Earth and the other seven planets in our solar system have only one star: the Sun. Years ago, astronomers found the first exoplanet that had two stars. They also found one with three stars. And four. Just how many stars can one planet...

There are a lot of weird exoplanets out there, like 55 Cancri e (aka Janssen), which is probably half covered in lava. But the half that's covered in lava might not be quite the half you're thinking of.<br/>

The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landscape that we now think of as the Amazon looked very different. And would you believe that the entire revolution of the Amazon began with...

In astronomy we talk about billions of years like it’s no big deal. But how can we be sure about timescales so far beyond the capacity for human intuition? Our discovery of what we now call deep time is very recent - as recent as our...

Einstein once asked whether “the moon exists only when I look at it?". It was rhetorical objection to the idea that measurement in quantum mechanics causes reality to become real. But there was a time when the moon didn’t exist, and then...

With the global pandemic of Covid 19 still encompassing the world, we are generally not big fans of viruses right now. But we sure are thinking about them a lot. That’s right, even astrophysicists are pondering these bizarre little...

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from deadly space radiation. What if it were drastically weakened, as a precursor to flipping upside down? I mean, it has before … many, many times..

Spaceship Earth has a literal deflector...

Otherwise landed in 2004 with its twin - MER-A, better known as Spirit. These six-wheeled golf-cart-sized robots were Swiss army knives of geological lab instruments. Opportunities most spectacular discovery where these cute little...

The Kepler telescope recently noticed a strange partial eclipse that some have speculated could be a Dyson Sphere. Are Dyson Sphere's possible? Are they practical? What other alternatives to futuristic energy capture do we have to choose...

What do we do to protect ourselves from extinction level events? And what if some of those events are unavoidable? Can we survive adrift in space? Find out in this episode of Space Time.

We already have the technology to bring humans safely to Mars and set up small settlements - or at least could do within a generation. But those settlements will need to be cocooned - shielded against the deadly cold, intense radiation,...

Recently, the oldest quasar ever seen was discovered by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, as well as the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. In this first episode of...

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.

Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are now. Because they used to face some pretty stiff competition from a group of lizard look-alikes.

In the quest to understand how evolution basically built the woolly mammoth, we may have found the blueprints for building them ourselves.

There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period was anything but boring. In fact, it set the stage for our modern version of plate tectonics - and...

A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.

In between two of the islands of Indonesia, there’s an ancient line that is both real and…not real.

Around 30 million years ago, a new group of predators began to push nautiloids from their former global range into a single remaining refuge. But who were these predators?

The world of the Jurassic was a lot like ours - similar interactions between plants and insects were happening, but the players have changed over time. Because it looks like pollination by insects actually got going twice.

In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the...

They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have saved the world.

While Earth’s natural history has been playing out over the last few billion years, another epic planetary saga has also been unfolding right next door.

In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. How did this giant marine reptile end up high in the Andes Mountains?