Exposing Pseudoastronomy

Moving away from the Earth-centric episodes since The Return of the podcast, this epsidoe addresses the concept of dark matter and claims that it is pseudoscience (and liberal pseudoscience at that!). Throughout the episode, we explore the history of the concept, how it arose, and why it arose, and then some alternative explanations. I make the case that it is not pseudoscience at all, but real, genuine, Grade-A science.

Flat Earth proponents have numerous claims that they use to promote the concept that Earth is flat. In this episode, we examine two of the claims that are somewhat related: The world looks like the United Nations flag (therefore "they" are "giving it away"), and airplane flights somehow prove Earth is flat.

When a NASA press released announced that scientists had observed x-rays coming from Pluto, my knee-jerk reaction was that certain people would use this to claim that Pluto was built by aliens. A later thought was that some might use it to bolster their ideas of the electric universe. Conveniently, I was going to be seeing one of the main study authors, Dr. Casey Lisse, just a day later at a conference, so I interviewed him about the find to really figure out what was going on, what was expected, what was unexpected, and if aliens built everything.

After 139 episodes, a return to some of the claims that Earth is hollow, this time as presented by David Icke. An examination into how gravity works, the structure of comets, magnetic fields, icebergs, and muskox migration patterns wrapped in an atmosphere of conspiracy that everything in our lives is run by fourth-dimensional reptilian aliens from Planet X.

Sometimes, things just get to you. A Planet X proponent who has been preaching catastrophe for years, keeps saying the doom will happen in about a year, and yet is objecitvely proven wrong each time, got to me. This episode is a documentation proving that Marshall Masters' Planet X timeline is wrong, that for years he's been saying it's about a year away and will be obvious to everyone, and that his latest statements for December 2017 will just be more of the same: NOTHING.

A beginning examination of some of the modern claims put forth by the very recent resurgeance of Flat Earth proponents.  This episode focuses on common (or not-so-common) sense, Earth's curvature, and the overall shape of the planet.  It has three additional segments past the main one: Logical Fallacy, Feedback, and Announcements.

A ten-minute update and apology for delay in new episodes, and an announcement that the podcast is now officially on hiatus for another few months.

A close examination of why astronomers claim that they know about things on the other side of the universe, but they can't figure out what's going on in our own backyard. Since this episode comes out two months after my previous, there are also three New News stories where I discuss a recent exosystem mystery, space law, and, conveniently, the new most-distant known object in our solar system.

On July 7, 2015, one week before the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto and Charon, I sat down with six other early career scientists and interviewed them about several different topics related to the mission and just being a planetary scientist or scientist in general. And, for those listeners who stay to the end, there is a bonus of over 3 minutes of outtakes!

From an ego standpoint, it's nice to get credit if you're the first to do something or figure something out. But from a scientific standpoint, it's also important to remember what has been known so we don't waste resources rediscovering something. And, from a pseudoscientific standpoint, many people like to take credit for imaginary claims about discovering something before scientists. On this episode, I explore all of these.

A conspiracy idea is that part of Nazi Germany propaganda was to redefine the musical standard for the world, moving it up in pitch from a standard A4 note that vibrates at 432 Hz to the more jarring 440 Hz which allows mind control and agitates people to be more war-like. I look into this claim from a physics and physical standpoint to determe if it could have any validity.

There are a lot of rumors going around that September 2015 is going to result in doom and gloom, with the destruction of financial markets, or maybe the world will end in a Christian New Testiment way, or we'll just get whacked by an asteroid. I talk about five different rumors in this episode and I put them in context with other, past claims, and other, past claims of the exact same thing that (obviously) did not result in doomsday.

A look at many of the conspiracies related to the New Horizons mission through the Pluto-Charon system. This Part 2 episode focuses on anomaly-hunting -based conspiracies, including the alleged secret space program and a lot of image analysis.

A look at many of the conspiracies related to the New Horizons mission through the Pluto-Charon system. This Part 1 episode focuses on some of the more mundane conspiracies, such as those related to naming conventions, the data download plan, and young-Earth creationism.

Most often when discussing the age of the Earth or the solar system, scientists refer to radiometric dating. In kind, young-Earth creationists will try almost exclusively to poke holes in radiometric dating. But, before radioactive decay was discovered over one century ago, scientists in many different fields had already concluded that Earth was at least millions, if not hundreds of millions of years old. This episode discusses the reasoning they used.

I briefly spoke with two of the science journalists who are embedded within NASA's New Horizons team for the spacecraft's flyby of the Pluto-Charon system. I asked them how they work to convert the complicated and technical science into something the public can digest and get excited about.

I bring you an interview with Dr. John Spencer, head of the hazards search for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto, and co-deputy of the Geology and Geophysics Investigation team for New Horizons. We discuss how spacecraft images are processed, unique challenges for New Horizons, and some of the things we're doing to try to avoid creation of anomalies that some people might try to claim are evidence for a conspiracy.

The Big Bang is the model that is used to explain what happened just after the origin of the universe. No more, and no less. But there are different kinds of arguments that people make to argue that the Big Bang never happened. In this episode, we go through some of these arguments and the arguments made by scientists to support Big Bang cosmology.

Bob Lazar is often credited - at least in part - with re-energizing the UFO field in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unfortunately for the field, most who have looked into his claims have found them lacking in veracity. In this episode, I look specifically into his claims about ununpentium, also known as Element 115, which is supposed to be the source of propulsion for UFOs and work in their energy production.

On May 24, 2015, I presented a live talk at the Denver ComicCon modeled after Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of" televsision series. The session title was, "Skeptical Science." The topic was Planet X, chosen because it has grown into a large class of different claims all under the moniker "Planet X," and so an exploration of it can explore a wide variety of critical thinking -based concepts.