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.