Quantum computing is cool, but you know what would be extra awesome - a quantum internet. In fact if we want the first we’ll need the latter. And the first step to the quantum internet is quantum cryptography.

We live in the stelliferous era. Somewhere between 10 and 1000 billion trillion stars fill the observable universe with light. But there was a time before the first star ignited. A time we call the cosmic dark ages.

Carl Sagan’s famous words: “We are star stuff” refers to a mind-blowing idea – that most atomic nuclei in our bodies were created in the nuclear furnace and the explosive deaths of stars that lived in the ancient universe. Many heavy elements - includes most precious metals - were produced in an even more spectacular event: the collision of neutron stars.

When we first realized that black holes could have masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun, it came as a bit of a shock. They were discovered as the driving force behind quasars, where matter is heated to extreme incandescence before its plunge into vast black holes. But if that weren’t enough, we soon realized that every decent-sized galaxy contains a supermassive black hole.

Energy too cheap to meter - that was the promise of nuclear power in the 1950s, at least according to Lewis Strauss chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. That promise has not come to pass - but with some incredible new technologies, perhaps it still could. The question is - should it?

The world is widely regarded as being well and truly into the digital age, also called the information age. However, it’s one thing to design a protocol, it’s something else entirely to build a system to support it. To understand what needs to be done we need to get to the foundations of quantum mechanics - we need to talk about quantum information theory.

A hundred years ago we discovered the beginning of the universe. Observations of the retreating galaxies by Edwin Hubble and Vesto Slipher, combined with Einstein’s then-brand-new general theory of relativity, revealed that our universe is expanding.

Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary expansion multiplied the size of the universe by a larger factor than in the following 13 and a half billion years of regular expansion. This story seems like a bit of a … stretch.

We define the Big Bang as the extremely hot, dense, rapidly expanding universe that is described by Einstein’s equations. That picture of the universe is very solid down to about a trillionth of a second after the supposed beginning of time. We can make good guesses down to about 10^-30th of a second. But before that?

Do you want to major in Astrophysics? Are you thinking about becoming (or ever just wondered how one becomes) an Astrophysicist? Do you want to know Matt O’Dowd’s origin story? Then buckle up and enjoy the ride and try your astrophysics skill in calculating bubble universes.

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from deadly space radiation. What if it were drastically weakened, as a precursor to flipping upside down? I mean, it has before … many, many times..

Humanity’s future is glorious. As we master space travel, we’ll hop from one lifeless world to the next. Life will blossom in our path and the galaxy will shimmer with beautiful Earth-like orbs. Hmmm… maybe. This won’t sound so far fetched if we prove we can do it at least once. If we successfully terraform Mars.

You know what a planet is, right? A big round thing that orbits a star. Uh, not so fast. The surprisingly vicious debate over the planetary status of Pluto has given us a fascinating glimpse into what a scientific definition really is. And perhaps the word planet is too vague to be used as a scientific definition at all.

The universe is big, but it’s peanuts compared to the eternally inflating multiverse. But just how many universes are there? What are they like? And most importantly, what can they tell us about … aliens?

Black holes are crazy enough on their own – but crash two together and you end up with a roiling blob of inescapable space that vibrates like a beaten drum. And the rich harmonics of those vibrations, seen through gravitational waves, could hold the secrets to the nature of the fabric of spacetime itself. We’ll explore the papers that claim to have detected black hole harmonics.

It’s time we talked about loop quantum gravity. What exactly is it? What are the loops? And can it really defeat string theory in our quest for a Theory of Everything?

Time travel stories are cool because both the past and future are somehow more interesting that the present and because everyone wants a redo. But so far it appears we’re doomed to live consumed by regret in the eternal, boring present. Time marches on, inexorably and only forward. Or so we thought until Einstein came along.

Why does it appear, that humanity is the lone intelligence in the universe? The answer might be that planet Earth is more unique than we've previously assumed. The rare earth hypothesis posits exactly this - that a range of factors made Earth exceptionally unusual and uniquely able to produce intelligent life.

Life exists in our universe. There we go - one hopefully uncontroversial statement. Therefore our universe is capable of producing and supporting life. How am I going? Two for two? Let’s try for three: therefore there are countless universes. Hmmm. Did I break my streak?

The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic principle guarantees that you are NOT seeing the universe in most typical state. But used correctly, this highly controversial idea can be extremely powerful. So, how do you correctly use the anthropic principle?