During the AGU 2014 Fall Meeting John Cook, Peter Sinclair, and I interviewed a stellar list of scientists. Everyone brought their A game which gave us some incredible footage. At the end of the conference I returned home with about 36 hours of footage.

I’m already working on editing all that into videos that I can upload to my YouTube Channel. But there’s also a lot of material that I can’t use for those videos. Most of the time because they don’t fit the subject I’m tackling. Though it doesn’t mean they’re not good, quite on the contrary.

There are possible hundreds of little moments in there where scientists share interesting anecdotes and stories about their work. Or beautifully explain scientific research in just one or two minutes. There are also moments where we all are having some fun and a good laugh.

It would be an incredible waste to let those little snippets that I find during editing end up on the cutting floor. These clips would then have to wait for a future video project where they might be used. To prevent this from happening I’m starting a new video series: AGU 2014 Tidbits – Anecdotes And Stories From The Front Lines Of Science.

The first video in this series was already released just over a week ago. It’s a clip where Richard Alley talks about how he communicates science with anything that works. He shared with us in his usual enthusiastic way the story of him explaining Milankovitch cycles by using his bald spot to Dana Rohrbacher:

Another great little moment was at the end of my interview of John Cook. I already had all the material I needed but I still had a bit of time left.

With the camera still running I jokingly asked him if he and Dana Nuccitelli like to plot to take over the world (we were chatting about plotting data). This didn’t result in a silly answer back, it prompted Cook into sharing a little hobby of his. Collecting conspiracy theories:

It’s great moments like this that gave me the idea to create this series. I hope you’ll enjoy these videos as much as I enjoy finding these little nuggets during editing.