OF BATS, POOP AND RESEARCH: AN INTERVIEW!

OF BATS, POOP AND RESEARCH: AN INTERVIEW!

(in Eng?ish)

(Craving for more crazy interviews? Go here, here & here!)  

The interview opens with PiPs dressed like a Batman form the ‘70 clearly running away, with the spirited eyes of a scared to death idiot character of a dumb blog, from hundreds of wildly crazy-enthusiast super-cute bats hunting it for an autograph, and from a raging mob of balloons of different sizes, shapes and colors filled with “KA-POW!”, its little brother “POW!”, ”SMOK!”, ”BAM!”, ”SWOOSH!”, the antsy "GASP!" and the terrible unforgiving ”THWACK!” (which sounds a bit like a mix of Clint Eastwood’s look after he finds out that the last spoon of his favorite ice cream flavor has been kidnapped by a fake scout who in reality is a middle aged short fella with the worst case of halitosis in the recent history of medicine and who profoundly dislikes Spaghetti Western and muscle cars with an Italian city in their names, aaand Chewbecca “singing” a Skrillex track at the top of its lungs) which - the mob - wants its six months overdue paycheck.

The Batman logo on the "chest" of PiPs comes from a free photo by Henry & Co. and the bats come from a free photo by Rinck Content Studio; both pics are adapted by @sciencemug. Source of both pics: Unsplash

Eventually PiPs manages to lose the balloons by distracting them with the cardboard cutout of a sexy Cat Woman chasing a spot of light, but not the bats, and, while hiding behind the url of the Wikipedia page of baobabs covered by a purple anti-biosonar cloak made in Jokerland, notices a man who follows the bats who, in turn, notices it:

- Man, please – PiPs says terrified - don’t tell ‘em I’m here, if I sign another autograph I’m going to loose my arm, and therefore my armpit, and thus my deodorant sponsorship thanks to which I can afford to pay the rent to live in this lousy blog… By the way, who are you? And most importantly, do you know what those things are, some sort of furry UFOs (or, as they’re called now, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) with an insane passion for cheap vintage tv-shows maybe?

- My name is Jason Preble, I’m a PhD student at the Kyoto University, and those are not things, they are bats, the only mammals capable of true flight [by the way you, dear human reader, are a mammal too, you know, just a reminder... Note of SM] . More precisely they are a couple of species of bats which ecology (N1) I’m studying: the Ryukyu tube-nosed bat and Yanbaru whiskered bat. They only live in the remaining forests of three islands at the far southwest end of Japan: Okinawa, Tokunoshima, and Amami-Oshima.

The black bat (on the left) is the Yanbaru whiskered bat, the brown bat (on the right) is the Ryukyu tube-nosed bat [Credits: original pics (one of each bat) by Jason Preble (adapted by @sciencemug)]

P- I see, I see… So, being from Japan, besides DC Comics they’re probably into manga too… Well I guess, then, it’ll be safer for me to choose a zombee costume for Halloween, as I don’t recall any comics or manga ‘bout zombees. Or maybe I should wear the tragic mask, only few know about, of Rusty, the Tap-dance shoe which becomes a drunkard (and eventually decides to end itself by buying a particularly keen on footwear St. Bernard puppy) after its dream of becoming a spy is broken because of its inborn inability to be noiseless…

Anyway Sir, why on Earth are you chasing them?

JP- These bats are considered endangered, meaning that

THE EXPLOSIVE STORY OF DYNAMITE & THE NOBEL PRIZE!

Ooooh, hello dear English speaking-reading-hearing listener, welcome back to me, @sciencemug, the blog/podcast/twitter&instagram accounts/entity behind the unsuccessful e-shopstuffngo on zazzle.com which tells you science stories while solving advanced equations and therefore ending up telling the equivalent of a ‘70s song played backwards and finding as a result of the equations a portrait of SpongeBob, aaand which talks to you thanks to the voice, kidnapped via a voodoo-wireless trick, from a veeery very very dumb human.

Aaand which does all of this in Eng?ish, a language that is to bad English what Avengers: Endgame is to a nasty bruise on the face of good movies history. 

Today, dear listener, I'm gonna tell you the story of a man, his most famous invention and a prize.

Listen to the podcast episode

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on Podcast Machine 

(Music: Upbeat Party by Scott Holmes; licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License) 

Today in 1833 Alfred Nobel is born. You may remember him for some witty educational movies of the '50 like: "How to blast a mountain while baking cookies", or "1003 ways to lose your pinky and still count to ten". But what you may be not aware of is that the man files a patent in 1867 for an obscure invention probably only few experts know about: dynamite. 

Alfred Nobel img is a Public Domain pic source wikia.com (adapted by @sciencemug)

Now, Alfred, who's called "The Blast" by his friends for being always fun to be around to, is one of the four sons of a Swedish engineer and inventor, he gets top quality private education in natural sciences, languages and literature, and a extra training in chemical engineering. He travels around Europe (Finland, France, Russia, Germany) and the US, and, as a teenager, he is fluent (and can tell jokes that crack) in Swedish, Russian, French, English and German, basically like every average today's teenager who, yet, master also the LoL-Code and the Emoticonish.

Anyway, Alfie's youth is not all flowers and booms as his family goes through tough economical difficulties for quite some time. While father and sons try to fix things up, Alfred's mother, who comes from money, saves the day, thanks to a modest income coming from her running a grocery store where she sells milk and vegetables, till, eventually, the family's finances fully recover. 

Meanwhile in Paris Alfred has his mind blown up when