Hey guys! I’m taking a quick break from my regularly scheduled Life in Paris programming to announce that Colin’s lizards are literally taking over the world… at least by internet. He published a paper in the journal Nature [paywall] this week, and ever since the press release went out he’s been doing media interviews left and right, for news organizations from Europe to the US . (For the uninitiated, the prestige of scientific journals is inversely proportional to the number of words in their titles—thus, one-word Nature is one of the two biggest journals out there, the other being Science.)

So what’s it like to be the wife of a practically-famous scientist? Well, I’m insanely proud of course, and I also appreciate the opportunity to pop open a cold bottle of champagne. But it’s not all glamorous. This week, it meant sitting silently in our tiny apartment while he taped radio interviews at 10:00 pm because, you know, time differences. And we had to close all the windows and turn off the fan to minimize background noise, despite the fact that Paris is currently experiencing a record-breaking heatwave. (Air conditioning is essentially unheard of in France.) So as you’re listening to Colin chat about sticky-toed lizards and gale-force winds, just be glad you can’t see the rivers of sweat in the background.

For more info on the study, you can check out Colin’s fun behind-the-scenes blog post here.

And here are some of my favorite media mentions:

• PRI’s The World: July 26, 2018, episode
• Nature Video: Natural selection in a hurricane: The lizards that won’t let go
• The Atlantic: After Last Year’s Hurricanes, Caribbean Lizards Are Better at Holding on for Dear Life
• Smithsonian: Lizards With Bigger Toes and Smaller Hind Legs Survive Hurricanes
• Associated Press: Researchers use leaf blower to see how lizards endure storms

Practicing for an interview before the real videographers arrived.

Update: The day after I posted this, Colin’s lizards starred in yet another radio piece, this time rendering the hosts speechless and invoking comparisons to Tom Cruise. Read more about that here!