Recent episodes

Creating Earth NASA’s iconic images of Earth from space date back to the late 1960s--with snapshots taken by Apollo astronauts. The modern “blue marble” images are captured by machines and they’re not photos. They’re datasets collected by instruments aboard satellites and then translated into imagery on the ground.

Ode To Ice Ice can be difficult to get a handle on, literally and figuratively. It can be cloudy or clear, as hard as concrete or as soft as a snowflake. We spoke with two ice experts--an ice sculptor and ice researcher--about the slippery material, to find out what fascinates them about frozen water.

Mini Speed Demons From mantis shrimp to trap-jaw ants, some of the fastest organisms on the planet are ones you may have never heard of. Biologist Sheila Patek, of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says the creatures she studies move at speeds that are hard for us to imagine, let alone perceive. A high-speed camera is a must.

Computer Of Bubbles Bubbles can do computations, says Stanford professor Manu Prakash. Just like electrons running through wires in your computer, Prakash directed bubbles through tiny etched tubes and showed basic computations were possible. Bubbles are bigger and slower than electrons, but they can carry things--meaning you could create as you compute, Prakash says.