Episode 575: Yogurt, but Make It Sci-Fi

This week's episode was a ride through everything from neighborhood drama to yogurt overlords, with plenty of science and sci-fi sprinkled along the way.   Real Life  Ben kicked things off with Five Nights at Freddy's—because apparently, jump scares are just how he likes to unwind. From there, he veered into a wild story involving a crossing guard, a flag man, and threats from a community member that had us questioning if this was real life or the start of a low-budget thriller. Devon had politics on his mind (as he often does), and let's just say it was… cathartic. Steven closed his section with a review of Mickey 17 (yes, the Bong Joon-ho movie starring Robert Pattinson), finally finishing Rick & Morty, and then going deep into the concept of an Alien Earth. Meanwhile, Ben reminded everyone to get your COVID booster while you still can. His advice? If you need to, just say you have asthma. "Who's gonna check?" he asked. (Don't tempt fate, Ben.)   Future or Now  Ben brought us back to his favorite corner of the internet: The Weird Wide Web. This time he found: A Pigeon Hadron Collider (yes, it exists), Computer shoes (also real, somehow), And a store that generates anything you type (Hacker News link here) Devon turned things more serious with some big Mars news. NASA's Perseverance rover collected a sample called Sapphire Canyon from an ancient riverbed, and it could preserve evidence of ancient microbial life. NASA's announcement and the coverage highlight the discovery's potential—though, as Devon pointed out, politicians are already trying to spin credit in ways that don't hold up. Steven brought us back to Earth (sort of) with the rise of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs. Harvard Health explains how they work, while a new RAND report, shows nearly 12% of Americans have already tried them. Effective? Yes. Side effects? Also yes.   Book Club  This week we read "When the Yogurt Took Over" by John Scalzi (link here), which you may know from its animated adaptation in Love, Death & Robots. Short, weird, and oddly plausible—because if dairy products do overthrow humanity, it's probably our fault. Next week: we're tackling Edward Bryant's "giANTS" (1979), which you can find here. Prepare yourself for some very big bugs. Devon also dropped some knowledge about Sean Carroll's The Particle at the End of the Universe, tying our sci-fi chat back to real physics.   That's the roundup! Between pigeons smashing atoms, yogurt world domination, and Mars microbes, it was one of those episodes where the line between real science and sci-fi got blurry—and we loved every minute of it.