What do a Nobel prize-winning physicist, a stem cell scientist and a video game pioneer have in common? They were all onstage at New York University’s Webster Hall on Thursday night to talk about how science impacted their lives — in ways both humorous and poignant — at The Moth, New York’s quirky storytelling venue.

At the event, jointly presented by the storytelling series and the World Science Festival, presenters adhered to The Moth’s guidelines: they had to say their piece in 10 minutes or less, and couldn’t use notes. Six stories were told, but here were three of our favorites:

Richard Garriott opened the evening with the story of his long journey toward space travel. Garriott’s father was a NASA astronaut, and he lived a few doors down from both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren. But his poor eyesight meant that, at the time, he couldn’t hope to follow his father into space. Instead, he turned his energies to the emerging field of computers, and eventually made a fortune through creating fantasy video games, most notably the Ultima series. Despite further medical setbacks, Garriott was able to secure passage on a Soyuz capsule in 2008. And, thanks to a series of experiments performed on Garriott during his spaceflight, NASA now admits astronaut candidates with laser-corrected vision.

Kristin Baldwin, a stem cell biologist at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, made the landmark discovery that adult mice could be derived from reprogrammed skin cells. But her knowledge of genetics was no help in her relationship with her sister. How could two girls with virtually identical DNA be so different? Reconciliation came, oddly enough, through science: when Baldwin’s sister was trying to conceive through sperm donation, she asked for advice on which genetic traits would be expressed in her baby.

Frank Wilczek, the 2004 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, told how he inadvertently sparked fears of the apocalypse with a letter he wrote to Scientific American. He was responding to a reader who was concerned that the new particle accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory might create a black hole that could swallow the Earth. In an attempt to explain why this was unlikely, Wilczek pointed out another, equally improbable danger that the accelerator could create: strangelets, novel arrangements of quarks which would cause surrounding atomic nuclei to crystallize around it in forms vastly different from the ones humanity is comfortable with. This reorganization of atoms would very quickly reduce Long Island (and probably the rest of the planet) to a lump of strange matter. Wilczek ended up spending two days talking to journalists from a pay phone in New Hampshire, explaining (again) why the world wasn’t going to end.

These stories and others should soon be available on The Moth’s podcast.