Hello, everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy.

Today is Monday, February 23, 2026, and I'm the host of the show, Dr. Kara, Santa Maria.

And as always, before we dive into this week's episode, I want to thank those of you who make

talk nerdy possible. Remember, this show is and will always be 100% free to download as long

as I keep making episodes. The way that we keep this going is by relying on the support of individuals just like you.

I use Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N as my sort of vehicle for that. So if you're interested in

pledging on an episodic basis, you know, as little as a dollar an episode really, really does

help to pay the,

the, I guess I shouldn't say the salaries. I'm not paying their salaries, but to pay for the

hard work of my, gosh, I don't know, coordinator slash producer slash assistant slash, she does

everything for me, Noel Dilworth, along with our incredible editing team at Warp Zone Post and, you know,

any other, you know, hosting fees and things like that.

Yeah, so if you are interested in pledging, as I said, all you've got to do is visit patreon.com

slash talk nerdy to learn more.

This week's top patrons include Chuck Blell,

David J. E. Smith, Daniel Lang, Mary Neva, David Compton, Brian Holden, Gabbo J. O'Rica Hagman,

Pasquale Jalati, and Joe Wilkinson. And apologies for my voice. I've been quite sick for the past couple of weeks. I think I'm

finally coming out on the other side of it. But man, this cold is lingering. Let me know if any of you

are dealing with the same thing. Not fun, not fun. All right. This week, I had the opportunity

to chat with Laura Poppick. She's a science and environmental journalist. She's written for all sorts of, you know, amazing outlets like the New York Times, Smithsonian, Scientific American, National Geographic, Wired, and a bunch of other places, Science Magazine. And she has a new book out and it's really exciting because it is a finalist for a lot of kind of big deal awards, including the Los Angeles Times book prizes and science and technology and also the Penn E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. The book is called Strata, Stories from Deep Time. So without any further ado,

here she is Laura Poppick. Laura, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks so much for

having me here. I'm super excited to talk about your new book. And right off the bat, this is so funny, but I would pronounce this word strata. Is that the actual accepted pronouncing? That is how I say it, but that's been a common question. And it's funny. It had never even occurred to me that that would be something that folks would struggle with, but it makes a lot of sense because. Yeah, that some people might say Strata, maybe, but that's weird to me.

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