In Danny Boyle’s 2007 outer space thriller Sunshine, a group of scientists are trying to save our dying sun in the year 2057 with a seemingly counterintuitive method: sending a bomb into its core. As the sun’s weakened rays have turned the Earth into an icebox, their mission is to deliver a “payload” of their planet’s last remaining nuclear energy to bring the—ahem—sunshine back to its former glory.

Every day, we toss around ‘official numbers’ we only dimly, at best, understand. But now the next time you apply sunscreen, take shelter during an earthquake, check the weather, or turn up the volume of your music, you might just have a better idea of what’s really going on.

No movie has influenced our modern perception of dinosaurs more than 1993’s Jurassic Park. But although the movie thrilled a generation of future paleontologists, it falls flat on paleontological accuracy. The mechanism that allows the titular theme park to resurrect dinosaurs—cloning them from bits of DNA found inside mosquitoes trapped in amber—seemed at least somewhat plausible at the time (although the odds of finding mosquitoes that just happened to feed off a dinosaur before they croaked are mind-bogglingly slim). But sadly, more recent scientific investigations have quashed our dinosaur dreams.

It’s getting to that point (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway) where access to air conditioning and kegs of iced coffee becomes a prime motivator in our lives. But there are even simpler ways to beat the heat. As we start treading into the dog days of summer, why not look to the dogs—and kangaroos, and elephants—to teach us on how to keep our cool when it’s just too darn hot out?

Mad elephants, anxious dogs, compulsive bears: do their minds come unspooled the same way that a person’s does? After her experience with a disturbed pet, science historian Laurel Braitman set out to explore the roots of animal mental illness—and the ways that we can treat it. We spoke to Braitman recently about her new book, Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves.