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.