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Oliver Burkeman, author of 4000 Weeks: Time Management For Mortals, shares how perhaps it's not what's happening in life, but the fact that it happens at all as a sort of revelation to reboot us to be attuned to awe, wonder, and the present moment.

Listening to The Movies Why watch a movie if you can’t see the screen? Matthew and his friend Ben take in a Marx Brothers film and showcase the power of a good description. Blind Guy Travels is written and performed by Matthew Shifrin, and produced and sound-designed by Ian Coss. Blind Guy Travels is a production of Radiotopia from PRX and part of Radiotopia Presents, a podcast feed debuting limit...

*Due to a recording error this recording begins with Kellie Marie Tran answering a question* Join the creators and cast of the hit podcast Passenger List from PRX's Radiotopia for a fan-submitted Q&A about the mystery fiction series. This recording includes Kelly Marie Tran (Executive Producer, Voice of Kaitlin Le), John Dryden (Executive Producer and Show Creator), Lauren Shippen (Series Writer,...

All things in the cosmos have a lifespan, from the smallest particles to the most ancient suns. Everything has its season. Every season must come to an end. And this episode marks the end of Orbital Path. So, for the last transit of our podcast, Dr. Michelle Thaller and producer David Schulman join NASA astrobiologist Dr. Jen Eigenbrode on a site visit to one of Michelle’s very favorite places at...

Asteroids, as the dinosaurs found out, can have big effects on life on Earth.  Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatán. The impact caused apocalyptic tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Grit and ash blotted out the sun. It wiped out species that had roamed the Earth for millions of years. Yet asteroid hits also were critical to the origins of life on Earth. Asteroids may we...

To make a black hole, you need to think big. Really big. Start with a star much bigger than the sun — the bigger the better. Then settle in, and wait a few million years for your star to die. That should do the trick, if you want to get yourself a garden-variety black hole. But there’s another kind of black hole. They are mind-boggling in size. And deeply mysterious: Super-massive black holes. Las...

On September 15, 2018, the last Delta II rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force base, in California. It carried into orbit IceSat-2 — a satellite equipped with perhaps the most sophisticated space laser ever built.   NASA didn’t put it up there to shoot down rogue asteroids. Instead, it’s taking aim — with exquisite precision — at Earth. On this episode of Orbital Path, Dr. Michelle Thaller t...

In this encore episode of Orbital Path (previously heard in October 2017), Brian Greene, a celebrated explainer of how our universe operates and the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Columbia University, sits down to talk with Dr. Michelle Thaller. We live our lives in three dimensions. But we also walk those three dimensions along a fourth dimension: time. 

Our world makes sense...

To hear Leonard Susskind tell it, we are living in a golden age of quantum physics. And he should know. Susskind is a grandee of theoretical physics. In the 1960s, he was one of the discoverers of String Theory. His friends and collaborators over the years include the likes of Nobel Prize winners Gerard 't Hooft and Richard Feynman. And, for more than a decade, Susskind engaged in an intellectual...

For a long time, probably as long as we have been gazing up at the night sky, people have been asking ourselves: Are we alone? Is there life out there, anywhere else in the universe? For modern Earthlings, our fascination with extraterrestrial life has focussed on one place in particular: Mars. The planet today is a forbidding, arid place. But billions of years ago, Mars may have had a gigantic oc...

Zoe is in 8th grade. She’s a student in Mr. Andersen’s Earth science class at a public school in Brooklyn. Lately, she’s been concerned about the future of the planet. Specifically, Zoe has been learning about the phenomenon of planetary dehydration — and she wanted to ask Dr. Michelle Thaller what would happen if Earth lost its water. It’s part of a new Orbital Path project called “Telescope,” wh...

Instead of grappling with the big, cosmic questions that preoccupy adults, this week on Orbital Path we’re doing something different. We’re grappling with the big, cosmic questions that preoccupy kids. It’s part of a new project called “Telescope,” where Dr. Michelle Thaller takes on the really big questions in astronomy—from public school students. In this episode, Michelle fields questions from...

On August 17, 2017, an alert went out. Gravitational wave detectors in Louisiana and Washington state had detected a disturbance from deep space. The effect was subtle — these detectors and a sister site in Italy measure disturbances smaller than a proton. But the evidence was dramatic. And the story they told was truly cataclysmic: A pair of neutron stars had spiraled to their deaths. That apocal...

Scientists in 1985 discovered something that threatened the world we live in: The ozone layer had a hole in it. A big one. And this hole was growing very quickly. If it continued to grow, the consequences would be dire. Presented with the science, world leaders came up with an international agreement. The Montreal Protocol, as the treaty was called, may elicit shrugs today. But it staved off disas...

In this darkest season of the year, Dr. Michelle Thaller and NASA astronomer Andrew Booth curl up by the fire. Gazing into the embers, red wine in hand, they consider the meaning of the winter solstice — on other planets. Like Uranus, where parts of the planet go 42 earth years without seeing the sun. Or Mars, where winters are made colder by an orbit politely described as “eccentric.” Or Saturn —...

NASA’S office of planetary defense isn’t worried about Klingons or Amoeboid Zingatularians.  They worry about asteroids and comets.  Like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. It was about 20 yards across. An asteroid 150 yards in diameter could take out a city. An even bigger one — as the dinosaurs reading this will attest — could change earth’s ecology, and lead to mass extinct...

These days, astrophysicists like Dr. Michelle Thaller use instruments to probe the distant reaches of our galaxy, and far beyond. They use interferometry, the Hubble space telescope, and other technology impossible to imagine when the constellations of the winter sky were named. But, as the season changes and Orion returns to view, Michelle still finds plenty of wonder left for us to see — even wi...

We've got some awkward news to share, folks: The producer of Orbital Path is claiming he’s been abducted by space aliens. So this week, we're dusting off the theremin and returning to one of our favorite early episodes — “Must Be Aliens.” Dr. Michelle Thaller talks with Phil Plait — AKA the "Bad Astronomer" — about the Kepler mission to find planets circling other stars ... and why we humans are s...

The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan avidly guards its traditional culture. Bhutan is a nation that — instead of looking to GDP or debt ratios — measures success by an index of “Gross National Happiness.” In this episode of Orbital Path, Dr. Michelle Thaller describes her recent adventures in Bhutan — including a climb to a Buddhist monastery perched on the face of a cliff. In that rarefied air, Michel...

We live our lives in three dimensions. But we also walk those three dimensions along a fourth dimension: time.

 Our world makes sense thanks to mathematics. Math lets us count our livestock, it lets us navigate our journeys. Mathematics has also proved an uncanny, stunningly accurate guide to what Brian Greene calls “the dark corners of reality.” 

But what happens when math takes us far, far bey...

In a scary time, in a scary world, in a scary universe, NASA astronomer Andrew Booth says one of the things that frightens him most is math. Specifically, the unshaken power of mathematics to describe the universe. That’s because, beyond the comforting world of Newtonian physics, math gets mind-bendingly weird. So from the relative safety of their backyard hot tub, Dr. Michelle Thaller and Booth (...

Remember the myth of Icarus? He and his dad were trying to escape from prison. Locked up on the Greek island of Crete, they made wings out of  beeswax and bird feathers. They soared to freedom — but Icarus got cocky, flew too close to the sun, and fell into the sea.  A few thousand years later, NASA is ready to do the job right. The Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to fly in 2018. The spacecraft ha...

After a full day in a clean suit, there’s nothing like a dip in the hot tub. NASA astronomer Andrew Booth spends his days working with lasers, developing some of the word’s most advanced telescopes. When he gets home from work, he loves to pour a glass of wine and slip into the hot tub. And ponder some of the weirder aspects of astrophysics. Orbital Path host Dr. Michelle Thaller (who happens to b...

There was a time before planets and suns. A time before oxygen. You could say there was time, even, before what we think of as light. Back in 1989, the Big Bang theory was still in question. But that year, a NASA team led by cosmologist John Mather launched a mission to probe the earliest moments of the universe. Mather won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer...

NASA is relying on hi-tech lasers — and some vintage U.S. Navy hand-me-downs — to learn about the polar regions of a remarkable, watery planet. It's located in the Orion spur of our galaxy. NASA scientists have detected mountain ranges completely under ice. But the remaining mysteries of the ice here are profound, and what the science tells us could have dramatic impact on human life. In this epis...