Joshua Tree National Park | How does anything survive in a desert this dry?

[Detour] The Wave | We won the permit lottery. Now what?

There are 64 permits available per day to get to The Wave. During peak season, 300 people compete for them. We won! …and then we realized we had an 8-year-old who had never hiked 6.5 miles in his life, a 90º & sunny weather forecast, no trail and no shade. This episode explains the geology of The Wave: Jurassic sand dunes, 200 million years old, turned to stone but caught mid-motion. We're guided by Jaron Tylock from Dreamland Safari Tours, who spent years taking people into the desert wilderness. UCLA PhD student Alana Archbold helps explain the stripes and the Moqui Marbles. We stand on actual dinosaur footprints. And we find out why geologists fly to southern Utah to study Mars — and what it means that two worlds billions of miles apart ended up looking remarkably similar. And we talk about what it actually feels like to be one of 64 people allowed into a place on a given day — and whether it lives up to the hype. Keywords: the wave, arizona, vermilion cliffs, coyote buttes, national parks, homeschool, worldschool, geology, desert, hiking, science, family travel, permit lottery

Redwood National and State Parks | How do the world’s tallest trees hold each other up?

Redwood trees have roots only ten feet deep. For a tree that grows as tall as the statue of liberty, that should be a problem…This episode is about why it isn't. We explain how redwoods manufacture the fog that feeds them, what a banana slug actually does for a forest, and what the Yurok people understood about these trees long before anyone else was paying attention. And we tell the story of four women — Laura Mahan, Lady Bird Johnson, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Amy Cordalis — who have spent the last century making sure these forests survived.

[Detour] LIGO | If two black holes collide in the universe, do they make a sound?

This episode explains how scientists built a machine so sensitive that your heartbeat standing next to it would ruin the experiment...and why they put it in the middle of the Washington desert. We walk through the control room where gravitational wave detections happen, with a working LIGO scientist as our guide. We explain what it means that space itself can stretch and squeeze, and why the signal they caught in 2015 had been traveling for 1.3 billion years before anyone caught it. We talk about Einstein getting fact-checked by a journal reviewer, refusing to believe it, and eventually being proven right sixty years after he died. And we look at what's coming next: a detector in space with arms two and a half million kilometers long that might — just might!!!— let us hear the echo of the Big Bang.

Joshua Tree National Park | How does anything survive in a desert this dry?

Joshua Tree isn't just about weird trees and cool rocks. This episode tells you why those "trees" are not actually trees and what a rain shadow actually does to a landscape. We explain why the Oasis of Mara—the place where Serrano and Chemehuevi people had lived peacefully for generations—got claimed by the state of California in 1875 and sold to the Southern Pacific Railroad without their consent. We meet Minerva Hamilton Hoyt, the wealthy socialite who shipped seven freight cars of desert plants across the country to convince people this place was worth saving. And we talk about what's happening right now: animals so desperate for water they're showing up in people's backyards, and what that means for the future of the desert.