Ready to go dark and get deep? In the third episode of the Why AxS podcast—where brilliant scientific and artistic minds ponder the important whys—we explore the infinite possibilities of the origins and nature of our universe.

Our guests couldn't be more disparate in their paths, yet conjoined in their pursuits.

Lita Albuquerque, an internationally renowned visual artist and ArtCenter faculty member, is inspired by the natural world, on this planet and beyond. Her works are intimate and epic, earthly and ephemeral—a celebration of how we connect to our environment, below and above.

Her large-scale installations—like Rock and Pigment, a series of rocks in the Mojave Desert in alignment to the stars overhead—connect human to celestial bodies, allowing us to feel what our minds can't comprehend—that we're a tiny speck suspended among billions of galaxies.

Dida Markovic, an astrophysicist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also studies the incomprehensible, specifically the dark sector of the universe.

Dark energy and dark matter govern 95% of all the gravitational interactions in the universe–yet, present a mystery to science.