Up Goer 5 (https://splasho.com/upgoer5/) challenges people to explain their work using only the 10,000 most commonly used words in the English language. In science, this is particularly difficult. In fact, “science” is not one of the 10,000 most commonly used words. Here are a couple of attempts from our lab:
Some life is so tiny you can't even see it. Some of this tiny life lives inside animals. Most of these tiny living things mind their own business, and some even help the animals they live in. However, a few of these tiny living things are bad for the animals they live in. These mean tiny living things only care about making more mean tiny living things, even if it hurts the animal. But, over a long time, the mean tiny living things can learn to be nicer. Eventually, the nice tiny living things and the animal become so close that they need each other in order to live. But how does this change from mean to nice happen? This is the question I ask with my work. I study a kind of mean tiny living thing that kills all the boy flies. Most of the time, that is all they do. But, I found a very different kind of tiny living thing that is in the middle of learning to be nicer. While it still has not given up killing boy flies, the girl flies are now so close to the tiny living things that they can't grow up without them. This is a new case that no one has ever seen before and it will let us see right in front of us what it looks like when a mean tiny living thing is turning into a nice tiny living thing. We can look at it and ask: How does the mean tiny living thing help the girl flies? Why does it help them? And what will happen next? Will it ever stop killing the boy flies and help them instead? These are the questions I am asking in my work to understand exactly how these relationships change over time. Then, we can figure out why and how mean tiny living things become nice.
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Our fight against small things in the world is an important area of interest. I use flies to look at how this fight has changed over time and focus on the smallest change possible to their bodies that can mean life or death for the fly. This small change means when one fly is attacked by tiny f*cks it may live but another fly with a different change may die from the same tiny f*cks attack. But the real question is why this change happens and if there is a good reason for this change. Maybe there are different types of tiny f*cks and this change allows flies to be better at fighting off those different types. Or maybe this change allows flies to have more babies, live longer, or even just be better at not needing water or food. But this change to the flies also could make the tiny f*cks of the stomach change which also is a big deal to flies. Flies and everyone would like to keep their good tiny f*cks and keep the bad tiny f*cks of the stomach in check. All of these areas of interest are possible and can give reason to why a fly would want to keep some of these smallest changes around in their bodies. Flies as a group would like to live the next ten hundred years and small changes could mean that they will see tomorrow and the day after.
