#Cosmos E11: Eternalists

(I live tweet Cosmos every Sunday @ 8pm CST. For all of my Cosmos recaps, please click here)

Episode 11 of Fox's Cosmos, "The Immortals", focuses things that stand the test of time - the first written word, stories, and organisms that can survive for millenia. All these things stand the test of time - and could possibly have extraterrestrial origins.

Early in the formation of our solar system, Earth and the other planet were slammed by asteroids and other rocks.  Rocks were flying all over the place, and organisms were along for the ride - possibly exchanging life between the planets.

Check out some video from the show below, as well as the Storify of the latest live tweet below!

#Cosmos E10: Electric Circus

Before this week's Cosmos, I was featured on the Black Girl Nerds podcast with Danielle Lee.  We talked Cosmos and other science issues - check it out the podcast below as well as the accompanying Storify!

Episode 10 of Fox's Cosmos is titled "The Electric Boy" - and luckily has no tie in Jamie Foxx's Electro from The Amazing Spiderman 2. We see how the first electric motor and generator were created based on the observations and experiments of scientists such as Michael Faraday and Humphry Davys. With the added math of James Maxwell, the world was ready to harness the part of electricity in useful ways. 

Check out some YouTube videos from Fox's channel and the live tweet Storify conversation below!

#Cosmos E9: Deepest Bluest

(I live tweet Cosmos every Sunday @ 8pm CST. For all of my Cosmos recaps, please click here)

This week's episode of Cosmos covered scientists such as Marie Tharp, who successfully mapped the ocean floor and its ridges, showing that the continents have been shifting over eons,  Earth's land mass transformed from one super continent known as Pangaea to the familiar continent outlay that we know today.  

The shifting had a significant effect on dead trees that lay deep in the rock of the planet. Eruptions caused poisonous gas to cover the Earth, freezing and heating up the planet and killing 90% of life. .

For more, check out the Storify of the live tweet below!

#Cosmos E8: Sister Act

(I live tweet Cosmos every Sunday @ 8pm CST. For all of my Cosmos recaps, please click here)

Episode 8 of Fox's Cosmos focuses on the stars in the night sky, and the immense effort behind categorizing them and figuring out their composition.  There were a significant amount of women that contributed heavily to astrophysics - Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Levin and Cecilia Payne - but what's most sad is that there are many more who have been erased from history. I'm glad that Cosmos focuses on these women, known as Pickering's harem (seriously, Harvard still uses this antiquated term - wtf), but let's hope that this wasn't the "all women" episode of the series. They should be interdispersed throughout.

Check out the Storify below!

#Cosmos E7: So Fresh & So Clean Clean

(I live tweet Cosmos every Sunday @ 8pm CST. For all of my Cosmos recaps, please click here)

Episode 7 of Fox's Cosmos, entitled "The Clean Room", covered the search behind the age of the Universe. Meteorites found on the Earth surface contain a certain amount of lead, which is actually a decayed form of Uranium.  Thus, by measuring the amount of lead, one can determine the age of the rock, and this can be extended to the age of the Earth. Clair Patterson had to build a "Clean Room", a lab that was free of lead contamination so that he could accurately measure the amount of lead in a meteorite.

Lead was a popular ingredient in many products in the middle of the 20th century, from paint to gasoline. Patterson's work help to show that the amount of lead in the environment has been increasing over time, and this helped many industries (such as oil and petroleum) to stop using lead in their products, since it was known to be poisonous.  Of course, these industries did not go down without a fight, and hired their own scientists to push their agenda.

Check out Outkast's video for "So Fresh, Co Clean" below, as well as the Storify of the live tweet of the episode.