At her NASA summer internship, Kirsten Siebach feels completely out of place among the Mars mission scientists, and Alison Spodek’s need to be seen as smart takes over her life.

With a new kid and her husband moving to Iowa for a job, Angie Chatman’s mental health begins to suffer, and Anna Bushlack’s romantic notions of married life with a child are broken when her husband relapses and her son is born with a cleft palate.

Comedian John Fugelsang doesn’t want to get married just to appease his Catholic parents, and when Chris Mustafa Gray’s daughter is born, his wife makes one rule that he must not indoctrinate their daughter with his new-found religious beliefs.

Samuel Scarpino is convinced that the paper he wrote about how hard it is to predict infectious diseases should win a Nobel Prize, and it’s grad student Moronke Harris’ turn with the deep-sea robot that no one can find, and she needs to conduct her research.

While tripping on acid, Michael Czajkowski goes into anaphylaxis, and Dust Cwaine sees their body differently while experimenting with magical mushrooms.

When Shannon Turner’s high school friend passes away from a rare virus from a monkey, she contemplates her sense of purpose, and after a traumatizing experience with a dead body leaves journalist Erica Buist agoraphobic, she embarks on a journey to understand how other cultures handle death in hopes of healing.

Feeling isolated in her new job as a particle accelerator operator at Fermilab, Cindy Joe finds comfort in the friendship of her unconventional pet, and actor Gail Thomas is invited to take part in a study testing mushrooms as treatment for depression in cancer survivors.

An expert in oxytocin, the hormone released during birth, Bianca Jones Marlin is determined to have a natural birth — even as the hours of labor add up…, and Ed Pritchard inadvertently becomes a leatherback turtle midwife during his first field job.

Brittany Ross gets inspired when her high school physics teacher assigns a physics video project where she has to demonstrate a law of physics out in the real world, and nothing will get in the way of Greg Pandelis’s dreams to be a zoologist, except maybe a giant cliff.

Raul Fernandez dreamed of going to university to study engineering. When he gets to Boston University, he feels unwelcome, and Cynthia Chapple was continually underestimated by her teachers and struggled with minimizing aspects of herself to be accepted.