Skeptics Guide to the Universe

Most amateur podcasts are … amateur. Long pauses, hesitant delivery, bad sound and worse material — like community TV without the funding. The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is one of the few exceptions to this pattern.  Presented by Dr Steven Novella, a neurologist working at Yale University, Skeptics Guide targets the armies of con-artists, psychics, faith healers and creationists that prey so ceaselessly on the credulous. Dr Novella is ably backed up a by a team of four co-presenters. Their constant cross-talk and banter during the show is one of its strengths. Skeptics Guide does not confine itself to debunking cranks, but also interviews scientists, educators and fellow skeptics, giving the show a consistently positive and forward-looking tone. Unreason is everywhere, but this highly entertaining show celebrates the human capacity to sort out truth from untruth. The Skeptics also maintain the appropriately titled blog, Rogue’s Gallery.

A few inhabitants of the Zoo

The scientists behind Galaxy Zoo 2 want to use your pattern recognition skills to help them classify galaxies. They call it ‘citizen astronomy’ and participants page through images of galaxies taken by an automated telescope, answering a series of questions about the appearance of a particular galaxy. The human eye is better than software at sorting these images into appropriate categories. Well over 100,000 people have participated and 50 million categorisations have been made (each galaxy is viewed by several people, making the classification much more reliable). Results so far have helped change thinking about the abundance of certain kinds of galaxies and have also resulted in the discovery of a very odd structure.