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.