News Archive

Skeptically Speaking has passed the 230 episode mark, and we want to make an announcement. We're changing our name. As of October 11th, we will be going by "Science for the People".

For those of you who are curious about the rebranding, read on!

Our Old Website

In the last almost five years, we've changed a lot. We started out on a little radio station called CJSR in Edmonton – a station we still get delightful fuzzy feelings about calling our home. We were a bit of a niche show, looking at issues from a fairly narrow perspective, and saw ourselves as serving the "skeptical community."

Back then, it was live, with a host, a guy operating the boards and a dude answering the phones. Our team changed a lot, and we became, well, pretty slick for an operation that ain't nobody get paid for.

With the changes in production came a parallel change in the content direction. Fairly early on, we started broadening ourselves. It became less about this "skepticism" thing, and more about science, how cool it is, and how it's still so relevant to people who can't tell a gluon from a quark. If we were going to have someone on the show that most people have never heard of before, well, they might as well have written a book called "Sex, Genes & Rock and Roll," or about how female bonobos say hello by rubbing clitorises, or someone who actually worked on Mars lander projects, or someone who asked the scientific question about why some people aren't straight.

A funny thing happened when we started doing this. The authors and the experts said "yes." They came on the show, and we let them talk about their work, beyond the soundbites they might be allowed, if they're lucky, in most other places. And while we're aware and thankful for all the science geeks who tuned in, we kept asking ourselves, "why should someone who doesn't know a thing about science care about this topic?" That became our philosophy.

Our New Website

We dropped our niche target audience long ago in the pursuit of offering a little slice of science to the kinds of people who throw on their local community radio station while they're driving to work, painting some protest signs, or just dancing naked in the shower. We're about getting the word of something we love to people who might not hear about it anywhere else, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'll love it a little too. We're about taking tough scientific concepts and teasing out what matters. We're about taking the latest in scientific progress and relate it to people like our friends and our families, and our communities, and our society. We're about getting fascinating guests on air, and giving them the time to talk that they don't get anywhere else. We're the child who asked their parents "why is that?" and didn't settle for the first answer. We want listeners to say, "...that's interesting." We're Science for the People, and we can't wait to move forward with you all as we seek to make ourselves that much more accessible and inclusive.

Thank you again for your continued support of our team of misfits who didn't accept "because" as an answer. Here's to another 230 episodes!