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Music Hello and welcome back to Big Mood, Little Mood.

I am your host, Daniel M. Lavery, and with me this week in the studio is Melissa Hughes, an R&D scientist who designs medical tests.

She also, for fun, climbs, paints, reads books about the many ways systems are broken and tries to figure out what happiness can look like here and now.

So some ambitious downtime.

And Melissa is here, having answered a recent call that I put out for more scientists to befriend me.

I think that's how I put it, right?

I just said scientists contact me.

I think you literally said chemist and I was like,

well, that's, that's really me. That sounds exactly right. And you just knew you were like,

this is my moment. My time has come. Yeah, when opportunity knocks, you answer. Is there a particular

aspect of chemistry that you think is going to be useful today as we tackle some of the questions in front of us?

I mean, actually for the last question, I was like, I don't know about this.

Let me Google an academic paper and see if I can have some more information.

I'm so glad because I could also Google an academic paper, but I would not have the appropriate training to be able to read it appropriately.

And I was just like, well, I found a paper. And I can show you the abstract. And we have reached the limits of my expertise. So I mean, I also definitely don't have sociology training. So, you know, I'm also of limited use here, but I do know numbers. So there's that.

Weirdly, my last office job before I became a full-time writer was at an academic publisher,

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