Hi, Wild Thing listeners. I've got some good news and some better news.

First, the good. I'm hard at work on season three of Wild Thing. Yeah, COVID is making it a little

hard to report from the field, but I promise it will happen. In the meantime, here's the better news.

While the main 10 story episodes for season two are finished,

I'm going to be releasing a bonus interview every month until season three comes out.

These interviews will be with scientists, uifologists, artists, and writers,

all kinds of different people who have something interesting to say about extraterrestrial life.

Like, for instance, the woman will be

hearing from today, Clara Sousa Silva. She works at MIT and was one of the scientists that found

evidence for potential life on Venus. That's right, Venus. The week's season two launched in

September 2020, scientists announced that they had found traces of a gas called

phosphine in the clouds of our next door neighbor. On Earth, only microbes and laboratories

make the gas, which raises the question of whether the phosphine on Venus might indicate

that there's life there. There's still a lot of research and testing and retesting and re-re-testing to be done before we'll have an

answer. But it's still pretty exciting to think about. Clara Sousa Silva was a member of one of the

teams working on this finding. She's something of an expert on phosphine. And she's an astro-quantum

chemist, which is a very cool job title for a job I know nothing about.

There's a lot of quantum chemists who you kind of study the way that molecules behave

at the tiniest scale and how they vibrate and rotate and what that does to light that comes

near them. But very few of them apply that work to astronomy. And so that's what makes me

a quantum astrochemist. All right. And you're the first of your kind or one of the one of a few of

your kind? I'm trying to convince more people to say they're quantum astrochemist. I once was at a

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