This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lickman, sitting in for Ira Flato.

Later in the hour, we'll take a look at what happens to your microbiome when you move to another country.

But first, this Tuesday, people across the country went to the polls,

with Democrats taking control of the House and Republicans expanding their representation in the Senate.

But how about the science seat count? Americans voted in eight new legislators

with backgrounds in science. Joining me now to talk about that and other science stories from the

week is Ryan Mandelbaum. He's a science writer at Gizmodo here in New York. Welcome back to Science

Friday. Nice to be here, Flora. How's everything going? Everything is great. How about you? I'm good. Okay, so this week, I mean, everyone was talking about the election. Who were these new legislators with science backgrounds? Sure. So there's a bunch of names. We've got Lauren Underwood, Joe Cunningham, Elaine Luria. I don't need to go through the whole list, but they're all Democrats.

And they're a bunch of candidates that people are especially excited about because they've taken over Republican seats or their first timers.

And they have backgrounds in science, such as nursing degrees and engineering degrees and even one worked in nuclear

reactors.

Here's what I want to know.

Will it make a difference in terms of science policy?

Like if we look to the past and look at scientists in Congress or in the Senate, have

they done more for science than people without

science backgrounds? In fact, I don't know. I think that we recently were this past year

wrote an article about Bill Foster, who was the only science PhD in Congress, and he seemed to

stress a bit more frustration. And in fact, recently, Maggie Kerth Baker from 538 had written something along the lines of, we haven't decided what it means to be a science candidate at all or whether, you know, it'll do anything at all. So it's, we're unclear. I guess we'll wait and see. Oh, yeah. Okay. So there's another election coming up, a science election of sorts. Tell me about it. Yeah. So the kilogram, which, you know, approximately little more than two pounds, is getting a, it's getting redone.

So we're frequently, you know, the old kilogram is actually just a hunk of metal in Paris.

Wait, wait.

So there is an actual kilogram.

Yeah, it's called Le Grande K.

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