Blue Dot

Evolution by natural selection is taking place everywhere on Earth. Or is it? As in "natural." In this episode Dave talks to Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary biologist from the Netherlands. His new book Darwin Comes To Town: How The Urban Jungle Drives Evolution examines how evolution is not only taking place, it is accelerating in our cities.

Blue Dot teams with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to give you a taste of their new podcast series, On a Mission. Created by science journalist Leslie Mullen, the podcast chronicles the InSight lander mission to Mars, which lifted off from Vandenburg AFB in Southern California (the first planetary mission launched from California!) in May. The lander is going to probe the interior of Mars to try and learn more about how the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus Earth and Mars) evolved their

Not many modern astronauts become household names. Chris Hadfield's moustached countenance has become an iconic exception since his final spaceflight as Commander of the International Space Station in 2013. His autobiographical lessons on life, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, was a bestseller and amazing chronicle of why spaceflight matters to all of us. Hadfield was the first Canadian to walk in space and helped install the Canada Arm2 onto the ISS during his second spaceflight in 2001.

Lost in a lot of the noise about climate change and sea level rise is the role that warming ocean currents are playing in the melting of ice. And perhaps nowhere on Earth is that role more dramatically playing out than on the giant glacial clad island of Greenland. Dave is joined by his longtime friend Josh Willis, the Principal Investigator for NASA's OMG mission -- Oceans Melting Greenland. The warming Atlantic ocean circulation system is demonstrably melting the ice shelves of Greenland which

In n the wake of Hurricane Michael, we thought it appropriate to revisit our show on climate and severe weather. Climate Change. It generates controversy as well as extreme weather. In this episode we talk to Josh Willis and John Morales, two atmospheric experts on the frontlines of communicating climate science. Willis won a Presidential Early Career award from Barack Obama in 2009.

This week we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first test flight of the Apollo spacecraft in October of 1968 -- Apollo 7 -- with the last surviving crew member, Walt Cunningham. After the tragic fire that took the lives of Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in January 1967, NASA had to completely redesign the Apollo spacecraft. Just over a year and a half later, the crew of Cunningham, Commander Wally Schirra and Donn Eisele took the spacecraft into earth orbit for

In this episode we look back at what was once known as, "The Great San Francisco Earthquake." But it isn't the famous disaster from 1906. On October 21 an estimated magnitude 6.8 temblor rocked the Bay Area when the Hayward Fault ruptured. Dubbed "the most dangerous fault in America," by seismologists, the tectonic boundary is an extension of the more famous San Andreas Fault and passes below the densely populated East Bay from Fremont through Hayward, Oakland and Berkeley before ending in San

This week's Blue Dot is a classic episode. Our nation's fleet of weather satellites are one of our greatest orbital assets. They provide the data that is fed into sophisticated computer models which are then used by forecasters to give us accurate 5 to 7 day outlooks on the weather. In November, the Joint Polar Satellite System or JPSS-1 was launched with amazing instrumental capabilities. In the image above, you can see the smoke plumes from the devastating Thomas Fire, the largest wildfire in

In this episode, Dave interviews James R. Hansen, author of First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong -- the first and only authorized biography of Neil A. Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11 and the first human being to set foot on another world. Hansen had unprecedented access to the famously reticent astronaut and conducted over 50 hours of deeply personal interviews and unfettered access to Armstrong's family and friends.

In this episode we celebrate 15 years of the Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared telescope, one of NASA's "Great Observatory" has helped revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos. Dave is joined by three top scientists from the Spitzer mission. Lisa Storrie Lombardi is the Project Manager and describes the telescope and its operations from an engineering standpoint. Then we are joined by Spitzer Science Center staff astronomer Sean Carey who describes some of the amazing discoveries made