Blue Dot

You know what ear worms are right? Those catchy tunes that get stuck in your head. Well the ones that get to me have not just a musical hook, they also have a scientific one. And I totally love to sing them in the shower. Join me. No not in the shower – but in my chat with the creator of Acapella Science on YouTube – Tim Blais.

Scientists are concerned and for good reason. Scientific evidence for things like climate change and vaccinations is increasingly being questioned and undermined. Governmental science agencies like the EPA are having their budgets cut and missions changed as Washington adapts to a new administration under Donald Trump. Scientists around the country and the world will be marching for the values of the scientific method – reasoning from evidence to uncover the truth.

How do we think? How do we solve problems and why do we sometimes struggle with finding answers to logical questions? It’s all about our brains, and neuroscience is one of the most daunting topics of any that I can think of. Thankfully, we have a guest who can help demystify how we interact with the world with our brains – she’s the creative force behind one of YouTube’s hottest science channels – Braincraft – meet one of my favorite Aussie science communicators – Vanessa Hill.

Being an astronaut is synonymous in our culture with being a hero. And there are a few that are household names, like John Glenn or Neil Armstrong. But perhaps none of them had as much of an impact on our society and NASA itself as the first American woman in space - Sally Ride. After her 1983 flight on the space shuttle Challenger, she became one of the most famous people in the world, and yet, she was also an intensely private person, her sexual orientation only becoming widely known after her

“Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here…” Those words have become part of our pop cultural history. Just like, “Houston, Tranquility Base here…the Eagle has landed.” During the halcyon days of Project Apollo in the late 1960s and early 70s, Houston was a call sign that referred to the Mission Operations Control Room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. We will talk to Houston ourselves, though not the one you might be thinking of…Rick Houston is the author of Go Flight! An inside look at the

A red dwarf star with seven Earth sized planets? Sound like science fiction? No, it is the Trappist-1 system recently discovered – and it rocked the science world because these are rocky worlds – maybe like Earth! Find out what we know and how we know it on this week’s show.

A dam holding back billions of gallons of water fails and hundreds of lives are lost in the deluge that follows in California. No, it is not a hypothetical "what if?" scenario for the Oroville Dam. It really happened, in Southern California in 1928. Find out the lessons learned and lingering questions about the deadliest man-made disaster of the 20 th Century. We speak with the author of Floodpath , Jon Wilkman.

We return once again to the most famous fictional address in the world - 221B Baker Street. We walk up the seventeen steps and we visit the many iterations of a certain consulting detective and his boswell. It's the world of Sherlock Holmes with The Baker Street Babes . We continue our conversation with Ashley Polasek and Amy Thomas.

There are famous real life addresses that most of us know, like 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but there is also a fictional one that I bet you also know – 221B Baker Street. Walk up the seventeen steps with us now as we visit with the many iterations of a certain consulting detective and his Boswell – it’s time to talk about the world of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson, and the women who understand them. Meet The Baker Street Babes – it’s all new and all blue – just like a Carbuncle.

Yup that’s one of my favorite bands from my formative years, Blue Oyster Cult and no, I don’t think they need more cowbell …I grew up on The Beatles and then transitioned as a teenager into the world of progressive rock. My two favorite bands were Yes and Genesis (with Peter Gabriel). The complexity of the music and its classical influences fascinated me, as did the new types of instrumentation – synthesizers, multiple keyboards, and guitars. Recently, I saw an iteration of Yes called ARW for