Danny Decode

The night sky is fascinating to watch with the naked eye. Billions of stars twinkle across our own galaxy and billions of other galaxies across the universe. But something else might catch your attention in the night sky: our own magnificent moon! But have you ever wondered why we always see the same side of the moon? In fact, the first time we ever took a picture of the far side of the moon was when the Apollo astronauts flew around the moon and back. From the surface of the Earth, it is simply impossible to see the other side of the Moon. Sounds like the far side of the moon is playing hide and seek. Actually, there is a reason for this strange phenomenon, and it is called tidal locking.

Photo used in this episode is from Tomruen on Wikipedia licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago and they left amazing fossils throughout the world as a reminder that they used to rule the Earth. But did you know that some dinosaurs are still alive today? Don’t panic, I’m not talking about dinosaurs that may try to eat you alive, like in the Jurassic Park movies. I am talking about birds. Yes, birds! Scientists discovered that birds are not just related to dinosaurs, they ARE dinosaurs!

Photo used in this episode is from PLoS Biology journal (http://www.plos.org/) licensed under cc-by-2.5 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Around fourteen billion years ago, our entire universe was very very small. How small? Well, it was roughly a million billion billion times smaller than a single atom. Sounds like not much room for all the planets, stars, and galaxies that form our universe today. In fact, way before stars formed, the universe was a kind of soup containing an insane amount of energy crammed into that super tiny space. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. Not so much a disaster, but a cataclysmic event did happen indeed, causing a phenomenal expansion of the universe, cooling down its soup of energy, enough to form stars, then planets, including Earth, then all the creatures that live on it. That cataclysmic event is commonly known as the Big Bang.

Did you know that 96% of animal species have eyes in one form or another? But when left in complete darkness, we are all left totally blind, or are we? For us humans, yes. We can only see when there is some source of light. Even cats, known to have good night vision, cannot see in absolute darkness. But many other animals can still see in pitch black.

Photo used in this episode is from the  Passivhaus Institut, Germany – http://www.passiv.de and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Earth is the only planet that can sustain life in our solar system and maybe in the entire universe. Or is it? Over the past few years, the Kepler telescope has been looking for other planets in our galaxy that could potentially hold life and guess what? A few were actually found. They are just the right temperature and size for liquid water to flow on their surface and they are orbiting their stars at the right distance, just like earth. However, they are so distant from us that travelling to one of them would take thousand of years with our current rocket technology. That’s a long time for human beings. What if we can transform a closer planet, like Mars or Venus, to make it habitable? Scientists already thought about that and they call it terraforming, which literally means "earth forming".

Photo used in this episode was originally posted to Flickr by Kevin M. Gill at https://www.flickr.com/photos/53460575@N03/8165909516 and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Picture this: an eight-legged, terrifying creature that can survive being baked in an oven, left with no food or water, submerged in any type of acid, compressed to 1,200 times the pressure you are experiencing right now, and even sent to the vacuum of space. You are picturing the tardigrade, the only animal that can live forever.

The tardigrade picture used in this episode is from Goldstein lab - tardigrades, licensed under the Creative Commons Share Alike 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Did you know that 85% of the matter in our universe is totally invisible? Not like air or germs that are invisible to our own eyes. I’m talking about matter that is completely undetectable. Scientists call it "dark matter". Sounds spooky, isn’t it?