Big Picture Science
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Big Picture Science
The surprising connections in science and technology that give you the Big Picture. Astronomer Seth Shostak and science journalist Molly Bentley are joined each week by leading researchers, techies, and journalists to provide a smart and humorous take on science. Our regular "Skeptic Check" episodes...
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Worms of Endearment
Earthworms may be small, limbless, and blind but, as Darwin observed nearly 150 years ago, they play a critical role in soil ecology. Darwin’s 19th ce...
Arctic Dispatch
The Arctic serves as the world’s refrigerator, keeping the planet cool. But temperatures in the Arctic are rising nearly four times faster than the re...
Cold Comfort
Another scorching summer has us blasting the AC and grabbing a chilled drink. Air conditioning and refrigeration may beat the heat, but they also pres...
CRISPR Mosquitoes
The powerful gene editing tool CRISPR is already being tested on animal and plant cells. It has even been used on humans. How might this revolutionary...
Skeptic Check: Blue Light Special
Many of us know the feeling: we intend to go to bed but pull out our phones for one last scroll. Setting them aside hours later, we’re wide awake, una...
Make Space for Animals
Long before Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space, Laika, a stray dog, crossed the final frontier. Find out what other surprising speci...
Skeptic Check: Disclosure Day
The latest Hollywood romp through the world of aliens has landed in theaters. Steven Spielberg’s movie Disclosure Day suggests that our government has...
Vroom!
Self-driving cars, once a thing of science fiction, have become a reality in a handful of cities across the country. As our vehicles gain autonomy, th...
Outside of Our Minds
Since humans first chiseled marks into stone, we have externalized our thoughts and ideas. Our tools may have evolved—now we clack away at computer ke...
Skeptic Check: Cryptids
Bigfoot could get official status if proposed legislation passes making it the state cryptid of California. If nothing else, the effort shows that fas...
Allergy Reason
Runny nose. Itchy, watery eyes. Sneezing. If you don’t have allergies, you probably know someone who does. The number of people with allergies, includ...
Preventing Future Pandemics
We may not want to think about another pandemic, but, as epidemiologists say, it is once again a “when,” not “if,” scenario. For his latest book, jour...
Shadow of Chernobyl
Forty years later, the exclusion zone surrounding the infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant remains uninhabited by humans. But among the radioactive...
40 Years After Chernobyl
On April 26th, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union blasted a plume of radioactive debris a half mile into the...
Skeptic Check: Feeling Risky
It’s not just facts that inform our decisions. They’re also guided by how those facts feel. From deciding whether to buckle our seat belts to addressi...
Old School
Great news! We've been nominated for a Webby Award!
Our three-part Katrina series is a finalist for Best News &
Politics limited s...
Amazing Arctic
What’s it like to live on a block of ice, especially when it thaws? An environment writer shares his forty-year experience in the Arctic, including th...
Flower Power
Before everything could come up roses, there had to be a primordial flower – the mother, and father, of all flowers. Now scientists are on the hunt fo...
Fantastic-er Voyage
Thinking small can sometimes achieve big things. A new generation of diminutive robots can enter our bodies and deal with medical problems such as int...
Skeptic Check: Project Hail Mary
As protagonist Ryland Grace fights to save Earth - and possibly the universe - in Project Hail Mary, author Andy Weir discusses the science behind his...
Skeptic Check: Moon Conspiracy
As NASA’s Artemis program promises to take us back to the moon for the first time in fifty years, we consider what it means that as many as 10% of Ame...
Chasing an Asteroid
Everyone knows that a big rock wiped out the dinosaurs. But the danger from an asteroid hitting Earth is not limited to ancient history. To deal with...
Birds of a Feather
With only a microscope and a collection of birds, taxidermist Roxie Laybourne became the world’s first forensic ornithologist. The “feather detective”...
Celestial Shake-Up
We’re going back to the Moon. The planned March 2026 launch of Artemis II is the first crewed mission to the moon since 1972. Historic as it is, it is...
Hot to Cold
There are benefits to chilling out. When we cool superconductors to 460℉ degrees below zero, they acquire extraordinary properties that help run quant...
Like Lightning
Every second, lightning strikes 50 to 100 times somewhere. It can wreak havoc by starting wildfires and sometimes killing people. But lightning also p...
Cold to Hot
The icy-white crust of Arctic permafrost is melting, and increased plant growth is turning the glacial north green. Metals like iron, once locked insi...
Where the Wind Blows
It’s omnipresent on Earth and absent on the Moon. When it’s blowing sand in our eyes or frigid air down our necks, we may curse the wind, but living o...
Life in the Solar System
Spewing lava and belching noxious fumes, volcanoes seem hostile to biology. But the search for life off-Earth includes the hunt for these hotheads on...
Skeptic Check: Hypnosis
You are getting sleeeepy and open to suggestion. But is that how hypnotism works? And does it really open up a portal to the unconscious mind? Hypnoti...
Beyond the Periodic Table
You interact with about two-thirds of the elements of the periodic table every day. Some, like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, make up our bodies and th...
Movie Mayhem
Science fiction movies force us to face a multitude of end-of-the-world scenarios. Whether the final curtain is dropped by rampaging aliens, killer ro...
The Best Things in Life are Tree(s)
While humans were leaving the Stone Age and entering the Bronze, some Bristlecone pine trees grew from seeds to sprouts. They’ve been growing ever sin...
A Real Gas
Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We can’t see gases in our atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen, b...
Amazing Amazonia
The Amazon is often described as an ecosystem under dire threat due to climate change and deliberate deforestation. Yet there is still considerable ho...
Flu the Coop
The worry about whether H5N1 will trigger a human pandemic has concealed a startling reality. Avian influenza has already taken an enormous toll on th...
Skeptic Check: String Theory
The idea that the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings was once the science theory du jour. String theory promised to unite the disparate theori...
Solar Good
In Brazil, leaders from across the globe are gathering for COP30, the premier climate summit in the world. For the first time, the U.S. is sitting it...
Katrina and the River
“The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise,” said Mark Twain. In this, our final episod...
The Decomposers
What happens to us after we die is as much a question for anthropology and ecology as it is for theology. Death and decay are not comfortable subject...