The newest edition of the SETI radio show "Are We Alone" is up, and in the segment called Skeptic Check astronomer Seth Shostak and I poke fun at the latest silliness about Betelgeuse and the Mayan doomsday. The rest of the show is, as usual, really good and fun to listen to (all about ESP — but you knew that already), so head over there and give it a download. But do it before December 21, 2012.

Or wait until afterwards. It’ll still be around, as will the Earth.

At SETIcon last week, I talked with Seth Shostak as part of our regular "Brains on Vacation/Skeptic Check" segment of the SETI podcast/radio show "Are We Alone". The topic this time was Conservapedia — a frothingly antiscience and antireality website — and how it has a grotesquely wrong entry on Einstein’s Relativity (as well as a laughable 29 "counterexamples" to relativity).

The podcast is available on the Are We Alone site, and here’s a direct link to the MP3.

I was interviewed by my friend, SETI- and astronomy enthusiast Lourdes Cahuich for the SETI.cl website. And, because the site is in Chile, it’s also en Español.

I talk a bit about how I got started in astronomy and outreach, why I love social networks, and why I’m so strongly anti-antivax.

Bonus: there’s an interview with an article about Frank Drake there too!

The podcast "Are We Alone" is a great weekly ‘cast from the SETI Institute, and this week’s episode has Seth Shostak and me discussing the nonsense about Iraq using bomb-detecting dowsing rods (here’s a direct download of the MP3). These magic wands do not work, and their use has allowed cars loaded with bombs through checkpoints in the Middle East. This is a direct example of how magical, antiscientific thinking can do real harm, resulting in dangerous situations and even deaths… hundreds of them.

The "Are We Alone" SETI podcast this week is a repeat from August, but in case you missed it the topic is 2012 and other Hollywood movies where science is abused, and I talk about the real ways the world might end. Listen before going to see the movie!

The SETI Institute’s latest episode of the podcast Are We Alone is now up, and I talk with Seth Shostak about the idea that somehow, forces unknown (God? The Universe Itself? The Doctor? Tony Newman and Doug Phillips?) have tried to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider… from the future!

Personally, I’m not buying it, but it’s an interesting idea. The authors of a published study say that we should perform some sort of experiment before turning the LHC on to see if someone from the future is trying to contact us. But I have a better idea: let’s turn the LHC on and see if it works. If it does, then we’re done with this idea. And if it doesn’t, hand me my sonic screwdriver. There’s work to do!

[Edited to add: Well, the folks at CERN have been injecting particles into the LHC stream since Friday. They'll be ramping it up to full speed in the coming weeks, so we'll know soon enough about all this!]