Barbara grew up playing outside, her pockets packed with rocks, chestnuts, and all sorts of other natural things. "I think it's part of the reason why [my mother] had me take over the laundry very young," she said. Ontario, Canada was her home, near the point at which the Great Lakes flow into the St. Lawrence River, alongside the rocks that "I've then gone on to spend my life studying."

Barbara Sherwood Lollar is now an earth scientist at the University of Toronto. She investigates groundwater and the carbon cycle, as well as underground hydrogen gas, and recently published a paper showing where hydrogen gas reservoirs are found naturally all over the world. She hopes to connect this database with people who want to use hydrogen for industrial uses, as well as for producing clean local power. She also helped discover microorganisms living deep within the rocks beneath the Earth's surface that are powered by hydrogen, not sunlight. One of these microbes is called Sherwoodlollaribacterium unditelluris, named after her.

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Sinéad was born a scientist. As a child, she asked for extra math and physics lessons on the weekends, and she thrived at University College London upon finding fellow science folks.

Now, Sinéad Farrell, PhD, is a geophysicist at the University of Maryland, and she uses remote sensing satellites to study Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. She also explores the ice on foot, braving polar bears and frozen food to determine how the frozen ocean is changing over time.

You can find Sinéad at @dr-slfarrell.bsky.social.

Logan grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, bears ambling through his Colorado backyard and summers full of prairie dog census volunteer work. But it wasn't until an Introduction to Linguistics class during his first semester at McGill University that he realized he wanted to pursue a degree in biology and language. With his formative years spent exploring nature, research in animal communication inevitably followed.

Logan James is now a postdoctoral fellow at McGill, in partnership with the Earth Species Project, where he studies the sounds that animals make and what those sounds mean to other animals. His latest research investigates whether humans prefer the same utterances as the animals themselves, from cricket trills, to songbird warblers and primate grunts.

If you'd like to play an online game to determine whether you prefer the same sounds as a frog, bird, mammal or insect, click here: https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/havoc

Sparrow sounds provided by Stephen Nowicki and Susan Peters.

Túngara frog sounds provided by Michael Ryan.