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.

Therapist Susan Fee signs up herself and her daughter for a stress management research study, and while suffering from a panic attack, comedian Kenice Mobley reflects on a psychology experiment about the impact of race on comfort that she took part in.