Dr. Starkid

June Sass is a public health scientist and microbiologist with a master’s from Johns Hopkins in molecular microbiology and immunology. Her work connects fungal biology, public health, pathogens, therapeutics, astromycology, and the microbiome. She also runs Summercraft Kombucha, where she develops mushroom kombucha and wellness drinks. Expect to learn why fungi and bacteria are not just harmful pa...

This is the first installment in the astrobiology series, adapted from the astrobiology course Dr. Dakotah Tyler taught at university. Expect to learn what astrobiology actually means, why sci-fi aliens are usually too human, why UFO claims require careful assumptions, and why defining life is harder than it sounds. We cover viruses, dormant microbes, ideas as information systems, chemical possibi...

Dr. Dakotah Tyler sits down with Dr. Suh for a wide-ranging conversation on biomedical engineering, organs on chips, how biology behaves in space, stem cells, evolution, and human identity. They talk about microgravity and aging, space travel, induced pluripotent stem cells, tissue engineering, animal research ethics, body odor genetics, microplastics, beauty standards, the manosphere, and what it...

What would alien astronomers see if they pointed an impossible telescope at Earth from millions of light-years away? This episode uses that thought experiment to explain light travel time, relativity, time dilation, the Andromeda paradox, and the strange idea that there may be no single universal “now.” We also get into the block universe, why GPS depends on relativity, and what all of this might...

This episode starts with the story behind the science: how a football injury, a lost sense of identity, and a Cosmos documentary helped send me toward astronomy and exoplanet research. From there, we get into what my dissertation was actually about: atmospheric mass loss for close-in exoplanets. That means planets getting blasted by radiation from their stars, losing gas over time, and sometimes l...

How did we go from knowing a handful of planets in our own solar system to confirming thousands of worlds around other stars? This episode traces the story of exoplanets, from ancient “wanderers” in the night sky to the modern methods astronomers use to detect worlds we usually can’t see directly. We talk Galileo, Jupiter’s moons, hot Jupiters, pulsar planets, lava worlds, water worlds, rogue plan...