Rachelle Saunders

Rachelle is the producer and one of the hosts of "Science for the People", a syndicated radio show and podcast that broadcasts weekly across North America. It explores the connections between science, pop culture, history, and politics. By day she slings code as a web developer and listens to an astonishing number of podcasts.
  • Feminism

    The Force Awakens, Mary Sue & Female Wish Fulfillment Tropes

    A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I used to write a lot of pop culture meta. Before I was a science nerd I was a different sort of nerd, one created in the smashing together of advanced English Literature classes and pop culture genre storytelling. Then I was invited to guest host a podcast and the…

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  • Science

    Fairies as Atoms & Speedaway Electric Boots: The Fantasy/Science Mashups of Victorian Britain

    We don’t think of science and fairy tales being particularly good bedfellows these days, but it was a popular trope in the Victorian era in Great Britain. In this week’s Science for the People episode, I spoke with Melanie Keene, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, about her book “Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of…

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  • Meta Stuff

    How Should We Pay for Science Journalism?

    A few months back I followed a Twitter conversation about paying for science journalism. It was sparked by these Tweets by Flying Trilobite and FriendsOfDarwin, commenting on the new paywall Slate put on their site for non-US visitors. Oh, @slate is going behind a paywall for non-US readers. #unsubscribed #thatWasEasy – http://t.co/aEcO66eD0Z — Friends of Darwin (@friendsofdarwin) July 21, 2015…

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  • Featured

    Getting Away With Murder (Because It’s Christmas)

    Every Christmas the Science for the People team digs into our back catalogue and plucks out one of our favourites to rebroadcast over the holiday. This year, we’ve pulled one of our favouritest favourites! The “Getting Away With Murder” panel discussion was recorded live at SkepchickCon 2014. As the title suggests, our panelists discussed the realities of forensic and crime…

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  • Featured

    Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities, Ethics, Control, and Jobs

    Whether you want to talk science fiction or the possibilities of our real-world future, artificial intelligence is a hot topic right now. People of all types are talking about it, are interested in reading about it, and have questions about what is possible, what might be possible, and how AI might impact us humans just trying to live our lives.…

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  • Featured

    On Setting The “Universal Sex Difference” Bar Way Too Low

    This post was co-written by Veronica Berglyd Olsen and Will Robertson. Studies about brains, gender, and sex always seem to make headlines somewhere. Recently, the Washington Post and many other news sources reported a new study that found brains don’t belong to either a distinct “male” or “female” category: instead, our brains are a big continuum or “mosaic” of features.…

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  • Science

    Are All Invasive Species Really So Bad?

    We humans sure do like to organize things into categories. One of those category partitions is “belongs” and “doesn’t belong”. More often than not, the things we point at and say belong are the familiar things, and the ones we like. Something that’s new or different, that comes from the other shore or the other side… we feel differently about…

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  • Featured

    Gifts & Reciprocity, AKA: No Strings Attached?

    In this week’s show we did our annual “best of this year’s science books” with the lovely John Dupuis of Confessions of a Science Librarian and Mary Brock, Skepchick’s book club queen. After we added to your reading list, we also created a top science-themed gift idea list, curated by the excellent Courtney Caldwell from Skepchick and Mad Art Lab,…

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