Curiosity Daily Podcast: You Can Enjoy Play Before Work, Life After Asteroid Impacts, and an Eyepatch Eyesight Hack

Let’s say one day astronomers announce that our worst nightmare has come true: a large object is headed towards the Earth with a significant chance of impact. What do we do?

Puppy Bowl XXII premieres Sunday, February 8, 2026, at 2:00PM ET/11:00AM PT with more adoptable puppies from shelters and rescues than ever before.

National Insect week occurs between June 20 -26. The week focuses on the importance of insects within ecosystems, nature, and wildlife. Insects do have a bad reputation, as some are a nuisance, and some are scary, but each plays a key role in maintaining order in nature. In celebration of the hard-working insects that you may see in your backyard, here’s a list of the ones you won’t be seeing. The rarest insects on the planet.

Puppy Bowl XXI premieres Sunday, February 9 at 2P ET/11A PT with more adoptable puppies from shelters and rescues than ever before.

Puppy Bowl XX premieres Sunday, February 11 at 2P ET/11A PT with more adoptable puppies from shelters and rescues than ever before.

Shark Week’s Luke Tipple welcomes professional photographer Mike Coots, who lost his leg to a tiger shark attack when he was only 18. But after his horrific injury, he came to love sharks, and became a lifelong advocate for their safety. Luke and Mike discuss his career, his love for photographing sharks, and how to positively approach the big life-changing moments that can happen to any of us.

Shark Week’s Luke Tipple tackles the question “How can I work with sharks?” alongside two experts in the field – and their answers are not always the obvious ones. Luke is joined first by Kelly Link, Associate Curator of the Georgia Aquarium who talks about what it’s like to be an aquarist, how it differs from field work, and how to get yourself noticed. The second guest is Dr. Neil Hammerschlag who goes into detail on what it takes to become a prominent scientist, and what other paths you can take if a PhD isn’t for you. And at the end, researcher Sierra stops by to tell us about the world’s smallest shark.

Host Luke Tipple is joined this week by renowned Harvard professor, Dr. Avi Loeb, who recently led a deep-sea expedition to discover if evidence for advanced alien life crash-landed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014. They discuss the recent Congressional UFO hearings, how the last seventy years of research into extraterrestrial life has been potentially misguided, and the challenges of searching for tiny objects on the bottom of the ocean.

Luke Tipple invites “The Lost Shark Guy,” Dr. Dave Ebert, who is personally responsible for finding dozens of shark species that were either previously unknown to science or thought to be extinct. He and Luke discuss why shark populations are a direct indicator of how healthy the ocean is, how to find undiscovered sharks, and why diversity in sharks is essential for marine life.

Host Luke Tipple welcomes two guests to discuss how researchers can kill sharks in the name of science – and whether they need to at all. The first is Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, shark researcher and founder of Atlantic Shark Expeditions, and an expert on data-gathering in the field. He’s followed by explorer Fred Buyle, a world-record-breaking freediver whose innovative methods of shark tagging are explored. Plus, our researcher Sierra tells us about how a 50-year study changed our understanding of tiger sharks – and much of the work wasn’t even done by scientists.