I have to admit, realizing it is somehow late August was a bit startling. I’m not entirely sure where my summer went, but I am grateful that my garden is finally producing veg, and the temps are starting to slowly trend downward. The Dog Days of summer are named for...
From October 25, 2023: Around our parent collaboration, CosmoQuest, Halloween is, hands-down, the most beloved season of the year. Costumes are worn. Yards are decorated. We are here for all the strangers that knock on our door - the weirdos, the witches, and the...
In this episode, we look at what tree rings can teach us about past earthquakes, and how well machine learning can identify life, like trees, from carbon-rich materials that were never alive to distant galaxies and spinning black holes. We even take a deep dive into...
When we headed into recording this episode, I didn’t know if there would be a government shutdown or not, and I have to admit, on Saturday, September 30, I spent more than a few hours binge-watching TV shows while frequently updating my news feeds. This episode would...
There are some news cycles that are just plain weird, and this news cycle tried really, really hard to be one of them. Headlines last week highlighted that JWST observed methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet, which is entirely true. This headline...
In this week's episode, we look at the upcoming solar maximum, how solar activity affects Neptune, the robotic invasion fleet on Mars, and how some of the weirdest star systems in reality have been able to form. In our closer look, we fail to see dark matter - like...
This episode reminds you to look up, look out, and reflect on what we see around us. Stories cover a weird white dwarf that is doing things our Sun may do billions of years from now, how satellite images can now be used to measure river flows here and on Mars, and...
While putting together this show, I often find myself thinking “Wow, this release is like that science fiction plot line” or “Oooo, this is new… I hope someone uses this in a story.” Most of the time, when I think things like that, I’m reading about black holes, star...
A few years ago, an audience member pointed out that I always seem a little too happy when discussing death and destruction from the sky. I’m not actually excited about our universe trying to kill off humanity, I’m excited about science, and it just turns out that a...
Each week, when we set off to do this show, we start with one core idea: We want to tell you what is new in space and astronomy… and remember Earth is a planet too. When we select stories, we try to find the ones we’re excited to talk about over coffee, or the ones we...
In this episode, we need to take one of our periodic looks at our planet's science and understand what it means to life as we know it. But we will only look at Earth for the first two segments. Then we’re going to race away to enjoy an interview by Beth Johnson with...
Space science isn’t where the money is… at least not yet. Astronomy and planetary science in the U.S. are funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and a variety of smaller foundations and extremely wealthy individuals. And this means that sometimes science can...
In this week's episode, we’re going to look at how we now work to understand the history of life - including human life - on Earth by studying the geology of our planet, and we’re going to take those lessons learned and apply them to Mars, and exoplanets beyond our...
In today’s show, we’re going to be talking more about meteors - including the source of the Geminids meteor shower, asteroid Phaethon - as well as hot planets, hungry black holes, and how we’re working to uncover the identity of dark matter.
While we could spend an entire episode on Earth, there is just too much going on in the universe to linger anywhere too long. From our world, we journey out to look at the super massive black hole in the core of M87, and then Beth Johnson will join us with an...
This episode features the kind of news week where we looked at the April 20th eclipse in the South Pacific and decided it just wasn’t a huge priority. Between watching Starship's “will it won’t it” launch attempts and getting news of discoveries in cosmology and new...
For decades now, our planetary science news cycles have been dominated by Mars. Mars is relatively close, and we have a lot of experience landing there and science goals to pursue. But it has left our other closest neighbor, Venus, off the mission list. That is, until...
Humans are the ultimate pattern matchers - at least for now. I have to admit I’m looking forward to the day I can give some new AI a set of images and ask it to tell me what animals it can find among the nebulae. The software isn’t there yet… But we’re also going to...
Right now, humans are tantalizingly close to being able to search for life on other worlds where it is reasonable to think life could exist. We can’t do it yet - at least not in a way that would be safe for any potential life, but this is a long game, and as we’ll...
A new asteroid has been discovered with an orbit that crosses our own planet’s orbit. In general, this object and Earth are very good and not trying to occupy the same space at the same time, and we’ve managed to coexist for a fair amount of time. We are going to have...
In general, the kind of year we’ll experience gets its label at the end of the year. 2005 was the year of the never-ending hurricane season. 2017 was the year we experienced an eclipse and lost Cassini. 2020 was the year satellite constellations went from a handful to...
OK so this is actually episode six, but our producer Ally numbered the episodes weird and we got mixed up. This week, thanks to the support of so many, we’re going to be looking at earthquakes, early results from JWST, spherical novae, the Dark Side of the Moon, and a...
In this show, we’ll go through more than 20 studies and observations ranging from planetary climates to galaxy mergers, and we’ll take a closer look at how Artificial Intelligence is being asked to play a role in every area of this research. And we’ll ask, “Is this...
