Well, we've been home for the last few weeks, like probably many of you have.

Some parts of it have been a little hard, but there have been some really great parts, too.

One of the things that have been really exciting is to see how many illustrators, scientists, authors, podcasters, you name it,

have been providing free, educational, and fun information and lessons for all of us.

One program that we've discovered

is the Skype A Scientist Program. They have live shows nearly every weekday where you can listen

in on a talk with a range of different scientists and ask questions. They've had ones on space,

whales, ice shells, even bats. They also have an option to speak directly one-on-one with a

scientist. We got paired last

week with Dr. Dan Killam, who studies giant clams. Going into this interview, we really didn't

know that much about giant clams, but now we know a whole lot, like how old they can live,

how big they can get, how their eyes work, how they're similar to trees, all sorts of stuff.

We ended up speaking longer than we could fit

into one episode, so we've included the rest of our Q&A session as a free for everybody post on

our Patreon page. You don't need to support us to listen. The link is in the show notes. We hope you're

all staying healthy, and we hope you enjoy the interview.

I'm really happy to hear you guys have questions about clams or whatever.

Just to briefly tell you who I am, I am a scientist, a paleontologist, so I study fossils, long-dead animals, but study modern ones to compare them, and I focus on the clamps. Who here has seen a clam?

Raise your hand. One of you? Okay, two of you, three, all three of you have seen clams.

And I studied their shells because their shells have rings just like a tree. Have you

guys heard of tree rings? What do tree rings tell us? What are, what are tree rings? They tell us how much

water the tree is getting? And how old they are? Yeah, how old they are and yeah, things about their

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