Over at The Atlantic, Ed Yong put out a request to scientists and researchers about trying to get their work through airport security screenings...
"
That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis"
Martin Cohn studies genitals and urinary tracts, and how they develop in embryos:
A TSA officer asked if Cohn had anything sharp or fragile inside. Yes, he said, some 3-D-printed anatomical models. They’re pretty fragile. The officer pulled out two models of mouse embryos, nodded to herself, and moved on. “And then,” Cohn recalls, “she pulled out this mouse penis by its base, like it was Excalibur.”
What is this?
“Do you need to know or do you want to know?” said Cohn.
I’m curious, she replied.
“It’s a 3-D print-out of an adult mouse penis.”
A what?
“A 3-D print-out of an adult mouse penis.”
Oh no it isn’t.
“It is.”
The officer called over three of her colleagues and asked them to guess what it is. No one said anything, so Cohn told them. They fell apart laughing.
Astrophysicist Brian Schmidt was carrying something rather special that happened to show up on the security scan as a solid black disk. "Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?" they said. "The King of Sweden," he replied. "Why did he give this to you?," they probed. "Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating." It was his Nobel Prize medallion....
Ondine Cleaver from UT Southwestern Medical Center once tried carrying tupperware containers full of frogs. Realizing that the x-rays would be very dangerous to her specimens, so she offered to show the contents to the TSA agent. "We opened it just a slit, and there were 12-14 eyes staring at her. She screamed. She did this 3 times. A few other agents came by to see, and none could deal with the container being opened more than a bit. But they had to make sure there was nothing nefarious inside, so we went through cycles of opening the container, screaming, closing it laughing, and again."
"Airport security lines, it turns out, are a fantastic venue for scientists to try their hand at outreach. Various scientists are said to have claimed that you don’t really understand something if you can’t explain it to your grandmother, a barmaid, a six-year-old, and other such sexist or ageist variants. But how about this: can you successfully explain it to an TSA official—someone who not only might have no background in science, but also strongly suspects that you might be a national security threat? Can you justify your research in the face of questions like “What are you doing?” or “Why are you doing it?” or “Why are you taking that onto a plane?” "