110 SPRING 2019 • POPSCI.COM as told to Jillian Mock and Charlie Wood / illustrations by Tara Jacoby
TALES FROM THE FIELD
COLLECTIONSdo you mind
if we look in
your bag?
If water bottles and forgot-
ten nail clippers are the only
items slowing you down at
airport checkpoints, you’re
probably not a field scientist. In their
quest to bring samples and instruments
to and from various sites, researchers
regularly end up flying with audaciously
odd objects. Here are a few outlandish
materials that puzzled security.5
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absolutely nothing
AMY FRAPPIER, PALEOCLIMATOLOGIST AT
SKIDMORE COLLEGE
When my team carried glass vessels to
Belize, a customs agent wanted to open
them. I explained they were completely
empty: Collecting air requires a con-
tainer with almost no molecules inside.
Luckily, his eyes glazed over as I dis-
cussed vacuums, and he waved us through.
army ants
BRIAN FISHER,CURATOR OF ENTOMOLOGY AT THE
CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Shortly after 9/11, I collected half a
million Costa Rican army ants for a museum
exhibit in California. Under new safety
laws, TSA agents had to open all contain-
ers of animals. I spent all night in the
Los Angeles airport begging them not to
crack open my garbage-can-size suitcase.diamond vises
ANAT SHAHAR,GEOCHEMIST AT THE
CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE IN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
To see how metals act in Earth’s
interior, my team squeezes them in
diamond anvil—vises the size of
extra-wide pill bottles. We also
blast them with X-rays from a source
in Chicago, so I often fly with them.
Agents sometimes grill me because
in a scanner, the samples look
suspiciously dense.spacecraft prototype
GREG DALTON, MECHANICAL
ENGINEER AT THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY
Before the Parker Solar
Probe headed toward the
sun, my team had to make
sure its electron analyzer
wouldn’t burn up. So I
hand-carried the delicate
component to a heating
facility at Johns Hopkins.
The suitcase- size part was
bristling with wires and
electronics, and on the
trip back, TSA agents
diverted us into secondary
inspection. So we handed
out promotional Parker
stickers to win them over
with a charm offensive.a dead bird in a coffee thermos
ALICE BOYLE,BIOLOGIST AT KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY
In 2017, I was in Costa Rica studying little-known
birds called white-ruffed manakins. When one died
unexpectedly, it was an opportunity to sequence
the species’ genome for the first time. So I froze
its body and stashed it in my coffee thermos. I
reached the airport, and security wanted to make
sure I didn’t have any liquids left in the mug. I
had to say, “Well, there is ice...and a dead bird.”lava flows
ARIANNA SOLDATI,POSTDOCTORAL
FELLOW AT LUDWIG MAXIMILIAN
UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH IN GERMANY
As a graduate student, I wanted to
melt down a hunk of cooled lava and
compare it with the flows on active
volcanoes. So I took it from
Syracuse, New York, to Missouri in
my carry-on. Security stopped me
and opened the bag, and I worried
the 5-by-10-inch piece of rippled
black glass would break. But the
inspectors handled it carefully
and were fascinated to learn about
the science happening right in
their hometown.