A conversation about the mystery behind what makes-up 95% of the universe with Dr. Jason Rhodes and Dr. Alina Kiessling , Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Dr. Rhodes earned a B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA; an M.A and a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University, NJ. After stints as a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Caltech in Pasadena, California, he landed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2004. His projects include NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST), the European Space Agency's Euclid mission, and the Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). All of these are designed to study "dark energy," the hypothesized cause of the Universe's accelerated expansion. Dr. Kiessling is a JPL Research Scientist investigating dark matter and dark energy through weak lensing analysis of N-body simulations. She earned a B.Sc. (Hons) Space Science at LaTrobe University, Australia and later earned her Ph.D. Astrophysics at University of Edinburgh, UK. Alina is a member of Euclid and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Dark Energy Science Collaboration (LSST-DESC) and was a consultant on the WFIRST-AFTA Science Definition Reports. Additionally, she is co-leading the development of the 20-20-20 Airships NASA Centennial Challenge to develop stratospheric airships, with the expectation that these will become low-cost platforms for the astrophysics (and Earth science) missions of the future. Her research interests are Weak Gravitational Lensing, Cosmology, and N-Body Simulations Transcript

A Conversation with War Correspondent and Human Rights Reporter,  Janine Di Giovanni Documenting War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity During the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in Conversation With David Freed

Sixty-eight years ago on December 1, 1955, Mrs.Rosa Parks rejected a bus driver's order to leave a row of four seats in the "colored" section and move to the back of the bus. Her defiance and subsequent arrest sparked a successful boycott of buses in Montgomery a few days later; a pivotal event in the civil rights movement that ultimately led to the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. Mrs. Parks became an icon of the movement, celebrated for this single courageous act of civil disobedience. "There was much more to Mrs. Parks than the seat she refused to relinquish on "that" bus. By profession she was a seamstress. Her stitching was delicate and precise; she made beautiful clothes. But in the bigger picture, she sewed pieces of people's lives together throughout the world and lifted them up with tenacity, hope, and pure love." H.H. Leonards

A conversation with Colin Woodard, Director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. Author of six books including American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.

A conversation with Dr. Beth Shapiro about biodiversity, de-extinction, and ethically reinventing nature to save the planet

Oumuamua was an elongated space object, which was discovered speeding past the sun in 2017. At the time is was the only celestial body known to have visited our solar system from another. The name comes from Hawaiian and It roughly translates to 'first distant messenger'.

How can a single fertilized egg give rise to a complex organism with varied cells? The answers may be found in epigenetics… the study of how cells control gene activity by reading, but not changing the DNA sequence. Our next guest to the Forum will be Dr. Karissa Sanbonmatsu, a structural biologist working in epigenetics at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

A breakthrough study sponsored by the NIH revealed there are shared genetic markers that underly substance use disorders. These new findings offer a road to more effective prevention and treatment strategies for multiple substance use disorders.

With the company Creative Director and former dancer, Janet Eilber and dancers Xin Ying and Charlotte Landreau.