World of Weird Things Podcast

Space, the final frontier, a place of endless possibility, wonder, and opportunity. And a whole lot of weird stuff that challenges your ideas of what you think you knew about the universe you inhabit. So, to start off the year, we're taking you on a quick tour through the solar system and beyond to talk about some odd observations and theories you might not have heard before, from Saturn's disappearing -- yes, disappearing -- rings, to a really good and slightly disturbing reason we haven't heard from any intelligent aliens yet. Along the way, we'll also debate what makes a planet a planet, and send some shout outs to some relevant TV shows and fun videos.

Whenever you praise human spaceflight or space tourism a bit too loudly around the wrong people, you're bound to get assailed by seemingly morally unassailable criticisms of space exploration being a luxury we can ill afford when we have so many pressing problems right here on Earth. But what if we were to tell you that not only does sending humans into space barely makes a microscopic dent in global budgets, it's also good for us long term and may hold one of the keys to getting our civilization out of its current consumerism-obsessed, self-destructive, soul-crushing rut?

Here at the Fish household, we know the pain of fighting the COVID bulge after two years of trying to stay healthy in a global pandemic and stress levels shooting through the roof in jobs seen as essential or critical. So, as we're trying to get healthy again, we're looking at all the snake oil and bad advice the weight loss industry and various social media pyramid schemes unleashed in their attempts to cash in on people trying to get healthy and moving as we head into 2022 to separate the scams, myths, and stereotypes from real scientific advice.

The hottest new scam on social media is selling new crypto coins with strange, funny, or really and blatantly misleading names through influencers who suddenly discovered a burning passion for obscure and arcane financial instruments with no clear monetary value. That's right, they're shooting for the moon and they're taking you along for the ride because your support means so much to them. Except for the small problem that the coins they're so fond of are pretty obvious scams, the influencers don't actually own any and are paid to advertise them, and you're going to lose all your money within days, if not hours, if you actually buy them. Welcome to the brave new world of still somehow sort of legal pump and dump scams and crypto for the masses.

Want more people to become environmentalists who care about Earth's future, sustainability, clean air and water, and advocate for green energy? Forget luring them on luxury eco tours and shuttling them between pristine tropical alcoves and toxic landfills. Take them to space instead to trigger a curious phenomenon that will give them an unparalleled perspective on the fragility and uniqueness of our world, a perspective we usually see in astronauts. What is this effect and how long does it last? We dive into the details on this week's episode.

On another extended episode of the WoWT Podcast, we talked to Marc-Andre Argentino, one of the world's top experts on QAnon and conspiratorial ideation about how the far right conspiracy of everything has evolved to become an omnipresent menace on social media and in politics, how it's changing in new ways, and what it will take for society to lessen its iron grip on millions' of follower's minds. What he told us was, well, rather disconcerting...

With this horrible year coming to an end, we're thinking about the future, the far future that is. That's why this week, we're doing a deep dive into the continued popularity of cyberpunk and mind uploading tropes, the science of merging humans and machines, the devices that show us what bizarre things are actually scientifically possible, and the surprising revelation that if you're planning to get a robotic body in your old age, finding a way to preserve your stomach may be a lot more important than keeping your heart and lungs. Why? Well, there's only one way to find out, and that's to tune in.

You'd think that in societies where we prize sharing, caring, and getting along as much as we can, angry jerks who throw temper tantrums when things don't go exactly their way would be swiftly ostracized and face serious consequences for repeated offenses, not run entire countries with legions of supporters, and create destabilizing movements based around angry conspiracy theories and lies. So, how are they so successful? And how do you know if you may be one of these people? Believe it or not, psychology offers a great deal of insight into both questions, as well as how to shut down out of control sociopaths.

You spent months fine tuning your neural network, constantly tweaking its architecture, training it until it achieves 99.5% accuracy, but when you deployed it in the real world with less than stellar results. Why? It's probably because you managed to hit the limits to what our current machine learning formulas and approaches can achieve when training computers to make sense of our messy and inconsistent world. On this week's episode we dive into some of those limits and what they mean to the humans AI is meant to help or replace.

We think we have a pretty good handle on what life is, but the reality is that thinks we think of as living are just a subset of possible chemistries and mechanisms by which life could evolve and function. To really understand what it means to be alive and recognize alien existences radically different from everything we think we know means we need to ask ourselves some very weird and complicated questions like what life, and what sort of things could we expect to be the most common lifeforms in the universe.

You're not just being paranoid. Your every step on the internet, every download, and every time you open an app are logged and stored somewhere. Almost always, the raw data is examined by software to find persistent bugs and patterns of use for programmers and designers to make better software or figure out what apps and features are popular and which ones are not. But all those oceans of data being collected along with your activity on social media and background noise from your voice-activated AI assistants are ripe for abuse and it's long past time we had a very serious discussion on what we're collecting, why, and how we use it.

Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, and ancient alien cities buried under the Antarctic ice are standard fodder for many works by occultists and science fiction authors asking us and themselves whether over the hundreds of millions of years during which life could exist on the surface of our world. Now, scientists are starting to ask the same question. Is it possible that we're not the first advanced society on this planet? And if so, how could we know? The answer wouldn't just give us more perspective on our own origins, it could also help us find proof of alien life.

We've been launching things into space since the late 1950s, and while the aspirational talk about exploring the final frontier keeps getting louder, we've been a lot quieter about the fact that all those rockets left a vast, orbiting field of high-speed trash which poses increasing hazards to future missions. And while we think we know how to clean it up, actually doing it requires negotiating some very thorny politics, and establishing some very new and different priorities.

After finally solving our audio problems thanks to some professional help, the WoWT Podcast is finally back, and before we get going again, we're revisiting our episode on the psychology of cults to correct some of our predictions in light of COVID-19. With the pandemic still doing its damage, people are spiraling down conspiracy theory rabbit holes on social media and falling prey to cults ready to take advantage of their very understandable and normal discontent and anxiety. We dive into their tactics, explain how cult leaders groom their followers, and talk about the biggest thing we can do to dull the appeal of malevolent groups. And we bet it's not what you think it is…

When pop culture wants you to think that a certain character has superhuman intelligence, that character is given an enormous head and it's either outright stated or heavily implied that their brains are enormous compared to ours. But as science learns more and more about brains and how they actually work, not just in humans but in intelligent animals around the world, it seems like there may be a lot more to being smart than just using your brain, especially if you aren't a primate or a mammal…

It's only the start of May and already the world is done with 2020 and its pajama apocalypse. So how did we get here? What makes COVID-19 so insidious? Why are so many people apparently so angry about trying to stave off a novel opportunistic disease? Do we have anything that can actually treat COVID-19? Why is social media drowning in absurd conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, 5G, the WHO, and China? And, of course, how do we keep this disaster from repeating itself a decade down the road? We dive into all that and more this episode of the WoWT Podcast.

One of the most important traits all social animals have to make sure they stick together and help each other survive as a species is empathy, and humans are no exception. But how do you measure how empathic someone is and study the origins of something so complex? According to researchers, you start with kids and work your way up to adults. And if you do it right, you can pinpoint causes of, and unlock solutions to, seemingly intractable political and social problems…

After looking through our files, it turns out we never uploaded an episode we recorded in the beginning of December about the strange substance known as antimatter. It's all the rage in sci-fi and scientific documentaries, but there's not a lot of confusing information about it beyond "if you combine it with matter it goes boom." So, we set out to fix that by breaking down what antimatter actually is, how it was discovered, how we can use it, how it exists in a universe made of matter, and since we're talking about that, why isn't the universe made of antimatter in the first place.

We promised to talk about cyborgs, what they are, where the idea originated, and why it's so important to understand how to merge our minds and bodies with machines over the long term and here we are. On this week's episode we dive into the origins of the word and the history of the technology involved, sort out some nomenclature, and cover why we'll want to join our brains with artificial intelligence and bodies with computers, especially if we'll want to explore deep space.

We know we need more people in STEM careers as we try to build a workforce of the future. But our current attempts to teach them the skills they'll need for the jobs of tomorrow are a little out of date, specifically the kind of math to which we steer them. While calculus is considered the pinnacle of math classes in many high schools, the real discipline in demand is statistics since it's required to understand and work with artificial intelligence, do research, and analyze the enormous volumes of data collected by modern software. How did we get here and how can we correct our course?

The science illiterate and fact averse love to call scientific bodies of knowledge "just theories, not facts" with the predictability of an atomic clock when faced with something they find irksome, but this betrays a glaring lack of rudimentary understanding behind what science calls a theory and why. In this episode, we dive into the mechanics of and definitions of the terms describing the scientific method, and try to answer why so many people don't know that scientific theories are collections of facts, not a stopover for discoveries that "get promoted to laws."

As the world became more and more complicated and interconnected, an awful lot of people in both high and low places decided not only that they shouldn't try to keep up with the pace of change, but they didn't have to and learning about what was coming over the horizon next was unnecessary because they already knew everything there was to know. But why do people feel so self-confident and dismissive towards actual experts sounding alarms even as they see disasters unfold in real time in front of their noses? There's a psychological phenomenon that explains exactly what's happening and it's called Dunning-Kruger.

Science fiction movies are one of the primary ways people learn about space exploration and get inspired to help build humanity's future. This is why a movie which treats it as a complete waste, doesn't even pretend to be scientifically plausible, and paints those who are passionate to solve deep existential mysteries as insane and homicidally psychotic obsessives isn't just a disservice to the genre, it's a disservice to its viewers. And this is why we're going to tackle its flaws, both scientific and creative.

Probiotics are quickly becoming a huge business, claiming to heal millions with the power of balancing the biosphere of symbiotic bacteria in their guts. But the science is a lot more complicated than hawkers of supplements and yogurts will have you believe, and far from helping good bacteria recolonize your digestive tract, they're merely delivery mechanisms for benign and temporary microscopic visitors. So where does the science end and hype begin? Are there any real benefits to probiotics? And what can we learn from studying our bacterial biomes?

According to numerous disaster movies, global warming should cause downright apocalyptic storms that will wipe out human civilization. The reality is a lot more subtle and often distorted by news coverage, and while it's hard to say that tornados and hurricanes are getting stronger, there is evidence that climate change did alter how many storm systems behave, and on average, it wasn't for the better…

Governments really, really want to snoop on your messages and are once again demanding that tech companies create a backdoor for law enforcement to crack encryption standards which protect everything from your electronic payments to your medical information. In a sane world, experts would once again tell them that math and basic human fallibility and greed would make a secure backdoor impossible and that would be the end of it. But we don't live in a sane world, which is why bureaucrats are throwing temper tantrums and demanding we simply accept the fallout of meeting their demands, refusing to understand that the cost of doing so could be trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, and a crime spree unlike the world has ever seen.

Thanks to a crash landing by an Israeli lunar experiment, the nearest world to our own has a small colony of living things alien to its environment. Well, sort of, since the tardigrades, the extraordinarily hearty creatures on board, are in a state of suspended animation and won't be doing much of anything for millions of years if left alone. But this incident does raise a few red flags we need to address before we keep exploring space, especially with privately built and financed experiments, and brings up some very bizarre questions about the origin of life on Earth and other inhabited worlds we have to take seriously.

According to science fiction, the 2020s were supposed to be an era of autonomous flying cars and jetpacks zipping around massive cities that looked like forests of glass, steel, and concrete. Now that we're just a year away from that point on the calendar, we actually do have jetpacks, flying cars, and artificial intelligence capable of driving all by itself, they're just not nearly as advanced as sci-fi writers thought and they're going to be applied in slightly different ways than they predicted…

Imagine if everything you knew was just a simulation inside a supercomputer or a cluster of servers on a distant alien outpost, controlled by sophisticated otherworldly machines. But this isn't a rehash of The Matrix. Your body isn't in a vat being used to generate power or used for anything of consequence. In fact, you don't exist in a physical form. You're just the emergent property of a code means to better understand how universes live and die for extraterrestrial scientists. It's an entertaining and scary thought, but how likely is it? And what do we do if we are in fact just digital phantoms?

Politicians and older voters insist that worries about the robot job apocalypse are overblown, and while computers are getting smarter, they're not smart enough to take so many jobs that they'll create an honest to goodness crisis. But they're wrong, and we know that because one of the hosts just built a prototype for Skynet-style robots and got a glimpse into the future in the process. And while that future is scary, the reality is that it doesn't have to be with just a little political will and basic understanding on what's on the horizon…

Secrecy breeds conspiracy and fanciful rumors, and no place on Earth today seems to be more secretive and more shrouded in mystery than Area 51. It's suspected to be home to specimen of alien life, a place to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial technology, or even a front for something a lot more secretive buried under the Nevada desert. But believe it or not, we actually do know a lot about Area 51 and what happens there, as well as many glimpses into its dark and unsettling history the government will neither confirm or deny.

California has stopped rocking and rolling, which means it's time for conspiracy theorists to do what they do best, spreading rumors and elaborate videos claiming that we saw an Air Force space plane triggering natural disasters from space. And speaking of natural disasters, while we might not be able to control earthquakes and droughts, it turns out we could actually control one force of nature with modern technology: volcanic eruptions. Plus, we would even make a profit in the process.

According to the late Dr. Stephen Hawking and a number of other thinkers, one of the reasons why we can't seem to detect a signal from an alien society is because marauding species are on a mission to destroy any advanced life in a quest to eliminate any possible competitors for cosmic resources and potential enemies before they have the technology and weapons to defeat them. But given the vastness of space, the abundance of resources in it, and the rarity of spacefaring intelligent life, does this idea actually make sense?

Dr. Steven Novella joins the Fishes to talk about the follies of Big Pharma and the conspiracy theories swirling around it. Are cures really less profitable than long term treatment? Can you even keep a cure a secret in this day and age? And why are people resorting to conspiracies to answer questions addressed in just about any book about medicine and biology?

In today's world, we're accustomed to the daily rhythm of the 9 to 5 days of a five-day work week and pay by the hour. But as more jobs are being taken over by machines, the pattern of our working lives will have to come to a slow but still screeching halt. It will have to because the reason behind its existence is a historical aberration, and it's time we start rethinking it, both at work and in schools instead of continuously careening into an obvious dead end.

QAnon expert and observer Travis View joins the Fishes to talk about the psychology of conspiracy theories and how their most ardent followers can reject our shared reality and manufacture their own. What happens when people retreat from the real world and lash out at those who won't join them in their messy divorce with facts? And how can we get them back from the black hole of reading imaginary tea leaves?

Since 1947, both the public and the media have been fascinated with flying saucers, floating triangles, odd lights zooming across the sky, and the little gray or green men thought to pilot them. And while it's not completely out of the realm of possibility that we may have been visited by an alien civilization, the odds that it happened, much less that it's happening all the time, are beyond overwhelmingly against it. So why are we seeing so many strange lights in the sky and hearing so many bizarre stories about them and their supposed pilots?

Of all the stellar objects talked about in popular science, Super-Earths are almost criminally underrated, which is a shame because they represent some of the best places to find life, are an interesting addition to the debate about how to classify Pluto and bodies like it, and show the link between rocky planets in inner solar systems and gas giants. You could even say that if we really want to understand how solar systems are formed, we need to learn a lot more about the many Super-Earths we've keep discovering every time we look for new exoplanets…

Instead of Typhoid Mary, we have Typhoid Ayden, Brayden, Jayden, and Kayden as upper middle class suburbanites are refusing to vaccinate their children. And as if that's not enough, their prodigious use of social media and inordinate amount of time in comment sections and writing for mommy blogs managed to convince 1 in 10 Americans that humanity's safest and most successful public health program which drove the scourges of the past into extinction or very close to it, is a Big Pharma conspiracy to get kids sick because reasons. It's a triumph of ignorance, arrogance, bad faith, and quackery in action, and we need to take it as the health hazard it is.

Popular science news is just about everywhere, and millions of people subscribe to mailing lists with the latest and greatest from the worlds of astronomy, medicine, biology, and climatology. But not all pop sci news is accurate, and the way the media chooses to cover certain topics is both misleading and irresponsible, inspiring cranks and scam artists, and pitting scientists and volumes of peer-reviewed evidence against loudmouth pundits who really don't care if the world burns, or people's health is in danger as long as the camera is focused on them. How did this happen and what can you do to get good science coverage? Tune in and find out.

Turn on the news today and you'll get a never-ending torrent of rage and misery. Social media is being dominated by outrage and virtual mobs demanding someone's head on a platter for making a stupid joke or a hateful comment. We're constantly upset about something, trying to rope others into our anger. And that has psychologists who study anger worried because as odd as it may seem, being angry and expressing that anger is actually good for you and society as a whole. Of course, being angry can only be beneficial up to a certain threshold, and we've either passed it a while ago, or are very quickly approaching it.

Now that everyone saw and talked about the EHT black hole image, it's probably a good time to catch up on all the details the popular explainers missed, like what's inside a black hole, what happens to the matter that falls into it, why they're so important for us to investigate as we keep exploring space and the ultimate fate of our universe, and perhaps most importantly of all, how and why they burp when they eat.

Thanks to an experiment to better understand brain structure and function, and how well brains of the deceased could help us test potential treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, we've accidentally entered a brave new world in which reanimated minds hooked up to machines and computers aren't nearly as impossible as we might like. What does that mean for the future of neurology and medical treatments? Are some of the studies we want to do even ethical? Do we really need to worry about science going too far, and is there really such a thing, especially if we have a chance to save lives and understand ourselves better than ever before?

We might talk a lot about sex in the West these days, but that doesn't mean we've been able to successfully debunk a lot of myths that have been floating around for generations. Can you be addicted to sex? How pervasive is hookup culture? Does size matter, and if so, to what extent? Are we going to become obsessed with sex bots or use them to cure social ills? What's the most horrifying way to reproduce on our planet? And why do we reproduce sexually in the first place if the process takes so much time and effort? Believe it or not, science has weighed in all these topics, and we're going to dive into what it has to say.

Science fiction universes have an impressive array of horrifying weapons. From antimatter bombs to plasma rifles, to the many iterations of death stars, fictional characters often face certain death facing down glowing barrels that would produce little more than a fizzle and a spray of sparks if fired in the real world, be so ridiculously unstable and overpowered, they'd destroy anyone crazy enough to use them, do far more damage to the person or alien using them, or just plain violate the laws of physics and impossible to build in the first place. We're going to take a critical look at some of the most popular examples and explain why if you're trying to design a doomsday weapon or a game-changing gun, you might want to look for inspiration somewhere other than comic books.

Sci-fi author Charlie Jane Anders wanted to give us an idea of what life would be like on a tidally locked world, a planet orbiting so close to its star that it can't rotate around its axis, in an article for The Atlantic. Unfortunately, it turned out to be less of a dissection of a hypothetical colony on a completely alien world, and more of a stealthy ad for her science fiction novel, which... really, who'd do something like that? (Me, actually. I would do that.) In the interest of providing a more or less realistic answer, we're going to talk about how astronauts would cope with spending their lives in permanent twilight of one of the most common types of terrestrial planets out there.

Earth can be our home for many millions of years to come, but at some point, we will absolutely venture away from it and start surfing the solar winds, or powering up our ion drives, to navigate the many worlds our solar system has to offer. We'll swing around gas giants and play on their moons. We'll build cities on the Moon and Mars. We'll mine asteroids for all the water ice, ore, and precious metals we'll ever need. It's not just a fantasy. In fact, the required technology is just around the corner. We just need to make the first steps, right after we explain why we'd ever want to leave a planet on which we evolved, especially when not everyone could join us on this adventure.

Tech evangelists have found the solution to everything from our economic woes to a cure for cancer, from an airtight defense from fake news and internet hoaxes to a way to prevent an evil AI from deciding to kill all humans. That solution? The blockchain. But just as Sawbones taught us, cure-alls cure nothing, a technology meant to fix everything is highly unlikely to succeed and the blockchain is no exception. It was invented to disrupt the global financial system, but despite its inability to succeed in this space, its fans are trying to find a problem it can actually tackle. And that prompts the question of what exactly is the blockchain and what can it really do?

Fake news seems to be the term of everyone's lips today, even if its meaning seems to change from person to person. While what we consider fake news might vary, we know that bots and trolls on social media are fanning propaganda and disinformation for profit and political gain, a potent reminder that yes, anyone can have a site and publish pretty much whatever they want. But how do conspiracy theories and hoaxes that used to be fringe views constantly ending up on the news and in your timelines? The answer is complicated and a little disturbing...

The Western far right appears convinced that taking better care of our planet, ourselves, and making our cities greener and more walkable, are actually just sinister plots to enslave them. Why? There's an entire industry of conspiracy theorists making millions of convincing mostly older, whiter, more rural, conservatives that the government, their neighbors, and even their kids, are out to get them. We may have found ourselves looking down the barrel of an environmental crisis unintentionally, but the efforts to stop us from doing anything about it are both willful and coordinated.

While the crew of Futurama figured out what dark matter is, and the sinister secret behind how it was harnessed as starship fuel, scientists haven't been as successful. What we do know is that it makes up nearly a quarter of the universe while all but 4% of the remaining mass is attributed to a force called dark energy, so we can't just ignore it while we study the cosmos. And with so many experiments ruling out hypothesis after hypothesis as to what these two might be, some researchers are asking whether dark matter exists and if instead of running in circles, we should try to answer a question that's also stumped us for a long time: how does gravity work?