The Distance of the Moon

When neuroscientist Madeline Lancaster was a brand new postdoc, she accidentally used an expired protein gel in a lab experiment and noticed something weird. The stem cells she was trying to grow in a dish were self-assembling. The result? Madeline was the first person ever to gr ...  Show more

In 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu ‘Smokey’ Roosa was asked to take something to the moon with him. Of all things, he chose to take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34 times, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds ...  Show more

Neil Maher talks about the social forces that shaped NASA in the 1960s and 70s, connecting the space race with the radical upheavals of the counterculture. Maher is a professor of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark. He is the author o ...  Show more

In addition to flying, landing, and returning from the moon in 1969 — NASA's Apollo 11 crew helped with a series of scientific experiments. One of them was to leave a special instrument with lots of little reflectors on the surface of the moon. The goal of that experiment was to ...  Show more

In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:Your Weight Has a "Set Point" That Your Brain Thinks Is BestThe Most Exclusive Museum in the Galaxy May Be on the Mo ...  Show more

During the summer of 1969, the Apollo 10 lunar mission orbited the dark side of the moon encountered unfamiliar signals coming from the moon's surface. After the famed Apollo 11 moon landing later that summer, word began to spread that the astronauts had encountered something ali ...  Show more