This episode is presented by eBay.

Rob, everyone loves a deal and a bargain from time to time, don't they? Absolutely, mate. And you know where you can grab a great deal? Talk to me. Where? The eBay app. Yes, you are correct. You didn't need to talk to me. I already knew it. I love eBay. When you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. there's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else.

Then when you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. There's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else. Then when you're selling, it's so simple and most

importantly, free. It's free, Rob. When it's this easy to sell for free and there's great

deals on things you love. You can't help but say when it's eBay. It excludes vehicles and business

sellers. Science talk will begin after this

short message. Hey all, I'm hoping you'll join me in a step back into the past, a past where you,

pa, my, grandma and grandpappy might head down to the local state fair to enter what was once called

a fitter family's competition. And these were not about

athletics. They were held in the name of eugenics. Families would happily line up to be judged on their

breeding just like livestock. My name is Brian. And I'm Andrea. We're from base pairs, the official

podcast of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. And there's

some huge new science that's making this unsettling American history an urgent issue. More on that

later in the episode. Stay tuned. Welcome to Scientific American Science Talk posted on November 11th,

2017.

I'm Steve Merski. On this episode...

So if you go, for example, from the scale that we associate with the size of an atom,

down to the size of the atomic nucleus, is at least another five orders of magnitude.

And there's not much there. It's just maybe a fleeting electron, but we're

made of all of that. That's Caleb Scharf. He's an astronomer and the director of Columbia

University's Astrobiology Center. His latest book is The Zoomable Universe, an epic tour through

cosmic scale, from almost everything to almost nothing. It's published by Scientific American and

...