You have questions, I have answers! In this edition of Ask Joe Stuff, you'll find out what the date really is according to Earth's age, why we get chills up our spine, what my favorite planet is, why hair grows (or doesn't), and why root...

I don’t want to alarm you, but the world is going to end. All of this. Gone. And scientists are certain all of this will happen. On the bright side this isn’t going to happen for 4-5 billion years. It makes me wonder: In a universe...

Glass is made of sand, which is a kind of rock. But glass is transparent, and rocks aren’t transparent. What’s up with that? Why is glass clear? And why can I sit on a chair? And why can we touch anything? Today we zoom down to the weird...

Earth has seasons, but what about the rest of the planets in the solar system? Let’s take a tour from Mercury to Pluto and see what seasons would be like on all our planetary neighbors. Bring a sweater!

On July 4th 2016, the Juno spacecraft entered orbit around the planet Jupiter after leaving earth five years ago. The Juno probe will tell us what lies inside the mysterious gas giant and with this information we’ll better understand the...

The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an...

Could the tech industry's complex algorithms support people during their darkest times, rather than just deliver targeted ads? Drawing from his own experience with depression, global mental health researcher Sandersan Onie shows how...

Since the 1950s, governments, companies, and researchers have been planting flags among the stars. But while it might seem like there's plenty of room in space, some pieces of celestial real estate are more valuable than others. As far...

You and the professor have driven your DeLorean back to the past to fix issues with the spacetime continuum caused by your time traveling. But another DeLorean appears with older versions of you and the professor. The professors panic...

A hydrogen atom is traveling high within the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere. This particular atom first entered the exosphere millions of years ago, but today it overcomes Earth's gravitational pull and escapes, joining the...

Growing food in space will be necessary to support the future of space exploration. And it won't be monoculture, either. Here's why astronauts will be growing whole ecosystems in space.

Most of us are stoked if we can get a stone to skip more than 3 or 4 times. The world record holder at skipping stones has 88 skips. Here's why science says that number is way too low.

If you take a look at all the impact craters in our solar system, the vast majority are nice, neat circles. But why? Meteorites and asteroids strike planets and moons at all sorts of angles. Where are all the elliptical craters?

You might think of x-rays as the go-to particle to see through solid objects. But there's a subatomic particle out there that can see through everything from volcanos to lead shielding in nuclear reactors. It's called a muon, and...

The Sun is green, actually. We'll go into why the blackbody effect means the Sun emits more green visible light than any other color, and why evolution and color perception mean it's ok to see it as yellow, anyway.

In the hunt for life beyond Earth, scientists shouldn't skip over frozen planets. In some cases, ice might actually help life evolve!

Ever since we started launching stuff into space, we've communicated with spacecraft (and astronauts) using radio waves. But over the past few decades, scientists have experimented with a new technique that could make things a lot more...

Bacteria are everywhere, including clouds, and the rain that falls from them. Not only can they survive the harsh environment and hitchhike across continents, they can share their genes, too. Including the ones that make them resistant...

You'd think that the Northern and Southern Hemispheres would be basically symmetrical -- that since our planet is a ball, the climate, temperature, and weather patterns would be the same on top as on the bottom. But there are some...

If you picture a rocket launch, do you imagine it taking off from a hot air balloon? In this episode, we'll learn how using balloons to launch sounding rockets advanced our understanding of planet Earth, radiation, and how to keep...

Hunting for rogue planets is like hunting for an invisible needle in a haystack. But we're getting a much clearer view thanks to gravitational microlensing surveys. And it looks like there are a LOT more of them out there than we thought.

Despite being a noble gas, helium has a carbon footprint. We haven't managed to find any helium reservoirs that don't also contain natural gas. But must they? Scientists and startups alike are on the hunt.

Months before Apollo 8 took humans around the Moon for the first time, two Russian tortoises (plus some other lunar tourists) had already made it back home. This was Zond 5 — the first mission to return to Earth after visiting another...

About 1.8–0.8 billion ago, the Earth went through a period known as the Boring Billion, where not a lot changed in terms of geology, evolution, or even the number of hours in a day. Some scientists call it “the dullest period in Earth’s...