Whenever you bring together Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins — one the public face of astrophysics, the other the public face of biology — you’re pretty much guaranteed a good crowd and a spirited conversation.

Last week NASA released Pursuit of Light, a short HD film that uses amazing data visualizations (mixed with live action footage) to tell stories about the Earth, The Moon, The Sun, The Planets, and the Deep Sky. And it’s all “wrapped in poetic implication about humanity’s need to explore,” says the film’s producer.

Richard Dawkins needs no introduction. Lawrence Krauss barely needs an introduction — although we’ll tell you that he’s a leading voice in theoretical physics and the author of the recent book, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. (We recommend watching this lecture to get familiar with his work.

Of course, the big news this week is that MIT and Harvard announced that they’re joining forces to offer free online courses starting next fall. We gave you the scoop on that yesterday. Now we give you another MIT announcement that has largely flown beneath the radar.

Perhaps you heard the news this week. Four billionaires (Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot Jr. and Charles Simonyi) have thrown their financial weight behind Planetary Resources, Inc., a Washington-based startup with big and bold plans.

Presenting the keynote speech at the 28th National Space Symposium, the new public face of astrophysics, Neil deGrasse Tyson, continued making his case for funding NASA and funding it well. Here he tried out a new argument. NASA is not just good for scientific progress. It’s good for our creativity, imagination and collective culture.

This week, The New York Times gave us some good news. According to an article by Gretchen Reynolds, a decade of research by neuroscientists and physiologists shows fairly convincingly that exercise can make you smarter.

Turn down your speakers …  but not all of the way off. Now see what sound waves look like when they’re visualized and the geometric patterns they make.

Back in 1825, Michael Faraday, the venerated English scientist, established The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children. Faraday gave the inaugural lecture himself, hoping to get a younger generation interested in science, and the tradition has carried on ever since.

In October 1946, American scientists, working in White Sands, New Mexico, shot a V-2 missile 65 miles into the air. The missile (originally designed by the Nazis during World War II) carried a 35-millimeter camera aloft that snapped an image every second and a half.