The STEM Journals

- Season 3

(2023)

Entrepreneurs and engineers come together to create innovative designs for outdoor activities and sports.

Geoff explores the word of microscopic technological advances, and how this nanotechnology is leading to huge developments in energy, medicine, materials, and more.

Geoff explores the world of social insects: bees, ants, wasps, and termites. Geoff visits the Arizona State University and and bee labs to learn more about these insects' amazing cooperative lives before joining a University of Arizona entomologist to locate termites in the desert.

Geoff joins students to learn about atmospheric sciences before traveling to Winslow, Arizona to Meteor Crater with a team of atmospheric sciences researchers to study weather in and around the crater, and how that informs what we know about our own planet's atmosphere.

Two years from mission launch for OSIRIS-REx, Geoff meets with engineers in Tucson, Arizona associated with University of Arizona and Denver, Colorado's Lockheed Martin Space Systems taking the first steps to building the spacecraft.

Geoff Notkin takes a stab at medical school, working with simulated patients at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Phoenix and learns about how genomics researchers at TGen and Phoenix Children's Hospital are trying to unlock genetic codes to effectively fight cancer, Alzheimer's and other devastating diseases.

Geoff unearths fossils dating from 50 and 150 million years ago in the heart of Wyoming's dinosaur fossil country. International paleontologists work together to excavate a suspected fossilized Diplodocus dinosaur. Meanwhile a researcher at Arizona State University studies stromatolites, the most ancient record of life on Earth, as a potential analogue for prehistoric Martian life.

What is the next "Big Idea" and who will develop it? Geoff meets bright, young innovators trying to solve puzzles that will advance science and technology as well as mentors from Arizona State University's SCENE program, who encourage their students to become professional scientists and shape their research to exhibit at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Outside the classroom, makerspaces and hackerspaces like TechShop are the playground for today's makers, who will become tomorrow's difference makers.