Episode 531: Colin Farrell’s In This?

Science Faction Podcast

This episode contains: Steven and Ben are handling post-election nerves and how to channel that energy productively. Ben’s been comforted by watching New York City newscasts from 1981, which you can find on YouTube. How refreshing it is to see a newscast that’s not supposed to be entertainment! Steven’s been focusing on family time and getting to know his nephew. Ben binged the first four episodes of WondLa. Check out the official trailer and see how it’s tracking on Rotten Tomatoes. Steven is picking up some serious I Am Mother vibes from that WondLa trailer. RIP Star Trek guest star (and Candyman himself) Tony Todd, a legend gone too soon. Remember Star Trek: Lower Decks? The 943rd episode just aired (Season 5, Episode 4)! It’s good! You should watch it! We chat about how the multiverses are going, specifically DC vs Marvel.

Future or Now

Are You Bready For This?: Steven presents a new study that discusses human’s taste for carby bread and reveals how the duplication of the salivary amylase gene (AMY1) may have occurred over 800,000 years ago, long before agriculture. Wait, bread makes you fat? This gene duplication helped shape human adaptation to starchy foods and led to the wide genetic variation in AMY1 copy number that exists today, influencing how effectively humans digest starch.

Read more about this study on Science Daily.

Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known: Do you miss the social media of yore? The posts and videos that showed our humanity without the editing and gloss? Ben remembers it, and so does Ben Thompson, who wrote a blog post about the prevalence of IMG_#### videos on YouTube. These are relics from between 2009 and 2012 when iPhone and iPod Touch included a “Send to YouTube” feature that allowed users to upload videos directly to YouTube from the Photos app. Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos, and if you search YouTube for “IMG_” and then four random digits, you’ll find some one-of-a-kind videos of random stranger’s lives.

Read more and have a warm digital hug on ben-mini.github.io.

Book Club

Since Devon’s not here, we’re skipping book club this week. Next week, we’ll be exploring Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd,” a haunting look at strange crowd behaviors in urban life. Watch an audiobook of this story on YouTube.

This week, we get into the trailers for some upcoming big Marvel and Star Wars stuff:

• Captain America: Brave New World

• Thunderbolts

• Star Wars: Skeleton Crew and a special shoutout to the music featured in the trailer: a Huttese cover of “Major Tom (Coming Home)”.

• Marvel Studios Disney+ D23 2024/25

Do you want to see YouTube more like a classic series of television stations? Check out YTCH.