The asteroid Vesta may be a fragment of a much larger protoplanet, and astronomers examine old data to discover a large molecular cloud lurking right in the solar system's backyard. Get all the details, plus habitable exoplanets get another look, space news, and trivial matters with your friendly neighborhood astroquarks.…

While researching the history of parole in South Africa, a lawyer and anthropologist discovers the origins of the N2 road, which she drives everyday. Now interested in this highway’s history, she explores how this and other roads were used to expand territory and exploit people during South Africa’s colonial periods under Dutch and British rule, an…

NASA's Lucy mission had a picture perfect encounter with the asteroid Donaldjohanson on its way to the first ever flybys of Trojan asteroids. Discoveries of ancient supermassive black holes challenge theories of their formation. If dark matter is composed of ultralight particles (lighter than a neutrino), that could resolve the mystery. Join us for…

In existence for more than 70 years, the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is the site of the longest ceasefire in the world. What can this region teach us about the long, intended—and unintended—consequences of this form of a truce? In this episode, sociocultural anthropologist T. Yejoo Kim uncovers how residents have been surviving through decades …

The astroquarks discover hot takes and explore the nature of ice, the origin of Earth's water, and the trouble with the singularities at the hearts of black holes. Plus, we have a stumper, astronomical trivia, and much more.By Josh Colwell, Addie Dove, Jim Cooney, Audrey Martin

In this episode, social anthropologist Luis Alfredo Briceño González talks about his experiences as a foreign researcher in Chile. During his fieldwork, he met Marta, a Venezuelan woman residing in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Santiago. Marta and her family held a mock election to protest not being able to vote in their home country d…

When it comes to the division of labor in hunter-gather societies, the stereotype is generally that men hunt and women gather. But when a recent study claimed that women in hunter-gather societies hunt just as much as their male counterparts, the finding made news around the world. But why does gender equality in the past matter so much today? This…

Venus's extra-thick crust may be extra chewy, allowing convection to occur and helping power volcanoes into the current era. New observations of the distant universe, meanwhile, show that dark energy may not have behaved as expected in the standard cosmological model. We'll break it all down for you together with space news and trivia with your fri…

Since its emergence in 1960s Harlem, the LGBTQ+ “ballroom scene” has expanded into a transnational subculture. For outsiders, understanding how a ball functions can take time. Join linguistic anthropologist Dozandri Mendoza as they “walk” us through a night at a kiki ball in Puerto Rico. They introduce us to DJs, commentators, performers, and the B…

A survey of nearby stars establishes the rate of supernovas in our general neighborhood. Evidence indicates we had nearby stellar explosions at the times of two mass extinctions. Those supernovas may have decimated the ozone layer and contributed to extinctions and climate changes. Plus, we recorded on April 1 and take a look at silly April 1 scien…

The United Fruit Company was a U.S. multinational corporation and at one time, the largest landholder in Central America. To maintain authority in this part of the world, the company stamped out labor reform, collaborated with U.S.-backed coups, and, oddly enough, invested in archaeology. Why? In this episode, anthropologist Charlotte Williams expl…

If there are Hycean worlds and if they have a certain kind of microbial life and if there is enough of it, JWST might be able to see the chemical products of that in the planet's atmosphere. We take a look at that, debris from neighboring stars entering our solar system, and the first results from the Euclid space telescope. Join us for all this pl…

Culture is a force that makes us who we are. It drives social interactions and relationships, shapes beliefs and politics, ignites imaginations, and molds identities. Cultural conflicts are at the heart of many crises facing the world—increasing inequality, persistent bigotry, ecological collapse. In this season of the podcast, we’re investigating …

There are exciting new observations from recent lunar missions, a possible chunk of the Moon keeping us company, and an intriguing observation supporting the theory that the entire universe is inside a black hole! Get inside the event horizon with the astroquarks for all the space updates, trivia, and more.…

We take a look at the formation and structure of the Oort cloud of comets which is spherical at large distances but has a spiral structure in its inner regions. And, after all this time, there's a surprising twist on the nature of the iron mineral that gives Mars its reddish hue. Also hiding in plain sight is a dwarf galaxy in the neighborhood of t…

Lunar exploration continues to accelerate, and there's a new longest "structure" in the universe. Quipu is a quasi-alignment of clusters of galaxies stretching over 1 billion light years. Structure is in cynical quotation marks because these objects are not bound or connected to each other in any way, but their arrangement is a natural consequence …

The more measurements we make of the expansion of the universe, the more it seems as though Hubble Tension is not a problem with our data but a problem with our understanding of the expansion of the universe. We'll talk about that, and some cool new observations closer to home, including a disintegrating exoplanet that is giving us a unique peak in…