"Hi, I'm Megan Amram. I love science, but I also love looking good. I went to Harvard. Let's begin." And thus starts the new satirical science show "Experimenting with Megan Amram" on Amy Poehler's Smart Girls site.
Hosted by author, "Parks and Recreation" TV writer and comedian Megan Amram, the show is a natural spin-off from her hilarious book " Science... for Her!" which combined real science with tongue-in-cheek commentary about gender roles in science. After all, her book explained physics through nail art.
In Monday's debut episode of "Experimenting with Megan Amram," we learn how to make a clock from a potato following the handy instructions included on the Smart Girls site (PDF). Of course, why stop at a boring potato clock when you can make a biological potato clock?
But before we can see how Amram plans on transforming a creepy baby doll into a bio clock, she interviews engineer and Cal Tech Aeronautics professor Beverley McKeon.
McKeon explains her work in fluid mechanics, which in her field of study is the "flow over surfaces," as well as her experiments involving turbulence. She also talks briefly about being the first female associate director of Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, California Institute of Technology (GALCIT).
While the show packs in a lot of science talk in under five minutes, it's interesting to watch Amram try to derail the actual seriousness of the topics by bringing up gender jokes of nail drying, watching "The Notebook," modeling and Beyoncé.