![\"The](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/SkypeAScientist2.jpg\")
<\/a>\u201cWhere did you grow up?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do moths eat clothes?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDo aliens really exist?\u201d<\/p>\n
The teacher of these kindergarteners says she has never seen them as engaged as this, when they got to Skype a scientist.<\/p>\n
Her kindergarten class is in Venice, Florida, and the scientist was Nichole Broderick<\/a>, an assistant professor of molecular and cell biology, who was Skyping from her UConn Storrs office 1,300 miles away. Broderick is one of 497 scientists who talked with schoolchildren last semester through a project called Skype a Scientist, started by a third-year graduate student at UConn named Sarah McAnulty.<\/p>\n Aliens loom large in kindergarteners\u2019 minds, and Broderick was pleased to use the alien question to introduce the kids to invasive species, which, she explained, are just like aliens but from other ecosystems instead of other planets.<\/p>\n In other classes in other places, other scientists discussed the social lives of ants with middle schoolers; introduced fourth graders to the extreme environment of a Yellowstone geyser; and talked with high schoolers about the environmental consequences of war. The researchers hailed from all over this country, and the classrooms from as far away as Kyrgyzstan. But in every case they had been introduced by McAnulty.<\/p>\n Black Ink and Blue Blood<\/strong><\/p>\n McAnulty spends most of her time studying bobtail squid in associate professor Spencer Nyholm\u2019s biology lab<\/a>. She loves science and is, in Nyholm\u2019s words, a phenomenal graduate student, a self-starter who raises money and bobtail squid with the same dedication, for the lab depends on a steady stream of both. Late last year, McAnulty began thinking about politics, too. Because politics had begun to impinge on science.<\/p>\n The country was divided like never before in her lifetime. Anti-intellectualism seemed to be on the rise, and even truth itself seemed under attack. Academic research in the U.S. depends on public funding, and public funding depends on the goodwill of the people. And somehow, that goodwill seemed to be eroding.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a community, we were realizing that people view scientists as aloof and cold,\u201d says McAnulty, \u201ceven suspecting we had ulterior motives for sharing our data!\u201d<\/p>\n She says this with shock, as if comparing scientists exchanging data sets to Big Tobacco manipulating medical trials is unthinkable. And until seven or eight years ago, it was. But something has changed in the public\u2019s perception of scientists.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a feeling that for U.S. science to survive, we really need to get people trusting scientists again,\u201d says McAnulty. She\u2019s chatting with me near the entrance to her lab in the Biology\/Physics Building. Right next door is where she raises the bobtail squid. Bobtail squid are adorable, as cute as an invertebrate can be. Only a few centimeters long, with big eyes and eight short little legs, they can even glow in the dark, thanks to the colonies of bioluminescent bacteria that live symbiotically inside them. Nyholm\u2019s lab focuses on the relationship between symbiotic bacteria and their hosts.<\/p>\n McAnulty\u2019s part of the research zooms in on the squid\u2019s immune system and why it tolerates the glowing bacteria. Bacteria live in our guts, too, although they don\u2019t make us glow in the dark. Studying the squid\u2019s relationship with their symbionts could tell us more about ours. McAnulty has become an expert at drawing blood from the little mollusks. She says she doesn\u2019t mind it nearly as much as she did when she worked with mice.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt bad doing experiments on mice. Something about their red blood. I don\u2019t feel as bad with squid. And they usually come right back,\u201d swimming off into their tank, leaving nothing but a vial of bluish-green blood behind.<\/p>\n Wait \u2013 squid have blue blood?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s because of the hemocyanin,\u201d she tells me. Like hemoglobin in our red blood cells, hemocyanin uses a metal to bind oxygen. But where we use iron, squid\u2019s hemocyanin uses copper. As she explains this, the Pharmacy Building looms behind her. Its copper roof has oxidized to a rich bluish green color from exposure to rain and air. A similar chemical reaction accounts for a squid\u2019s blue blood.<\/p>\n ‘Ask Me Anything’<\/strong><\/p>\n She says she enjoys the back-and-forth with readers, and her answers are always informed by her own experience.<\/p>\n McAnulty has spent a lot of time talking to colleagues about the public perception of science. The problem seems clear: How can scientists remake their public image from aloof to approachable? Many scientists aren\u2019t all that great at talking about their work with nonscientists. Sometimes it\u2019s because they think no one else will be interested in hearing about it. Other times they\u2019ve been holed up in their lab talking only to colleagues for so long they\u2019ve forgotten how to communicate with regular folks. Get two researchers from the same sub-field talking to each other excitedly, and even other scientists from another field can quickly lose the thread as the two specialists descend into a rarefied dialect of Deep Geek.<\/p>\n McAnulty, however, likes talking about her research with nonscientists. She also has an intuitive grasp of marketing and outreach. She\u2019d started the Tumblr so she could share her work more broadly, and she\u2019d picked Tumblr because it reaches a younger, more female audience than other social media favored by scientists. Still, she knew that her Tumblr page was preaching to the choir. You don\u2019t seek out scientists who study bobtail squid unless you\u2019re already interested in squid. Most people are firmly ensconced in their own little bubbles.<\/p>\n Who Has the Most Questions? Kids<\/strong><\/p>\n But kids are different. Before graduate school, McAnulty spent a year working in a diabetes biology lab in the Max Delbr\u00fcck Center for Molecular Medicine<\/a> in Berlin. The university hosts a \u201cLong Night of Science\u201d each summer, when it opens up the labs to the public, and families participate in science activities until late in the evening. The kids were always curious about everything. What if she could talk to school-aged children, children who were probably apolitical and just interested in cool ideas?<\/p>\n One day she was chatting with a bunch of biologists on Twitter when the idea of reaching out to classrooms via Skype came up. \u201cWe just decided to do it. What\u2019s the worst that could happen? We make some teachers mad at us,\u201d she recalls. And so Skype a Scientist was born.<\/p>\n McAnulty began reaching out to teachers through Facebook. Would you like to have your class talk to a scientist? she asked. She aimed especially for teachers in geographic areas that might be pretty remote from real-life scientists, but she replied to any teacher who inquired. It quickly became apparent that making teachers mad was not going to be an issue.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t wait to do it again! I\u2019d recommend it to anyone in the school,\u201d says Cathleen Francis, the kindergarten and first grade teacher in Venice, Florida whose class asked about aliens.<\/p>\n \u201cSkype a Scientist is great for me,\u201d says Trudy Fadden, a middle school science teacher in Vermont. \u201cYou have to build a relationship. And you don\u2019t want it to be a dog and pony show, you have to make connections between the kids and the science.\u201d That real person helps tremendously, she adds, even if they are only on a screen. Fadden had two scientists Skype her class, one from Rutgers University and the other from UConn, a graduate student in the Klassen Lab<\/a> for molecular and cell biology named Emily Green. She has kept in touch with both researchers and plans to Skype them again next year.<\/p>\n Answering Curiosity in Every Language<\/strong><\/p>\n Fadden and Francis were early adopters, part of the first wave of teachers who simply answered Facebook inquiries. McAnulty would manually match them with a scientist in the right discipline and time zone. The requests kept coming. And then a teacher mentioned Skype a Scientist publicly at a conference in Texas and the Google sign-up form McAnulty had slapped together \u201cjust blew up,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Overnight, 200 classrooms signed up. Scientists showed equal enthusiasm. One would tell another, who would tell another, and by the end of July, McAnulty had more than 1,740 classrooms signed up and 1,755 scientists, with participants hailing from 17 countries and all 50 states. More press followed, including a feature on NPR\u2019s \u201cScience Friday.\u201d<\/p>\n UConn scientists continue to be major players. College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources graduate student Mauri Liberati did a total of nine sessions with one school. Three UConn biology professors \u2013 Nichole Broderick, Susan Herrick, and Ken Noll \u2013 have participated, signed up for more sessions, and involved more professors for this fall. They all say it\u2019s fun, and it\u2019s easy. Broderick says she enjoyed her Skype session with the kindergarteners as much as Francis did. \u201cHaving to explain concepts to 5- and 6-year-olds really makes you think,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>McAnulty put up a Tumblr page when she joined Nyholm\u2019s lab. She posts about her research, science books she likes, marine biology in general, and loads of cute squid pictures. She also has an \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d section. Readers ask all kinds of questions, as earnest as \u201cHow do you ethically source cuttlebone\u201d or \u201cHow do you pick the animal you want to study for the rest of your life?\u201d and as ridiculous as \u201cDo squids pass gas?\u201d Sarah replies to that last with, \u201cWell, yes and no. They do get air trapped in their mantles when they swim over a bubble, but they don\u2019t pass gas from their digestive tracts as far as I know!\u201d<\/p>\n