Be Smart

The oldest rocks on Earth are more than just ancient—they’re time machines, holding clues to Earth’s missing history and revealing what happened in the unknown times after the Big Bang. We’ll work with our Adam and Joss from Howtown to learn more and visit our friends at The Smithsonian to examine some of these beyond-ancient rocks ourselves.

This is one of the weirdest mysteries of human evolution: Why do we have grandmas? From menopause to our slow maturation and super-long lifespans, humans are quite unique in the animal kingdom. Could grandma be an evolutionary secret weapon? Or is she just a quirky side effect of living long lives?

Imagine the scale of raindrops if you were the size of a small bird. Or mosquito. Flying through a drizzle should be deadly! Like flying through falling cars and boulders. And yet it’s not, because nature has given them a superpower—superhydrophobic surfaces that repel water and keep them airborne. How do these microscopic structures work? And how has modern engineering been inspired by them?