WhenIWasYourAge: People were never "living with their disease." We cured them. Or they died from it.

In any city with lots of skyscrapers, lots of skyline, the moon seems bigger than it is. It's called the moon illusion.

Why can't Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn't exist then they don't have a favorite planet. Right? Please write back but not in cursive because I can't read cursive.

There are books on my shelf that I'm not into. They are things I don't know anything about yet. It's going to lead me off into a new place. The books don't represent an interest; they represent a source of my ignorance.

When you're a hammer (as the saying goes), all your problems look like nails. If you're a meteorite expert pondering the sudden extinction of boatloads of species, you'll want to say an impact did it. If you're an igneous petrologist, volcanoes did it. If you're into spaceborne bioclouds, an interstellar virus did it. If you're a hypernova expert, gamma rays did it.

There's nothing a teacher likes better than ten minute videos. It's not the whole class, but it's not too short, it's enough to wrap a lesson plan around.

The show [ StarTalk ] was born as a radio program out of a National Science Foundation grant.