Third Pod from the Sun

Ryan Zeigler has a one-of-a-kind job: He’s the guy in charge of the Moon rocks. Starting with Apollo 11 in 1969 and ending with Apollo 17 in 1972, astronauts brought back more than 800 pounds of samples from the Moon – from micron-scale motes of dust to boulders weighing more than 25 pounds. In the 50 years since the Moon rocks arrived back on Earth, scientists all over the world have used these s...

To those of us on land, the world underneath the oceans seems quiet and serene. But scientists who study ocean acoustics will tell you it is anything but tranquil underwater. Our oceans are home to a cacophony of sounds – from the songs of marine mammals to the cracking of icebergs to the rumbling of earthquakes to the roar of ships. In this episode, Bob Dziak, head of NOAA’s acoustics program, de...

At Third Pod, we often talk with researchers about how they grew up to become scientists. But how does an actor become a scientist on screen? In this special episode of Third Pod from the Sun, we talk with actor Anthony Rapp about inhabiting the character of Lt. Commander Paul Stamets on “ Star Trek: Discovery .” Rapp, best known for playing Marc Cohen in the original Broadway cast of the Tony Awa...

Few natural phenomena are more difficult to study than tornadoes. They’re short-lived, their locations are notoriously hard to predict, and getting close enough to observe them is both challenging and extremely dangerous. In this episode, Ohio University meteorologist Jana Houser describes what it’s like to chase these monster storms. Listen to Jana describe the terror and excitement of her first...

In the early years of the 20 th century, several groups of explorers attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole, as Antarctica was one of the last unexplored places on Earth. A team of Norwegian explorers led by Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole on December 14, 1911. A competing British party led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the Pole roughly a month later. Amundsen’s...

In this bonus clip for our most recent episode, Science Turns to Search and Rescue , David Babb describes the incredible wildlife of the Arctic.

  The Arctic Ocean is topped with a layer of frozen sea water – sea ice – that grows every winter and shrinks every summer. To study the ice in detail, researchers hop aboard an icebreaker ship that can plow through the sharp, cold ice floes without being damaged. But two years ago, the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen was called off its scientific mission to assist the Canadian coast guard with searc...

About 11,000 years ago, the Sahara desert turned green. The region received ten times the rain that falls there now, filling lakes and supporting savannahs, woodlands, and human communities. This was not the first time our species had encountered a green Sahara. Every 20,000 years or so, the wobble in Earth’s axis called precession brings the northern hemisphere a little closer to the Sun in summe...

Snapping shrimp are small but mighty creatures: they’re only a few inches long but are among the noisiest animals in the ocean. The loud cracking noise they make when snapping their claws sounds almost like a gunshot, and when enough shrimp snap at once, the din can be louder than the roar of a passenger jet flying overhead. Snapping shrimp are typically found in warm, shallow subtropical waters a...

Hawaii is frequently described as a paradise in the Pacific Ocean, but for some scientists conducting field work, there can be some challenges to overcome. In this special episode, Kate Brauman , the lead scientist at the Global Water Initiative at the University of Minnesota, describes her field work experiences in Kona on the big island of Hawaii. Kate's research into land use and its impact on...

In 1959, the United States built an unusual military base under the surface of the Greenland ice Sheet. Camp Century was a hub for scientific research, but it also doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic. When Camp Century was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be forever...

Water is the most essential of essentials. We can survive weeks without food but only days without water. And it’s something that many of us take for granted. But water is not as plentiful, available, and clean in all parts of the world. And with climate change, water is going to become (and is already) a limited resource to some. From Arizona to Katmandu, Chris Scott , Research Professor of Water...

Third Pod from the Sun is all about the scientists and the methods behind the science. And who better to talk to about going the extra mile for results than photographer and star of the film Chasing Ice , James Balog ? For three decades, James has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on one of the most important issues of our era: human modification of our planet’s natural systems. He and his...

  Third Pod from the Sun is all about the scientists and the methods behind the science. And who better to talk to about going the extra mile for results than photographer and star of the film Chasing Ice , James Balog ? For three decades, James has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on one of the most important issues of our era: human modification of our planet’s natural systems. He and h...

  Third Pod from the Sun is all about the scientists and the methods behind the science. And who better to talk to about going the extra mile for results than photographer and star of the film Chasing Ice , James Balog ? For three decades, James has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on one of the most important issues of our era: human modification of our planet’s natural systems. He and h...

  Kathy Crane is a true adventurer. As one of the first women in the field of marine geophysics in the 1970s, she hypothesized and then helped discover the existence of hydrothermal vents on the Galápagos Rift along the East Pacific Rise in the mid-1970s and was one the first people to see many of the strange creatures that make their home in this improbable environment. Using a temperature-monito...

Check out this bonus clip from our most recent episode, Footprints from an Ancient World, where Renata Netto talks about what it's like to be a woman in her field.

  Renata Netto spends a lot of time on beaches. The Brazilian scientist is an ichnologist , a specialist in the traces of ancient animal behaviors preserved in fossilized footprints, trackways, burrows, nests and other impressions. These “trace fossils” do not hold the animal itself, but a kind of geological memory of its presence on Earth, 60,000 or 600,000 or 600 million years ago. Many trace fo...

In the mid-1980s, scientists uncovered a troubling phenomenon: The ozone layer, which protects all living things on Earth from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation, was rapidly thinning over Antarctica. The discovery set off a race by scientists to figure out what was causing the ozone hole, and eventually the realization that chlorofluorocarbons used in refrigerators, air conditioners and aerosol cans...

  There are lots of weird, dirty jobs out there. Roadkill collector. Deodorant tester. Catfish noodler. Chicken sexer. But what about… whale poop collector? Leigh Torres , a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, collects the feces from these giant mammals to measure levels of stress hormones present in their bodies. The dirty job involves following a whale for some time and scooping the sof...

Check out this clip that didn't make it into our recent episode, The Oldest Water on Earth , what old water smells like!

  Tensions escalated between the United States and Soviet Union in the wake of World War II as the two countries stockpiled nuclear weapons and detonated hundreds of test bombs in the atmosphere. But this arms race had an unexpected side effect: scientists learned for the first time how air behaves in Earth’s upper atmosphere and how pollution, volcanic ash, and radioactive fallout travel around t...

Thousands of feet below the surface of the Earth is salty water that hasn’t seen the light of day in millions or even billions of years. Miners working deep underground had encountered and wondered about the origin of this water for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that scientists started to investigate where this water was coming from and what it might contain – giving researchers clues int...

The ocean floor stores a vast amount of information about Earth and its history. Volcanic rocks that make up most of the seafloor tell scientists about the composition of Earth’s interior, and the sediments lying on top of those rocks document what conditions were like when they were laid down millions of years ago. Scientists access this record of Earth’s past by drilling and extracting cores – l...