AI Summary
5 min readWhy This Lab Studies the Speed of Bug Pee and Other Curiosities
In a lab in the Rocky Mountains, a sharpshooter insect flicks a droplet of urine so fast that it defies basic physics—the droplet moves through the air faster than the leg that kicked it. Bioengineer Saad Bhamla and his PhD student Elliot spent months double-checking their data before they believed what they were seeing. "If you threw a baseball at a hundred miles an hour, but your finger that was flinging it moved only at 50 miles an hour, it just wouldn't make sense," Bhamla explains. "Where would that extra speed come from?"
The Physics of Super-Propulsive Pee
The answer lies in surface tension. Unlike a rigid baseball, the droplet is squishy. As the sharpshooter's stylus (the appendage that flicks the urine) deforms the droplet, surface tension stores energy like a spring. The insect times the release so that this stored energy adds a boost to the droplet's launch—a phenomenon Bhamla's lab calls "super propulsion."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:16) **Lab Philosophy & The Super-Propulsive Pee of Sharpshooters** - Dr. Saad Bhamla introduces his lab’s approach to curiosity-driven science, starting with the unexpected discovery of how sharpshooter insects flick their pee.
- 2 (05:42) **Music, Time, and Thermodynamics** - Bhamla describes a completely different project: analyzing how the arrow of time is encoded in Western music using statistical physics.
- 3 (08:56) **The “Alice in Wonderland” Approach vs. Academic Norms** - Bhamla discusses the side-eye he gets for his multidisciplinary, curiosity-driven style, and why he gives himself permission to follow it.
- 4 (11:08) **Where the Philosophy Comes From: Loss and a Parking Lot Epiphany** - Bhamla traces his “childlike wonder” to losing his mother at a young age and a moment of emptiness after a financial success.
- 5 (16:23) **How to Tell if a Question is a Good One** - Bhamla explains his gut-level test for a worthwhile scientific question, comparing it to art.
- 6 (19:07) **Parenting a Future Scientist** - Bhamla shares how his five-year-old son, who went to the Amazon with him, approaches science with the same puzzle-seeking instinct.
- 7 Standout Quotes
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
In a lab in the Rocky Mountains, a group of scientists is hard at work trying to find answers across biology, physics, and engineering: They’re looking into things like the hydrodynamics of insect pee and the physics of sheepdog herding, and working to designing robots that resemble squid and hearing aids that only cost a dollar.
These endeavors may seem unrelated, but they’re glued together by bioengineer Saad Bhamla’s philosophy of science driven by curiosity, and how to make the most of the lab’s time. He joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about what led him to this approach.
Guest:
Dr. Saad Bhamla is an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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