Hello, everyone and welcome to talk nerdy.

Today is Monday, February 16th, 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, and the way that we keep it going

is by relying on the support of individuals just like you. If you'd like to pledge your support on an

episodic basis, all you've got to do is visit patreon.com. That's p-a-t-r-e-on-com slash talk nerdy to learn more.

This week's top patrons include Krister Jansson, Chuck Blell, David J J.E. Smith, Daniel Lang, Mary Neva, Thomas

Sadovich, Gabbo J, David Compton, Brian Holden, Ulrika H. Pascuali Jalati, Joe Wilkinson,

Jonas H. and Namita Anaskins. Thank you all so, so, so very much. All right, let's get into it. So this

week I had the opportunity to chat with Mindy Weisberger. She is a science writer and media producer.

She worked at so many cool jobs. Like after she studied film at Columbia,

she produced wrote and directed media

for the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

So she's got, you know, videos about dinosaurs

and astrophysics and biodiversity and evolution,

and they're in museums and science centers all over the world.

She also is a science editor for Scholastic and did a lot of on-camera work presenting science

experiments and doing voiceover for science videos and making original classroom materials

to help support science learning.

And of course, you've probably read her work because she has bylines across science

platforms like Live Science, CNN, Scientific American, Space.com, and How It Works, Magazine.

But she has a new book out.

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