Like millions of others right now, we on the Verge Science video team are hunkered down in our homes to help slow the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. This presents some obvious difficulties for video production: what do you film when you can’t leave the house?

Tricky as it is, we’re committed to getting scrappy with our circumstances. So I whipped up a small demonstration that doesn’t require a studio or co-workers. Step one: get a powder called Glo Germ, which sticks to hands, faces, and other surfaces and also glows under ultraviolet light. This will be my stand-in for virus particles. Step two: put some powder on my hands, and go about my normal business in my apartment. Step three: retrace my steps and see just how far and wide my faux-contamination has spread.

Check out the video above to see the results and learn more about the science behind all of those public health recommendations regarding handwashing and surface-cleaning. And follow along with The Verge’s guide to the COVID-19 pandemic for our latest reporting.

In the winter of 2005, I was so severely underweight and starved of energy that I went to great lengths to provide my body with any source of sugar. That included chugging a brilliant cocktail of Skittles dissolved in warm water. My sisters thought it was gross. As I sipped my drink, we watched Law & Order: SVU on television, but my vision was so blurry that I could barely make out which characters were which. Their voices helped. Later that night, I was jerked awake in my bed by simultaneous charley horses in each of my legs. My calf muscles were so contracted that my feet flipped up towards my face, something you only see in exorcism scenes from horror films. And, just like in The Exorcist, I wet myself. This wasn’t the first time in the past week that this all happened. It was the fourth.

Something was truly wrong with me.

The next day, my pediatrician pricked my finger and applied a tiny drop of blood onto her hospital-grade glucometer, a device that measures how much sugar is coursing through my veins. The display showed 896. I asked her what it should read. “One hundred” she replied after a long pause. “You have Type 1 diabetes.” I was told I was hours away from a coma. My father rushed me to the hospital.

If this had happened a century earlier, it would have been a death sentence. But today, living with Type 1 diabetes is possible, thanks to one thing: insulin. My body wasn’t producing enough of the hormone, which helps convert sugars into energy, and that meant that I needed an assist from artificially produced insulin. Just weeks after my 15th birthday, I started a daily regimen of three to four insulin injections coupled with upwards of 10 finger pricks per day to monitor my blood glucose.

Fifteen years later, diabetes management has improved beyond my wildest dreams. Syringes have been swapped out with insulin pumps, and finger pricks have been replaced with sensors embedded under the skin. But my insulin? That has pretty much stayed the same. And that’s fine — except for the fact that the price of that same insulin has nearly tripled since I first started using it.

There is a whole lot of finger-pointing and reasons why — from lack of competition to fuzzy legal hurdles surrounding the approval of next-generation drugs — but all of these reasons have led to nearly half of the world’s diabetic population without proper access to the drug. When that happens, diabetics are forced to ration their insulin, and some are even trying to manufacture insulin themselves.

In honor of National Diabetes Month, Verge Science’s latest video takes a look at the issues surrounding insulin and what might be in store for the drug — and for people like me who rely on it every day — in the years to come.

Back in February, I spent a few hours crawling around on my hands and knees on a rooftop in Brooklyn, New York. What I was looking for was smaller than the period at the end of this sentence: nearly invisible micrometeorites that may — or may not — have fallen from space. Surprisingly, I actually found some. I think.

With the help of a powerful neodymium magnet, some plastic sandwich bags, and a lot of patience, I was able to scrounge up about fifteen cosmic candidates — a process that we documented in our first micrometeorite video.

But finding the samples ultimately proved to be the easy part. Trying to verify their origin turned out to be an entirely different ordeal. Here at Verge Science, we simply didn’t have the capacity to reach a definitive conclusion, so we turned to the micrometeorite experts at NASA.

With a few of our most promising samples, and a bonus sample gifted to us by the world’s foremost micrometeorite hunter, we took a trip to Johnson Space Center in Houston to visit the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division. There, we were finally able to get to the bottom of our months-long hunt for a real micrometeorite, and we learned a few things about the universe along the way.

Be sure to check out the full video above for part two of our hunt for micrometeorites.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, was once a prosperous town, largely supported by the coal industry. But in 1962, a trash fire near an abandoned strip mine ignited what remained of the 25 million-ton coal seam beneath the town. Year after year, the fire spread, releasing noxious gas, opening up sinkholes, and ultimately making the town uninhabitable — for humans, at least.

In the absence of humans and in the presence of rapidly heating soil, some interesting microbes have appeared: thermophiles. These microbes, which live at super hot temperatures, have taken a liking to some of the vent zones in Centralia, some of which have heated up to nearly 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) over the course of just a few short decades.

Ashley Shade, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, has been studying the changes in soil temperature in Centralia and the effects on the communities of microbes living there. Her team has been looking into correlations between things like temperature change in the soil and genome sizes of the microbes she’s found. “The idea is if you can keep your cell small, you are going to benefit by not having to spend so much energy just maintaining all of your cell parts, which are kind of getting more wobbly at the higher temperatures,” Shade told The Verge last month.

With Shade’s help, Verge Science took a trip to Centralia, collected some hot soil samples, and attempted to grow thermophiles in our studio (with an incubator — not an underground fire). Check out the video for processes and results.

More than 11 billion miles away from Earth, two small discs are rocketing through space at speeds in excess of 37,200 miles per hour. Their journey started in 1977, when NASA sent the two Golden Records into space, bolted to the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The records contain a treasure trove of information about our home planet, including sounds, songs, and images from Earth.

At the moment, the records are just hangers-on to the Voyagers’ current mission, to document the outer limits of the Sun’s influence on the Solar System. By 2030, however, both Voyagers will cease communicating with NASA, but they will continue sailing through space. At that point, they will have only one mission: continue on with the Golden Records in hopes that another advanced civilization, somewhere in the galaxy, intercepts them.

The audio contained on the record should be fairly easy to decode — extraterrestrials will only need to figure out the correct speed and rotation of the disks, place the included stylus within the grooves of the record, and jam out to Chuck Berry, Mozart, and the sounds of the Earth.

Unscrambling the images contained on the record — that’s going to be a little bit harder.

You might think that the images were included in some printed or digital form, such as a .jpeg or .tiff. But back in 1977, there was no technology available to put images on analog disks. Voyager’s computer systems could only hold 69 kilobytes of information, barely enough for one image, let alone 115. So NASA invented a way to include image data on the LPs.

By projecting images onto a screen, recording them with a television camera, and then turning those video signals into audio waveforms, the images could be properly pressed onto the records. The reversal process — turning that image data back into images — is what any extraterrestrial (or curious human) would have to figure out how to do.

Luckily, NASA engineers included instructions on the cover of the record to help decode the data contained on the disks. And without access to 1970’s technology and expertise, the guidelines were tricky for us to follow. But after learning a lot from the DIY community, including from Ron Barry, who wrote his own in-depth guide to decoding the disks, we were able to see the data.

We tried two alternate methods using Microsoft Excel and Python — and were amazed to find that even 40 years later and with completely different technology, it was still possible to unravel images from the audio waves.

Maybe extraterrestrials will be able to figure this out after all.

Take a look at the video to see how we decoded the Golden Record — and maybe give it a try yourself.