Comedians Emily Heller and Auggie Smith join Matt and Andy this week to kick off 2014 with a lively discussion of Emily's incredible creation Suck My Dick, New Yorker, eighth grade science fairs, belly button cheese, boiling-water-to-snow-to-hospital shenanigans, the truth about the polar vortex, double asteroids, microbes gettin' it on and the Upworthy Generator.
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There aren't many questions bigger than "Are we alone in the universe?" This week's episode might not provide an answer, but Matt, Jesse and Andy interview two people with great insight on the subject: Lee Billings, author of the recent Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, and Dr. Bjoern Benneke, a postdoctoral scholar in planetary science at Caltech, were kind enough to shed some light on exoplanet hunting, Dyson spheres, the Drake equation, and the philosophical significance of finding out if there's anyone else out there.
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This episode kicks off two weeks in a row of actual science, as Matt, Jesse and Andy welcome professor and scientist Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, author of Newton's Football: The Science Behind America's Game, and comedian/football fan Sarah Tiana to discuss the brutal early days of the sport, football's concussion epidemic, Refrigerator Perry's rapping prowess, desperation giving rise to the A-11 offense, Vince Lombardi choosing plays based on game theory, loss-averse monkeys, toe-less placekickers, Greg Cook's injury that led to the West Coast offense, the reasons for the Michigan/Ohio State rivalry and Andy's football announcer grandfather.
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Scottish comedy wunderkind Daniel Sloss recently made his US late night debut on Conan, and he stopped by Bluebell Ranch to talk with Matt, Jesse and Andy about Scottish pride, upkilt photographs, Daniel and his father's diamond-bladed Robot Wars competitor Bot Out Of Hell, a new drug that fixes bent boners, drunk adolescent mice, where humans really sit on the food chain, the nuts and bolts of being hanged, drawn and quartered and the fact that everyone's fingers connect.
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This episode is a glorious shambles. With Andy out of town, Canadian/British comedian Jason John Whitehead drops in on Matt and Jesse attempting to make a Thanksgiving bonus episode in Jesse's bedroom, chatting about birthright trips to Israel, Thanksgiving stuff, Jesse's typewriter collection, mighty hunters, genetic inheritence of fears, seahorse fluid dynamics, illegal koala handling and goosing.
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Hilarious British comedian/writer/actor Andi Osho recently moved stateside and appeared on @midnight and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and this week she helps Matt, Jesse and Andy with a listener suggestion-themed show covering topics including ridiculously fast LED-based Internet connectivity, a scientific analysis of urinal splashback, the importance of the direction of a dog's tail wag, why spoilers might be a good thing, and the fact that Jesse's dad trained to be a mall Santa.
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Actor Samm Levine of Freaks and Geeks and Inglourious Basterds fame joins comedian and writer of the Sundance Jury Prize-winning film Smashed Susan Burke to help Matt, Andy and Jesse discuss Short Circuit 2 nostalgia, losing to Jon Hamm in the Leonard Maltin game, monkeys who are hardwired to be scared of snakes, using teeth to make replacement eye lenses, actress Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping spread-spectrum invention and the fake Zagat binder that Jesse takes with him when eating in restaurants alone.
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Hilarious writers/comedians/actors/producers Scotty Landes and Heather Thomson join Matt, Andy, and Jesse this week for the show. Man about town James Austin Johnson sits in for color commentary. They get to the bottom of: Pepto Bismol! Scientific Hippie poetry! Sitting in the shower! Women are better multitaskers! Self-pleasuring in cars! Rubbernecking! Professional hugging! The science of Captchas! Second rate sex parties! Selling your own blood! Robotic dogs! Facial recognition software! Animals doing math! Sam Elliott! India's space program! Scratch-off tickets and champagne!
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Caltech and LIGO physicists Jamie Rollins and Larry Price join Andy, Jesse and Matt to up the Science:Probably ratio for just one week as they discuss: Why we don't go straight through tables! What's inside an atom! Why chemistry isn't their forté! Dark matter and WIMPS! Gravity waves and what LIGO actually is! How to measure something that's smaller than the smallest thing you can think of! Putting experiments in space! What inspired Einstein to come up with relativity (hint - the two of them didn't agree on it)! How scientists fake getting a result to test each other! The feebleness of gravity!
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Things get a bit less-than-scientific this week as Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning comedian Brendon Burns joins Matt, Jesse and Andy, delving into Australian cult protest songs, finding bombs using dolphin-inspired radar, naked children on giant slip-n-slides, personality trends across the US and how to pronounce "awry."
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You may know comedian Nate Craig from truTV's World's Dumbest, Comedy Central's Mash Up, or from his new album Infinity, and he joins Matt, Andy and newly anointed third host Jesse Case to talk about fake IDs, flushing out brain toxins, fast-aging breasts and farting into tissues.
http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-087-nate-craig
Karen Gillan, star of Doctor Who and the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy, was kind enough to join Matt, Andy, and Jesse this week to talk about this year’s Nobel Prize winners, fact-checking the movie Gravity, reading your own obituary, and Karen’s freshly shaven head.
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This week’s episode comes to you from the second annual LA Podcast Festival, with Matt and Andy welcoming Rhys Darby and Brandon Fibbs to talk about sea serpents, Sasquatch whisperers, space lawyers, astronaut reality shows, and the technological prowess of the New Zealand Army.
http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-085-live-from-la-pod-fest-with-rhys-darby-and-brandon-fibbs
Podcasting pioneers Keith Malley and Chemda of the long-running show Keith and The Girl join Matt, Andy and Jesse this week to talk about die-hard fans, Brooks’s Saturday Night Live debut, tomato/potato plants, having babies after menopause, and why Popular Science decided to disable their comments.
http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-084-keith-and-the-girl
It’s sports week at Probably Science, as Matt and Andy welcome David Epstein, a Sports Illustrated journalist and the author of the outstanding new book The Sports Gene, along with college basketball player-turned-comedian Paul Morrissey, to discuss the burgeoning field of sports genetics research and try to get to the bottom of how elite athletes are made.
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Matt, Andy and Jesse are joined this week by USC paleontology PhD candidate Kathleen Ritterbush to talk about teaching science to boatloads of evangelicals, 201 million-year-old sea snail and sponge fossils, being the third man on The Dating Game and having your wedding ring made out of fossils.
http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-082-kathleen-ritterbush
Matt and Andy are back this week, welcoming the very funny Humphrey Ker and Bryan Cook to the program to talk about going on strike against Joan Rivers, moving someone else’s hand with your mind, getting fooled by a fake story about testicle-biting fish, and a lengthy explanation of the British phenomenon of pantomimes.
http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-081-with-humphrey-ker-and-bryan-cook
Matt’s been out of the country, Andy’s been out of town, and Brooks just got hired to write for Saturday Night Live — those are our excuses for the delay in getting a new episode up, but luckily Matt was able to do a remote recording with the very funny Nick Doody, his co-writer on the BBC radio show Bigipedia. We’ll be back soon with more new episodes, and congratulations, Brooks!
Matt’s been in the UK and Andy’s been in Portland, so rather than leave the audience twisting in the wind for a few weeks, they decided to record some remote bonus interviews. These weren’t supposed to be very science-y, but in the course of talking with Jesse Case, Dr. Richard Flower, Dr. Anna Collu, Jeff Mounts and Emily Mounts, the discussions actually ended up having a fair amount of legitimate science, and a bit of history as well. Keep your standards low, and enjoy!
This week Matt and Andy welcome comedy/science sibling duo Hank Thompson, a comedian and producer atTYT Comedy, and Dr. Chris Thompson, a post-doctoral fellow at Scripps Research Institute in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, to talk about songbirds, sibling rivalry, albino African clawed frogs, and taxi drivers with giant hippocampi.
http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-079-hank-and-chris-thompson
