No bones about it - with Owen Madsen
Hi, folks, and welcome to Earth on the Rocks, the show where we get to know the person behind the science. As always I'm your host Shelby Rader and joining us today is the first student in this series. We're going to start to feature students this season so you get to hear a little bit more about their perspectives and the things that they've found enjoyable or surprising about their experiences in graduate school and with the work that they're doing. And so the first student in this part of the series is Owen Madsen. Owen, thanks for joining us.
Owen:Hi, Shelby. Thanks for inviting me. I'm so excited to be here.
Shelby:Yeah. I'm excited to have you. So we're gonna get to know you over drinks today. And so what would be your drink of choice or as introduced at the end of last season, your drink of non choice if you have one?
Owen:Yeah. I'd say my drink of choice is definitely either mint or raspberry lemonade. I am a big summer person. Even though the sun is a deadly laser, I can't go outside for more than fifteen minutes without burning if I'm not wearing a lot of sunscreen or, like, full sleeves, but I love lemonade. This was just, a staple of growing up in Central Indiana.
Owen:Lemonade is the drink of the summer for me, And I just I really love the flavors. The raspberry lemonade is just like that extra bit of sweetness in mint lemonade if you make, like, like an herbal mint tea beforehand. And then you add it to your lemonade, you use that as your base. It's really tasty and really minty and really nice and refreshing. So I'd say that's my drink of choice, and my drink of non choice is anything alcoholic.
Owen:I don't do that. It's not my thing. I'm more or less allergic to alcohol. My doctor said, Don't don't do this. Don't do this to yourself.
Owen:And I was like, Great. I won't.
Shelby:Heard loud and clear.
Owen:Like, You got it. Not a problem. It's really nice for my budget, too.
Shelby:Yeah. I love raspberry lemonade. I have not tried mint lemonade and so I'm gonna have to try that now.
Owen:Yeah. It's really nice. The more if you happen to grow mint in your garden and it's a weed so you have to contain it into it like a pot or something but my family had a big garden growing up and I helped with it. And so we would harvest our own herbs for tea and like seasonings. Like our pizza sauce was always tomatoes that we had canned from our garden and like the parsley, the basil, the all of that came from our garden.
Owen:There would be times of the year where there would just be herbs drying on the counter. So it's like, you want to make a sandwich? Nice try, kid.
Shelby:Yeah. We got herbs in the way.
Owen:We got herbs in the way. And so there's always been like a stash of homegrown, home dried mint leaves that then you can crush with your classic mortar and pestle. I'm realizing now that this is just like little bit Little House on the Prairie, little bit like witchy. But, you know, that's just how it was. Homegrown mint for the win.
Shelby:So an earlier episode of this season, I proposed the idea that we should have a departmental drink testing because so many people in our department make different versions of drinks at home. And so I'm gonna suggest that you bring some mint tea, mint lemonade, whenever we ultimately have that. Gonna have to organize it, but we're gonna make it happen.
Owen:Yes, 1000%.
Shelby:So Owen, you're currently a PhD student in the department. So how would you identify or classify yourself if someone said, What are you working on? Or What do you do?
Owen:Yeah, what do I do? I like to think of myself as a professional question asker. I view myself as a scientist. I would say I view myself as a paleontologist. I study the past.
Owen:I study ancient life. If you were to ask my husband what I do for a living, I'm a molecule scientist, and that's his takeaway from all of my ramblings at him. Yeah. I'd say a paleontologist and a professional question asker. I also like to think of myself as an educator, someone who helps other people learn and ask questions themselves.
Shelby:Yeah, I think that that aspect of what you do is something that I personally really admire and so I want to talk both about some of the research that you're doing but also some of the education components of that because I think that's a really integral part of what we all do and yeah the way that you do it is seems like a lot of fun.
Owen:Yeah, I have a lot of fun with the education side of my research as much as the lab work.
Shelby:So on the sort of research side of things, what sort of questions are you asking as a professional question asker?
Owen:So question number one I always have is what was it like? A paleontology standpoint, if you take paleontology, it's like the big kind of bird's eye view of paleontology. It's the study of ancient life and ancient life interacting with each other, what was alive in the past, and those key questions really shape what was life like 5,000,000 years ago, 10,000,000 years, 300,000,000 years ago? These are the sorts of questions that a lot of paleontologists ask. And so I don't really study like dinosaurs or like even mammals or ice age creatures that when you tell people you're a paleontologist, especially small children, they're automatically like dinosaurs.
Owen:And if you're lucky, they'll have seen the animated movie Ice Age, and so maybe you get mammoths. It's like, no, nice try, Molecules. Yes. So most of my work is on the Grey Fossil Site in East Tennessee here in The US. And it's this lovely little four and a half to 5,000,000 year old fossil site that has things like alligators and a mastodon and tapirs and red pandas and camels and rhinos.
Owen:And this collection of animals for East Tennessee should be like sounding some klaxons. Yeah. Things What's happening were weird at the beginning of the Pliocene and of the Miocene in this area of the world. And so rather than studying the vertebrates, which have been very well studied and are continuing to be well studied.
Shelby:And and can you tell us what a vertebrate is for folks
Owen:who not animal with bones. So the chicken you eat for dinner, that's a vertebrate. The horses you see as you drive past them, that's a vertebrate. You and I are both vertebrates unless something has gone very,
Shelby:very wrong.
Owen:And it's pretty much anything with with a bony spine. So clams, not vertebrates. Bees, not vertebrates. Birds, yes, vertebrates. Dinosaurs, also vertebrates.
Owen:That's kind of the the line we have. Does it have vertebrae? The, you know, the individual bones in the spine. So all of them have been really well studied. And so what I'm doing is I'm taking the the dirt, the soil surrounding those bones and taking a look at that because it's all from the same time period as those animals.
Owen:And I'm seeing, okay, what are the molecules here? And what what are they? What do they come from? And what can that tell us about the broader environment at the Grey Fossil site? It's very big picture.
Owen:What else was here? And a lot of the times, the molecules, which we we all make molecules. Every living creature makes or produces molecules or modifies them. You go down, okay, there's the cellular level, there's the atomic level, and the molecular level is just kind of like right above the atomic scale. And certain molecules are associated only with certain organisms.
Owen:And so, the molecules I study in particular come exclusively from flowering plants or angiosperms. And at the Grey Fossil site, there are just flowering plant molecules. There are no pine trees. There's no conifers. No.
Owen:There are no ferns. So plants
Shelby:For this time period.
Owen:For this particular time period. Now if you go to East Tennessee today, Southern Appalachia, you will find pine trees. You will find conifers. You're gonna find all of these other plants because they're there today, but they weren't at this specific location at this specific time, which is really cool.
Shelby:Yeah.
Owen:And that's that's a lot of what I've been working on. And then going from that, I do a lot of, okay, what molecules were found here? Okay. Where are they elsewhere on the planet? How do those particular molecules at those locations compare?
Owen:What is the global distribution of this particular suite of molecules? What's happening here? And then using maps to try and figure out, okay, are there patterns? Are there trends? What's going on here?
Owen:And so that's a lot of the questions that I've been kind of tackling in the lab.
Shelby:And have you found any patterns or trends or things with this area and how it relates to what was happening in the region or what was
Owen:happening Yeah. So in kind of like the global setting, the particular suite of molecules I've been tracking, they're called oleonanes. I've been referring to them as plant derived pentacyclic triterpenoids.
Shelby:That rolls off the tongue.
Owen:I know. It's grand. But it's one of those things where these particular flowering plant molecules, these angiosperm markers, if they're found in coals or oils or or shales, just like a variety of past records, it means there were flowering plants there. And so if you go back in geologic time and you check the global distribution of these molecules, you can actually start to see the pattern of where these plants originated and how fast or slowly they spread over time.
Shelby:That's amazing.
Owen:It's really cool stuff. And it's not something we would have really been able to do twenty or forty years ago. That the field of organic geochemistry, which this kind of shovels into, is about as old as Simon is. So, maybe a little older. There is also a certain amount of computing capacity and mapping programs that we now have and is also a matter of have there been enough locations that have found these molecules that there is a pattern to it that we can then identify.
Owen:It's something on the order of 300 different locations, which over sixty, seventy, over like a 120,000,000 years of time. And so when you track that much time and that many locations, it's actually a really sparse record because they're they're really spread out. But most of that information has come about in the last twenty to thirty years based on research. So this is kind of cutting edge compilation question
Shelby:asking, Yeah, that's which I really really impressive. So you mentioned Saman. Saman Brassel, who was on the show last season, is a faculty member that you're working with while
Owen:you're Yeah, he's my research advisor and mentor, and just kind of the person that makes sure that I don't lose my mind going into a deep dive somewhere.
Shelby:And so you mentioned this idea of sort of compilation, so I know another aspect of what you've been doing is sort of reconstructions maybe is the right word for during these time periods as you're seeing this sort of proliferation of these flowering plants where things were because things geographically five million years ago were not where they are today, which I think is maybe a different way of thinking for some people. Can you talk to us a little
Owen:Yeah, bit so about our the continents as they are today North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and a variety of subcontinents, they haven't always been in the same place. The plate tectonics, we can actually track the movement of the continents, even just looking at the ocean. Or if you track, like, the Hawaiian Islands and some of the what once were islands on seamounts Mhmm. Yeah, you can actually see the motion of the plates on our planet, which is so cool. But in order to actually reconstruct where these things were back in time, you have to move the continents back in time as well.
Owen:And so the mapping that I have to do in order to properly reconstruct these past locations means moving the continents and moving those data points. So something that was a coal that's in, say, Eastern Europe right now wasn't always at those geographic coordinates. In the past, you have to move Europe and that data point back in time with plate tectonics to Pangaea, let's say, and it's a different location. And so what once was subtropical or tropical is now kind of a lot closer to the poles. That's a very different environment.
Owen:And so for any sort of paleoenvironmental reconstruction, you have to take into account that continents were not always in the same place. Some of them haven't moved a lot. Africa hasn't really moved a lot, but Antarctica has moved a lot. North America has chugged its way across the Atlantic. Like, we are moving.
Owen:And so these these different locations of the continents plays a big impact into what plants can and do evolve over time. So that's a lot of the reconstruction work that I've been doing.
Shelby:Yeah, I would imagine that when you have continents that at one time were in close proximity, you could see plant movement and evolution in ways that you couldn't if if they were Because they're completely separate. Exactly.
Owen:Yeah. And it's like, okay, so how do we have an oil from Venezuela and an oil in Nigeria? They're a world away now, but they weren't 140,000,000 years ago. And so that's kind of a lot of the mapping side of things. If you don't take into account that, you're going to end up with a lot of questions you otherwise might have been able to answer.
Shelby:Yeah, and your work uses a lot of interesting techniques that are sometimes used independently, but you do fieldwork, you do lab work, you're doing this sort of computer modeling. Are there aspects of any of those that, for you personally are sort of more exciting or things that you enjoy Oh,
Owen:anything that isn't outside. Yeah. I've gotten to participate in a fossil site dig in Saltville, Virginia, which is widely considered one of the first fossil sites. Like, the Jeffersonian sloth came from there. That was a miserable three days.
Owen:It was so hot. There were so many wasps. It was muddy. The best part of that weekend was the outreach day when I got to work with fourth graders and talk about, like, fossils and and do kind of, like, the educational component. I'm so pale, and I burn so easily.
Owen:The sun is a deadly laser. I said it at the beginning, and I hold to it now. I've worked at the Grey Fossil Site. I've I've traipsed around. I've collected things.
Owen:There are so many the outside world is a dangerous place, children. Like, everyone. I I don't know about you, but I prefer to be unstung Yeah. And unbitten by black widows and brown recluses.
Shelby:Mosquitoes.
Owen:Mosquitoes. I'm like, I would like to live to past my twenties. Yeah. That would be grand. And the outside is not conducive to that.
Owen:And, like, the digging the digging is really fun. When you when you go to a paleontological dig that isn't, you know, sandstone or sedimentary rock and it's just soil, it's just like digging in the in the garden. Except rather than digging straight down into the garden, that's a great way to get a shovel through bone and break things. And so the digging technique, you use this little two inch trowel, at least at the great fossil site. Right?
Owen:It's gonna be different at every single location. You get to carefully, like, shave off the first, like, millimeter or two of soil into the bucket. Shave it off into the bucket because your goal is to not break anything.
Shelby:Not damage anything.
Owen:Not damage anything. Now a paleontologist who works with the vertebrates and says that they've never broken anything, they're a liar. Everyone breaks something. The nice thing is that we have reconstructive techniques. We can put it back together.
Owen:It's okay. But you do try and do as little damage as you can in the field so that in the prep lab and in collections, you don't end up making people hate you, by repeatedly smashing things that a little bit of time prevented.
Shelby:So you have also mentioned that some of your favorite aspects of some of what you've done are the educational outreach components. And I know you do a lot of that work and are really good at it. So can you tell us a little bit about that aspect of what you do?
Owen:Yeah, yeah. And this really comes back to how I view science as an activity. That I view science to be made up of three components: background research you've got to read what everybody else has been doing. This is a terrifying task at times. Especially when it's like, okay, I'm coming into this field, my mentor's been in this almost from the beginning.
Owen:His mentors were, like, the founding people in the field. I'm reading sixty plus years of literature.
Shelby:It's overwhelming.
Owen:It's thousands of papers, and that's a lot. And now Simon's really fortunate in that he's gotten to just read like papers as they've come out, and he gets to stay updated, and he's not doing this backlog here in the in twenty twenty twenty five, that it's quite terrifying at the start, but it's well worth it to get the background information, to go to class, to go to lectures, to go to seminars. Like, okay, gotta get the background information. You have to actually almost know what you're doing. Almost.
Owen:Almost. Yeah. You don't have to know what you're doing at any point in time. You just have to have the resources and the awareness to go get those resources to be able to then know what you're doing.
Shelby:Yeah.
Owen:We're not doing science isolation. And then from there, it's like, okay, now we've got to ask the questions, we've got to do the fieldwork, the labwork, the computing, the modeling. And actually then is part three, which is communicating the science. If you don't communicate the science, you might as well didn't do it. And part of that communication looks like writing scientific papers and articles and going to conferences and giving talks and making posters and giving seminars and becoming an educator yourself.
Owen:And a lot of that is science outreach for me personally. What am I doing if I can't explain what I'm doing to a general audience? What am I doing? Do I really know what I'm talking about if I can't talk to a 10 year old about this? And now the way you present that information, the way you talk about research and science as a whole changes drastically depending on who you're talking to.
Owen:I find that absolutely fascinating that some of the outreach I've done is very streamlined. That, okay, we're gonna make plaster casts and molds. And the thing that I remember most from that isn't necessarily the act of making the plaster casts and molds and modeling what that is by actually doing it. It's a really common stabilization technique in paleontology. Wrap every large fossil in plaster and make sure it's secure and then move it.
Owen:But it's not necessarily that moment that's what people remember. It's the individual personal connection of you are a scientist. You, the person talking to this child or children, you're the scientist. You're the expert. But it isn't about that.
Owen:It's about seeing them engage with what you're talking about. That's what really matters. Because it means that they're asking questions and thinking about it and maybe they get to go home and then they have a discussion at home with a parent or a guardian or one of their siblings or a friend. Hey, I got to do this really cool thing over the summer. I got to be so messy and covered in plaster and that guy was really passionate about it, but he also mistook a little piece of plaster for being an animal cracker and ate it, which did happen and the kids did laugh at me.
Owen:But that's okay. It tastes gross, by the way. Yeah. Plaster in Paris, zero out of 10 stars. Very gross.
Owen:Does but looks identical in color to animal crackers. It's a problem. But it that's that's not even the point, though. The point is that the kids had so much fun. Did one of the kids step into the square that you're not supposed to step into because it eats boots?
Owen:Yeah. He had to be airlifted out, like hands under armpits. It made a terrible suction noise when he got pulled out. But it happens. Those experiences are fundamental for forming a curiosity in the world and a joy of learning.
Shelby:Yeah, they're so formative and you never know what the trigger is going to be for different people and so it's important to have those opportunities for people of all ages to engage, but especially younger people and for our fields because I think, you know earth and atmospheric sciences both are so integral to our daily lives and to so many aspects of industry but aren't always things that are sort of at the forefront of education at the K-twelve level. And so having those opportunities to really reach out and engage and communicate and inspire people I think is really really important for what we do and it's a lot of fun that you get those opportunities to do that.
Owen:Yeah, it's so much fun. I've loved I've done kind of field outreach like at Saltville and I've done museum activity outreach. I've built kind of pop up museum activities before. It's always a really fun challenge to take a complex topic and make it hands on. I really love that challenge.
Owen:How do you talk about how grasses wear at teeth faster and that's why horses have giant teeth that extend way into their jaws? How do you take that concept and make it a hands on activity? Chalk. You use chalk in place of teeth and you have kids rub it on normal paper, kind of tree leafy greens, and you have them rub it on sandpaper for your grass and just because grass is just so much worse on the teeth because of the silica in it. It's don't don't go eating grass.
Owen:It's a great way to destroy your teeth. There's a reason we are omnivores, but not grass eaters. We're not adapted for it as humans. And the difference is night and day. And this this connection and then to pull out, okay, and here's a horse tooth or or a mass a mammoth tooth, which is they're grass adapted.
Owen:And then you pull out a mastodon tooth, it's way smaller. It's way different. And it's like, oh, wait. The environments that these animals were living in dictated a portion of their actual bodies. This has real impact.
Owen:And I love that sort of challenge of, okay, complex topic. Let's make it hands on. A lot of brainstorming goes into this. I'm rarely ever working by myself. There's almost always a team of other undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, staff members at various museums to actually make this work.
Owen:And then of course, test day is the activity, the the spotlight hour itself and seeing, okay. What works? What doesn't work? What do I do next time? What improvements am I making?
Owen:And jotting those notes down. So the next paleontology day or next Darwin day or next science fest, those improvements can be incorporated and made. I approach education a lot like I approach my lab research. What do I do? I test it.
Owen:I evaluate it. I tweak it, I change it, I modify the variables and I do it again because how can you get better at something if you only do it once?
Shelby:Well and I think that's part of what what I find really fun about some of the outreach stuff too is it's like you mentioned with research it's so iterative. You know like how do we improve this how does this get better and how can we reach out and engage more and more people in ways that that sort of fundamental to how they're viewing the world or viewing this aspect of science and maybe inspiring them to be involved in the field. So on that, what inspired you to get into the field? How did you end up in sort of this trajectory that you're in?
Owen:That is a very good question. So actually starts in elementary school for me, which is not very common. No. I know. I know there are kind of stereotypes around horse girls.
Owen:I was the lion kid.
Shelby:Yeah.
Owen:I loved lions. The between the lions show, Lion King, Lion King two. I never watched Lion King one and a half, but I loved lions. I hated that our school elementary mascot was a tiger. Tigers were losers.
Owen:It was this was this was my attitude at nine years old. I was very intensely into lions. They were so cool. And all of my classmates knew this. I would not shut up about lions.
Owen:They were like my thing. And at one point in time, my school library was getting rid of like old magazines and one of my classmates picked up the National Geographic Kids Lions magazine in the early 2000s if not late 90s kind of situation. And that classmate gave it to me because obviously it was a free book. He didn't want it. But he knew that I loved lions and I wasn't walking past the library.
Owen:So he snagged it for me. Thank you, Zachary. And I opened it and I read through it, obviously. I'm reading everything I can get my hands on about lions at this point to the point of exhaustion of everyone around me. And I get to the center spread of where lions are located geographically, and there were four lions.
Owen:Now today there are only two lions, the Asiatic and African lions, but there were there was a North American lion and a European cave lion on this map. And there was information about this and I was like, this can't be true. This cannot be true. How come I didn't know about lions? How come I don't have no we could have had North American lions if I had been born ten thousand If years only.
Owen:It was so infuriating to me. I thought that the magazine was wrong which explains a lot about my nine year old self. I was not homeschooled for a very good reason. And I was like, No, this can't be true. And so I go online, again, relatively earlier days of the internet, but National Geographic had a really good up and going website at the time.
Owen:I looked it up and it was real. And there was data and research on it and I was like, no way. This is so cool. And of course I had to learn everything about the North American lion because this was a lion I didn't know about. The European cave lion, I mean, cool, but like whatever.
Owen:I had to know about the North American lion. It was the biggest. It was bigger than modern tigers. Like, clearly this was important for my vendetta against tigers.
Shelby:Yeah.
Owen:And so obviously I had to learn what they were eating, what they were chasing, who else was alive at that time. And so I kind of got sucked into this like ice age paleontology black hole a little bit. And so when I went to go choose which college I would go to during high school, I went online to my school library's scientific research paper search function and typed in the scientific name for North American Lion and I found papers by people and I noted which schools they were at and that is how I chose which colleges to apply to. And I knew I was interested in paleontology. I wanted to do that sort of research, I didn't know what research I was going to do but I knew I wanted to do research and I wanted to not stay local to Central Indiana.
Owen:So those were kind of the deciding factors and that's how I got into so I applied to various places. I attended East Tennessee State University, which is about twenty minutes away, fifteen if you speed just a little, from the Grey Fossil site and its museum. And so the geosciences department there does a lot of collaboration with the museum and there are faculty that overlap between museum and the university. And it's right nestled in the mountains and I loved it. So I was a geosciences major from the start just because I wanted to prove National Geographic Lions for kids wrong.
Owen:I was wrong. So that's kind of how I got into this field.
Shelby:Yeah, that was an early onset sort of goal in mind, which like you mentioned is sort of unusual, but itis fantastic that that was the case for you.
Owen:Yeah, itis ledO Now, to be very clear, I have never done research on Panthero leo atrox, the North American lion. I did I did get the chance to go out to to California to go to La Brea and see in person my favorite animal. If you were to ask me my favorite animal today, it's the North American lion. My favorite dinosaur is the chicken, but animal in general, it's the North American lion. And it was just, yeah, very early.
Owen:Very early. And not very common. Yeah. Because a lot of the times geosciences is a I oopsed into it. Yep.
Owen:And here I am. And my research has changed. In my undergraduate, I focused a lot on the trees from the Grey Fossil Site, the wood itself, because that also got preserved. And there are these four and a half, 5,000,000 year old fossil ring, like tree rings preserved.
Shelby:Which is crazy.
Owen:It's so nuts. So my undergraduate research really focused on, okay, how do we preserve this wood in a way that other people in the future can then study it? Because wood behaves very differently than bone when it comes to no longer being saturated with groundwater. The drying process is just a little different and caring for it is a little different. But that was my undergraduate research, then I found IU actually during my undergraduate research search that I applied to IU as, you know, a potential undergraduate and ultimately decided, no, ETSU is a much better fit for me.
Owen:More trees, further from home. Let's let's run this adventure. Let's do something different. And so I knew that IU had a good program. I had talked to David Polly as part of my college application process back in 2017.
Owen:And so it was just a matter of, okay, I'm doing something different. Let me apply here. Let me talk to some of the faculty here. And it was a really good fit. I applied to both the IU Geography and Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Owen:And in my conversations with Geography, it came out that, no, you should really apply to EAS. The questions you're asking are a much better fit for this department.
Shelby:So in this sort of timeline, even from from when you were first inspired to maybe think about paleontology to where you are now, is there any aspect of of sort of that trajectory going through undergrad and the graduate school that has been surprising to you or might be surprising to other folks that are listening that are curious about what this sort of experience is like?
Owen:Yeah, I'd say that the arts and the influence of the arts was really surprising to me. I view science as a companion and a best friend to the arts, that the arts are meant to inspire us as people, as humans, as beings in this world, and the sciences is very much a way of understanding and explaining the world. They kind of go hand in hand, that it's really hard to be a scientist if you don't approach the world with whimsy and wonder. And art really helps inspire that. And so the influence of the arts, I think, has been really surprising to me.
Owen:I took a costume design class in my undergraduate for kicks and giggles. I'm a hobbyist sewer. I make a lot of my own clothes just so that they actually fit my body. Men's fashion is very boring at times. And so it's just like, no, I want the crazy patterns.
Owen:Let's go. So the influence of the arts and taking time to actually draw or sketch or think about clothing that are I quilted during a large number of my undergraduate and graduate classes that I had. I call them math magical quilts that my first quilt, I completely hand sewed it. 100% hand sewing like you would three hundred years ago. And it was all hexagons and all yellows, oranges, and reds.
Owen:And I stitched waggle patterns for the quilting. And so it's this like bee quilt, and it has some of the science involved in it. And I've done a couple of like tessellations, which are repeating patterns in really interesting ways. I've done a tessellation quilt and it's just a really good way for me to actually be thinking and taking notes. Sometimes I look at one quilt that I have and it's like, Oh, I remember.
Owen:That's when I was in Simon's organic geochemistry class and we were talking about when people licked oils. Don't do that. Don't lick the fresh oil from the ground. We have better techniques now. Oh, it's a sweet oil.
Owen:Yeah, let's not ingest oil byproducts or oil straight from the ground. Bad idea. But that's sort of like time to think and meditate and just let a problem that I'm working on churn over in my brain while doing an art has been so useful helpful and very surprising. If you were to have asked 12 year old, 15 year old me, I would have said, What? No.
Owen:That has nothing to do with science, but it has everything to do with my process and the way that I engage with research science as a whole is very much the arts that I'll go art museums now with my husband and we will just look at the art and there's science behind the art as well, that different pigments in, like, oil paintings, those have specific molecular signatures that, okay, I don't know them off the top of my head, but I know about them. And the wood in the frames of various pictures has been identified and used to check, Oh, hey, is this painting actually valid? Is it from this time period? Using dendrochronological techniques, using tree rings to backdate them. And so this, like, intersection between the arts and sciences is really was really surprising and it's so rewarding now that it's one thing to have fun facts about molecules but nobody can see a molecule.
Owen:To have interesting little tidbits to add to a broader discussion about arts is really fun.
Shelby:Yeah, think, I mean, I'm a huge proponent of recognizing this intersection of science and arts because I think a lot of times people view them as very separate fields, know, that science is very rigid and structured and that arts is where you are able to have this creative process occur when so much of both of them are influenced by one another, as you just said. And even so much of the earth sciences, you can really benefit from being creative and being artistic. There's so much sketching involved when you're in the field and trying to draw things to scale. And I'm a terrible artist. You've had me in class.
Shelby:You know that my art skills are not the best. They leave a lot to be desired.
Owen:Room to grow.
Shelby:Room to grow. Yes, an opportunity for personal development is how I view that. But it's really useful to even be able to draw a rough idea of where something is in relation to something else. People who are capable in both of those areas can make really, really meaningful products, both in terms of their research but also in terms of the sort of outreach idea that we've talked about. I think having engaging visuals and aesthetically pleasing photos or pictures or things that you've drawn as diagrams can make such a big difference.
Shelby:And so I'm totally on board with you on this idea of sort of the intersection of these two things being surprising and also a lot of fun.
Owen:Oh, so much fun. It's so much fun to be talking to say like a music major. And they're talking about their violin and how it works and to be able to connect with them like, oh yeah, a variety of various high profile violin makers in the sixteen hundreds. Their instruments are now checked today based off of the growth patterns in the wood that was used to build them. To be able to make that connection is so wonderful.
Owen:I very much like to approach the world with what's something new I can learn today? What is the next thing? I went to an opera a couple of weekends ago, and it's in French, and I'm maybe, maybe two thirds fluent for like a 10 year old in French. And to be there and to just like experience this, it had me asking and thinking critically about how would I communicate language? How do I communicate colors and animals in the way this opera it was meant for children in its inception.
Owen:And it was just it was such an engaging thought process on what lessons are we communicating to small children? How would I communicate these concepts to small children? And how has that changed before versus after viewing this opera? It was I love asking questions about anything and everything. The more knowledge I can learn, the better.
Shelby:So speaking of questions, I have sort of one one final question for you before we get to end segment of the yes, please. If someone is listening to this, especially someone who's younger and may think this is maybe a career trajectory I'm interested in, what advice would you have for them? And I think this is going to be so helpful because you're sort of like in the midst of all of this now and so so what would you tell someone who is curious about this field or how to go about things?
Owen:I would say get involved. A lot of small towns have museums. A lot of big towns have museums. Go see if you can go volunteer. Go talk to people.
Owen:Don't be afraid that a specialist is going to shoot you down just because you're young or because you don't know anything. Ask questions. Ask all the questions. Do a little bit of reading. Maybe you're not actively reading giant scientific articles.
Owen:A lot of the times, a lot of that information goes over my head. I'm not a specialist in most fields. In fact, lot of graduate school has been learning how much I just don't know.
Shelby:Yeah.
Owen:And that's okay. I think embracing embracing that I don't know everything, embracing that you don't know everything, none of us can. There's just not enough hours in the day. So embrace it, ask questions, find some place to volunteer, Ask questions of your teachers. Talk to your teachers.
Owen:One of my best experiences in high school was asking a lot of questions of my poor AP psychology teacher. Why this? Why are we studying this? Get those why questions, get that big picture and contextualize it. I'd say that that talk to people.
Owen:Talk to your teachers. Talk to your friends. Talk to the people who you're not friends with. They might have really interesting perspectives.
Shelby:Be curious.
Owen:Be curious.
Shelby:Yeah. I think that's always good advice. So we wrap up every show with our Yes, Please segment where we each get to get on our soapbox and talk passionately about something in the moment for a minute. And so I will give you the option if you want to go first or second.
Owen:I think I want to go first. Okay.
Shelby:And so this will be Owen Madsen's Yes Please.
Owen:I am so excited. I just started a reading challenge. The goal is one book, one physical hand page turning book made of paper a month, which is a very reasonable goal. The goal is to obviously, I'm going to exceed it. I've already met my goal for October even though we weren't my husband and I are both doing this.
Owen:We have a lovely library at home and so we both have about thirteen, fourteen books in our to be read pile for this challenge. I'm so excited. Read Roan Hood most recently, which is Robin Hood's Daughter. It's this short little it's like 130 pages. It's meant for late elementary schoolers, but she was a delightful heroine.
Owen:Roan was so cool, and I just so excited to be reading books, and reading physical books and reading them with someone I love.
Shelby:Amazing. So is there any sort of theme for the 12 books, or you just have each selected? There there are a couple
Owen:of rules. So we both read a lot of manga and graphic novels. Those were excluded. We can read those on our own. They can't in order to count for the challenge, they can't be a book we've read before.
Shelby:Okay.
Owen:My husband read Roan Hood as a kid, and that's part of why we have a copy. And so he actually did a quick little reread of it. That didn't count for his book of the month, but it does count for mine because I had never read it before. So that's another rule. We obviously had to have a physical copy in our library.
Owen:But other than that, it can be any genre. I've got Radium Girls in my list, which I'm really excited to read. I've got Ronin, which is Star Wars novel based off of one of the Visions shorts that Disney put out. My husband has Cinder from the Lunar Chronicles in his pile. There are a couple of books that I've read that he hasn't in his pile.
Owen:I've got Stardust by Neil Gaiman in mine that Howl's Moving Castle, just like a nice variety. I'm a big fantasy lover. I love the the fantasy genre. I love the dragons. I love the magic.
Owen:I like sci fi. I like how curious it is. I I like asking what if. And I love seeing how different authors cover that. And so a lot of my a lot of the fantasy books, there have been more than I might like to admit that I have acquired at discount prices at used bookstores and then didn't read.
Owen:So a large part of this is to try and fix that problem. Yeah. The other rule is that if it's a big series, only the first book or the next book you haven't read goes on the to be read pile with the assumption you'll read the rest of them. There are four more books after the first Rowan Hood. I plan to blow through them this week or next.
Owen:Yeah. I'm so excited.
Shelby:I love this idea. I think that's such a good way to work through your pile of previously purchased books. I think we all have a We stack of
Owen:all have them. If you buy physical books, you have that stack.
Shelby:Yes. And I also love the caveat that it needs to be a physical paper book. I think that is an excellent choice to sort of disconnect from the electronics for a little bit.
Owen:Absolutely.
Shelby:Alright. Owen, if you don't mind to time me. Yep. This will be my yes, please. Yes, please.
Shelby:Can we all have better airport etiquette? This is a little different from how I usually do my yes, pleases, but I've been traveling recently. I just came back from a conference this week. Traveled I over the summer for a couple of conferences and some field work. And something about the airport brings out the worst in people's behaviors, I feel like.
Shelby:It's like we lose all sense of what it means to be human. And so if we can, you know, be more patient, be more kind, maybe don't hover over the baggage claim as bags come out but give a little space so that people can grab their bags, I think everybody would appreciate that. Travel nowadays isn't that fun. I think it's stressful. Sometimes you're running behind, flights get delayed.
Shelby:Everybody's on edge. And so whatever we can do individually, collectively to help bring that down, I think we should all try to do that. Be kind to your flight attendants, be kind to your fellow passengers. Just try to increase the airport etiquette a little bit.
Owen:And time. Do you have a favorite airport food? Oh. Because whenever I go to the airport, I always get so dehydrated.
Shelby:Yeah. Yes.
Owen:And so I always whenever there's an airport with soft pretzels tanned, I will get soft pretzels and lemonade from them. And it just like fixes all of my airplane woes because normally I'm hungry and tired and cranky and I'm trying to be as good of a person as I can, so I have to have a snack. Yeah. I'd say that's my favorite.
Shelby:My go to airport snack when I'm traveling are hard pretzels, like the small pretzels. Snyders specifically, yes. One of the things I allow myself when I travel on airplanes is I don't typically drink pop. Like, I mostly am just drinking water. So whenever I fly, that's sort of the highlight of the flight is that, you know, they give out the free sodas, and so I always will take one and enjoy it quite a bit.
Shelby:Owen, thank you so much for being on. This has been great to have you on, and I think this is gonna be a really fun aspect of the show coming up as having you and other students give their perspectives on things.
Owen:Yeah, was great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Shelby:And join us next week when we have a new guest. See you then. Earth on the rocks is produced by Cari Metz with artwork provided by Connor Leimgruber, with technical recording managed by Kate Crum and Betsy Leija. Funding for this podcast was provided by the National Science Foundation grant, EAR dash 2422824.
