In this episode, Stuart and Natty talk with Dr. Sarah Balgooyen of PFAS@Mines at the Colorado School of Mines about her team's surprisingly good news: PFAS levels in Great Lakes fish have been declining since the mid-2000s. They get into how you actually find that out — freeze-drying and blending 50-year-old lake trout pulled out of an EPA freezer — and how Teflon went from a failed refrigerant experiment to a key material in the Manhattan Project. PLUS: a New Yorker cartoon pitch!

Warren Dunes State Park, Michigan

Bob's Atomic Burgers, Golden, CO

Sarah's paper — Journal of Great Lakes Research

PFAS@Mines research group