Sarah Demers has this nagging feeling she’s not a real physicist, and after dropping out of college, Kevin Smiley can’t seem to shake his feelings of inadequacy.
On a flight to St. Louis, the plane Brad Lawrence is on, needs to make an emergency landing, and while Keven Griffen is doing field work in Sierra Nevada a wildfire breaks out.
Gregor Posadas joins the army to pursue his dreams of becoming an engineer and fulfill his father’s wish of “fixing” their home country of the Philippines, and after losing his father as a young child, Nanduh Balakrishnan feels compelled to use his school savings to buy a life saving drug for a patient at the hospital he’s working at.
While constantly staring at Mercury’s craters for NASA's MESSENGER mission, a picture of the Galapagos Islands captures Paul Byrne’s attention, and while serving in the navy to get his engineering degree, David Estrada is struck by the level of poverty he witnesses on the tiny island of East Timor.
While on a school trip in Russia, Cassandra Hartblay’s vegetarian dietary restrictions keep getting tested, and as a meat lover, Jenny Kleeman has high hopes for the world’s first lab-grown chicken nugget.
After constantly living in the shadow of her older sister, RJ Millena isn’t sure how to carve her own path, and when Jasmine Anenberg finds out her high school friend overdoses while she’s working in the field, she starts to see the world differently.
Dave Kalema keeps lying to his sick mother about how bad his knee injury is, and Dionne C. Monsanto doesn’t know how to help her daughter with her mental illness.
After her colleagues make fun of the pie she brings on Pi Day, Desiré Whitmore decides she will never again celebrate Pi Day, and math teacher Theodore Chao goes all out for Pi Day at his school.
In college, Nick Link almost burns down the entire neighborhood when he and his friends set some Christmas trees on fire, and after moving to America from Mumbai, Urvi Talaty feels like she has finally escaped the heavily polluted air that choked her as a kid.
When Riley Blevin’s son gets diagnosed with a rare disease, it changes his life, and Heidi Wallis becomes completely obsessed with trying to fix her daughter.
Scientist Bruce Hungate yearns to find someone who cares about the tiny details as much as he does, and science reporter Ari Daniel and his wife are at odds when it comes to moving their family to Lebanon, but the pandemic changes things.
At her NASA summer internship, Kirsten Siebach feels completely out of place among the Mars mission scientists, and Alison Spodek’s need to be seen as smart takes over her life.
With a new kid and her husband moving to Iowa for a job, Angie Chatman’s mental health begins to suffer, and Anna Bushlack’s romantic notions of married life with a child are broken when her husband relapses and her son is born with a cleft palate.
Comedian John Fugelsang doesn’t want to get married just to appease his Catholic parents, and when Chris Mustafa Gray’s daughter is born, his wife makes one rule that he must not indoctrinate their daughter with his new-found religious beliefs.
Samuel Scarpino is convinced that the paper he wrote about how hard it is to predict infectious diseases should win a Nobel Prize, and it’s grad student Moronke Harris’ turn with the deep-sea robot that no one can find, and she needs to conduct her research.
While tripping on acid, Michael Czajkowski goes into anaphylaxis, and Dust Cwaine sees their body differently while experimenting with magical mushrooms.
When Shannon Turner’s high school friend passes away from a rare virus from a monkey, she contemplates her sense of purpose, and after a traumatizing experience with a dead body leaves journalist Erica Buist agoraphobic, she embarks on a journey to understand how other cultures handle death in hopes of healing.