Hello, everyone, and welcome to talk nerdy. Today is Monday, July 28th, 2025, and I'm the host of the show, Dr. Kara, Santa Maria. And as always, I want to thank

those of you who make talk nerdy possible. You are the reason that I can keep recording

these fascinating interviews week after week and get them up on air for anybody who wants to listen

to download 100% for free. Basically, our funding model at

this point because of how seldom and how dried up the sort of ad sales world is, is almost

fully on Patreon. You will notice that there are programmatic ads at the beginning of the show

and maybe once or twice throughout the show depending on its length.

That is a model that almost all podcasts are sort of have to use at this point in order to have our hosting.

But those programmatic ads are very, very different than host red ads, pulling back the curtain a little bit here.

They don't contribute financially nearly to the extent of host red ads and pulling back the curtain a little bit here. They don't contribute financially

nearly to the extent of host red ads, and those have just really dried up a lot. So

always open to advertising or to partnerships, if that's something that you're interested in,

especially if it goes hand in hand with the science and social justice topics that we often talk

about on the show, especially if it highlights women

or gender minorities or people of color or just folks who usually or historically have not

been empowered to have their stories told. But that said, really Patreon is the way that we're keeping

this going. It's how I pay my producer, Noel. It's how I pay my editors. And yeah, it's how I've been doing this now for 11 years. We are on episode 500, what episode? 561 right now. And so I do want to thank those of you who have contributed on a weekly basis.

They include Anu Badovaj, Chuck Blell, Daniel Lang, David J.E. Smith, Joseph Lomore, Mary Neva, Brian Holden, David Compton, Gabriel F. Harmio, Joe Wilkinson, Pasquale Jalati, Ulrika Hagman, and many, many, many more. Those are just the top patrons,

but so many of you have contributed over the years, and I'm just really, really, really grateful.

Okay, so let's get into it. This week, I had the opportunity to chat with Star Vartan.

She is a science writer, and she has contributed to a lot of different outlets that

you've probably read, including Scientific American, National Geographic, and also news outlets like CNN,

...