call an ambulance because she didn't want the neighbors to know, she said, that she was sick and weak.
So, if I had called a helicopter to get rescued off the Egg with a bunch of snakes, my family on Kythira would probably never live it down. So, no helicopter. Couldn't do that to my family.
Greg Pandelis shares his story at Dallas Morning News in Dallas, TX in April 2023. Photo by Jason Hensel.
So, I was sitting on the side of this cliff panicking, my heart beating a million times a minute, and I kind of started beating myself up. I started thinking, “Man, why'd I have to become a zoologist? Why’d I have to come to this oversized rock in the middle of the ocean for a couple of snakes? And maybe my grandma was right and I should have gone to medical school.” That last one was a fleeting thought, thankfully.
But I was sitting there and I was panicking and I was trying to calm myself down and it wasn't working. Finally, I looked down into the waves below, I happened to look down, and I saw a Mediterranean monk seal, which is a critically endangered mammal. There are only three of them known to occur in the area of Kythira there and there's only like 250 in all of Greece, so it was a pretty spectacular sight indeed.
This kind of calmed me down because, despite the fact that I was panicking, the back of my mind was like, "Hell, yeah, that's awesome!" And all my excitement and passion for animals that drove me here just came flooding right back. I think I had that seal to thank for getting off that place in one piece.
After I kind of calmed down a bit and gathered up my courage, I just decided to take the most direct route back up the cliff. I just climbed hands and feet and footholds the same way you see at a rock wall at some gyms, back up the approximately 50 meters to the top, snakes still on my back along for the ride.
When I got to the top, I finally managed to find my way back to the correct trail and I made my way back to the meeting spot in the dark without a flashlight, two hours after I was supposed to be there, completely exhausted. Luckily, the boatman was still there. He told me he was about to return to Kythira to go request a team to come rescue me. He thought I had died, so, yeah, he's never taken me back there again.
When I finally got home, I told a much milder version of this story to my dad because I didn't want to worry him. I ended it with, "But I got the specimens, so it was all worth it. And I can't wait to see the look on my professor's face when I get these back to the museum."
He just looked at me and said, "You're crazy.