To celebrate the release of Star Trek Into Darkness, serial guest James Grime has taken on the arduous task of re-watching the original series to study the mathematics featured on the screen. He joins us for a podcast-only special to tell us all about it, with audio clips of the relevant episodes. We'll talk about cicadas, morphogenesis (or “waves on cows”), deceiving androids from first principles, and the biggest question of them all: does the redshirt always die?

If you want to check James’ working, he's published a series of posts over at The Aperiodical on the same themes: part I, part II, part III.

Please enjoy this photograph of Gödel, which we mention towards the end of the show. Please also enjoy further information on the remarkable Valais goat. The short skirt uniform worn by both men and women in early episodes of The Next Generation is called a skant, and it was occasionally worn with trousers.

JIM: Science and medics, those are the blue shirts.
HOST: Where do mathematicians go? Scientists?
JIM: That’s right, yes, science.
HOST: You’re safe?
JIM: Yes, I am, I’m in the blue shirt category.
as quoted by Peter Rowlett in What colour shirt do mathematicians wear?

• Theme from Star Trek
• Nerf Herder – Mr. Spock
• Beach House – Zebra
• Leonard Nimoy – The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins
• William Shatner – Real

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Oliver Marsh studies science-media interactions at the department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, occasionally performs at Bright Club, and blogs about “the human side of science”. He joins Andy in the studio for the final episode of season 6!

• KT Tunstall – Funnyman
• David Bowie – Life on Mars
• Ethel Merman – There's No Business Like Show Business
• The Smiths – That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore
• Mother Mother – Infinitesimal

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Andy is joined by Sam Gregson—who works on a “very big thing in Geneva”—to discuss public perceptions of scientists, as revealed through fiction and the media.

CP violations; sinusoidal need & perception; hypocritical stand-up sets; aliens; Stargate SG-1; destroying the magic; Spock; Brians with Ph.D.s; and more.

• Santa Dash 2012

• Red Hot Chili Peppers – Love Rollercoaster
• Right Said Fred – I'm Too Sexy
• Carly Simon – You're So Vain
• The Flying Lizards – Money (That's What I Want)
• Pilot – Magic
• D:Ream – Things Can Only Get Better

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James Grime, “resident tamed mathematician” of The Enigma Project and past guest, returns to the show to discuss the cliché of depicting scientists as tormented by their own vast intellects.

Can 2 + 2 = 5?; Good Will Hunting; George Dantzig; Walter Pitt; William Sidris; Srinivasa Ramanujan; 21; card counting; savants; Fermat's last theorem; Gauss.

Some links from the end of the show:

• the first episode of Sci Cam.
• The Science of Fiction podcast, though if you're reading this you may already have noticed.

• Radiohead – 2 + 2 = 5
• MGMT – Time to Pretend
• The Notwist – This Room

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We're joined by Helen Scales—marine biologist, broadcaster and author of Poseidon’s Steed—to discuss watery lairs, submariners, cephalopods and more, with a nautical soundtrack.

• Eyeball washed up on Florida beach 'probably from large swordfish'
• A World Without Coral Reefs
• The Rime of the Modern Mariner
• Moby Dick Big Read
• Mind Game
• The Life Acquatic
• Leafy seadragon

• Lisa Hannigan – Ocean and a Rock
• Villagers – The Waves
• Kings of Convenience – Cayman Islands
• Sigur Rós – Starálfur
• The Beatles – Octopus’s Garden

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Nick Crumpton—zoologist, co-editor of BlueSci Films, freelance journalist, occasional beard-haver and ukulelist—joins the show to talk primarily about long-dead mammals.

• Half-life of DNA
• 100-Million-Year-Old Spider Attack Found in Amber
• High morphological variation of vestibular system accompanies slow and infrequent locomotion in three-toed sloths
• Ice Age's Scrat Discovered
• Bathtime for Baby Sloths
• The Mammoth Trilogy
• Innerspace
• I Shrink, Therefore I Am
• The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

• John Williams – Theme from Jurassic Park
• David Byrne & St. Vincent – Ice Age
• PVT – In The Blood
• Here We Go Magic – Collector

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Your intrepid hosts have spent their summers in two unfamiliar cities apiece. To kick off the new season, we'll be discussing fiction which deals with the unique characters of different cities and societies. Expect plenty of free marketing for China Miéville. (Also, Andy has been working on a new survival technique in case of the breakdown of society…)

• Neverwhere
• London Underground mosquito
• Divergent American Sign Language
• (Just like of Montreal are not from Montréal, Architecture in Helsinki are not from Helsinki, as this Venn diagram about Scandinavia illustrates.)
• Maple syrup heist
• Andy recommends Tactical Nuclear Penguin
• A review of Penrose’s Cycles of Time.
• Angry Minnesotans Take 3D Printer Away From Gunmaker
• Tesla museum campaign
• Garuda (Will and two past Science of Fiction guest presenters’ band) on Facebook and SoundCloud

• The Clash – London Calling
• Kaki King – Montreal
• They Might Be Giants – Electric Car
• Buke and Gase – Naked Cities

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Leonard Richardson joins the show from across the Atlantic to talk about games as plot devices, generative content, storytelling, games which exploit the player, and dadaism. You may know Leonard as the creator of Robot Finds Kitten, the maintainer of Beautiful Soup and the author of Constellation Games, among his many other works.

• Candlemark & Gleam.
• The Constellation Games Semi-Official Home Page (A production of The Great Hall Of The People And Also Science).
• Holly's blog post with statistics garnered from her research.
• The incredible spreadsheet.
• Wikipedia on Lucky Wander Boy.
• The generative artworks of Adam Parrish.
• Spurious, for all your sonnet needs. Since the recording of this episode, Leonard fixed the bug mentioned, so the sonnets are true Queneau Assemblies.
• Dada Da Dada Da Dum, Leonard's all-new limerick Queneau assembler inspired by Andy's remark.
• Not mentioned on the show, but Dinosaur Comics fans should take a look at Dadasaurus Rex.
• Jonathan Whiting on Nethack on Games We Have Known And Loved.
• @MarkovGuybrush.
• Speaking of Twitter, @leonardr.
• We noticed after the recording that Amazon UK lists Constellation Games without any punitive shipping costs.

• Psapp – About Fun
• Adam Parrish’s Frotzophone
• Darren Korb – Twisted Streets (from the Bastion soundtrack)
• Alex Smoke – Anima

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Andy and Will discuss the ways people converse in fiction: some archaic, some fantastical.

• Causality-violating quantum entanglement
• How the world's travel guides describe America

• El Ten Eleven – Thinking Loudly
• The Notwist – Pick Up The Phone
• Lali Puna – Call 1-800-FEAR
• 65daysofstatic – Radio Protector

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Daisy Scholten joins Andy to talk about saintly medical techniques, the afterlife, and absolutely no Dan Brown.

Don't forget to get your ticket to see Prometheus on Monday 4th, preceded by an in-the-flesh edition of The Science of Fiction about the science of Alien! (Why not join the Facebook event?)

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How might the world end? This week, The Science of Fiction investigates the myriad of scenarios for the downfall of humanity. Plus, we introduce a revolutionary new unit of apocalyptic severity…

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With Andy having fled the country, Will is joined by Trevor Wood to talk about Nash equilibria, reputation-based currency, and the 16th-century tulip bubble. (They will try to avoid discussing Diplomacy too much.)

You may remember Trevor from his Season 2 appearance on mathematics and mathematicians.

• von Neumann
• John Nash
• Tulip mania
• @dcurtis on SpaceX and Instagram
• 2010 Flash Crash (do not confuse)
• Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom
• How Bitcoin works
• beenz
• Swatch .beats
• golden balls. the weirdest split or steal ever!
• Buy tickets for our screening of Prometheus at the Arts Picturehouse. Come heckle us in the flesh!

• The Hives – Supply and Demand
• Battles – Wall Street
• I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles
• Johnny Cash – Folsom Prison Blues
• R.E.M. – It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

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Picking up where What if… we could all become cyborgs?, a show Andy produced for the BBC World Service, and last week's episode both left off, Andy and Will discuss cyborgs, hive minds, extending the senses, and the alleged emasculating effects of smartphones.

Bionic eyes; artificial synæsthesia; lab rats with brain implants sense invisible infrared light; powering an artificial heart; Google Glass; Sergey Brin: Smartphones are ‘emasculating’; Steve Mann (Will mentioned the hit-and-run anecdote in this article but didn't realise it was the same man who was assaulted in McDonald's); the many strands of Ghost in the Shell; brain hacking; typing with twenty fingers; Nigel Shadbolt and AIs for the elderly; the Borg; the Ood; Intercontinental mind-meld unites two rats; Rats ARE like the Borg; faint memories of a Dark Angel plotline; Lab-grown human brains could control robots, says Kevin Warwick; aaaaaaand rat kings.

• The Six Million Dollar Man theme
• Faded Paper Figures – Information Runs On
• Scott Matthew – Lithium Flower (from the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex soundtrack)
• Pet Shop Boys – Always On My Mind
• Kraftwerk – The Robots

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The worst offenders might be shampoo adverts, but egregious pseudo-science is not exactly rare in fiction. Joined by The Science Of Fiction regular Djuke Veldhuis, we take a look at what gets scribbled in beside the bits in the script marked “technobabble”.

• BBC News: Tackling the trade in human flesh pills
• io9: Remember when we thought we’d get all our nutrition from pills and bars?
• Wired: Physicist uses maths to avoid traffic penalty
• That Mitchell and Webb Look on brushing tongues

• Death Cab for Cutie – Crooked Teeth
• Placebo – Every You Every Me
• Clint Mansell – Leaving Earth

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Minimizing the edit distance from last week's show, Chris Smowton joins us to talk about androids, AI, the uncanny valley, and tiny fire extinguishing robots.

• Cory Doctorow's I, Robot
• Cory Doctorow: A Prose By Any Other Name
• Dr Kathleen Richardson
• New York Times article quoting Dr Richardson
• Big Dog
• Zima Blue and Other Stories

• Stars – Sad Robot
• Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Pt. 1
• Kael Alden (Robot Repair) – Where You Belong

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We take a look at reboots, remakes, re-imaginings, and other almost-synonymous new versions of old works. Are they made to take advantage of new technology; to update the plots for modern audiences; or maybe for no valid reason at all?

Needless to say, none of the music featured on this episode was as it was originally recorded:

• Mark Ronson – Just
• Karen O, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – Immigrant Song
• The Dears – What I'm Trying To Say Pt. 1
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience – All Along The Watchtower
• Alarm Will Sound – 4

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Kat Arney—songstress, Naked Scientist, knitter—joins Andy and Will to chat about colliders, steampunk, lab-based literature, quacks and the ’Verse.

• 230% efficient LEDs
• The Diamond Age
• Radium infuser for drinking water
• Ford Nucleon
• Experimental Heart and The Honest Look by Jennifer Rohn
• Charlatan: The Fraudulent Life of John Brinkley by Pope Brock

• Talk In Colour – Nightshifts (free download!)
• Sunday Driver – Concubine Waltz
• The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing – Charlie
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog – My Freeze Ray
• Tim Minchin – If You Open Your Mind Too Much Your Brain Will Fall Out (Take My Wife)

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Fasten your tin-foil hats securely, as Andy and Will delve into the murky world of conspiracy theories. Assassination plots, Martian civilizations, mysterious ionosphere research—and how The Establishment will wipe your memory when you've finished listening.

• PROOF THAT THE CYDONIA FACE ON MARS IS ARTIFICIAL vs. NASA's takedown;
• HAARP;
• Starfish Prime;
• Strange Sounds in the Sky;
• Flight of the Navigator;
• The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever;
• Obama's birth video;
• Reptilian Kitten Eaters;
• A Study in Emerald (pdf);
• This American Life 453: Nemeses.

• 65daysofstatic – The Conspiracy of Seeds
• Muse - Knights of Cydonia
• Frou Frou - Shh
• The Lion King – The Circle of Life
• Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven (backwards)
• Jonathan Coulton – Nemeses (feat. John Roderick)

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Andy and Will take a (pseudo-)random walk around the scientific and/or fictional topics suggested by their music collections, from interdimensional transport using gravity pulses to musical trees via whistling at nuclear missiles.

• TIGJAM UK 6 inspired the theme.
• Consellation Games by Leonard Richardson, featuring two free chapters.

Thomas Truax plays the Hornicator. It is Psapp who built and played the Bone-a-phone.

• Thomas Truax – Inside The Internet
• Muse – Supermassive Black Hole
• Brad Fiedel – Terminator 2 main title
• Placebo – Slave to the Wage
• Hella – 1-800-GHOST-DANCE
• Garbage – Special

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Djuke, guest star of last season's episode about stress, returns to the show to discuss hybrids, aliens and mutants across fiction and fact (and 16th century Scottish superstition, naturally).

• Helen Arney – Animals (feat. Professor Elemental)
• Jonathan Coulton – Skullcrusher Mountain
• The National – Looking for Astronauts
• Talkdemonic – Mountain Cats
• Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs – Garden

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Andy and Will correct their past selves’ on-air blunders, and take a look at shakey science in fiction and fact.

• Blood Red Shoes – I Wish I Was Someone Better
• Noah and the Whale – Tonight's The Kind Of Night
• Errors – Supertribe
• Efterklang – Step Aside
• Psapp – Needle and Thread
• Nine Inch Nails – III Ghosts 4

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Bond, Neil Stephenson, Turing, and a real live Enigma machine in the studio!

Here are some photos: Andy, James, the Enigma machine, its instructions, and a video of James demonstrating the machine during the episode.

James Grime is the “resident tamed mathematician” of The Enigma Project.

• Tunng – Code Breaker
• Massive Attack – Babel
• Matt Monroe – From Russia With Love
• Silversun Pickups – There’s No Secrets This Year

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Good Will Hunting, the bat sonar digital switchover, The Hunt for Red October, The Oxford Murders, A Beautiful Mind, Pi, Kevin Bacon, curing the world of Facebook, dinosaurs.

Your archivist believes that one host was struggling to remember the details of the Ramanujan-Hardy number on this episode.

• Darwin Deez – Radar Detector
• Battles – Ice Cream
• Broken Social Scene – Love and Mathematics
• De La Soul – Me, Myself and I
• Jurassic Park themes

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Cam Robinson hosts GameSpot's The What If Machine, where he explores how close the wonder of modern science fact can bring us to gaming science fiction. He joins us to discuss cybernetics, autonomous robots, nanotechnology, and more, with his choice of excellent tunes.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, implants, augmented reality, Call of Duty, Noel Sharkey on The Life Scientific, ethical risks of robotics, Crysis 3, wipE'out", levitation, Punch the Custard (Will misremembered how the hit detection works), space travel, and Cam’s recommendation of the one recent game non-gamers should play.

• Radiohead – Paranoid Android
• Nine Inch Nails – Discipline
• AC/DC – TNT
• Sabrepulse – City at Speed
• Muse – Space Dementia

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A music-packed episode of some of our favourite music from and about fiction! From concept albums to point-and-click adventures, and Vikram Seth to Rez and Stalwart.

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Floods, custard shortages, beards, raccoons, Command & Conquer, environmental pressures, vulnerability theory and more.

Here’s an article about the Minecraft mod Rachel mentioned.

• They Might Be Giants – Flood
• Imogen Heap – Earth
• Maps and Atlases – Solid Ground
• Fever Ray – When I Grow Up
• Jon Boden – When The Walls Come Tumbling Down

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…assuming a spherical shark…

How the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force) crop up in TV shows, comics, films and more! Michael is the host of Burst the Bubble.

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Genetic engineering, stem cell research, and the impact of biotechnology on societies past, present and future, mundane and fantastical.

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Televisions in Papua New Guinea; Heinz ketchup varieties; Fight Club; Dell, Apple and freedom from choice.

Getting old; toddlers going caving; Star Wars fan-edits; Falling Down; responsible breakdowns; parachuting; American Beauty; living in a cave for a month; factory workers versus CEOs; sleep cycles; ageing, ulcers, chocolate and turkey.

Full Metal Jacket; the transitions between cushy modern life and the battlefield; the hippocampus; the boredom of military life; predictability and control; blood flow in fight or flight; spiders and leopards.

Over-grooming; a child in a road accident in China; over-litigious-ness; the bystander effect; social stress; first aid training.

• Pixies – Where Is My Mind
• Björk – Human Behaviour
• Silversun Pickups – Panic Switch
• Pink Floyd – Shine On You Crazy Diamond (part 1)

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Happy birthday Kim; robots; humans are inefficient batteries; squeaky burgers; the end of the world in the late 90s; Demolition Man, Escape From New York; knitting; Equilibrium; hug speakeasies.

Being engaged to Zooey Deschanel; The Matrix; The Truman Show; surveillance vs. voyeurism; “other markers are available”; Neuromancer; Ghost in the Shell; cyborg rats.

Theremins; 1984 vs. We (and Brave New World); book roulette; reading poets; James Randi; Escape From New York’s special effects; glow-in-the-dark cats; circumcision.

Superhero vigilantes with pepper spray; trick or treat; silent movies; Wall-E; Beneath A Steel Sky; GATTACA’s temporal ambiguity; The Forever War; Czech dog poo vigilante; The Culture; elitism.

• Fol Chen – In Ruins
• The Postal Service – This Place Is A Prison
• The Octopus Project – Music Is Happiness
• Faded Paper Figures – Metropolis

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Chaos, the weather, and why mathematicians can prove there isn't an answer to everything.

Niraj is a PhD student in nanophotonics, and wrote a children's book called Butterfly Flo and the Everything Effect—a story about a butterfly in the Australian bush who learns about chaos theory and how he can change the weather.

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Andy and Will chat about what they've been reading and watching over the summer.

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Final episode of the series with Dr Amy Milton on the subject of memory, and how to erase it.

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Dorée gives us a glimpse into the troubled minds of Victorian horror writers, and their pathological fears of, well, pathology.

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Spoken nerd and songstress Helen Arney lends her voice to the show. Video games, fossils, AIs, cat chat, and almost no ukuleles.

• Buckner & Garcia – Pac-Man Fever
• They Might Be Giants – I Am A Palaeontologist
• A.F. Harrold – Science Party Poem
• Tim Minchin – When I Grow Up (from Matilda)
• Jonathan Coulton – Good Morning Tucson
• Helen Arney – The Sun Has Got Its Huff On

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Prof. Andy Parker heads up the the work on the Large Hardion Collider in Cambridge. We ask him about his work in search of hidden dimensions, and (as always) check that he isn't about to create a black hole that will destroy the Earth.

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Andy Pontzen discusses the science of time travel, and judges the quality of depictions in fiction from on-air synopses! Expect DeLorean, Terminators and time-travelling phone boxes (be it Bill and Ted’s or the Doctor’s).

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“Science Punk” Frank Swain talks about real life zombies, and Thomas Wooley discusses his reseach into how we will fare in the event of a zombie attack. We all know the zombie apocalypse is coming, so listen in to make sure you're prepared!

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Andy and Will go head-to-head with their favourite fictional scientists.

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A show on computers and Computers Science in fiction, inevitably tripping over geek classics such as Tron and Hackers, and spaced by nerdcore and chiptune-y sounds.

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Andy and Michael discuss everything “Who”, asking questions like “How does a Dalek really work?” and investigating important issues including “will we all be Cybermen by the end on the century?” No previous knowledge of the Doctor's adventures needed!

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The very first show, featuring Ben Valsler, producer of the Naked Scientists.

Ben's Masters dissertation was titled “Depictions of science and technology in comics and graphic novels”; this episode looks over his comic collection and discusses the science and its depiction in them.

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Political ecologist Ivan Scales—McGrath Lecturer and Director of Studies in Geography at St Catharine's College, Cambridge—joins the show to discuss natural resource use and environmental change. Ivan is the McGrath Lecturer and Director of Studies in Geography at St Catharine's College.

• Villagers – Mercy, Mercy Me
• R.E.M. – It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
• Grandaddy – Broken Household Appliance National Forest
• Radiohead – Idioteque
• Joni Mitchell – Big Yellow Taxi
• Pixies – Monkey Gone To Heaven

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Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation joins Will by phone to discuss reversing the effects of ageing, the accurate or counterproductive ways life extension and immortality are presented in fiction, and public perception and acceptance of new medical technology.

Repairing the body vs. uploading human consciousness; Buying Time (aka The Long Habit of Living) by Joe Haldeman; whither implants; prosthetics and improving on baseline humans; the state of the art of rejuvenation research.

By around 2050, I'm fairly sure that the human-driven automobile will be a specialised race-track toy for gear-heads, much as horse-drawn carriages in the developed world are a quaint hobby or a deliberate affectation.

Charles Stross

• Death Cab for Cutie – What Sarah Said
• Barcelona – Obsoletion
• 65daysofstatic – When We Were Younger & Better
• Ume – Pendulum

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Andy and Will round off the year with a show on intoxicants: real or fantastical, legal or outlawed, poison or cure (or sometimes both…).

James Bond’s heart, curare, Charles Waterton’s donkey- and bellows-based hobbies, counteracting poisons with poisons, deadly beauty treatments, glass swans, penicillin, recycling a policeman's urine, K-Pax, alkaloids, opiates, the works of Jeff Noon, Hofmann, tripping babies, Equilibrium, mood stabilizers, and a surprisingly large number of emails!

The claim that Dolophine, a brand name for methadone, was chosen in honour of Hitler was sadly too good to be true.

This is a fantastically interesting show!

an anonymous listener

• Alice Cooper – Poison
• The National – All The Wine
• Skunk Anansie – She’s My Heroine
• Massive Attack – Rush Minute

Plus, if you were listening live:

• Nirvana – Lithium

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Alexandra Kamins, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and IOZ, brings us the messy reality behind the spread of disease, everyone's favourite apocalyptic scenario. Pestilence galore!

Zoonotic disease, pandemics/epidemics, fruit bats, Contagion, Outbreak, Ebola, badgers, the imposition of quarantine, (not) being a “helping-people doctor”, Good Omens and more.

• Metallica – Four Horsemen
• Toto – Africa
• Peter, Paul and Mary – Leaving on a Jet Plane
• They Might Be Giants - Doctor Worm

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Serial guest Michael Conterio joins the show to discuss the fiction and fact of technology enabled by quantum mechanics. Michael co-hosts Burst The Bubble—which airs just before The Science of Fiction—and is the ringleader of Sci Cam, a new magazine-style live video show with interviews, beginner's guides and news.

101 Housework Songs, wave-particle duality, A Quantum Murder, A Quantum of Solace, teleportation, lasers, Boeing YAL-1, semiconductors, Qubit Slip, and many other things.

• Katrina and the Waves – Walking on Sunshine
• Jonny Berliner – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
• Chris Cornell – You Know My Name
• The Firm – Star Trekkin’

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