The Star Spot

The Star Spot


Latest Episodes

Episode 175: The Truth is Out There (at the University of Manitoba)
December 22, 2019

Feature Guest: Shelley Sweeney The University of Manitoba has just acquired the largest collection of UFO related material. Prominent Canadian ufologist Christ Rutkowski has made a donation of over 30,000 documents, photos, artifacts and government...

Episode 174: Fuzzy Dark Matter, with Lachlan Lancaster
November 24, 2019

Feature Guest: Lachlan Lancaster Quantum mechanics is strange. Until recently we could comfort ourselves with the belief that its odd properties were safely confined to the world of the microscopic. But what if quantum mechanical effects were suddenly...

Episode 173: Discovering an Ancient Oasis, with William Rapin
November 10, 2019

Feature Guest: William Rapin Welcome to Sutton Island, here in the middle of a beautiful and rugged landscape consisting of shallow lakes filled with salts and minerals. It’s a common vista on this world, and while the world in question is not our...

Episode 172: The Hubble Not-So Constant
September 15, 2019

Feature Guest: Sherry Suyu The Hubble constant, which measures the expansion rate of the cosmos, may not be a constant after all, and if that’s true it means we’re missing something big in our understanding of the universe. Today we’re joined...

Episode 171: Ploonets: When Moons Go Rogue, with Jorge Zuluaga
September 01, 2019

Feature Guest: Jorge Zuluaga Astronomers have yet to confirm a single detection of an exomoon, that is a moon orbiting a planet outside our solar system. Now it turns out at least part of the explanation is that we may have been looking in the wrong...

Episode 170: The Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts, with Vikram Ravi
August 18, 2019

Feature Guest: Vikram Ravi They come to us from deep space. They last a tiny fraction of a second. They contain as much energy as the sun’s total output in 80 years. Yet we still haven’t figured out what causes these so-called Fast Radio Bursts or...

Episode 169: Science at the Limits (Part 2)

August 04, 2019

Feature Guest: Dan Falk Scientists are finding themselves increasingly squeezed between academics sounding the limits of science and a public increasingly taken in by pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Today we conclude our review of science under...

Episode 168: Celebrating Apollo + Science at the Limits (Part 1)

July 21, 2019

Feature Guest: Dan Falk Today we’re joined here at The Star Spot by science writer Dan Falk. We’ll start today’s interview with a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landing of humans on the moon and the internationalism of that...

Episode 167: Current in Space + The Best of The Star Spot: Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt
July 07, 2019

Feature Guest: Brian Schmidt Today we offer a best of from our vault here at The Star Spot. We dug back to a fan favourite, our December 2014 interview with Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, who won the biggest prize in science for discovering the...

Episode 166: Nanodiamonds are Forever, with Jane Greaves
June 09, 2019

Feature Guest: Jane Greaves Remember that nursery rhyme, “Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky?” Well they were on to something, because it turns out diamonds - albeit nanodiamonds - are ubiquitous across the Milky Way galaxy....