Learn Amazing Facts About Women Scientists With Kari Byron

Kari Byron has done some pretty weird things in her career. “I have been locked in a coffin with scorpions … I have jumped off a 100-story building,” she says. “I stung myself with a jellyfish. I can’t tell you what the weirdest thing is.”

From her decade as a co-host on the Discovery Channel show MythBusters to Netflix’s White Rabbit Project, Byron has spent her professional life making science cool. That might seem like a strange turn of events for someone who considers themselves an artist—but to Byron, it’s not so weird. “What I love about art is the same thing I like about science,” she says. “It’s really fostering a curiosity, looking for questions, looking for reasons. … I really think that they’re hand in hand: science, technology, engineering, art, and math. I think I’m a STEAM girl.”

Most recently, Byron hosted Crash Test World, which she calls “my Anthony Bourdain of innovation.” The series took Byron around the world, from New York City to Israel to Qatar, where she got the chance to talk to “solution seekers and the people that are trying to make the world a better place—having a conversation, often through the science of positivity.” And naturally, she got up to things that some might consider pretty weird—like noshing on some food made of crickets. (Though many people wouldn’t find it weird: According to some estimates, 80 percent of the world eats insects.)

“Bugs are an incredible source of protein,” Byron says. “As a kid, I would have loved to see grown-up me eating bugs.” She believes that crickets are “a gateway bug for eating other bugs” and sees parallels in how people react to eating bugs with early attitudes about sushi: “When I was a kid, {sushi} just seemed like the weirdest, craziest thing, and now it’s normal,” she says. “I really think that when my kid’s grown, she’s going to be like, ‘Oh my God, of course, yeah, I eat crickets on everything.’”

Today, Byron is the co-founder of EXPLR, an online platform with a mission “to empower students with practical skills and experiences for success in both school and life” through its online offerings for kids, parents, and teachers.

EXPLR also throws in-person events like the National STEM Festival, which showcases student projects from kids all over the U.S. and its territories. “These projects, some of them are patent ready,” Byron says. “One kid from last year went and sold his project to nine different companies. He’s not even in college yet. These kids will blow you away. … What I’m looking forward to is when we get to the National Stem Festival, I don’t know, 2050, we’ll actually be able to look back and be like, ‘This was the catalyst moment for the cure to cancer.’ ” This year, the festival will be held in Washington, D.C., from March 19 to March 22.

In honor of Women’s History Month, we sat down with Byron to cover all kinds of amazing facts about women scientists. You’ll find out about the woman who accidentally invented Kevlar, the woman who was the first American scientist to spot a comet, the woman who demonstrated the greenhouse effect in the 1850s—and much more.  

Watch the full episode above, and check out some of our conversation with Byron that we couldn’t fit into the video below. And don’t forget to subscribe to Mental Floss on YouTube for more fascinating videos every week.

1. On the science projects she worked on as a kid
2. On the myths she wished they’d gotten to investigate on MythBusters
3. On her dream guest for the National STEM Festival Presented by EXPLR’s Office Hours (living or dead)
4. On emerging technology that the next generation won’t be able to imagine life without

On the science projects she worked on as a kid

“The ones I did just for fun at my house probably could have set things on fire, and I should have had a lot more parental advisement at the time. But for school, we did a lot of cool ones. We did all of the basics—the volcano with the baking soda and the vinegar and that kind of thing. … I did a science fair project on growing plants in dirt versus growing plants and coffee. I think I was in the second grade, but it turns out that the plants in coffee would grow super, super fast, and then die quickly. I kind of feel like that’s what coffee does to me today. I should have learned that lesson as a kid.”

On the myths she wished they’d gotten to investigate on MythBusters

“I see stuff all the time that I wish MythBusters was still around so that I could test, like, constantly. And people send them to me every day. But while we were on MythBusters, there were a lot of myths that we couldn’t test … one, we wanted to see if the downward force of a of a Formula 1 race car could drive upside down, but nobody would give us a Formula 1 race car because, you know, they’re kind of expensive. ... We probably could have built a helical track, but we really just didn’t have that time to do a myth that big. So that one never made it.”

On her dream guest for the National STEM Festival Presented by EXPLR’s Office Hours (living or dead)

“If it was someone dead I would pick Ben Franklin because he’s my favorite. … I just want to hear how he ticks. I want to know what made him do all the crazy things he did. But if I could pick somebody currently … I love Ursula Burns. She was a CEO of Xerox and I liked her origin story. And I think that a lot of people don’t understand STEM jobs can come from so many different places, and the origin story of becoming a CEO is actually also a STEM job. Storytellers are STEM jobs. There’s just so many ways that you can get a STEM career, and it’s just never a linear path. … But man, my list is actually really, really, really long. The series could go on forever.”

On emerging technology that the next generation won’t be able to imagine life without

“AI, Artificial Intelligence, is becoming a tool that we use for everything that we do. I honestly think it’s going to take the place of all boring bureaucracies and that we are going to get back to more. Humanity’s life is going to get more authentic, because all the dumb stuff that we have to do, like paperwork and reading manuals, gone now we can just go out and enjoy the world. I hope that’s what happens.”

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