Science Faction Podcast

Devon Craft and Steven Domingues and Benjamin Daniel Lawless
  • 4.2 (10)
  • Science
  • Updated Weekly

A science and science fiction based podcast hosted by two high school friends, and two college friends. Listen and learn and geek out. In this podcast, science meets fact, meets fiction.

  1. 4d ago

    Feelings Are Not Facts

    This week on Science Faction, we tackle the important questions: Is bread actually good? Can a Disney Channel movie sneak science fiction past Steven? Can Star Trek: Strange New Worlds finally make Ben stop complaining? And, most importantly, how did a movie about sheep detectives turn out to be legitimately great? Then, in Future or Now, things get a little more serious as Devon brings us a massive Kelvin wave moving toward California, while Ben explores a fake version of Windows 11 that leads us into a much bigger question: why are we still using computers basically the same way we have for decades? Real Life We begin, naturally, with bread. Ben is against it. Devon, who apparently becomes increasingly French whenever bread is involved, is very much in favor of it. Steven loves sourdough and becomes increasingly concerned about what exactly Ben considers the staple crops of his diet. Devon settles the matter with perhaps the strongest argument anyone can make: fresh French bread is amazing, and he will eat all of it. From there, Steven has two movies to discuss, neither of which would normally be considered science fiction. Or would they? First up is Big City Greens: Spacecation, which gets a thumbs-up from Steven. It's a Big City Greens adventure that sends the family into space, which certainly sounds suspiciously like science fiction. There's also a familiar name in the writing credits: Mike Trapp. Then there's The Love Hypothesis. If you've listened to Steven talk about romantic comedies before, you probably already know where this conversation is headed. If you don't, well…he's going to tell you. Meanwhile, Ben has reached the end of another season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which raises an important question: is there a limit to how long Ben can complain about Star Trek? Season four is over, and somehow the show may have accidentally made a good Star Trek episode. That sends us into a bigger discussion about what some fans want from the franchise: an aspirational future where science, discovery, truth, and people working together matter more than enormous space armadas and the latest galaxy-ending artificial intelligence. Could this finally make Ben stop complaining about Star Trek? Maybe for five minutes. But the biggest surprise of Ben's week was The Sheep Detectives. And apparently it was EPIC. Ben calls it a genuinely smart movie and, perhaps most impressively, says it succeeds where Cars 2 failed. Beneath the absurd premise of sheep solving a mystery, there's a story dealing with grief and trauma that worked far better than Ben expected. Ben recommends it. Strongly. Future or Now Devon brings us something considerably larger than sheep detectives: a slow-moving, planetary-scale Kelvin wave heading toward California. The Guardian: Concern mounts over planetary-scale Kelvin wave heading for California The enormous mass of warm water is moving across the Pacific and could affect sea levels along the California coast, with changes potentially approaching a foot in some areas. That leads us into a conversation about what these enormous ocean systems actually mean when they finally reach land—and, for Devon, a much more personal connection involving his son and the devastating flooding in Texas. Then Ben takes us somewhere considerably sillier. Definitely Not Windows is exactly what it sounds like: a parody of Windows 11 that gives us an excuse to complain about modern operating systems. But the joke leads into a much more interesting question. Why do computers still work like this? Windows, icons, folders, desktops, applications—we've been iterating on essentially the same basic ideas for decades. Ben brings in Scott Jenson's exploration of what could come next and asks whether we're really going to use the same desktop UX forever. Scott Jenson: Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever? If artificial intelligence changes how we interact with computers, maybe the future isn't simply an AI assistant sitting inside the same old operating system. Maybe the entire idea of what an operating system looks like—and how we tell a computer what we want—needs to change. So this week we've got bread, romantic comedies, surprisingly good Star Trek, emotionally complicated sheep, planetary waves, fake Windows, and the possible death of the desktop. You know. Science Faction.

  2. Sep 23

    I Have No Hands, And I Must Play Super Mario

    This week on Science Faction, we've got VR mini golf inside a gelatinous lair, Lanterns continuing its hot streak, questionable Resident Evil continuity, and Devon discovering that talking about guitar theory apparently removes all normal limits on podcast airtime. Then we get into the science: human neurons growing inside mouse brains and the complete nervous system of a fruit fly being reconstructed digitally—because apparently mapping a brain isn't enough anymore. Now we need to see if it can play Doom. Real Life Ben has been back in Walkabout Mini Golf, checking out Gloop Lair, a new course that sends players into a wonderfully strange underground world filled with colorful goo, bizarre environments, and exactly the sort of elaborate miniature-golf nonsense that keeps us coming back to this game. Gloop Lair: https://www.mightycoconut.com/gloop-lair Steven continues his weekly declaration that Lanterns is amazing, this time after Episode 6. We also get a Nathan Fillion sighting as Guy Gardner, which naturally gives us another excuse to talk about superheroes. Steven has also fallen even farther down the vibe-coding rabbit hole. The latest project is CRAWLBOX, a loot-box generator built for the Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG. What started as a relatively simple helper for generating rewards has, predictably, turned into an increasingly elaborate system for creating randomized weapons, armor, magic items, consumables, enchantments, and other crawler loot. Try CRAWLBOX: https://dungeon-crawler-loot.stevezero.chatgpt.site Ben brings us the strange crossover between The Rookie and Dropout, which raises some questions about what happens when a network procedural collides with the very different world of internet comedy. Read more at IndieWire: https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/dropout-the-rookie-crossover-controversy-explained-1235182321/ Steven also watched the latest Resident Evil movie. Is it a reboot? Is it connected to something else? Does any of that actually matter? Who knows. What we do know is that it was an entertaining distraction that seems squarely aimed at a younger, roughly 18–24 audience. Meanwhile, Devon is tired and claims he hasn't been doing much—which somehow turns into an extended discussion about learning Bullet for My Valentine songs, taking guitar lessons online, and studying the CAGED system. And then something remarkable happens: Devon starts talking about music. And keeps talking. And keeps talking. Steven eventually has a more fundamental question: Why is Devon putting this much effort into learning all of this guitar stuff? That launches us into a much bigger conversation about learning an instrument, understanding music instead of simply playing songs, and why apparently the secret to getting Devon to talk forever is mentioning a fretboard. Future or Now Human Neurons…Inside Mouse Brains Devon brings us a story that sounds like the opening act of a science-fiction movie: researchers are growing human neurons inside mouse brains. Scientists are using these transplanted human cells to study how neurons develop and behave inside a living brain, potentially giving researchers a new way to investigate neurodevelopmental disorders that are difficult to reproduce using traditional laboratory models. It's fascinating research. It's also one of those sentences where every additional explanation somehow makes it sound more like science fiction. Read the Science article: https://www.science.org/content/article/human-neurons-flourish-mouse-brains-offering-new-view-neurodevelopmental-disorders We Mapped a Fruit Fly Brain. Naturally, We Made It Play Video Games. Steven's story starts with a major scientific achievement: researchers produced a remarkably detailed map of the nervous system of an adult male fruit fly. That alone is impressive. The resulting connectome gives researchers an extraordinary look at how a relatively small biological brain is wired together. But this is the internet, so obviously somebody had to ask the important question: Can we use it to play video games? Researchers and programmers are already experimenting with computational models based on fruit-fly neural circuitry, including attempts to put these systems into virtual environments involving games such as Doom and Super Mario 64. Which raises some wonderfully strange questions. If you reproduce the connections inside a brain, how much of the original behavior comes along with it? How much does the body matter? Could increasingly sophisticated connectomes eventually produce useful artificial agents? And, perhaps most importantly, how humiliating will it be when a fruit fly becomes better at Doom than we are? Read more: Gizmodo: https://gizmodo.com/google-mapped-a-fruit-flys-brain-now-its-playing-doom-and-super-mario-64-2000808616 Google Research — A Connectomics Milestone: Mapping the Complete Male Fruit Fly Brain: https://research.google/blog/a-connectomics-milestone-mapping-the-complete-male-fruit-fly-brain/ This week: VR goo, Guy Gardner, vibe-coded loot boxes, entirely too much guitar theory, human neurons living in mice, and a fruit fly learning to play video games. Just another perfectly normal episode of Science Faction.

  3. Sep 16

    Never Forget the Badmirals

    This week on Science Faction, real life means surgery updates, kids claiming their own rooms, Ben questioning whether he needs a room of his own, and a surprisingly enthusiastic review of Lanterns. We also talk Silo, Pluribus, Strange New Worlds, and a new game that brings GoldenEye-style shooting into the modern age. Then in Future or Now, things get philosophical as we ask whether your brain is actually "making" decisions at all, before Ben introduces us to Douglas Harding's strange and fascinating Headless Way. Real Life This week Steven starts with some actual real-life stuff: Annabell had surgery, so there's an update on how everything went before we move on to considerably less important matters. Namely, Lanterns Episode 5, which Steven thought was absolutely fantastic. The series continues to hit that sweet spot between serious adult drama and comic-book weirdness, and Episode 5 might be one of its strongest outings yet. Devon's household is undergoing a major reorganization as the kids finally get their own rooms. That means purging years of accumulated toys, painting, decorating, rearranging furniture, and discovering exactly how much stuff children can somehow acquire. Devon also checks in on Silo Season 3. With the next season set to be the last, the end is coming into view—but getting there takes some patience. The beginning of this season is slooooow. Meanwhile, Ben is sharing an office with his son, which raises an important middle-aged question: does Ben actually need a space of his own? We also get the mysterious "Congratulations, Carol" text message, some Emmy talk, and an update on Pluribus Season 2. Vince Gilligan recently gave an update on the progress of Season 2, saying that the new season isn't technically completely written yet, but work is well underway. Then it's back to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where we somehow end up with Dr. Miles Dyson in Star Trek and another entry in the franchise's long and distinguished tradition of terrible admirals: the "Badmiral." Ben also has a new game recommendation: Agent 64: Spies Never Die. It's essentially a love letter to the Nintendo 64 era of first-person shooters—especially GoldenEye—but with modernized controls that don't require you to remember how we somehow survived playing FPS games with an N64 controller. Future or Now Steven brings us Brain Matters, and this week we're questioning something fairly fundamental: who—or what—is actually making your decisions? A neuroscience story highlighted by ScienceDaily challenges the familiar idea that somewhere inside the brain there is a central decision-making system responsible for choosing what we do. Instead, what we experience as a conscious "decision" may emerge from the constantly changing interaction between perception, movement, the body, and the environment around us. If that model is right, there may not be a little command center inside your head examining the available options and issuing orders. Decision-making could be something far more distributed—a process that happens as the brain, body, and world continuously respond to one another. Which, naturally, sends Science Faction directly into the comfortable and completely uncomplicated territory of consciousness, agency, and free will. Ben follows that discussion from a very different direction with Douglas Harding's "The Headless Way." You can watch Harding's 1991 Melbourne talk here. Harding's experiments ask people to reconsider their ordinary sense of being a person located somewhere "inside" their head, using surprisingly simple exercises—such as literally pointing back toward where you imagine your own face to be. For anyone wanting to try it rather than just hear us talk about it, The Headless Way has the pointing experiment available here. The Harding talk recently generated some controversy in Ben's sangha, giving him a reason to dig further into the idea and prepare a presentation about it. That also means experimenting with AI tools during the production process, including using Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, while preparing and editing the accompanying video. So this week we somehow travel from neuroscience questioning where decisions come from to a philosophical exercise questioning whether you have a head. And Devon? Devon swears he was going to find something for Future or Now. He did not.

  4. Sep 9

    Stop Not Reading Books

    Devon made the wise decision not to join us this week, which leaves Ben and Steven unsupervised to talk about Star Trek, Star Wars, Linux, AI, and what exactly we should expect from the "free" software we use. Real Life Ben kicks things off with more Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, including a new episode that he loved…and the rest of his family absolutely did not. Apparently soap-opera Star Trek is officially a thing now, and that sends us down the inevitable rabbit hole of Trek lore, timelines, and the increasingly complicated ways all the different series connect to one another. There's also some good news from the world of science fiction: John Scalzi won the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Series for Old Man's War. Scalzi celebrated the win over on his blog, where he seems appropriately delighted to bring home yet another little rocket. Read John Scalzi's "Suddenly: Hugo!" post Steven, meanwhile, has been watching the numbers on last week's episode, which has climbed to 124 views on YouTube. That leads directly into a question we probably shouldn't be asking on this particular podcast: Should AI be writing our episode titles? If it comes up with better titles than we do, is that good? Bad? Embarrassing? All three? The Science Faction Podcast on YouTube Steven also has about ten hours in Star Wars: Zero Company, and so far, it's excellent. For X-COM fans in particular, there's a lot to like here. Set during the Clone Wars, the game digs into corners of the Star Wars universe without feeling like it's simply throwing familiar things onto the screen for the sake of recognition. It understands the setting, uses it well, and so far feels like a great fit for the tactical strategy formula. Star Wars: Zero Company on Steam Future or Now Then Ben asks the question that sends us straight into the Linux lake: What is Omarchy, who is it actually for, and why did Steven decide to jump in? Omarchy That turns into a much broader conversation about Linux, open-source software, Twitter/X, vibecoded slop, and the appeal of actually taking control of the computer sitting on your desk. Modern computers are extraordinarily capable machines, but most of us interact with them through a relatively narrow collection of applications and interfaces. What happens when you start digging underneath all of that and customizing the machine around the way you want to use it? There's an important distinction, though, between being willing to experiment with something yourself and recommending that someone else do the same thing. Steven can mess around with Linux because he has another computer available if everything goes sideways. Having spare hardware, free time, and enough technical experience to troubleshoot problems is a privilege that changes the equation considerably. And that brings us to an even bigger question: Who should we actually support when it comes to "free" software? Free and open-source software doesn't magically appear. Somebody is writing it, maintaining it, fixing bugs, answering questions, hosting infrastructure, and dealing with the endless parade of people asking why Feature X doesn't work exactly the way they want. If software gives us more control over our computers and reduces our dependence on giant technology companies, maybe "free" shouldn't automatically mean "something we should never have to pay for." This week, we're wandering through several different flavors of nerd territory: Star Trek continuity, Star Wars tactics, AI creativity, Linux experimentation, and the people quietly building the software that lets the rest of us tinker with our computers. Just another perfectly normal episode of Science Faction.

  5. Sep 2

    Episode 624: Parenting Is Mostly Marketing

    This week on Science Faction, we've got sick hosts, recovering rats, California fires, extremely low-tuned guitars, and more Star Trek than you can shake a tricorder at. Devon also somehow turns movie night into legal analysis before discovering that his children have absolutely no interest in Harry Potter—forcing him to take matters into his own hands. Real Life Devon kicks things off with the DigiTech Drop pedal, a piece of guitar gear that lets you digitally drop your tuning without having to completely retune or swap guitars. That leads us down the increasingly low-pitched rabbit hole of modern metalcore bands, how they're tuning their guitars, and just how low a guitar can go before it stops being a guitar and becomes heavy machinery. Steven, meanwhile, has been dealing with the sickness that wouldn't leave. Sometimes you get sick, recover, and move on with your life. Other times your immune system apparently signs up for a limited series. Ben has an update on the rat tumor saga following surgery, complete with tiny socks, medication, and all the complications that come with providing postoperative care to an animal that has absolutely no idea why you're doing any of this. And because apparently we needed another reminder that we live in California: the state is on fire again. Ben talks about keeping tabs on everything with Watch Duty, which provides real-time wildfire maps, alerts, evacuation information, fire perimeters, and other emergency information. Movies, Lawyers, and Questionable Taste Devon has also been watching movies, starting with Bugonia on Netflix. The sci-fi black comedy from director Yorgos Lanthimos stars Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons and involves two conspiracy-obsessed men who become convinced that a powerful CEO is actually an alien. Then there's Coyote vs. Acme. Devon enjoyed it, but being a lawyer means he naturally has some thoughts about what happens when you apply even the slightest amount of legal scrutiny to a movie about Wile E. Coyote. He also watched Anatomy of a Fall, a French courtroom drama with a distinctly 1970s feel. It's serious, methodical, and very much outside our normal science-fiction wheelhouse. So why is Devon talking about it? We're wondering the same thing. Strange New Worlds and Old-School Trek Ben brings us back where we belong with the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Off-Hour", including the return of Phil Boyce, a character whose roots stretch all the way back to the original Star Trek pilot era. That naturally sends us into Trek history, potential future casting for McCoy and Sulu, and a discussion of Brian Markinson. From there, we get into the famous professional competition between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as Star Trek became a phenomenon. It's exactly the kind of conversation where one episode of modern Trek somehow requires discussing television made roughly 60 years ago. Lanterns and Dungeon Crawler Carl Steven is three episodes into Lanterns, and the verdict remains the same: this show is really good. The series continues to work as an adult police procedural that happens to exist inside a comic-book universe rather than simply being another conventional superhero show. He's also gone back into the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl with the release of the Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG PDFs. Steven is relistening to the first audiobook while digging into the game, and so far the designers seem to have nailed the ridiculous, violent, funny tone that makes the books work. Larry Johnson and the Sorcerer's Stone Finally, Devon decided it was time to introduce his kids to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. They refused. Rather than accept defeat, Devon did what any reasonable parent would do: he started reading them Larry Johnson and the Sorcerer's Stone instead. Apparently, changing the name was enough. So far, they love it. Parenting is mostly marketing.

  6. Aug 26

    A Loose Set of Values

    This week, the Science Faction crew has rats, road trips, gaming marathons, and some surprisingly good superhero television before asking an important question: what happens when your dog gets its own digital assistant? We also look at a new weapon in the fight against AI scraping and tease what Steven has coming next week. Real Life Ben has some unfortunate pet news this week: tumors have appeared on one of the family rats. Meanwhile, the "fat" rat has been put on a diet, so apparently even the rodents are dealing with health and wellness goals. On the entertainment side, Ben wonders whether Star Trek: Strange New Worlds may finally be getting a little too strange. Joe Lo Truglio, best known as Charles Boyle on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, enters the conversation and gives us plenty to talk about. Devon has returned from Boston — but not the band. While there, he took one of the city's famous duck tours aboard an amphibious vehicle and ventured out on a ghost tour populated mostly by people in character. Somewhere along the way, we also discover that Devon may be skeptical about cemeteries. Thankfully, he has no tumor news to report. Steven, meanwhile, had an epic gaming weekend. That included Marvel Zombies, a game of Dungeon Crawl Classics, and a trip into the weird west with We Deal in Lead. He also checked out Lanterns and came away impressed. It's a genuinely good police procedural made for adults that also happens to exist in a comic-book universe. Future or Now Ben starts us off with a question inspired by something he saw on a morning walk: What if your digital assistant lived on your dog's collar? Imagine a near-future version of Dug from Up. We're probably not about to translate canine brain waves into speech, but a smart collar equipped with local AI, sensors, and a memory of your dog's life could do quite a bit. The collar could remember veterinary instructions and medication schedules, giving owners an easy way to keep track of their pet's care. That could be especially useful for elderly pet owners or anyone managing a complicated treatment schedule. It could also provide context when something goes wrong. If your dog eats something it shouldn't, sensors and location data might help determine where it happened and what the animal encountered. Instead of answering the vet's questions with a shrug, you'd potentially have an actual record. Then there's passive health monitoring. Think of it as an Apple Watch for dogs: heart rate, temperature, activity, blood oxygen, sleep, and other measurements tracked continuously. Rather than waiting for obvious symptoms, changes from an individual animal's normal baseline could provide an early warning that something isn't right. But putting an always-listening, always-sensing computer around your dog's neck creates an obvious problem: privacy. The device potentially knows where you go, when you're home, what your routines look like, and even what your house sounds like. Who owns that information? Where is it stored? Who can access it? A completely local system trained only around the pet could mitigate some of those concerns, but the temptation to turn that information into another giant pool of commercially valuable data would be enormous. That's the tension at the heart of the idea. The same technology could have tremendous benefits for animal health and welfare while simultaneously creating another surveillance system following us through our daily lives. We've already seen how technologies like automated license-plate readers can expand far beyond their original use cases. Ben would very much prefer that his helpful talking dog collar not eventually become the Canine Gestapo. Devon brings us another front in the ongoing battle over AI and the internet: "Devious New Font Turns AI Scrapers Into Mincemeat." Researchers have developed a font designed to remain readable to humans while confusing automated systems scraping text for AI. The idea opens up a much larger discussion about the future of AI training, ownership of online material, and whether technical tools can give creators more control over how their work is collected and used. If AI is going to remain part of our lives, finding ways to build systems around ethically sourced data may become increasingly important. Steven doesn't have a Future or Now story this week—but that's because he's saving something for next time. Consider this your tease for next week's episode.

  7. Aug 19

    A Third of a Good LEGO Set

    This week on Science Faction, we're confronting the inevitable decline of both man and machine. Steven's 3D printer is showing its age, patches are becoming increasingly relatable, and Ben has some thoughts about games that aren't quite what they first appear to be. We also dig into new Star Wars and Marvel trailers, a pair of Stephen King-adjacent movie reviews, strange new twists on Minesweeper, and several games that seem scientifically engineered to appeal directly to us. Real Life Ben starts things off by investigating a pressing technological crisis: what exactly is happening with Steven's 3D printer? The diagnosis seems to be that it's simply old and tired—which, frankly, is becoming a recurring theme around here. That leads us into FDM versus resin printers, the surprisingly low cost of getting into 3D printing these days, and the realization that you can apparently buy a new printer for about a third of the price of a really good LEGO set. Meanwhile, Steven is ordering patches again, including one featuring a skull giving a thumbs-up alongside the phrase "Everything Hurts." At some point, novelty merchandise stops being ironic and simply becomes an accurate description of middle age. Ben also reviews Tunic, a charming, Zelda-esque adventure game starring a tiny fox. But appearances can be deceiving, and Tunic turns out to have considerably more going on beneath the surface than its cute presentation initially suggests. Devon takes us outside our usual science-fiction territory with Green Book, starring Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali. It's definitely not sci-fi, but sometimes a good movie is just a good movie. Check out Green Book on IMDb. Steven then turns his attention back toward the nerdier corners of entertainment with reactions to two big trailers. First up is the Ahsoka Season 2 trailer and what it suggests about the next chapter of the Star Wars series. Then we jump over to Marvel for the VisionQuest trailer and see what's in store for Vision. Future or Now Devon is preparing for his annual trip to Boston to watch the Giants, but there's still time for movies. He reviews The Life of Chuck, based on the Stephen King story and featuring a decidedly different flavor of King adaptation. You can find The Life of Chuck on IMDb. He also reviews The Drama, because apparently one movie review wasn't enough this week. Here's The Drama on IMDb. Ben brings us back to games with Quantum Sweeper, a free iOS variation on Minesweeper that takes the familiar formula in a new direction. Learn more about Quantum Sweeper. Unfortunately, Dragonsweeper has stopped working properly in iOS Safari. That's a shame, because Ben still thinks it's absolutely worth your time if you have another way to play it. You can find Dragonsweeper on itch.io. Finally, Steven has discovered what may be an entire genre of game designed specifically to generate Ben Energy. There's RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike on Steam, which combines the hypnotic appeal of a coin-pusher machine with roguelike mechanics. Then there's the wonderfully named How Many Dudes? on Steam, which asks one of the most important questions in modern gaming: just how many dudes are there? And rounding things out is Dogpile on Steam, completing a trio of games that Steven suspects Ben was genetically engineered to enjoy. From dying 3D printers and increasingly appropriate patches to deceptively deep indie games, new trailers, movies, and a suspicious number of dudes, we've got another episode full of the stuff we've been watching, playing, and obsessing over.

  8. Aug 12

    A Block of Wood

    This week, we bounce from questionable kindergarten teaching techniques and a tour through old movies to a pile of upcoming sci-fi and superhero projects. Then, in Future or Now, AI gives hurricane forecasters a potentially huge advantage, NASA pulls off another bit of engineering wizardry to keep Voyager 2 alive, and the cast of The Pitt boldly goes where plenty of actors have gone before. Real Life Steven is officially over summer. Heat, summer schedules, summer in general—it's time to move on. Meanwhile, Ben has been watching OLD MOVIES, including Kindergarten Cop. Ben calls it an "exceptional film," but watching Arnold Schwarzenegger take control of a classroom in 2026 raises some questions. How would Detective John Kimble's teaching methods stack up against modern school employee safety training? How many policies would he violate before lunch? And perhaps most unsettling: just how old are all those kindergarteners today? That sends us down the inevitable road of examining an old movie through the lens of people who now have entirely too much experience with how schools actually operate. Steven also has a pile of upcoming genre television and movie news to talk about. Neuromancer is headed to Apple TV, while Blade Runner 2099 is coming as a limited series on Prime Video. San Diego Comic-Con also brought news about Ghost Rider and Black Panther 3, along with more X-Men casting news involving Cyclops, Emma Frost, Beast, and Professor X. Trailer Links: Neuromancer: Watch on YouTube Blade Runner 2099: Watch on YouTube Devon has been doing some family movie watching, working through the Jumanji movies and eventually arriving at Zathura. Technically part of the larger Jumanji family, Zathura doesn't quite live up to its predecessor. It doesn't help that Dax Shepard's character has to exist in the shadow of Robin Williams, which leads to the assessment that Shepard comes across as "a block of wood" by comparison. Things get considerably darker with The Long Walk, based on Stephen King's novel originally published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. Devon found the adaptation interesting and well done—but extremely bleak. That conversation somehow takes a detour through Time Runner before eventually landing on Hokum and its supernatural layer. Future or Now AI Gets Better at Predicting Hurricanes Ben brings us a potentially enormous development in weather forecasting. Google DeepMind's WeatherNext AI system has demonstrated an ability to improve hurricane forecasts, potentially giving forecasters and emergency planners an additional day of warning. The system predicts both storm tracks and intensity and can rapidly generate thousands of possible scenarios. During Hurricane Melissa, it reportedly identified major intensification earlier than conventional forecasting models. That's potentially life-saving extra time for communities preparing for a major storm. But there's an interesting wrinkle: like many sophisticated AI systems, exactly how the model reaches some of its conclusions isn't always clear to the scientists using it. That makes WeatherNext another fascinating example of AI producing useful results while simultaneously raising questions about how much we need to understand a system before we're comfortable relying on it. And despite the improvement in modeling, humans aren't leaving the process. Meteorologists still have to interpret the information, communicate uncertainty, and turn forecasts into useful warnings for the public. Read the Ars Technica report on DeepMind's hurricane forecasting breakthrough This Week in Space: Voyager's "Big Bang" Nearly half a century after leaving Earth, Voyager 2 is still going, and NASA engineers are once again finding creative ways to keep it alive. In an operation nicknamed the "Big Bang," engineers simultaneously shut down power-hungry hardware and transitioned to lower-power alternatives while carefully keeping the spacecraft warm enough to survive. Voyager's dwindling power supply has forced NASA to make increasingly difficult decisions about which systems can remain operational, making every additional bit of usable energy precious. It's another remarkable chapter in a mission launched in 1977 that is still returning scientific data from interstellar space. Read more about the Voyager 2 operation at ScienceDaily Explore NASA's Voyager mission And while we're talking about space, we check back in on New Asgard and ask the important question: is Devon still going to space? The Pitt Goes to Star Trek Finally, there's an unusual crossover coming for fans of The Pitt and Star Trek. Noah Wyle and members of The Pitt cast are participating in a Star Trek table read benefiting the Writers Guild Foundation. It's not a new Trek series and it's not some bizarre medical-drama crossover episode—but it is an opportunity to hear a completely different cast tackle Star Trek material while supporting the foundation's programs. Read more about The Pitt cast's Star Trek table read at TrekMovie   From aging action comedies to AI-powered hurricane forecasts and a spacecraft that refuses to die, this week is a reminder that the future has a funny way of colliding with the past. Join us next time for more science, sci-fi, and whatever unexpected detours we stumble into along the way.

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About

A science and science fiction based podcast hosted by two high school friends, and two college friends. Listen and learn and geek out. In this podcast, science meets fact, meets fiction.

Information

  • Creator
    Devon Craft and Steven Domingues and Benjamin Daniel Lawless
  • Years Active
    2014 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Devon Craft and Steven Domingues and Benjamin Daniel Lawless
  • Show Website
    Science Faction Podcast