In this week’s episode, we’re featuring two powerful stories born from our education program.
Part 1: As an undergraduate with no “real” science experience, Molly Magid is thrilled to join a research project studying how bats fly—until she discovers the bats refuse to cooperate.
Molly Magid is a science communicator and podcast producer. She has been telling stories about science since the first grade, when she wrote a biologically accurate story about ladybugs. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Molly now lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. She enjoys sharing her passion for science anywhere from podcasts to social media to declaring her love of longfin eels on the street.
Part 2: As a child, Léa Souccar and her father explore the wreckage in the aftermath of a devastating bombing.
Léa Souccar was born in Lebanon, three years into the war. By the time the fighting stopped, she was twelve. In between, the voice of her storytelling grandmother carried her above the chaos—like a flying carpet—and helped shape who she became. During her first year studying Performing Arts, Beirut hosted its first Storytelling and Monodrama Festival. She skipped classes that week to attend every lecture by day and every performance by night. Something long asleep inside her woke up. From that moment on, she trained relentlessly, learning from renowned storytellers from around the world. After earning a Master’s in Theater Education for Special Needs, she began working as a storyteller and puppeteer, sharing stories in schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and prisons. In 2010, she became a primary school teacher in France. She found her place in a preschool classroom, where she began exploring all the ways oral storytelling can support and inspire learning. Today, she leads workshops where she shares her two greatest passions: storytelling and education—and the sparks that fly when the two meet.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
PART 1
The summer after my second year in college was the first time that I worked in a science lab. I was so ready to do real science. I'd spent a lot of the last year working on predetermined labs and classes and reading textbooks where other people had done science. I would have done anything to generate my own results.
So I was really excited when I got the chance to work for three months studying bat flight in a bioengineering lab. Along with a couple of other undergrads, we set out to train bats to fly in a wind tunnel. We were meant to record high‑speed video of these bats flying so that you could zoom in millisecond by millisecond on the motion of their heads, their wings, their arms.
Now, you might be wondering why we were doing this. Evidently, it was meant to inform drone design, or at least that's what it said on the successful application to the Air Force for grant funding, but, really, we were in the land of basic research, just doing science for science's sake.
Now, before I could meet the bats, I had to do a bunch of things like fill out forms, take lab safety and bioethics courses, and I had to get a rabies vaccine, but I also prepared personally. So I got like a Batgirl t‑shirt from my parents. My roommate gave me a bat necklace. I was ready, but I didn't realize when I met the bats, how cute they would be.
They have these big eyes. They have fluffy faces and pointy ears, and they almost have the face of like a Chihuahua. It's not for nothing that these Egyptian fruit bats are sometimes called dog‑faced bats.
So when I walked in and saw them, all I wanted to do was give them a cuddle. Now, that was expressly forbidden. I was not meant to create a connection with these bats. They were lab animals. The team and I went around and we carried them in these opaque Rubbermaid containers and no one was meant to know that they were bats. If anyone asked, we said they were research supplies.
We weren't allowed to take photos and we couldn't even call the bats by any particular name. Instead, we took more of an approach like Sephora. We painted their nails different colors and then referred to them based on those colors, like blue‑blue, blue‑red, blue‑yellow and so on.
Now, before we could even put these bats into the wind tunnel to fly, there was a lot to get done. We had to prepare the flying area, get the cameras set up, and paint bat toenails. Everything was going well, though I did get in a little bit of trouble because I bought some nail polish not through internal purchasing. The lab manager who was in charge of coordinating all the care for the bats was not super happy with me, but it was okay.
Finally, the day came when everything was ready. The wind tunnel was on, the cameras were poised. I grabbed a bat from a Rubbermaid container and put it inside. It started to flap its wings and strain against the wind, but then it just flopped to the ground and flattened itself out like a bat pancake, clinging to the sides of the wind tunnel.
We all looked at each other and so we're like, “Oh, that was a bit of a flop.”
So I grabbed it out, put it back in the wind tunnel to start flying again and it did the same thing. So I turned to everyone, I said, “Well, this bat’s a dud. We'll try another one.”
Grabbed another bat from the container, the same thing happened. Every single adorable bat failed. I was really confused that these bats weren't flying because that's what bats do. You might not know very much about bats, but if you do, it's probably that they're the only flying mammal. What was going on with these bats not wanting to fly?
Part of it was probably that these bats were lab animals. They'd never been out in the wild. They had lived most of their life in a 16 by 9 cage, crawling around or snuggled together in what we affectionately called a bat bomb. And they never had to go find their food. They were brought these platters of fruit every day. So there was no incentive for them to learn to fly or to enjoy flying.
And so the team and I decided we had to do something to get these bats to start flying for our experiments. First, we came up with the idea of clicker training, like using sound to motivate a certain behavior. But the bats have really specific hearings. We weren't sure that was going to work.
Then we designed this ping pong paddle device to sort of like loft the bat in the air and prevent them from landing on the ground and hanging on. But instead, the bat just sort of hung onto the paddle instead and no amount of bat tennis moves would get them off.
We even got some very experienced bat trainers in from Europe and they seemed super prepared to take on the challenge, but after a few days that failed too.
This was like two months into a three‑month project. We didn't have any results. That's when the supervisor, the biology professor in charge of the lab, she suggested we could use food modification. Now, that's just like a fancy word for fasting. It basically means we wouldn't give the bats food for about a day, and then the next day they would be really motivated to go after the fruit juice we were giving for a reward.
The team and I thought we might as well try it, so we grabbed a couple of the best flyers, put them aside in their own food modification cage, and then started the experiments again.
And just like that, they started flying. These bats would do anything to get a taste of tropical fruit juice at the end of the experiment. It was finally working. We were getting results for the first time.
Then one morning, I got a phone call. I remember it was really early. It wasn't even 8:00 AM, but I saw that it was the lab manager calling me, so I knew I needed to pick up. When I did, the first thing that she shouted at me was, "What's going on with the bats in the separate cage?"
I was confused. I said, "What do you mean what's going on with them?"
And she replied, "Well, one of them is dead and the other is dying, so what did you do to them?"
I gasped. I could barely process what she was saying, but I stammered something out like, "Well, we've been restricting their food, but we didn't think this would happen."
And she said, "Well, I've got to deal with this situation so it's up to you to tell everyone else,” and then she hung up. I just slid to the floor and sat down.
At some point, I started crying and mostly I felt numb. I couldn't really take in the information. I couldn't believe that what we had done had harmed these bats. I wanted to just stay there curled into a ball but I realized I had to get up. I had to tell everyone what had happened.
So, I went into lab, I gathered everyone together. I started to tell them, “Look, the two bats that we were using for the experiment, they died. It's blue‑blue, it's red‑blue.”
But before we could discuss it for too long, the lab manager came storming into the room and in her hand was one of those clear plastic gallon Ziplock bags. Inside were two dead bats.
When she saw us all there, she started screaming, "Look what you've done. This is what happens when you're not paying attention. These bats died on your watch." Then she threw the bag at our feet and said, "Go put those in the freezer."
We all just looked at each other, shocked.
Thankfully, there was a PhD student there who dealt with the bag of dead bats, but all the students, all the other undergrads were saying how crazy it was that she threw a bag of dead bats at us, how unfair it was she was blaming us for this, how irresponsible it was that she did this.
I was shocked and angry too. I knew what she had done was unprofessional and not right, but at the same time, I stayed silent because I could also understand her. She spent day in and day out caring for these bats. They meant a lot to her. They meant a lot to me too. I knew that I wasn't supposed to form a connection with them, but I had. They weren't just research supplies, they were living things. And what we had done with our experiments, we had failed them. I had failed them.
A couple of days later, everyone on the team was ready to continue the experiments with different bats. I went through the motions till the end of the summer, but then I left the lab and I didn't come back. I realized that if denying my connection to living things was what I needed to do to do this kind of real science, that wasn't a price I was willing to pay.
PART 2
When I was 11, I lived with my sister, my two brothers, and my parents in an itsy‑bitsy pink bathroom. Don't get me wrong. We actually had a big flat with four bedrooms, each one with a window. Now, in any normal place, windows would be a blessing. But in a war zone, not so much. The safest room was right in the middle of the flat, the bathroom of all places. So my parents turned it into a scaled‑down little home of its own.
My father filled the bathtub with water. It became our supply, since nothing came out of the taps anymore. He laid a wooden plank over it, topped with a sponge mattress, and that was our makeshift sofa for movie nights on a tiny video recorder as rockets and shells shook the walls outside.
We heated canned food on a camping stove. We lit the place with battery‑powered lamps. Electricity had been gone for months. We had a few candles I was dreadfully scared to use, thanks to some horrific fire stories, and tons of art supplies, white and colored paper, scissors, pencils and pens, glue, markers and paint, glitter, wool, feathers, you name it.
And above all, we had books, stacks and stacks of books. I inhaled stories like oxygen. I needed my daily fix of stories, just to deal with the bathroom, the noise, the no‑sunlight days. Because stories, somehow, had the power to silence rockets and shells.
Until that summer night, all night, shells crashing, Kalashnikovs blasting, explosions making our teeth rattle.
In the morning, the weapons fell silent and there was the stickiest silence I can remember. The after silence.
My father stretched out his limbs, looked at me and said, “Wanna go down with me to see what happened to the street?”
I nodded and we made our way down the four flights of stairs. I took a deep breath of that golden, Mediterranean light, thick, warm, alive. I still don't get how darkness can grow in a place flooded with that much light.
The street was a battlefield, a total wreck. Shattered glass everywhere, cars twisted into crumpled heaps of metal, craters in the asphalt and this thick, grey dust, concrete dust covering everything.
Right in the middle of the street laid a fallen phone pole, its cables all tangled like a giant’s messy hair.
My father stepped up to the fallen pole and he picked up a long chunk of phone cable.
"Do you know how phone cables work?"
"No," I said.
He pulled out the pen knife he always kept in his pocket. He ran his knife down the black plastic cover, split it clean open, and out burst a rainbow of tiny wires. He started explaining how these tiny copper wires carried voices, mine, his, yours, all the way across the city, across the country, sometimes across the planet. He showed me how each little thread has its job. How every color led to a different house.
To fix the line, he said, you got to match the right colors. Red to red, blue to blue, no guessing. He kept talking about the signals running through the copper and, I swear, I could see the words traveling down the wires, sliding along the colors, like little sparks of sound on a mission.
Then my father said, "Do you know how to make a Scooby‑Doo?"
"What's a Scooby‑Doo?" I asked.
"It's a kind of bread. You make it with two wires or more.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
"Choose two colors," he said. I picked a green wire and a yellow one.
We sat on the edge of the concrete planter, surrounded by the scents of mint, basil, and thyme growing all around us. He showed me how to make the knots, bending each wire on the next. We braided in silence, all the way to the end of the wires.
When we were done, we stood up, dusted off our shoes, and headed back to the itsy‑bitsy bathroom on the second floor of that red building, streaked with shrapnel.
That day, I learned three things. How phone cables work, how to braid a Scooby‑Doo, and that science holds stories, tucked deep inside its wires and wonders. That was the first spark that fired up my storytelling gift. I figured out I can braid stories and science together, just like the two strands of that Scooby‑Doo, to pass along knowledge like a secret spell, because knowledge somehow has the power to silence rockets and shells.
Thank you.