Smologies with Alie Ward

They’re acrobatic fliers with long bodies and veined wings and their babies breathe through their butts: dragonflies. Let’s get into the difference between a damselfly and dragonfly, how fast they dart around, how big they were in the age of the dinosaurs, and lots more with scholar, American Museum of Natural History curator, and dragonfly expert: Dr. Jessica Ware.

A long snout. Hundreds of teeth. Scales that could slice you. What is a gar and should we fear it? Should we hug it? One of the world’s most passionate and knowledgeable experts on this ancient, mysterious fish joins to make you fall in love with these slimy longbois. Dr. Solomon David is affable, charming, enthusiastic and absolutely shameless when it comes to fish puns. Slip into some hip waders and jump in the muck to learn all about a creature that -- despite decades of mudslinging -- is not a gar-bage fish. Also: why gar caviar is a very bad idea.

Smaller than you can imagine. Potato-shaped. Mysterious. Misunderstood. And tough enough to survive the vacuum of space or decades of desiccation. Join professor and Tardigradologist Dr. Paul Bartels to saunter into a microscopic wonderland of bizarrely long naps, glow-in-the-dark moss piglets, cryptobiosis, kitten claws, balloon butts, and the friends living in your gutters.

Landfills! Composting! Recycling flimflam! An instantly classic conversation with the incredibly knowledgeable, frank and wonderful Dr. Robin Nagle: a clinical professor, author, TED speaker and former New York City sanitation worker and truly the best person on Earth to trash talk with. We cover our long history of figuring out what do do with our waste, what you can and can’t actually recycle, sticky mustard bottles, incinerators, the journeys our trash takes, why rats love plastic garbage bags, and how and why can thank your local sanitation workers.

Sunspots! Solar storms! Photons! Magnetic fields! Let’s get to know the center of our solar system: the Sun. What is it made of? How big is it? How old is it? When will it explode? How does its light reach your eye? What kind of star is it? How do they form and change? Dr. Michael Kirk and Dr. India Jackson are brilliant and charming Heliologists who have both worked with NASA’s heliophysics departments. Get to know them and also the giant hot plasma ball we revolve around. You’ll never (not) look at it the same.

Polar vortices! Atmospheric rivers! Cold fronts! Warm fronts! Hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones… Wait, what’s the difference anyway? One of the world’s leading Meteorologists, Dr. Marshall Shepherd – a former NASA scientist and current Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia – is here to field a downpour of questions. We chat about the personalities of climate and the moods of weather, heatwaves, hail, sleet, fluid dynamics, storms of all kinds, and what a rain forecast really means.

Gorillas. These chest-beating, salad-munching, communal living, thick-furred beauties have so many surprises for you. Gorillaologist (IT’S A WORD) Dr. Tara Stoinski has been a gorilla scientist for three decades and dishes on everything from forest farts, banana flim-flam, night-time nesting, gorilla laughter, playing, parenting, what those big teeth are for, and why we’re more alike than we might think.