How do birds fly? And how is chemistry involved?!

0:00Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie Do It gaming team take on Gilly DeKing and wallow $267 million gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown four rounds, multiple games, one winner plus a half-time performance by multi-platamartists, Traviem McCoy, watch all the action and see who wins in advances to the championship match against Neo right now at globalgamingleague.com. That's globalgamingleague.com. The maps app that came with your phone, it's fine if you enjoy waiting and guessing and inefficient routes or you could use MapQuest. MapQuest is back with live directions, real-time traffic and faster routes, it moves when you move. Best of all, no prints are needed, no paper, no more misterns, just you and the app. Get there fast with MapQuest, download the MapQuest app on the app store or visit MapQuest.com. MapQuest, still getting you there.

1:00Okay, Jam, have you ever seen a bird fly? Uh, yes, probably many times. Well, I've ever wondered how they do it. I kind of have, in fact, you know, I didn't ask you this, but one of my kids, my inquisitive oldest, did ask me about bird flying and feathers and so like that, nothing long ago. Really? I couldn't, I couldn't really, I mean, I didn't know, I didn't know. Well, you know, I've been auditing a bird class as a semester and we recently covered the physics of how birds fly and I was immediately so excited to share about this on the podcast. Are you ready to hear about it? I'd love to hear about it. Yes, let's do it. Alright. Hey, I'm Melissa. I'm Jam. And I'm a chemist. And I'm not. And welcome to chemistry for your life. The podcast steps, you understand the chemistry of your everyday life.

2:03And hopefully every day you're seeing birds fly because that is what makes the world a better place. Yes. And so to get ahead of a question, a comment that will probably be commented upon this video, I would guess. Okay. At least it has happened. Okay. You said the physics of bird flying. I did. So my question here is probably some chemistry in there, right? Right. So I have a little disclaimer actually up at the top. Okay. So my bird professor taught us about the, like, here's sort of the basics of aerodynamics. And then I had some questions. So I dug a little bit deeper and there the disclaimer is if you've learned about how birds fly the physics of it, there are some common misconceptions that are often taught. So I was looking and I didn't really feel like the answers were satisfying to me. And then I found a physics education research. So that's like what I do, but for physics, basically talking about how we often teach

3:04the physics of flight wrong. And so I went really in depth on the, there's and a few other people there like, okay, this is how and why a flying happens. And so I took all that in and I synthesized it and I'm now trying to give you my perspective on what's happening at the molecular level with the physics. Okay. Got it. So this is a chemist's perspective on the science of flying. Right. Okay. A little bit of like a not chemistry off the cuff, but my interpretation of what I took in from these other other sources and like tried to put together. And I did run it by my husband, who's an engineer, and I was like, does the physics of this makes sense to you when I explain it this way? And he said, yeah, like and he has had to calculate some of the concepts that we're talking about in some of his classes. And he's like, yeah, that tracks to me.

4:06So, so that's a little disclaimer at the top. But if you're not happy with my explanation, I've linked all my sources. Nice. And but I thought that the world divided science up into very neat categories and never shall they meet or overlap. You know, that's the funny thing is physics is how things move and things are made up of atoms. So there's so much chemistry and everything. Wow. So there's physics, like I had to take a physical chemistry class, right? So there's physics behind how the electrons are moving, how atoms are moving, where electrons even are. There's math to describe the likely areas of where electrons are going to be. So it's all very intertwined. I believe it makes sense to me. Let's just call it science for your life from now on. Yeah. Yeah. It just changed it. Yeah, it's like maybe we won't get those comments quite as much. It was funny because I was like, I can't remember which one it was now, but one of our shorts. We've talked about it a couple of times, but it was like, we got, I think maybe two comments

5:07within a week or two of each other, where someone was like, isn't this physics, yeah, physics of what molecules, hey, got you, got him, got him. My husband is brother always saying, hey, got him, whatever they like, kind of get the other one. Okay. So I, this is like I said, me synthesizing everything, but I have kind of a weird analogy for you to start out with. Okay. But do you remember ubleck? I do remember ubleck. Is it cornstarch and water stuff? Cornstarch and water. It's an amorphous solid type thing that when you squeeze it hard like quickly, you put a force on it, it puts force back on you, but when you kind of just let it go, it leaks out. Yes. Yes. Okay. This is a weird analogy, but as far as I can tell, birds, wings are essentially designed so that they can elicit that same response in the air. They make the air molecules act like ubleck. Okay. Okay.

6:08So, this is behind the fight of birds, well, fight in general, I guess, is that wings have a nice shape to them. And that shape makes it so that the molecules are going to have to split and go around the air. There's molecules in the air, so there's gas molecules. Those molecules would have to split and go around the wing, much like if you had a rock in a stream of water. Okay. Right. So, if you can imagine the air is sort of like a pool or something, and if you're moving through it, you know, if you're as a human or swimming through a pool of water, first of all, all those water molecules are already in motion. Same thing is happening in the air. All those air molecules, gas molecules are in the air moving around. And, you know, if you're a human, you're going through it. You're moving through the water and the water is going around your body. Same kind of thing is happening as a bird moves through all the molecules in the air. Okay. They split and they go around the body. But especially that wing has a specific shape that impacts the way that the molecules

7:12move. Okay. So, as the wing hits the air, the wings are often slightly curved or angled downwards. The air is going to be diverted either down below the wing and rapidly forced into a smaller space with a lot of other gas molecules or it'll kind of go up. So, if you are forcing the air down into a space where there's already a lot of other gas molecules, then you're trying to push together atoms which are surrounded by negatively charged electrons. Okay. And when you try to push together two negative things, if you've ever tried to push two negative ends of a magnet together, there's a little bit of a force. It doesn't want to be pushed together that quickly or pushed very close together at all. So you can kind of imagine that if you're trying to force a bunch of atoms rapidly into

8:14a closed space, it'd be similar to trying to be pushing a bunch of negatively charged magnets together in one space. So when they do that, there's resistance. And that resistance of the air molecules being pushed downwards generates a force in the opposite direction. Okay. So, some of the physics articles I read, you know, they're like, this is basically just a reactive force like when you sit down on a chair, the chair pushes back up against you kind of thing. But essentially, when you're pushing down that quickly, the air molecules are rash rapidly pushed together. These gaseous molecules rapidly push together. And they almost form an area that's, I don't want to say solid, but it's so resisting pushing things together. That for that moment, it pushes back and that resistance to being pushed together is an upward force called lift.

9:16Got it. And so this upward force is what allows birds and planes to stay in the air. And it reminds me of ublec because when you rapidly push on ublec, it pushes back. It resists you more of the harder you are pushing on it, okay? Exactly. And so, birds' wings are, you know, if they're just sort of flying in the air, they're constantly pushing air down and that air is full of gas molecules, which are not necessarily wanting to go, you know, in that space and so there's this, there's definitely an upward force generated called lift. Okay. So essentially, birds can fly because their wings are shaped in such a way that allows them to manipulate the molecules in the air, force them downwards, and as the molecules resist that rapid compression and equal an opposite force is exerted up. Right. Okay. I mentioned earlier that this is kind of a hot debate, slash common misconception.

10:19So if you learn the principle of flight differently, that's fine, you know, but all my sources, like I said, but often something called Bernoulli's principle is cited. And that is, it's like taught in even textbooks. But some of these articles kind of argue that like, well, Bernoulli's principle doesn't certainly make sense. You have to sort of make accommodations to explain why. But Bernoulli's principle is essentially that if a fluid is moving faster, who exert less pressure on a surface. So then this like fluid diet, yeah, fluid science, basically, I have heard this not quite put the proper way, baby, but the like, the movement of fluid on one side of the wing versus the other, top versus bottom, being different, right? Yes. It is different and it does go at different speeds. But there's some arguments that the difference in that pressure on the top and the bottom would potentially be negligible.

11:22But it does move faster above the wing than it does for certain wing shapes that it does below the wing. And there's really, there were some interesting papers where they use like gas particles, not gas, smoke. Oh, yes. So you could kind of watch. So if you want to go look, it's like interesting that they show the timing. So the pressure, they say that the fluid is moving faster on the top than the bottom. So in theory, the pressure would be less on the top than the bottom. But some other physics, physicists argue that that doesn't seem like it would be enough difference. And it, and you have to make some sort of like, okay, well, that only works because of this and that other thing isn't necessarily true, kind of. So they are the ones who argue that instead, it's an opposite force. But I would say something that I was confused by is if it's just about the density, you know, like, oh, there's a slightly higher density below than above, then wouldn't the denser air tend to sink because hot air rises because there's more movement there.

12:25Particles are more apart. But my bird professor did point out that the thing is, is that it's happening so rapidly. It's like instantaneous almost. So this like, is there even time for the denser particles to sink before the bird or the plane has moved on? Mm-hmm. That was interesting. Yeah. Do something to think about. And then another paper that I read, this was the physics education, one, also talked about centrifugal force. So basically the, his argument, or I think it was a he, is that the shape of the wings makes the flow of the air curve. And naturally in a curve, you have higher pressure, like at the top than at the bottom. So you kind of create a vacuum. So those were some of the other arguments, but all of them to me came up with the same major idea, which is that the air molecules, the gas molecules that are in the air, right

13:26below the wing, would be creating some kind of force upwards. And that's likely because they're rapidly pushed together. Got it. Got it. So that's my take on, that's a chemist take on flight. That's super cool. I was thinking like we've talked about other times where gas is, a gas gets pushed together, they're models of gas get pushed together. And we talked about balloons on our way talking about other things we talked about, the compressed air stuff and like the air destor stuff, right? And it's like, oh, it wants to, if you will allow it, it wants to push back out. It wants to be more spread out than it is. Yes. So it kind of makes sense in a different way that if you are going to compress it just slightly, not as much as like a can of air or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It is going to push back out. It's going to resist. Yeah. Against you or against a wing or whatever. Visiting that we've seen that, we see that in other places, but it doesn't quite until

14:30now wouldn't have thought about those as the same thing, you know, but the gas wants to be spread out. Yeah. Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie Do It Gaming team take on Gilly DeKing and wallow $267 million gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown, four rounds, multiple games, one winner plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist, Travis McCoy, watch all the action and see who wins and advances to the championship match against Neo right now at globalgaming league dot com. That's globalgaming league dot com everybody games. Total wine and more is one of those places where I always end up finding something I love. I was in my local total wine recently and asked for a recommendation on a bourbon and I ended up loving it and honestly the prices make it easy to say yes to grabbing a little extra like my go to bottle of Cabernet. If you're not sure what to grab, the team there can really help point you in the right direction. Shop total wine and more in store or online and get everything you need at the lowest

15:33prices. Here it's not sold in Virginia and North Carolina drink responsibly B-21 and for me, it's like hard to imagine the gas molecules doing much because air just seems so empty. But if you think about wind, which is again the movement of gas, it can lift and move crazy heavy things, you know, yes. So it's like we, I often, I think, have the misconception that like, well, gas is in the air. How can that be holding something up? But we see wind, which is the same thing, you know, it's a movement of the molecules by a different path, but there's still movement of gas molecules in the air, causing damage, you know? Right. And I'm running my bike every once in a while. I think the way that I bike home just happens to be a way that often wind blows the opposite.

16:34And there has been more than one occasion that it's like 15 mile an hour winds that I'm biking home in. And it feels like I'm doing everything I can to basically stand still. I'm like pushing so hard and the wind is just pushing against me. And so I'm like, yeah, it's strong, you know, the gas molecules can make a pretty intense current in a way that they want to totally thinking to about the like one of the ways that this becomes kind of intuitive, even if it's hard to explain and chemistry or physics terms. When you're a kid or adult, they won't do this and you're in the car and you put your hand out the window. Oh, yeah. You know, and do the thing. It's like effortless that you tilt your hand one way and it goes up because you're going to be so much faster in a car than you would just by walking or even running with your hands. It's like that amount of air you're like trying to push against basically and compress it. It really pushes your hand up. It's like, I don't want to do that, you know, yeah, it's such a weird sensation.

17:39But we really are like getting to test out a bit of what the wings and the that's so true. Oh, I love that. Thanks for giving that. That's a great point. I just was thinking like that came to my mind of like that feeling the air is resisting you thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's like the closest I've come in and obviously you have biking similar, but where you can kind of see the differences, you know, you could experience going with it and resisting it in both ways, kind of thing. Yeah. And I mean, also, it seems like, oh, this is so simple. But there are tons of adaptations for birds to be able to fly. So like, they don't have teeth because teeth are big and heavy. And if they were in the front, then like, it would be hard to get that lift. And they have pneumatic bones or basically like hollow or striated bones or there's like just a little bit of, you know, things in the bones holding them together. So they're just not very heavy. So like, they don't need as much lift as we would if we're flying, you know, so that they

18:45don't need to work as hard to get up there. And they're like all of their center of gravity and things like there's tons of adaptations that birds have that make it so that not only are they're wing shaped the right way, but they also have tuned everything else kind of to where they're able to fly. But there are some birds that are too heavy to be able to fly without help or at all. So yeah, interesting, like a, a lot of the birds that were like native to New Zealand that something so this but not all of them do like the Moa was a giant bird that, I mean, it was in, in a way, somewhere like an ostrich might that word, just like, it's living its life on the ground and it was huge and was eating other birds and, and that kind of stuff. We were to think about that we kind of lump all birds together, but it's like, well, really, they're quite different from each other.

19:45Yeah, but the ones that can fly are because they have a lot that is designed to make them fly. Yes, yeah. And even the theory of how they evolved to the initially, they think that feathers were insulation. And then over time they found that they could climb more steep inclines with feathers to like help them and so likely that helped, you know, select for, oh, I can climb more efficiently and so that I can hunt and gather food more efficiently and over time that developed into like, okay, now suddenly I'm able to, you know, jump off and kind of soar and then, you know, wow, dang, over millions of years. That's crazy to think about, you know, wow. And to study it, it is fun to learn about all these research in other areas, but someone took like baby birds who hadn't learned to fly yet and put them on like different degree,

20:46like angles of incline to see if they could fly or not fly, see if they could walk up it and the ones that even if they hadn't learned how to fly, had their wings could go up steeper inclines than if they plucked out their wings. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Wow. I know. That's interesting. It was kind of sad, though, without their wings. Yeah, that's a good point. So yeah. Like, hmm, did you have to do that to figure out what you did? I think they probably did. Yeah, probably so. That's interesting. Yeah, the ethics of that would be, it's nice that I don't work, I do work with human subjects, I guess, but, you know, living things in a way that was likely to, you know, like potentially cause harm. Yeah. It's good to learn about birds, but it's also like, oh, I'll sing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, you kind of were engaging with me throughout that, but if you do want to try to explain it back? I mean, yeah, I guess I'll do like the quick version of it, because I was, I was, but I didn't really recap it. But before I do that, I think something that is important for us to do that,

21:47I thought we should, we gave the episode, but I forgot. It's point out what we are wearing. Oh, yes, we're both wearing merch here. If you're on the YouTube channel, you can look at what we are wearing. Yes, which we, these are ones we haven't really worn in a while. So important for you to, to notice. Got the yay chemistry. Yeah, yeah. I'm not talking to my mic. It says yay. It's hard to see a little bit, but it says yay, chemistry, and green. And then we've got the gray background, but you can get it in all kinds of different colors. I like this one for teaching. So it's like, I could get away with wearing a t-shirt without being so like in your face about the fact that it's a t-shirt. Totally, yeah. We've thought about a few different merch designs. One, because I would say don't, well, buy something you're not going to actually wear and don't wear it, right? But two, it's like, oh, can this, you know, be really enjoyable to wear in other contexts? Not just like, hey, look, it's the name of the podcast.

22:49That doesn't do bit. Right. You know, if you like chemistry, yay chemistry, are a little early mile flasks at the bottom, but it doesn't say anything about our podcast anywhere. And our friend, Tim, friend of the show, chemistry teacher. Yes. He wears them to teach all the time. I mean, because yeah, you can. And then also for people who love chemistry and love a reference, a little joke, we've got the May the Intermolecular Forces be with you. Sure. Which is intentionally very similar in style to a common Star Wars design. But this was made from scratch by us. So it just happens to be very similar to Star Wars on purpose. Because I like the design, because it has like May the Intermolecular Forces, then May the and be with you are smaller and then Intermolecular Forces is big. Yes. It's a good pun. And so we did come out with this one last year, but we didn't do a great job of letting

23:51on though about it in time before made the fourth. So if you're someone who is a pretty big Star Wars person and wants to wear a Star Wars related thing on made the fourth, you've got two months from having we recording this to order this. So we've let you know in advance. So brief little merch intermission. Yeah. And we're kind of bad about mentioning the merch stuff. We're trying to be better about it. But everybody has helped the show a lot and gives you something that you can you have. So anyway, back to the task in hand, which is explaining how birds fly and or winged or anything with wings I guess, right? Yeah, yeah, I think I do think that planes use a similar concept based on everything I know. Although I will say birds generate thrust also, which is a forward motion that we didn't talk about today and planes separately generate that. They don't use our wings, birds use their wings to fly to generate lift and thrust forward,

24:55which is very impressive, but planes generate thrust separately. They primarily use the wings for lift. It probably is better. I think it's mostly early attempts at creating flying machines where they were trying to flap things. I think those were some of the most deadly things that they did not work. So we'll leave it to the birds. So in any of these cases with the wing, whether it's moving, flattening like a bird, or static and kind of shaped in a particular way on purpose, is that if it can succeed in pushing and kind of compressing putting against the molecules of air, the gas molecules in the air, and push them closer to each other on the bottom and not do that on top as much. So it's kind of like a relative difference there or whatever. Because either way you're moving to the air, you're kind of cutting through like you talked about with the water. It's like there's still going to be some resistance in general.

25:56There's just something you are cutting through, but if it could be... That's called drag. Drag, there we go. You're pushing against, yep. So if we can push against it more on the bottom, it wants to push back on us. We are coming up against some... And your force is kind of thing going on there. Yeah, probably so, yeah. You said it'd be like negative charge molecules going toward each other, right? Not necessarily negatively charge molecules, but all molecules have they're surrounded by electrons. So those electrons that are surrounded by them, those are negatively charged. So even if the molecule is neutral, they're still electron density around it is what we'd say. And so trying to force those close together rapidly is not easy to do. Got it. Okay, yes, got it.

27:00So when we do that, it pushes back against us, against the wing, and creates that lift. And if you're doing that, not just once, but kind of constantly, yep, you're getting the benefit of the air is pushing against you, while you're pushing against it. And you're hopefully soaring into and staying aloft in the air. And also a few little tweaks is that the shape of the wing for the bottom is often curved, so that basically the the air comes in beneath and gets forced like down a little bit. Yes, so it's it's almost like that's where the centrifugal thing you said earlier, or yes, that's part of it on top and bottom actually is with that.

28:03But basically the way it gets forced down is why if you deflect something down, it's like the push is back up against you. So it's kind of like giving the direct opposite force. So the curve or shape of the wing is likely part of what is going on beneath it to sort of compress them and force them together downwards rapidly. And then the opposite force would be up. And above the wing, a lot of time, it's curved over the top so that the top of the wing is a longer distance. So it's not being deflected up necessarily, but it'll kind of stay along the top curve of the wing. And there's more space in that area. So they're probably the molecules are less dense on that top area. So that's something else we talked about in class. And when you were summarizing it, I realized that I didn't really address the top of the wing very much. But and there's a tendency of air molecules to stick towards the thing that they're going around. So they'll kind of stick in the shape of the wing. So if on the top is going up

29:05and curving around, they have a little bit more space there. But then on the bottom, it's like and you're like shoving it down quickly, then or like turning it quickly, then that force and it's a smaller space could stick them together and then push back up against you. Okay, got it. So it's likely related to the shape of the wing. Right. Shape of the wing. Shape of the wing and then obviously moving forward. If you're a plane and pushing down if you're a bird and moving forward. Yeah, pushing down and moving forward. Yeah, they kind of it's not just up and down. They're kind of like moving almost in like like swimming. It reminded me of the ores on like a, you know, on a row team where it's like you go sort of forward, down, back, you know, the angle of it. It's not just flapping up and down. So that kind of generates probably the forward motion too. And they they likely make you can sort of see like if you're there's picture of planes flying through crowds and it'll leave like a little trail behind it of the

30:10downward motion, like basically cutting a path through the clouds, even if it's flying above them. It cuts a path below it where the plane itself wasn't from the air molecules rushing. Interesting. I say air molecules. I mean gas molecules in the air. Right. There's obviously a lot of stuff in the air, right? Yeah. So yeah, I think that that's cool. And I think this is sort of a simplified version of how I envision what's going on with the molecules when I think about flying. But I'm the mathematics and physics of it are much more complicated. So right. You know, this is a chemist take on a bird's physics. Yeah, we're we're we are talking about what's happening that those molecules being pushed toward each other and then pushing back. Yeah. What's interesting about all the flying stuff and physics and engineers is that they can get so precise about how much, you know, like how much lift are you getting? How big could the plane be? And how fast does it need to move? Right. And the faster you move, the more air molecules you're rapidly pushing down. And so you

31:13can generate lift by moving faster or even changing the angle that you're pushing them down at. So there's lots of little things that go into it. But after, you know, spending a day reading all these papers, this is this is how my brain made sense of it. Dang. Wow. To hopefully you guys liked it. I thought we might wrap up with a categories of what's your favorite bird? Nice. Definitely have a very bird or a good bird story. You know, I've got one of those two. Well, yeah, you've told one before that I really like that. You don't have to retell it if you don't want or you can't. It's been a while. It has been a long time. I've got mind doing it the first one. Let me go first. I say what's your favorite bird, but I don't think I have a favorite bird. I know. But you told me once that instead of seeing your favorite, like what's one that you're excited about right now? Yeah, that is a lot easier with movies, music, anything basically. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll tell you one that I'm excited about right now is

32:14at my old house, we were planning to go on a big hike, camping trip, whatever. And part of that was at Yellowstone, we bought like a spotting scope. It was pretty cheap on Amazon. We used credit card points to get it. And you could hook your phone up to it and take pictures of animals through the spotting scope. It's a kind of like a little telescope, but like binocular strength instead of, you know, but it was pretty hard to get just right. And, you know, because it wasn't a very high quality one, you put your phone on it to take a picture and it, you know, counterweighted the whole thing. And so you couldn't just like set it up and then put your phone there. But I found a bird with my binoculars. And I'm like, is reddish orange and black. It doesn't look like any bird I've ever seen before. And so I put this information in, I use this like Ivy League bird software from, I think it's Cornell. And they, like you could predict what bird it's going to be. And I put it in there. And I guess it was like unlikely to be there at that time of year or something. And so it was like no matches found.

33:18And I'm like, what do you mean no matches that I'm looking at this bird, whatever. And so I like tried to look some things up and I couldn't tell for sure. And I was like, I'm going to get my spotting scope. So I took my spotting scope out and it was like moving around really fast. It was a pretty tiny bird, but it was staying in this one tree. And finally, I got a video and I was able to get the bird perfectly captured in this little spotting scope. And I took a picture and I, then I used the picture to search on the bird software because you can describe it or you can listen to its call or you can upload a picture. And it was like, oh, here's your bird. And it's unlikely to be in this area. We're giving you, it's like a rare fine. So I felt like I did it. That's awesome. Wow. That was very exciting. And similarly in that time, there's a bunch of little tiny birds in the rain outside our house one day. And sparrows are really hard. They all look the same. And I got out my spotting scope and I took a video of them. And I, this was before I was taking my bird class. And I like saw that they had like black on

34:23their front of their face and it went all the way up their head. And I was like, I think it looks like this one. And the one I thought it looked like was a Harris' sparrow. And now that I'm in my bird class, we have to learn to tell all these birds apart. And I was right. I like went back and looked at the video and compared it to what I learned in class. I was like, it is. That's awesome. The first bird I found was an American red start. And then Harris's red start. Yeah. And then a Harris' sparrow. So those are two of my, those are two of my like birds that I'm proud of right now. Hey, that's cool. What's going to be tough is that I mean my like specificity is going to be kind of low. Well, maybe I can help you because I have to learn 205 birds on site. Oh, that's awesome. Okay. So first, I'll say one of my favorite birds for quite a while that I've, it's like what are the answer they give? Watch it one second. How are you going to, are you going to do

35:29bars and tone here? You're just going to leave me alone. Okay. I'll narrate. So Jam has stood up from the couch, walked over to the bookshelf that y'all can't see, but is just off camera right here. Like I can almost touch him right now. Stick out your hand, Jam. Yep. Right there. And he's, he's picked up a book. And now he's walking back crossing front of the camera. Here we go. And I can't see the title of the book. I don't know what book it is. I'm very excited. And he's back. Okay. So I'm back. So what am I favorite? Birds, which I don't know which types we have here, but is a Peregrine Falcon? Is that specific enough or is that a category? No, yeah, yeah. That's a specific bird. Yeah. Okay. Because, well, there's a couple reasons. One, sounds cool. Yeah, it does sound Peregrine took is. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Pippin's full name in all the rings. But there's this book

36:30called Deep Peregrine by J.A. Baker. We heard this. No, I haven't. Yeah, sure. The camera. Still in print. Very available. Nice. So this is very interesting because one, like just look how beautiful that painting of that bird is, you know, there's something always I felt so striking about birds of prey, but specifically Falcons. And I, so this book is interesting because it's this guy, D.A. Baker, kind of got like obsessed with the Peregrine Falcons near his home. He's somewhere in the UK back when he's writing this. Okay. It doesn't. We don't know a lot about him. Like, like, was he an ornithologist or a biological by that? It doesn't seem like it. But what he does is just spend all this time tracking the Peregrine Falcons near where he lives in the countryside. Wow. Like getting us, like, really studying their behavior. Yeah, yeah.

37:36And part of why I even have this book at all because in the realm of like documentary film, there's a documentary like, he has, he's done documentaries and narrative films, but he tells students to like, he's a famous guy. It's not one of my professors, but tells people to read this book because he is like, this is the way we need to approach documentary. We are trying to relay facts to people, but we're not writing textbooks. We are like telling people a story that wasn't really happened. Yeah. And the way in which he writes about this, instead of just like writing down like a list of information, you're in his perspective because he's like, I journeyed across the hill over to the cliffs. And there I found, you know, the female Peregrine, you know, and he's like, he's describing these things in this way that is is narrative.

38:37It is like engrossing and he kind of is a character that you're interested in. So anyway, it made it very easy for Peregrines to be a bird that I'm like into. Yeah. Because I've read a book about them where guys basically, well, I'll add this to my reading list. I better like it. It's pretty interesting. All right. And then the story that I have. Actually, I thought of something we are going to do another episode on birds. Okay. I think you should save it. Okay. I think you should save it and tell it as a little reward at the end of the episode that comes out in two weeks. Okay, deal. Okay, great. All right. Well, I think that is a good place for us to stop. So thank you for being so excited about learning about learning about how birds fly. Of course. Thank you for teaching us. And if you have a question, a comment, a follow up, and not just the question of

39:38is in this physics moment, just kidding. You can send that to you. It'll make us laugh. It will. Yeah. Please send us on our website, kemforyourlife.com. That's kemfryourlife.com, share those ideas, questions with us. If you'd like to help us keep our show going, and contribute to cover the cost of making it, you can join our super cool kem community of patrons on patreon.com slash kemfryourlife. You can add free feed to the show, a bonus episode just for our community every month. And you get some behind the scenes stuff and all of that just to say thank you for helping keep the show going, keeping it free for everybody else means the world to us. And we're grateful for our super cool community. Another way is by you can support the show buying this some merch. If you're into it, I should have given you the URL earlier at kemfryourlife.com slash store. Lots of options, maybe too many options, but you know, people like options. So there you go. And yeah, let us know if there's anything over there. You can't find the right way or it doesn't turn out how you'd like. We can help you out there. And the last way, the super

40:41freest way you can help us is by subscribing to our favorite podcast app rating, writing a review on whatever podcast app you use. If they have that, subscribing on YouTube, leaving a comment, saying hello over there. Those things just help us to be found by others. And so we can help explain the chemistry of their everyday life to them. Yeah. And this episode was created by me, Melissa Collini and him, Jen Robinson. Jim Robinson, it's not like I said, jam, but it's jam. Jim Robinson is our producer. He makes this beautiful sound quality. And if you'd like to learn more about today's episode, you can always check out our show notes or our website for references for every episode. And especially for this one. And like Jim said, this episode was made possible by our financial supporters, by our community on Patreon. And it really means so much to us that we want to shout out every single one of those people by name and thank them. So thank you to Hunter, to Chris, to Claire, to Steven, to Timothy, to Katrina, to Scott, to Vince, to Kyle,

41:47to Brian, to Latila, to Rachel, to Elizabeth, to John, to Jesse, to Dorine, to Heather, to Ash, to Emily, Avishai, Chelsea, to Christina, to Jacob, Venus, Suzanne, Erica, Colin, Jeanette, autoclave, Julie, and Justine. And Amanda, thank you all so much for everything you do. Your support is so exciting to us. And we've really enjoyed interacting with y'all on music league and just in general over on Patreon lately. So thank you all for everything you do to support the show. And yeah, chemistry. And yeah, birds. Yes. Has the news been getting you down? I'm Megan McCartle and I'm here to help. I'm the host of a new show from Washington Post opinion called reasonably optimistic. And it's an antidote to the pessimism that's riddling America right now. Every Wednesday, I'm going to talk to people who see a path forward.

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44:57That zippercrooter.com slash zip zippercrooter.com slash zip. If you liked the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.