Dr. Starkid

Could something alive on Earth survive in the ocean beneath an alien moon’s ice? Researchers tested that question by recreating some of the conditions thought to exist on Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn. The archaea they introduced survived and multiplied under some of those simulated conditions.
I wanted to understand how you even design that experiment when the ocean you’re studying is buried beneath ice. We talk through Cassini’s encounters with Enceladus’s plumes, how tidal heating keeps water liquid, and how microbes can get their energy from chemistry instead of sunlight.
I also follow this into a more speculative question: could life travel between worlds inside rocks launched by asteroid impacts? If we ever discover organisms on Enceladus, finding out whether they share an ancestor with Earth life would be incredible. There are a lot of hurdles between surviving a laboratory experiment and making that journey, and I walk through those too.
study link:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aei0167
Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.
Lead with curiosity.

Relevant studies mentioned:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2774113 - melanoma

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2790089 (free version: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8943625/) - Keratinocyte carcinoma (aka Non-melanoma skin cancer)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10896812/ — The evolution of human skin coloration

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-026-00940-x — Blindspot: how sun exposure guidelines have ignored the health of individuals with skin of color

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fj.201701472R - Research on the protective role of melanin in black skin against UV DNA damage 
Dr. Adewole Adamson is a board-certified dermatologist and health services researcher at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School. He has co-authored systematic reviews examining UV exposure and skin cancer in people of color. I asked him to come on because his findings challenge something I’ve been told my entire life: that everybody needs sunscreen to prevent skin cancer.
UV radiation damages DNA, and its connection to skin cancer is well established in white populations. But Dr. Adamson explains that studies looking for a connection between UV exposure and melanoma in Black people largely haven’t found one. His review of other common skin cancers found no studies directly examining that question in Black populations. So why are we giving everyone the same cancer-prevention message?
We talked about melanin, the different types of skin cancer, why sunscreen wouldn’t have prevented Bob Marley’s melanoma, and the questions around vitamin D. We also discussed sunscreen’s uses for sunburn and other skin damage, and why later cancer diagnoses demand attention to healthcare access and recognition of disease on darker skin.
For me, this is also a conversation about Black people being marginalized in medicine. When the evidence differs but the advice stays the same, whose health are we actually accounting for?
Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.
Lead with curiosity.

Elias 2-24b is already several times Jupiter’s mass, yet its star system is estimated to be less than a million years old. This episode follows the discovery and asks how a gas giant can grow so massive, so quickly.
We cover how astronomers use infrared and radio observations to study young planets, how they estimate ages, and why growing from tiny grains into a giant planet is a bit more complicated than it sounds. 
We also look at how an early forming giant planet can influence the future planets that are able to form around it, with connections to Jupiter, Mars, atmospheric loss, and the delivery of rock and ice in our solar system. Could the timing of planet formation help shape a system’s chances for life?
Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.
Lead with curiosity.

You might be a Martian.

In this installment of the Dr. Starkid astrobiology series, I’m making the case that life on Earth may have actually started on Mars first. This idea does not yet have scientific consensus, but there is a convincing evidence-based argument for what might be the simplest explanation for why life showed up on Earth so early.

Expect to learn about panspermia, LUCA, the origin of life, why Mars may have been chemically ready for life before Earth, how early Earth may have had too much water for some origin-of-life pathways, and how Martian rocks naturally travel to Earth.
The episode also covers wet-dry cycles, hydrothermal vents, dormant microbes, RNA world ideas, Martian meteorites, Black Beauty, ancient hydrothermal activity on Mars, atmospheric escape, the Fermi Paradox, and why searching Mars for ancient life might also mean searching for our own ancestors.
Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler. 

Lead with curiosity.

Momentum is a basic concept in physics: mass in motion, moving in a particular direction. But it also provides an interesting way to think about how a human life takes shape.
In this episode, Dr. Dakotah Tyler starts with the physics of momentum, inertia, conservation laws, and the strange rotations of planets like Uranus and Venus. From there, the conversation moves into biology, energy efficiency, the high metabolic cost of the human brain, learning, automaticity, and why repeated behaviors become increasingly resistant to change.
The same process can play out across an entire life. Decisions accumulate. Habits become easier. Responsibilities grow. The path you are already traveling can become increasingly difficult to leave, even when it is no longer taking you somewhere you want to go.
But that works in the other direction too.
Dr. Dakotah reflects on making his first science communication video, beginning a book while still in graduate school, and how small intentional decisions eventually accumulated into an entirely different career.
The lesson isn’t that the equations of physics literally govern our careers, relationships, or choices. It’s that momentum offers a useful way to think about them: motion matters, but so does direction.
Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.
Lead with curiosity.