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[curiosity-blog]

Featured Thought Leader: Marc Mondavi, Winemaker and Water Witch

Even as a young child, Marc Mondavi was immersed in the world of wine. His parents raised him on their winery property in California, where he learned the ins and outs of cultivating quality grapes, and became familiar with the delicate elements of terroir. Now the founder of his own Napa County winery, The Divining Rod, Mondavi has added the seemingly supernatural practice of water witching into his winemaking process. Read our interview below to get his thoughts on growing great grapes and his response to water witching skeptics.

Dive deeper into the world of wine with this collection of content: Uncorking The World Of Wine.

CURIOSITY: What’s your favorite kind of wine, and why?

MARC MONDAVI: Cabernet Sauvignon, because it’s a bold, unapologetic wine that pairs perfectly with some of my favorite foods—specifically tender, rich, flavorful red meats.

C: When growing grapes, is there a single most important factor that determines how wine will taste?

MM: Location is everything, you can't make great wine unless you grow the right grapes in the right location. I distinguish this two different ways. Over the long term, terroir is the main consideration—the unique factors of a given site including things such as soil type, climate, sun exposure, wind conditions and on and on. On an annual basis, weather conditions of a given growing season or vintage impact a wine's quality unpredictably. You can pick a site that is typically well-suited to a particular grape, but Mother Nature always reminds you who's in charge.

C: Does that mean that natural conditions have more of an impact on a wine grape’s tests than the winemaker?

MM: All great wines are a result of nature, but there are great wines made via minimal and more intrusive forms of winemaking. So nature trumps winemaking, but both make a huge impact on the taste and quality of the ultimate wine produced.

C: I've heard that vines that "struggle" more produce better wine. Is there truth to that idea?

MM: It is a fine line and delicate balance you need to maintain. If you over-water vines, the fruit won't be impressive. If you under-water the vines, fruit production will be low in both yield and quality. But if you achieve a healthy balance, you convince the vine to dedicate just the right amount of energy into producing beautiful fruit with optimum sugar levels, water content, acidity and so forth. It's an art that only comes with working with vines year after year. There isn't one "recipe" that works everywhere. Each vine in each different location needs a specific, unique amount of TLC to reach its potential.

C: What makes Napa Valley so suited to growing wine grapes?

MM: This is a topic that people have written books about, involving geology, climatology and viticulture. The short answer is terroir. The soil types, predictable weather, global latitude, proximity to the ocean and SF Bay...there are dozens of reasons I could give. But there are millions of minute things that make Napa different from other parts of the world and these factors combine to make the perfect recipe for great wine.

C: What's the hardest part of growing wine grapes? 

MM: It's trying to predict the unpredictable. Vine disease and pest management are high on the list. Vines are living things and need to be treated as such. 

C: What’s your favorite part?

My favorite part is harvest—the annual reward you get for a year's worth of nurturing the vineyards properly.

C: What are some common mistakes that you see amateur wine-drinkers make?

MM: As long as you keep an open mind and try different wines to expand your palate, there are no mistakes. The only mistake is to allow your trepidation to discourage you from trying new things: varietals, pairings, etc.

C: What do you think is the future of wine? What are some exciting developments that you’re waiting for?

MM: Alternative packaging will allow wine to be enjoyed more often. Wine in cans, wine in boxes, and more [ideas] are coming, and will help broaden wine’s reach.

C: How did you become interested in water witching, and how did you learn the practice?

MM: When I was in High School, I was dating a girl whose father turned out to be a water witch. One day he said “let’s see if you can do it.” We went to the backyard and he handed me a Y-shaped willow branch—a common type of divining rod. It pulled significantly to the ground when I walked over water. At that point he said “you’ve got it.” That was about 40 years ago. I didn’t take it up right away, but with the family being in the vineyard business, I later saw the benefit to exploring it further. I found a mentor who trained me and I’ve been improving my skills ever since.

C: How would you respond to someone who is skeptical about the science and effectiveness of water witching?

MM: It happens all the time and it’s completely understandable. A lot of people don’t believe in something they can’t see or in a phenomenon scientists can’t yet explain. I have no problems talking to skeptics. I only ask people to keep an open mind and look at the results. Scientists only recently explained the physics behind how bees can fly—that didn’t stop the bees from doing their thing.

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Featured Thought Leader: Scott Loarie, Co-Director of iNaturalist

Image © California Academy of Sciences

Dr. Scott Loarie wants to introduce you to the world in your own backyard. To that end, he co-directs iNaturalist, overseeing a site and app that allow users from all over the world to log observations of the species surrounding them. But iNaturalist is more than a handy logbook for native critters—it’s also a tool for scientists who want to study and preserve the planet’s biodiversity. We spoke to Dr. Loarie about why that preservation is so vital, and how you can do your part to promote it armed with nothing but your phone.

CURIOSITY: Here’s my very basic understanding of how iNaturalist works: you download it on your phone, you go outside, you see a plant or an animal, you take a picture, and even if you don't know what that species is, someone could help you identify it and you could learn a lot more about it. And your observation also becomes part of a huge collection of observations that researchers can draw from.

SCOTT LOARIE: Exactly. Right now we've got something like 150,000 people who are logging observations, and we've produced over 2 million separate observations. A lot of people said, “Oh, you're only gonna get potted plants and people's dogs and squirrels.” But we've gotten 81,000 species of organisms. That's about 4% of the diversity of life on Earth! Think about all the bugs and soil microorganisms around—just the fact that we've been able to crack 4%, with a handful of kids running around with their iPhones, is pretty impressive. There's a lot of interest in this type of crowdsourcing and citizen science being a legitimate tool to monitor of biodiversity.

iNaturalist is also a platform for citizen science projects. There are about 5,000 projects that can be very focused. One comes to mind that's just about roadkill—if you see some roadkill, you report it. And you don't just take picture, you also talk about the quality of the road, the speed limit … All of these projects help to grow the community.

C: Why should people care about biodiversity?

SL: There's a couple reasons why people should care about it. There's the intrinsic value of biodiversity, the value of biodiversity for its own sake. And there's the extrinsic value, which is the fact that our human health ultimately depends on the diversity of life. For example, so much of our agriculture depends on there being a diversity of insects out there that can pollinate our various crops. There have been studies that have valued the diversity of life in the trillions of dollars, economically, but that gets tricky because it's difficult to draw the connections between any one frog and an economic value.

Biodiversity’s importance comes from stability, and we see that in all sorts of different systems. Like the economy: if you have a single industry, when that goes down the whole system collapses. With all natural systems, if you have a diverse system, it's more resilient to climate change, to diseases, to shifts, to disturbances of any kind.

The world is a really exciting place because we have this diversity. It's part of our cultural heritage. I have a young daughter, and every book we open is just about looking through pictures of animals. Look at our sports teams, everybody has a mascot that's an animal. I think the diversity of life is so tightly linked to our history as humans that to lose it would not only be a cultural travesty, it would also make the world a less interesting place to live in. It'd be like if the only food to eat was McDonald's, everywhere.

C: How does this tie into iNaturalist? What do you want to accomplish with it?

SL: No matter what your feelings are about biodiversity, we're losing it at an unprecedented rate. Species are going extinct about 1,000 times faster than they ever have before. Which is really a crisis—we're currently going through the 6th mass extinction. This 1,000-year period that we're in right now, in the geologic record, it's almost indistinguishable from when the asteroid hit that wiped out the dinosaurs.

With iNaturalist we asked, why is this happening? And there's really two reasons. The first is that, as scientists, we don't have enough information to make good decisions about how to stop species from going extinct. We're not doing anything that scales to the scale of the problem. We literally have tens of thousands of species that are on the brink of extinction, and we don't have any sort of infrastructure that can keep tabs on where species are, where their distributions are changing, where species are going extinct, where new populations are showing up.

The second problem is that even if we did have all that information, you could argue that the public doesn't really care.

We're working on a single effort that addresses both of those points. In terms of scaling the data collection, we're doing that by engaging tens of thousands of people around the world to go out there with their iPhones and take pictures. In many ways iNaturalist is a big sensor, like a telescope or a satellite. This connected network of people around the world is producing biodiversity information and bringing it into focus like never before. We couldn't get the data if we didn't engage a lot of people.

Which ties directly into the second problem: how do you engage a lot of people?

We think that making an encounter with nature personal is what makes this stuff important to people. If you read about panda bears in the paper, it's interesting, but you'll probably never see a panda bear in the wild. But if you go out into your backyard and see a butterfly, and have a connection with that butterfly, and then someone's able to put that encounter into context—answering questions like, “Hey, what is this?” “Is it rare?” “Are you seeing it at the edge of its range?”—that produces an authentic, educational experience that will make these scientific concepts, ecology and biology, resonate more.

C: I would imagine some people get a little competitive!

SL: Yeah! So, birding has really taken off in the U.S., and we want people to have that birder passion about other taxa. Some birders, we call them “Birders Gone Bad,” they go out every day and take down lists of birds, but they completely overlook other things—flowers, bugs, frogs—because they didn't know what they are. But with iNaturalist, they can take pictures of all kinds of different taxa and get competitive about those too.

C: What are some other exciting ways you've seen iNaturalist used?

SL: Here's a quick story. This just happened in October of 2015. There was a 10-year-old girl in Southern California, and she saw a bird out her window, so she took a picture of it and posted it to iNaturalist. I think she left it unidentified. Her role was that of observer—we want any 10-year-old on the planet to be able to do this. So once it got posted, identifiers, who are scientists, other professionals, or amateur experts who spend a lot of time on the site and provide a huge service by identifying things, identified the bird as a social flycatcher. It had never been recorded in California before.

All of a sudden the birding community, the American Birding Association, got really excited about this, because this particular record was a state record, which is kind of a big deal. In California, birding is such a huge hobby, and yet this bird was overlooked by the birding community and it took a 10 year old girl to stumble upon it.

Recently, [the American Birding Association] picked their top 10 most crazy vagrants of 2015—a vagrant is a bird that appears in a place it shouldn't be—and it was number 8.

C: What are you working on with the National Park Service this year?

SL: We've been working with the National Park Service and National Geographic for a couple years, doing these things called BioBlitzes. They’re like iNaturalist flashmobs: everybody assembles at a park, and within a 24-hour period, they take as many observations as possible. The goal is to produce a big list of species. We've been doing one big BioBlitz a year for the past couple years.

This year is the centennial, a hundred years of the National Park Service, and as part of the celebration, they're doing a BioBlitz across the park service. It's going to be really cool! In DC, there will be a big screen that can visualize the simultaneous [observations], like the World Cup or a college basketball tournament, and tell you who's beating who. Right now we're focusing on convincing parks to sign up; we have 85 parks but we want to have at least 100. All of this will be happening in May of this year.

[To learn more about the 2016 National Parks BioBlitz on May 20 and 21, click here!]

C: What’s next for iNaturalist? Are there any new features that you’re excited about?

Now that we have over 2 million observations from around the world, what we want to do is take that data, distill it down, and give it back to the participants as something that's really useful. And one thing that naturalists really like are field guides! Traditional field guides say, “This is what's around you,” but they don't tell you what you're likely to see. Because we're building this field guide based on observations, it's a prediction of what you're most likely to see around you, which I think is really exciting.

We’ve found that we can also start targeting, saying “Hey everybody, go take these kinds of observations.” I mean, you can imagine the Zika virus or some sort of emerging outbreak ... and you say, “Shoot, we really need people to gather data on mosquitos, but how do we do it?” You'd have to grow this whole naturalistic community. But we already have a community of naturalists that are ready!

C: How do you stay curious?

SL: Being curious is a behavior. There are a lot of studies that say some of the best ways to change a behavior or stick with a behavior, like a New Year’s resolution or a diet, is to have social support … I always felt like that was a really hard thing for me. I was always interested in being a naturalist, but I found it a very lonely activity. Now I’m building a community of naturalists who can really teach and help one another, and we can create a bigger community of people who have that curiosity about their backyards and nature.

Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel

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Hiring: Partner Content Coordinator

Curiosity was spun out of Discovery Communications at the end of 2014 with investments from Chicago's best investors. Curiosity has 24 employees all based in Chicago.  

Chicago-based Curiosity is looking for a contract hire on our Content and Partnership Team with potential for full time position. This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to get a jumpstart in digital media and enhance the future of learning.

Only a daily basis, here is what you will be participating in and learning about:

Content Management: Help organize, curate and classifying multimedia assets. Review data and metrics and perform qualitative and quantitative assessments of content quality, type and topic.

Publishing: Manage the scheduling internally around asset publishing, as well as collaborating with partners around cross promotion of content.

Communication: Facilitate the communication both internally and externally about publishing, scheduling, and general partnerships.

Product: Learn to use a custom content management tools and have input in the product development.

Analytics: Leverage data to analyze the performance of a published asset based on a variety of numbers, and provide insights that help drive business decisions.

Our Ideal Candidate is:

Curious: Our team and our partners expect everyone at Curiosity to be truly fascinated by the world around them.

Detail-Oriented: There are a thousand moving parts at a startup, so maintaining focus and order is essential

Results Driven: Can use quantitative and qualitative context to drive decision making.

Confident: We don’t get everything right on the first try. Confidence is key to help you troubleshoot and move forward decisively.

Passionate: This is an opportunity to have a meaningful role in a meaningful effort to help the world be more curious and consume healthy educational media.  We hope you share our passion.

Fun: If you’re not having fun, it’s not worth it.

We are looking for someone who loves educational and/or online video content and want to contribute with creative problem solving every step of the way. We are a startup, so feeling comfortable in a fast-moving demanding environment is a must. You must be willing and hopefully enjoy communicating with creative and administrative talent within the digital media world. You will learn a lot and have an opportunity to make an impact in a young, fast-growing company.

To Apply email jobs@curiosity.com ATTN: Michael Burke

Resume

Cover Letter (Include:)

Tell us an online video creator you like, and why.

Tell us what you like most about Curiosity (Social, .Com or App) and what could use improvement.

3 websites (other than Curiosity) you enjoy and why

Your favorite essay you’ve written in the past few years

A little more about Curiosity:

With an ever-growing number of stimuli competing for people’s attention, Curiosity is developing a platform that enables “micro-learning” in the stride of our busy lives.

There are more ways to learn today than ever, but what’s missing is an easy, simple way to find and consume the best content. Curiosity is focused on creating context that makes content more relevant, making learning impulsive, easy, and entertaining. In doing so, we can offer and deliver upon a brand promise of making people smarter.

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Partner Spotlight: Aaron Pomerantz, Entomologist and Molecular Biologist

Many people want to keep bugs at bay, but Aaron Pomerantz can’t get enough of them. Armed with Master of Science degrees in Entomology and Molecular Biology, Pomerantz backpacks through the Peruvian Amazon to conduct research on the region’s unique insect population.

Recently, Aaron became one of the first researchers to study the Amazon rainforest with a revolutionary new piece of technology developed by Stanford researchers. It’s called the Foldscope, and it’s a 50-cent, origami-style paper microscope that can hook up to your smart phone.

Read on for our Q&A with Aaron, which includes more about how he’s using the Foldscope, his most exciting insect discovery, and how he handles bug-haters.

CURIOSITY: What initially drew you to entomology?

Aaron Pomerantz: I grew up in Los Angeles and my mom was an avid gardener; I think that helped because the native plants and flowers drew all sorts of birds, reptiles, and insects right up close. I was pretty set on either pursuing a veterinary degree or an entomology one—I leaned towards entomology because I learned about how important these critters are to human/animal health, agriculture, and ecosystems. Plus, I wanted to make scientific discoveries of my own.

C: Why would—or wouldn't—you encourage people to get interested in entomology?

AP: I would absolutely encourage people to get interested in entomology. Insects and other arthropods allow us to live on this planet—they pollinate our crops and keep our ecosystems functioning. There are so many things left to discover about insects and how they impact the world; it's truly a good time to get involved in entomology research if you’re up for the challenge!

C: What do you say to people who hate bugs? Is there hope for them?!

AP: There's totally hope. I think once you get over that initial fear you'll realize they can be truly beautiful, important and non-threatening animals. I hope that the images and videos we share help show people that they aren't something to be feared or stepped on; they are fascinating creatures that impact our lives in so many ways.

C: What has been your favorite insect to study?

AP: I'm truly drawn to the glow worms my colleague and I discovered in the Amazon rainforest. I just think it's fascinating that an animal can produce it's own light—and for the purpose of luring in prey is totally cool.

C: What is one of the most exciting discoveries you've made?

AP: I think the most exciting and surprising one was the tentacled caterpillar that reacts to the sound of my voice. While those caterpillars are known in the scientific literature, I don't think anyone had ever filmed or documented that bizarre behavior in the wild before. We still aren't fully sure what purpose the popping tentacles serve, but we have some ideas.

C: Which insect would you like to study further that you haven't had the chance to study yet?

AP: There are so many (there are literally over a million species described to date, and that's just a fraction of what's out there). I'd like to eventually take a closer look at the large and strange peanut-headed bugs.

C: How does the insect population of the Peruvian rainforest differ from that of other locations?

AP: The Peruvian rainforest within the Tambopata National Reserve is one of the most biodiverse places in the entire world. What that means is I can barely take two steps without having to stop and look at some interesting critter. Even though I've made several trips out there, I always see something new. Compared to Los Angeles, there's not the same level of biodiversity, but that's not to say unknown critters don't exist in places like big cities. Scientists in LA recently discovered 30 new fly species in people's backyards—so they're out there if you look!

C: How is the Foldscope affecting your research?

AP The Foldscope has been a really amazing device to add to my tool kit in the jungle. We used to have a microscope out at the remote research center, but the humidity and wear-and-tear of the rainforest broke it down. This origami-style paper microscope is fast, cheap, and easy to use—I can literally walk out into the jungle and investigate microscopic organisms right there in the field!

C: How do you stay curious?

AP: I think because we live in a time where we have the most advanced technology ever, yet we are simultaneously losing more biodiversity on our planet than ever before. Scientific tools alone can't solve our problems, we need people to add their creativity and curiosity to solve the problems that we face now and in the future.

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We’re hiring! Partner Manager, Brands

Curiosity was spun out of Discovery Communications at the end of 2014 with investments from Chicago's best investors. Curiosity has 20 employees all based in Chicago.   

Chicago-based Curiosity is looking for a Brand Partner Manager to lead our brand partnerships efforts. If you believe that the current media landscape is sorely lacking in dynamic, meaningful ways for brands to tell their stories, then this could be a great opportunity for you. Curiosity is the best platform and environment for brands to inspire learning, share knowledge, and authentically engage audiences around relevant, informative topics. We enable our Brand Partners to share their knowledge-focused content, provide expert perspectives, and contribute to the learning that occurs millions of times every day on our platform.  

As a Partner Manager, you will first and foremost be responsible for shaping the future of this brand new role.  Further, our Partner Manager will:

- Identify and engage brands that are investing (or should be investing) in marketing efforts that aim to educate and share knowledge

- Work closely with the Curiosity editorial team to concept ideas that integrate brands into Curiosity’s platform and are in line with our editorial and brand standards

- Create proposals and marketing plans that offer comprehensive solutions for clients

- Work with Curiosity editorial, design and product teams and project manage programs and campaign from pre-launch through renewal

- Capture metrics and prove success through data-driven analysis of the total time learning with the brand

- Oversee the entire sales process and forge great relationships with Curiosity partners

Our Ideal Candidate is:

- Curious: Our team and our partners expect everyone at Curiosity to be truly fascinated by the world around them.

- Detail-Oriented: There are a thousand moving parts at a startup, so maintaining focus and order is essential

- Confident: We don’t get everything right on the first try. Confidence is key to help you troubleshoot and move forward decisively.

- Proven: You’ve worked with brands or at a brand and crushed it.  

- Passionate: This isn’t a job, it’s an opportunity. We hope you live for it.

- Fun: If you’re not having fun, it’s not worth it.

Your experience should include:

- Working in Sales, Account Management and/or Marketing

- Executing campaigns, specific to content and video

- Storytelling and copywriting (Show us your writing skills in a cover letter)

- Ability to “own” a room

- Great track record of building relationships

If this sounds like you, please send us a note, tell us about yourself and what keeps you curious:

jobs@curiosity.com, attn Michael Burke

A little more about Curiosity:

With an ever-growing number of stimuli competing for people’s attention, Curiosity is developing a platform that enables “micro-learning” in the stride of our busy lives.

There are more ways to learn today than ever, but what’s missing is an easy, simple way to find and consume the best content. Curiosity is focused on creating context that makes content more relevant, making learning impulsive, easy, and entertaining. In doing so, we can offer and deliver upon a brand promise of making people smarter.

[curiosity-blog]

Featured Thought Leader: John Kane, Urban and Structural Entomologist at Orkin

John Kane is a Division Technical Services Manager for Orkin, and a structural and urban entomologist. In short, he knows his bugs—and he’s passionate about maintaining respectful human-insect relations. We spoke with him about some fascinating arthropods, tips for preventing a home infestation, and the frustrating misconceptions that people often have about the pest-control biz.

CURIOSITY: Can you describe your role at Orkin?

JOHN KANE: I prefer to say Division Entomologist, but [my title is] Division Technical Services Manager, or Division Technical Director. I get involved in the difficult pest-related problems, the most seemingly mysterious problems, and problems that are subject to the most regulation or the highest risk. For example, I would get called in to a hospital setting or pharmaceutical production facility where health was at stake. Or into a museum setting where a priceless artifact is being threatened with damage.

C: Woah, has that ever happened?

JK: Oh, absolutely. In every museum out there, the curators are battling against entropy and trying to preserve those relics as well as possible. There's risk everywhere.

I come from a background of research science, so my role is also to keep up with the most current research, to synthesize it and condense it into how it relates to the pest management industry, and deliver that information to the field in digestible packages. And I also do training.

C: What drew you to insects, initially?

JK: A general fascination with the outdoors. If you go outside and overturn any rock, or dislodge some leaf litter on the ground, you'll see a whole little ecosystem occurring. And that kind of thing is invisibly happening at all times, around everyone. It goes largely unappreciated—to many people it's disgusting, and they're afraid of it, so they'd rather not think of it. But to a scientifically minded person, it's just tremendously cool. I got involved [with entomology] so that I could go on a walk in the forest and really appreciate and understand the things I was seeing.

Part of the appeal of the entomological discipline was the fact that it is a microcosm: insects are easy to rear, easy to breed in a laboratory setting. We can do studies on them and improve upon ecological theories [in a way that] you couldn't with large mammals. The things we've learned in ecology, for example, using fruit flies, are enormous.

C: How did you go from studying entomology to going to work with Orkin and pest control? I'm curious as to whether it's a common career path, it seems a little counterintuitive.

JK: There can be some tension, but maybe not in the way that you think. It's not an issue of valuing the sanctity of the bugs, of their lives. I haven't found any conflict with my ideals or morals in that regard. But in academia, there's a little bit of stigma associated with going into industry. I was focused on public health. I was particularly interested in disease-carrying and transmitting insects, so I was looking at mosquitos, malaria, and West Nile virus; that was the thrust of my research. There was some hesitation getting into pest management on my own part, because I wasn't sure what form that would take. But it ended up being a great amount of fun, and I'm educating all the time.

C: You're a structural and urban entomologist. What does that entail? How does your focus differ from that of an entomologist who’s trekking around in the rainforest?

JK: Well, there are many insects out there, and most of them don't affect humans in a negative way. The last estimate I heard was 1.5 million species of insects and rising. Beetles alone, some people estimate that there are 350,000 species of them, and that figure is maybe eight years dated. The point is, if you have 3,000 species of moth, only 2 or 3 of them are adversely affecting you. Those are the clothes moths that damage your clothes. So, they're not all negative, and many of them can be beneficial, especially when in their native habitat.

One big example of that is termites. Out in the forests, they do tremendous work in nutrient recycling. Without wood-destroying insects, these trees would just take forever for bacteria to turn them over. Termites perform a very valuable service—except when they overlap with our lives. Some of the filth insects that people naturally find disgusting, things like filth flies, flesh flies, blow flies, they’re some of the few insects that can turn over connective tissue in animal flesh. They're performing a valuable service too, but they can spread disease when they overlap with our lives.

Our goal is to keep them separate, to keep them out of the sensitive areas, because they're still doing quite well out in the woods. We want to keep them out of the hospital or the cafeteria.

C: So humans and insects can totally coexist, we just need this level of management from you guys.

JK: Right, and pest control in a real sense is a branch of public health and healthcare. It's a necessary part of any civilization. Some of the earliest civilizations, one of the first moves they make is separating their garbage from where they live. That's the reason for a lot of disease-carrying vermin and bacteria. To the extent that we prevent transmission of pathogens by doing good pest control, we're definitely a part of health care.

C: What are the basic steps that someone should take to guard their home against pests?

JK: This one's fairly easy. The first thing I should say is that homeowners, at least yearly, should go around and take a hard, long look at their homes for changes. Has a squirrel chewed a hole through an overhang or an eave or a faucet? Do they see wasp nests? Do they see droppings in the attic? A good home inspection can take an hour, an hour and a half, which is totally doable.

Part two of that is, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. It's amazing what kind of real problems can be prevented with 80 cents worth of metal screen installed with a staple gun. A quick visit to the hardware store, $1.50 worth of parts, and you can prevent that mouse from getting in in the first place. I've seen many businesses look back and think, “Wow, we just had to reimburse a wedding party $40,000, and it could have been prevented by 80 cents worth of screening.”

C: What are the most common pests you deal with?

JK: Mice are probably the most common, and then there's ants, small beetles of various kinds, flies … Termites are not something that a homeowner can do much about, unfortunately. That really does take a specialist. There's different kinds of termites, but the one that we interact with the most in this part of the world is the subterranean termite. They're true to their name, they're in the soil, and they’re hard to monitor for and protect against.

They say there's two kinds of homes: those that have had termites, and those that will have termites. That's not just a soundbite, that's unfortunately true. They're very widespread. I've seen some studies that have found as many as 17 colonies of subterranean termites on a single property. I could talk about nothing but termites for an hour or two … I shouldn't do that.

C: I think a lot of people have a skewed image in their heads when they think of pest control. Are there common misconceptions about the occupation or the pests themselves that frustrate you?

JK: I think my main frustration is that people often think chemistry should be the first solution: “What should I spray?” They'll go to Home Depot and ask, “Who's your resident bug guy?” And human nature being what it is, someone there will consider themselves the resident bug expert, and they'll give their best suggestion on what chemical to use, and the person will go home and misuse that chemical, maybe give themselves a sublethal poisoning. That’s the kind of thing I see again and again, sometimes with highly intelligent people!

Another one is that, there’s much more fear of insects than is actually warranted. That's something I wish I could help with. I might see a honey bee foraging around and it wouldn't scare me at all. But I've seen a honey bee fly into a subway car, and everyone's terrified. Terrified! There's any number of completely harmless insects out there, and not everything is an infestation. With something like roaches, if you see one, there are probably more. But there are plenty of insects who are solitary wanderers. They're predators looking for other bugs to eat, and if you see one, it's probably just one! You don't have to hit the panic button for everything.

[Finally,] contrary to what people think, [pest control] is not blunt and imprecise. What people get from movies and TV is the image of an exterminator wearing dirty coveralls and spraying indiscriminately. When it's done right, that's just no longer the case.

We're also pretty deeply involved in pollinator protection: colony collapse disorder and the decline of the honey bees, those are topics that we routinely discuss, and we train to get pest management done without posing risk to natural pollinators. It's not an exciting news story, so most of the public will think that pest controllers don't care about that, that they're insensitive to that kind of thing, and that's not true.

C: Do you ever have any advice for people who are scared of bugs?

JK: Try to get information from good sources, such as university extensions, the CDC, or the WHO. Don't go to a website that's trying to sell you something.

I myself used to be afraid of spiders when I was young. I read a really good book called Spiders of the World, and by the time I put it down I was no longer afraid of spiders at all. For me, when I learn about something, what it can do and what it can't do, it takes away the mystery and fear. But not everyone seems to work that way.

I still don't like centipedes, because they're very aggressive. The house centipede is not a threat to anybody, but if I was traveling through the tropics, I would not want to tangle with any of the tropical centipedes. They bite, they get big, they can take down spiders and snakes. They make spiders look tame.

C: Do you have a favorite bug?

JK: Hard to say! Probably the honey bee, different kinds of bees. They're among the most intelligent of insects, so that earns them a place of fondness for me. They forage in such a complex, three-dimensional environment, and then they have to communicate with their hive-mates. A flower might produce nectar at a certain time of day, and the bee will have to find it, remember the shape and color of that flower, its rough height from the ground, its distance from the nest, and its angle from the nest. Then it goes back and communicates that: “This is the quality of the nectar, it's wonderful, it's really rich.” Or, “it's not so rich.” They are just really amazing, adaptable insects.

C: I learned recently that most bee species don’t have hives—that they’re solitary bees.

JK: Yeah, I used to study stingless bees. They're mostly tropical, and there are some 400+ species of them. There's a kind of stingless bee that makes honey by visiting dead animals. It just fascinates me how diverse life is in general.

C: How do you stay curious?

JK: Thankfully, it happens organically as I go about my day. When I solve a puzzle, when I figure out what's going wrong, that feels really good, and it helps keep me young a little bit. When I'm looking through a microscope at an interesting insect that came from a pharmaceutical plant, there's many times that I'll say, “Wow, this is so beautiful.”

I get reminded daily of why I got into entomology. Because it's really cool, the diversity of life. If you imagine something, some way of living, something bizarre, chances are there's some insect out there that gets pretty close to what you're thinking. Like the movie Alien, for example! The premise behind that is common in nature: parasitoid wasps. Insects that lay their eggs in another insect, which will either be comatose in a paralyzed state, or walking around none the wiser until at one point it bursts open and all these other bugs emerge. It's a horrible way to go, but it's really common.

And that's just one thing, there are so many insects out there, you could never become familiar with them all. There's always another one, something else to learn. A person never stops learning—or they shouldn’t, if they're doing things right.

Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel

[curiosity-blog]

Featured Thought Leader: Bart Shepherd, Director of Steinhart Aquarium

As the director of Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences, Bart Shepherd bridges two worlds: one where he oversees almost 40,000 live animals on land, and another underwater that few humans have ever seen. Shepherd is a frequent visitor to the Twilight Zone—an area that’s deeper than the range of traditional scuba dives. There, he conducts important research on a rich ecosystem, bringing his knowledge (and some amazing fish) back to the academy. We were fortunate enough to catch him between expeditions, and asked him about the many challenges and rewards of exploring uncharted reefs.

CURIOSITY: I like to ask people whether they're an outer-space person or an ocean person. I'm assuming you're an ocean person—how did that fascination start?

BART SHEPHERD: I'm definitely an ocean person, although I grew up a huge Star Wars fan. I’ve kept fish ever since I was a child. My mom got an aquarium when I was six or seven years old, and we put it in my bedroom. She and I did it together as a project, maintaining it, going to the pet store, picking out the fish.

I also grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, right on the ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, so I spent a lot of time playing around in the salt marsh and going fishing and crabbing. I think those were the things that really drove me to become a marine biologist. My whole life, I've had crazy dreams where the difference between air and water has been removed, and fish are just swimming around wherever I am.

C: Right now, you’re doing a lot of work in the “Twilight Zone.” Can you describe that region, and explain why it's so important that we explore it?

BS: That's some of the most interesting and exciting work that I'm doing right now. We're actually prepping to go to Vanuatu, which is near Fiji, to do Twilight Zone work there.

The Twilight Zone is this unexplored region of the ocean that sits just below where recreational scuba diving equipment allows you to go. But it’s shallow enough that there's still much of the coral reef structure there. Back in the ice age, 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, the sea level was much lower and reefs grew [in these areas]. As the water level rose and the planet warmed, the reefs became what we call drowned reefs. They got further and further away from the light, so that the coral couldn't survive and grow anymore, but they left behind this very complex three-dimensional structure that’s filled with all kinds of animals.

I dive with a team of scientists, and half of what we find down there is new. It's very exciting to be able to go down and see places that nobody else has ever looked at. I'm really the public outreach side, and I want to bring those stories, images, and animals to visitors at the academy and to virtual audiences online.

C: What unique challenges do you have to deal with when you’re diving to the Twilight Zone?

BS: Coming back is the hardest part. The challenge is the decompression. On a typical dive, you mess around at the surface for a couple of minutes, making sure your gear is set up, and then you just bomb to the bottom. You rocket down as fast as you can to your working depth, which might be 300 or 400 feet, and you've got 10 or 15 minutes at that depth to do your work. Then you turn around as a team and you start working your way back up.

Depending on how deep you've gone, you can have anywhere from three to four hours of ascent time ahead of you. It’s what we call an obligated decompression, where you have a computer that's telling you how high you can go, and you can't exceed that ceiling. You just work your way up the reef slow. That's tedious! So we try to come up with different things to do on the shallow parts of the dive, just to pass the time.

[See what a trip to the Twilight Zone looks like in this incredible video!]

C: Have you heard of the Aquarius Underwater Lab?

BS: Yeah, of course.

C: That’s amazing to me, that they can live there and not go through the four hours of decompression.

BS: Yeah, exactly, they just do it all at once at the end. I know people who have stayed in that. For us, though, that's not the most interesting part of the reef! I'd love to have one of those labs at 400 feet, so I could go down there for a week.

C: How do you communicate with your team while you’re diving?

BS: We scream at each other underwater. It's funny because we blend our own gas, we're not breathing air. Oxygen becomes toxic at the depth that we're working at, so you have to reduce the amount of oxygen from the 20% we're breathing right now, to maybe 7%. And nitrogen becomes a narcotic [at these depths]. You've maybe heard of nitrogen narcosis, where you go down to 100 feet and start feeling like you did a couple of shots of vodka. We want to make good decisions down there, so we need to take some of the nitrogen out of gas, too.

Then we need to replace the removed oxygen and nitrogen with something else. And we replace it with helium. Typically the gas we breathe on these deep dives is 7–10% oxygen, 70% helium. When you're talking to each other, 1) you have a mouthpiece in your mouth so you can't make any of the lip noises, and 2), you're breathing helium, so you sound very squeaky. And you have to talk loud because you're underwater, so you're screaming at each other in this sort of muffled high-pitched voice. It can be really entertaining, it's fun to watch on video. But at times it's a challenge because you want to tell somebody something and they can’t understand you.

C: That is both hilarious and inconvenient! You've mentioned finding new species and never-before-seen areas on your dives. What are some of the more memorable discoveries that you've made?

BS: We've found a lot of incredibly beautiful fish down there. There are a lot of fish that are in one of my favorite groups, the Anthias, or the fairy basslets. A lot of the fish at that depth are bright orange, red, or pink, because those wavelengths drop out as you go deeper in the water. So if you're a fish that wants to disappear at depth, you’re a color that doesn't exist at depth! They’re really gorgeous, you shine a light on them and you wouldn't believe it. Tell a kid to draw a rainbow fish, and that's what they draw.

On the last two trips in the Philippines, we were targeting one fish in particular called Sacura, and we actually brought back a pair of them alive. We'll get them on display in the coming summer as part of a new exhibit that we're opening here at the academy, and we'll be the first aquarium ever to display that species.

[Get a glimpse of the colorful life in the Twilight Zone.]

C: On that note, you're the director of the Steinhart Aquarium at the academy, and you’ve said that outreach is a passion of yours. What are some outreach strategies that have worked for you?

BS: A lot of it is about the creation of really compelling, rich exhibits that people can lose themselves in. I like to think of Steinhart Aquarium as “gourmet,” you know? It's not your cookie-cutter stuff. Some people might be disappointed that we don’t have piranhas, but we have so much else that you wouldn’t see at your typical public aquarium, and that's what we strive for: doing things that have never been done, showcasing environments and species that people wouldn’t have an opportunity to see anywhere else.

C: Do you have any tips for aquarium-goers everywhere about how they can get the most out of their visit?

BS: Yeah, slow down! Most people, they blow right by the tanks, we see that in visitor surveys and audience tracking. I don't expect people to read everything that we put on the wall, but stopping and looking at the animals for a second longer and trying to observe some of the behaviors … that's the beauty of it! It's not a still photograph that you look at and keep moving. These are dynamic mini-ecosystems, and the animals are interacting with each other and swimming around. Slow down!

C: It’s been established that our oceans are in a lot of trouble. Could you share what conservation efforts are near and dear to you right now?

BS: Coral reefs are probably the ecosystem that's most near and dear to my heart. I work with a group known as SECORE, Sexual Coral Reproduction. It's a group that exploits the way that coral reproduce for conservation purposes. My wife described it to me in way shorter and better terms than I could have: it's essentially in vitro fertilization for corals.

We go out in the wild and put little tents over the tops of the corals, and we collect the sperm and egg bundles that they release during their spawning. Then we fertilize those in the laboratory and grow lots and lots of little baby corals that can be put back out onto reefs in the wild. It's a great approach for buttressing coral populations and restoring reefs, maybe not to what they once were, but to something that still gives us a functional ecosystem.

C: How do you stay curious?

BS: How do you not? There's just so much out there! I definitely have a lot of hobbies, so that helps. I have two young children, and all they do is ask questions, right? So that certainly feeds into it, too. But how do you not stay curious? I think if you're not curious, you're complacent, and I don't want to be that.

Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel

[curiosity-blog]

Here at Curiosity, we’re growing quickly and hiring regularly for many different roles. 

As we meet more great people wishing to join our company and as we build a culture that is really starting to find a groove, we felt it was time to solidify our company values and publish them for everyone to see.

In the spirit of our visual and inspiring content philosophy, we created these posters which will be hanging in our office soon.

If you’re looking to join us, please email jobs@curiosity.com. 

[curiosity-blog]

Partner Spotlight: Craig Benzine of Wheezy Waiter and The Good Stuff

Craig Benzine wears many online hats. His most long-standing role is host of Wheezy Waiter, a YouTube channel that wittily chronicles his life, musings, and sometimes, the frustrations of living with several clones of himself. Then there’s The Good Stuff, a channel that explores a given topic—say, sleep, or the future of food—through a playlist of videos that includes interviews with various experts. Craig has also lent his hosting skills to Crash Course and Mental Floss. Given his breadth of experience, we had plenty to chat about for October’s Partner Spotlight.

CURIOSITY: You’re a bit of a jack of all trades: you make funny videos, you make informative (but still funny) videos, you’re in a band … at this point in your online-video career, how would you define yourself and what you do?

CRAIG BENZINE: That's a complicated question. Rhett and Link, who are big in the internet-video world, they call themselves Internetainers. That wouldn't be properly describing what I do because The Good Stuff is an education channel, so it's more than entertainment, I'd like to think. I guess I produce online videos—I consider myself more of a producer. Although, I host other things. Okay, let's figure this out ... I produce and perform in internet videos.

Any time this comes up it's always an awkward conversation. Like this right now. Basically I have to describe what I do in a way that sounds like I'm not doing internet porn.

CURIOSITY: Producer and performer, got it. How and why did you make the transition from doing Wheezy Waiter to doing learning-oriented videos? Have you always felt compelled to teach, or at least, to share information?

CB: At the beginning, I wasn't like, “I'm going to make content that teaches people.” I just saw an opportunity to do that along with the silly comedy that I was doing. I don't know why I decided that suddenly, but I guess I had been listening to a lot of This American Life and Radiolab. I never felt like, “I'm smart and I want everyone to be smart.” It was more like, “I can get enjoyment out of learning and I was others to get enjoyment out of learning.”

CURIOSITY: You mentioned that you wanted to bring an educational aspect to the silly things you were doing. Do you think humor is very important in the world of online learning?

CB: I use humor in everything I do. My goal is to make it entertaining for everyone, even if they're not understanding it. I try to trick people into learning. But that doesn't mean it's necessary to do that for everyone! There are educational channels out there that aren't so humorous, that are mostly about learning, and they do a great job and capture my interest very well. This is just my personal style I guess.

CURIOSITY: How do you decide what topics to cover on The Good Stuff?

CB: Basically, it's me and four other dudes, and we discuss what we think would make a broad enough topic for a playlist. One day someone said, what about the future of food? We discussed what would be cool about the future of food—there's vertical farms, indoor farming, urban farming, eating bugs is apparently a viable option for the future ... And then Sam, one of the producers, he found this company Beyond Meat, where they make meat out of plants. We were like "Oh, that's cool.” I flew out, interviewed them, and made the video.

It's all very vague, we don't know what we're going to end up with because we rely on interviews with people. We go out and learn as we're shooting.

CURIOSITY: What’s it like talking to those great minds for your videos?

CB: It's probably the thing that makes me the most nervous, of anything I do! Leading up to the interview ... I think I handle it pretty well, but I get a little anxious. I'm worried I'm going to sound like an idiot talking to smart people. But I'm very honored and flattered that I'm able to meet all them. We’ve interviewed Bill Nye, the Amazing Randi ... it’s been really fun.

CURIOSITY: You’ve done lots of collaborations with other people in the online-video community. Why do you think collaborating is important, and what are some of your favorite collabs that you’ve done?

CB: Well, collaboration from a business standpoint is very helpful, as far as growing your audience. But it also reminds your audience that this is a giant community, and that you're a part of it, you're a human being who interacts with other human beings! It feels very isolated if it's just you talking to the camera. It's more fun to break out of the normal thing you do and get ideas from other people.

One of my favorites that I've done for my channel was with this guy Josh Sundquist, who's Paralympian, he has one leg. He came to me with the idea that he had an evil clone who had two legs. We ended up shooting this video in Iowa City. We just ran around town and included his public speaking in the video. I really liked it, I thought it was a fun story.

As far as being on other people's channels, one of my other favorites is Nice Hotel with Julian Smith. He stayed in a nice hotel and we did a whole song about it. People still come up to me and reference it.

CURIOSITY: What do you think the future holds for online learning, and for you personally?

CB: I certainly think the world of educational videos is going to keep growing, and be more and more popular. There’s an ever-increasing number of content creators. It seems like when I started there was a handful of very popular channels, now there's hundreds, if not thousands. At some point there's gonna be too many! That's why places like Curiosity.com are helpful, to help curate that stuff. For me personally, I'm gonna keep making Wheezy Waiter videos and keep making the Good Stuff!

CURIOSITY: How many times do you think you've cloned yourself on Wheezy Waiter?

CB: Thousands. I have no idea.

CURIOSITY: How do you stay curious?

CB: Well, I read the news. I watch online videos, and I exercise. Exercise usually helps me think. If you sit around and just don't do anything, then your brain gets lazy too.

Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel

[curiosity-blog]

Current Job Openings

We’re always looking for passionate and talented people to join our quickly growing team. 

Please email jobs@curiosity.com if you feel like you’re a fit for any of the below opportunities.

 - Managing Editor

[curiosity-blog]

Partner Spotlight: Dr. Mary Ellen Camire, Past President of Institute of Food Technologists

As a food science professor at the University of Maine and a longtime member of the Institute of Food Technologists, Dr. Mary Ellen Camire works to usher in the future of food. Her expertise has made her a sought-after consultant for companies, research grant panels, and, yes, interviewers with all sorts of food FAQs. Read on for our chat with Dr. Camire, which includes the multiple reasons why “processed” shouldn’t be a bad word, plus advice for dealing with young, picky eaters.

CURIOSITY: Could you summarize IFT’s mission, and tell us why it’s so relevant today?

DR. MARY ELLEN CAMIRE: Our mission [at IFT] is to advance the science of food, and its application across the global food system. Today, your groceries come from all over the world—we want to make sure that everyone has access to sustainable nutrition and a sustainable food supply. It's a tall order!

C: Why is sustainability so important, and how has it factored into your work?

MEC: We waste a tremendous amount of food in the world, and we're really not going to be able to produce that much more food in the future. We have to be wiser about how we use it. I've been very interested in looking at food processing byproducts, and how we could reuse those. My first research project as a professor was studying the potato peels left over from making french fries, and how to use them as a fiber supplement.

We've also developed some healthy salmon jerky from strips of salmon that were left over from a smoked salmon plant. They needed the smoked salmon to fit inside their packaging, and so they would trim the fish, and there'd be pieces left over that they had no market for. We took those and made a healthy snack out of it.

So, I’m trying to find ways to use what's left over in a healthy way, to reduce the amount of energy that's needed to process foods, and to support expansion of local food systems.

C: The word “processed” is pretty demonized when it comes to discussing healthy food. Is that outlook warranted?

MEC: We hear that a lot in our classes, "How can you promote processed foods, they're so bad for you?" I say, "Did you have coffee this morning? Did you have a beer last night? Those are processed foods." Raisins, you take a grape and you dry it, that's processing. People just want to get on the bandwagon and say, “let's burn the monster.”

If they really stopped to think about what their lives would be like if they didn't have processed food … I don't want to go back to the time when women spent most of the day growing and preparing food! I have a profession, if I had to grow all my food, I wouldn't be able to do my job. I really think, growing up back in the 60s, that my mother was able to go back to college and have her career because of the availability of processed foods.

It's made a big difference, we're seeing major growth in other countries too. Women are working and they need foods that are more convenient. And being convenient doesn't mean it’s unhealthy. Oftentimes, processing means it’s safer!

C: How so?

MEC: A big emphasis among the members of IFT is nonthermal processing—ways to use energy to process the food so it looks and tastes and feels fresh, but it’s [been] processed to kill bacteria.

One way to do that is with high pressure. You might have seen packages of guacamole in the supermarket that can last a long time, because they've been high-pressure processed. The bacteria, they're very small, but the pressure is enough to pop their membranes and kill them, and it doesn't really change the taste and the appearance of the guacamole.

One [method] that's not out commercially yet is using plasma electricity to sterilize the surface of foods. Think of those balls at the science museum with all the electricity inside them. Think of something like that being applied to the surface of your food, zapping it. You still have a fresh fruit or vegetable, but the bacteria on the surface has been knocked out.

It's exciting to see those technologies coming closer and closer to commercialization.

C: That’s awesome! Are there any other popular misconceptions about food that bother you right now?

MEC: Well, some of the consumer nutrition trends are not necessarily science-based. Right now, some people are trying to go gluten-free when they don't have celiac disease. I'm very interested in whole grains and dietary fiber, and we have a lot of people who are removing those foods from their diets, and that's causing other health problems.

And potatoes! I'm of Irish descent, so my family came over to the U.S. during the potato famine in the 1800s. Today people vilify potatoes as being fattening and full of carbs, but potatoes have a lot of potassium, fiber, and antioxidants. They're really actually good for you, if you don't douse them in hot oil and get them all crispy.

C: If someone's studying nutrition, what are some strategies for separating the hard science from the pseudoscience?

MEC: Look out for emotionally charged words like toxins, poison, magic, miracle … any of Dr. Oz's favorite words. There's a lot of hype out there. I'll see things on Facebook like, “This diet will help you lose 10 pounds in two days.” Don't perpetuate something that you can't verify!

I recommend that people learn who a reputable source is. WebMD fact checks their information; the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is a profession group for dieticians, they have a lot of good information about nutrition; and IFT has a Food Facts page for consumers about food issues. Not every dot-org is sound science, but there are a lot of good ones out there.

C: Do you have any advice for parents who are trying to encourage healthy eating habits in their children?

MEC: “You have to eat your vegetables if you want dessert” is not an effective strategy. If you want them to eat fruits and vegetables, don't [present] it as a regular meal. Make it a treat, make it a snack. "Your cousins are coming over, look, we're going to have some special purple cauliflower." If there are other children around who you're pretty sure will eat the food, peer pressure works really well! If mom tells you to eat it and you see your friends eating it, you'll eat it because you'll be cool with them.

C: How do you stay curious?

I think I was born curious! I was really lucky, my folks encouraged me to go into science. I try to spend time with my three grandchildren, and they have a lot of questions. Sometimes their questions are naive but very insightful. They get me wondering, “Why is it this way?” and they trust me to go look it up for them.

Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel

[curiosity-blog]

Partner Spotlight: Sparky Sweets, PhD., Host of Thug Notes

As the host of Thug Notes, Sparky Sweets, PhD. dissects literature with his signature street-savvy style. No book is immune to his analysis—he’s covered modern hits (Gone Girl, 50 Shades of Grey, Game of Thrones) as well as established classics (Catch-22, King Lear, Dante’s Inferno…the list goes on). Today, though, Sparky ventures from the world of web series into the written word himself. His book, Thug Notes: A Street-Smart Guide to Classic Literature is now available for purchase, and contains even more thorough discussions of celebrated fictional works.

We were lucky enough to get hold of Sparky, so we asked him about the new book, his favorite Thug Notes moments, and the story that made him cry.  

(If you’re unfamiliar with Sparky, check out this playlist of some of his favorite Thug Notes episodes! Note: these videos contain profanity.)

CURIOSITY: Let’s talk about your book. What motivated you to publish it, and who do you hope to reach?

SPARKY SWEETS: People tell me all the time that Thug Notes has helped them with their school work and reinvigorated their passion for reading. Since my videos are only about five minutes long, I don’t get a chance to explore [the books] in as much detail as I would like. The Thug Notes book let’s me go all-out and tell it like it is.

For those students who are bored in English class, I’m hoping the Thug Notes book will make them see literature in a new light and convert them into a well-read baller. For people who have lost their love for the lit-game over the years, I’m hoping this book will remind them that there is some legit, timeless wisdom in these books that can apply to errybody’s life.

C: How did you choose which books to include in the Thug Notes book?

SS: We mostly went with books that people gotta read for school. We also tried to be diverse with our selection so we weren’t only covering American literature—we got some Achebe and Dostoevsky in there too.

C: What are some of your favorite books that you’ve covered on Thug Notes?

SS: My two absolute favorites are The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Grendel by John Gardner. I’m all about dat existential angst. Also, I think The Count of Monte Cristo is up there just because of how bada** the comeback story is. Revenge is a dish best served gangsta, and you can’t help but feel like you’re the one pimpin’ instead of Edmond while you read it.

Next, I’d say filming the Grapes of Wrath episode stands out to me because I’m pretty sure that’s the only one where we included the outtakes in the final cut. I couldn’t get through this one line about Rose of Sharon whipping out her t**** at the end. Too funny.  

C: Where do you like to go to read?

SS: I like reading in a quiet library amongst the stacks where you feel like you’re lost in a maze of bookshelves. Put me in the LA library with a stack of books and an a**-load of coffee and I can stay there for hours.

C: Why do you think literature is important?

SS: Right now reading is in the category of things we all make sure to forget to do every day, like flossing, taking vitamins, or putting on sunscreen. Literature allows us to see the world from vastly different perspectives. It forces us to consider new paradigms that can make us empathize with other human beings in a way science cannot. Technology may change the way we interact with the world, but it will never be able to make our choices for us. The arts empower us to make more informed and carefully considered choices—from big life decisions, to small choices about how to treat other people—and there’s nothing more important than that.

C: Has a book ever made you cry?

SS: Of course. Where the Red Fern Grows. F*** that book.

C: Which classical author would you want to spend a day with, and why?

SS: Dostoevsky for sure. He is one of the most forward-thinking artists of all time and it would be the most interesting thing ever to hear his thoughts on the state of the world right now. I’m sure he would be super curmudgeonly and wipe his a** with an iPhone. It would be awesome.

C: How do you respond to people who are offended by the fact that you swear on your show?

Surprisingly, there really aren’t that many people who complain. If they do, well… haters gonna hate. I think people get that in order to make something like Great Expectations relevant and interesting, you have to do something radical. Thug Notes is just that.

C: Do you have an opinion on the ebook vs. paper books debate?

SS: I can see arguments for both sides, but honestly, whatever gets your pages turning is good enough for me, playa. It’s nice to give people options, and I just hope in the long run the digital book industry does more to help good authors get their work read.

C: What advice do you have for students who are struggling with English and literature?

SS: Keep your chin up and stick with it even when you get discouraged. There’s no shame in asking for help, and remember that nobody really knows what they’re talking about all 100% of the time.  

C: How do you stay curious?

SS: First, I try to make sure I don’t always read things I know I’ll agree with. Second, I try to read erry single day. It’s one of those cases where you think you don’t have time to do it, when the reality is you don’t have time NOT to. Feel me?

Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel

[curiosity-blog]

YouTube Made the Video Star

“Who is Little Anthony and why are these girls crying?” Those were the questions racing through my mind as a swarm of screaming girls nearly knocked me off my feet. They were chasing down a skinny jeans-wearing kid with perfectly coiffed hair. As it turns out, they weren’t screaming "Little Anthony," but rather “Lohanthony," the name of a YouTube star.

The scene at VidCon

As the swarm passed and I looked around the Anaheim convention center where I stood (views of Disneyland in the distance), I thought, “this is the perfect introduction to VidCon.”

For those who have never heard of Vidcon, here’s some background:  

The four-day festival bills itself as the “largest gathering of people who love and are a part of” online video

It’s run by the Vlog Brothers, Hank and John Green, and their team at EcoGeek

There are three types of participants: Community (the fans), Creators (they make videos), and Industry (the business-types that support the connections between Creators and the Community)   

Pictured (from left to right:) Zach Ferraro, John Green, Michael Burke (myself)

As Curiosity’s Head of Partnerships, attending VidCon was an important opportunity to spend time with creators of knowledge-based content and better understand the challenges and opportunities they face. I was also eager to chat with developers of tools focused on content creation and distribution. And, of course, there were a number of parties on the docket that I couldn’t miss. Thankfully, I had my wingman Zach, who handles content curation and social strategy for Curiosity, along for the ride.

Over the course of the conference, through panels, amazing conversations, and general observation, Zach and I learned a lot. Here are a few key takeaways:

1) What was obvious: YouTube and online video are second to none in terms of fostering engagement between content creators and their audiences.  

Screaming teenage fans have been around since Beatlemania. Today, thanks to YouTube, an entertainer doesn’t need to be Paul McCartney to build a loyal following (just look at Lohanthony).

What’s changed is the arrival of YouTube, which (along with social media) makes creating, distributing, and consuming content effortless. Anyone can create and upload a YouTube video (as of this week you don’t even need a Google+ account), while fans can consume content anytime, anywhere thanks to mobile. On top of all that, social media helps creators develop a sense of closeness with their fans, and gives fans the opportunity to enjoy content among a community of their fellows.

Needless to say, the traditional model of channels and programming has been thrown out the window.

2) What was interesting: Facebook didn’t have a major presence at Vidcon. 

For all of the articles about Facebook pushing creators to natively host their content versus link out to YouTube, the social media giant wasn’t visibly present at VidCon to advance that conversation.

Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that many creators have spent years building their subscriber base on YouTube and enjoy a reliable (though potentially meager) revenue stream. For them, YouTube is a known entity. If Facebook is on a mission to draw in these creators, they’ll need to prove they have the tools to build a loyal audience and monetize content.

At Curiosity, we are bullish on Facebook as a distribution platform. With more than a million likes on our profile page, we see a big opportunity to be a distribution channel for creators. But for now,  as Susan Wojcicki says, “YouTube is their home...”

3) What was clear: there is a greater opportunity to enable content creators to build out their brand and sustain a business doing what they do best—creating great content.

Meeting the creators that Curiosity partners with every day was truly inspiring. Their infectious eagerness to swap mind-blowing facts and debate topics made me excited about how Curiosity can help them. We hope to provide them with a platform to build their brand and audience as well as with tools to monetize and merchandise on our site.

To ensure we get there, we’re establishing a Curiosity Creator Collaborative. Through this advisory group, we intend to capture feedback as we release new products and tools. We’re excited about how this will help drive innovation for Curiosity and success for creators.

Many of the creators I spoke with felt a level of responsibility to keep their audience curious and learning. At Curiosity, we aspire to be the channel that allows them to do just that.

Curiosity’s new mantra

- Michael Burke | Head of Partnerships, Curiosity.com | Twitter

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1 Million Facebook Fans!

We’re excited to announce we’ve just reached one million likes on Facebook! We reached this milestone almost completely organically. How? We think it has a lot to do with our focus on doing right by our fans. Specifically, our editors are painstaking about creating and sharing content that is compelling and relevant. We know that certain segments of our audience are passionate about math, while others love to learn about the human body. We share content accordingly.

We’re also focused on accuracy. In the ever-evolving world of scientific theory and discovery, it can be hard to always have the most complete, up-to-date story (just ask Gregory Brown from ASAPScience), but we strive to present ideas that are credible. And when we miss the mark, we make corrections.

Beyond that, our community managers love to engage with our fans. We respond as much as we can with comments, videos, stickers, and questions. Hearing from our fans gets us excited about what we do!

Many thanks to our fans for their support and for inspiring us with their knowledge, which they’ve generously shared with both us and each other. We certainly wouldn’t have made it here without you! Below we’ve collected five of our favorite posts from the past year as well as a fan comment from each. For more, follow us on Facebook!

The History of High Heels

Watch the Video | Featured Fan Comment:

The Sargasso Sea

Watch the Video | Featured Fan Comment:

Cheetah vs. Greyhound

Watch the Video | Featured Fan Comment:

Crab Nebula

Watch the Video | Featured Fan Comment:

Annie Oakley

Watch the Video | Featured Fan Comment:

As you can see, we have a passionate audience and we love engaging with them. But this isn’t limited to the confines of Facebook. Whether on Curiosity.com, in our mobile app, or on one of our other social media channels, we’re committed listening to our users, finding out what they love, and discovering ways to better serve them. We’re excited to be the brand that makes learning something new every day fun and easy. We look forward to continuing to grow and learn with you!

Our editorial team celebrating the one-million-fan milestone with ice cream.

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Top Picks for Kids (and Parents): Treasure Hunt!

The only thing more curious than a cat? A growing child. To feed hungry young minds, check out our top videos for kids this week:

Next time you search for change at the bottom of the sofa and come up dry, plan an expedition to unearth one of these five treasures you can still find (via Thoughty2).

Not included on the list: a leprechaun’s pot of gold. Brain Stuff explains what you'll really find at the end of a rainbow in this video.

There’s plenty of treasure in nature. Like this adorable squeaking caterpillar that Animalist found. Hear what it sounds like.

Or this cuddly skunk named Lollipop. No really, skunks are treasures. Watch the video from Animal Wonders.

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Partner Spotlight: Dr. Kiki Sanford, Host of This Week In Science

As the host of the This Week In Science podcast and radio show, Dr. Kiki Sanford shares news of exciting ideas and breakthroughs in the science world. (Helpfully, she’s a scientist herself—she earned her PhD in molecular, cellular, and integrative physiology.) Because her number-one passion is spreading amazing info, she’s a perfect fit for July’s Spotlight interview! Read our chat below to learn about her fascinating bird research, her favorite parts of TWIS, and the fellow scientists that inspire her.

CURIOSITY: You went to UC Davis for your PhD, and you studied neurophysiology, specifically in birds. Can you tell us a little more about your bird work? Are you still enthused about birds today?

DR. KIKI SANFORD: I'm absolutely still enthused about the birds today. My research was focused on spatial learning and memory, [and I] focused on specific behaviors that birds had, like food storing or migration. How does a bird, through its life, remember this amazing amount of information about where it has stored food to go back to and survive off of during the lean months? How does a bird remember how to get to its breeding ground, and how to get back?

C: We keep finding out how much smarter birds are than we originally thought!

KS: There are amazing statistics. There's this one species of bird, the Siberian tit, that lives in Siberia, a very northern climate. Before winter comes, as the days start getting shorter, it will store something like 250,000 pieces of food to survive off of. It's insane, a quarter-million pieces of food! And it goes back and finds these little stores because it knows where it's hidden them. I can't even remember where my keys are!

C: Eventually, you made the transition from full-time scientist to a someone in science communications, trying to teach others. What inspired this change?

KS: As an undergrad, I started doing work at the campus radio station. At first it was just a music show. And then, when I was in graduate school, I was talking to some friends one summer—we always talked about science—and we were like, "Haha, we should be on the radio!" And I was like, "We can be on the radio!”

So we started doing This Week in Science. At first it was just a hobby, but there came a point when I realized that my favorite moments during grad school were teaching classes, doing my radio show, and going to conferences and discussing science with people. I loved science, but the communicating of it was what I really wanted to do.

C: TWIS describes itself as “humorous, often opinionated, and irreverent.” Can you speak to the importance of these qualities for the show?

KS: Humor is a really important way to get ideas across to people. When they're smiling and laughing, people are more receptive to ideas. Being irreverent, that's been an interesting one for us, because some people who [start listening] to our show are very science- or engineering-minded. They're looking for something that has no joking and very strict language. Those people write me and say, "I don't like your show, you're not doing it the right way, you've lost me as a listener." And I'm like, "Well, you weren't my intended audience to begin with!" Our fun-loving attitude has helped us reach the audience we wanted to reach.

C: Do you have an episode of TWIS that stands out in your mind as a particular favorite?

KS: Earlier this year we did a live show in New York City for STEM Fest, and that was just brilliant. Being in front of a live audience took the show to a completely new level of energy that I don't think we've ever hit before. I remember we talked a bit about synthetic genomics ... balancing what gains humanity will get from designing genes vs. the threats [we'd] be up against.

C: You also started a show called Smart App Moms, which reviewed smartphone apps for children. As a parent and a scientist, do you have any advice for parents who want to cultivate their children’s interest in science?

KS: I think it's important to let your child explore … let them try and do things on their own, let them take things apart. Let them run around in nature. If they ask you a question, answer it to the best of your knowledge, but then try and give them something else to think about. So you're not just handing them knowledge, you're also inspiring them to keep thinking and keep asking more questions.

C: Who are some scientists that inspire you?

KS: There are so many! Sylvia Earle is an amazing oceanographer who has become one of the most important communicators of our time, getting the message out to people about the state of the oceans and climate change.

In terms of brain science, Miguel Nicolelis. He's been doing some really fascinating work at Duke University on brain-computer interfaces and brain-to-computer communication. It’s futuristic, pushing the envelope of what is possible, and I think it’s just fascinating. I like big thinkers.

C: How do you stay curious?

KS: Reading science fiction novels is something that I love to do. I'll read a book and there'll be these ideas in it, and I get curious. Then I go do a Google search or have a conversation with somebody. Reaching out and talking to new people, that inspires new thoughts, because you're bringing what they know into what you know. It's making space in my life so that I can integrate information from all sorts of different sources.

Interview conducted by Melanie Kassel

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What We Learned This Week: 7/10/15

Our editors wade through thousands of videos and articles every day to curate the five best things to learn in our app and on our site. Below, they share some of the most fascinating facts they stumbled upon this week.

The poop of blue whales is bright orange. This makes us wonder: why don’t more creatures discharge excrement in a color complementary to their skin? Learn all about blue whales via BBC Earth

Yawning and stretching at the same time? There’s a word for that: it’s “pandiculation.” Get more stimulating facts about sleep in this video from Earth Unplugged.

Contrary to common myth, Thomas Edison did not electrocute Topsy the elephant. Get the real story from Rutgers University.

Did you know it’s possible for a tooth to grow inside your nose? It is. It is also possible to have that tooth removed (thank goodness). GeoBeats has the photos.

Photo: Jacob Bøtter

From Guinness World Records, we learned that the oldest continually used national flag is that of Denmark (adopted in 1625).  Learn the myth behind the Danish flag’s origins and 24 other facts about national flags from List25.