Since its inception as a three-minute science splash on Lliana Bird’s Sunday show on XFM (now known as Radio X) Geek Chic’s Weird Science has gone from strength-to-strength. After 9 months of brevity we moved, in September 2014, to podcast format and promptly rocketed up the iTunes science podcast chart all the way to 4^th place by the 31^st October! I still can’t quite figure out how that actually happened. We were getting 20,000 downloads per month after just a couple of months. Weird. (Must be something Birdy did!) That said, we clearly owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who embraced us with such enthusiasm right from the outset. So ta! Gracias! Danke! Terima kasi! Grazie! Konnichiwa!

Now that we’ve crossed the 50-episode milestone we can safely say that we’ve had tens of thousands of downloads. Looking back at the strangest, most curious, thought-provoking, limits-of-mankind’s-knowledge-pushing science stories we’ve covered over the months is quite mind-boggling. Rainbow universes, panda’s feigning pregnancy, lab-grown human penises, discovering a new 9^th planet to replace Pluto, boozy chimps, underwater cities, quantum teleportation for instantaneous communication across interplanetary distances (one day), musical marmosets, a paralysed woman flying fighter planes with thought alone, the imminent mini-ice age, a 6^th mass extinction (this time it’s our fault), futuristic hover boards and a handful of dinosaurs thrown in for good measure – we’ve had it all.

No wonder Little Brown wanted to turn it into a book!

The illustrious Lliana Bird (@LlianaBird) and I (@drjacklewis) have just submitted the middle third of our wonderful tale of Geekery and Chicery to our publishers. Our book will take our readers on a carefully carved narrative that takes in the very best of all of the bizarre scientific endeavour and technological innovations we have encountered on our merry way through the last two years of science.

Best of all it will be illustrated by Dyna’s fantastically-talented, comedic, arty friends. [Dyna, by the way, is what I call Birdy in private – don’t ask].

So I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported the Geek Chic cause so far. Whether it’s subscribing to our podcast feed at iTunes, streaming us each week from Libsyn, Podbay etc or simply following us on Twitter (@GCweirdscience) to catch the interesting stories that didn’t quite make the cut for the show, plus supplementary information on each of the stories we do cover each week – THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

THANK YOU!

Without you, there would be no point in doing any of it. Okay so it would still be nice to know these things but if you hadn’t kindly taken the time to…

• Download it.
• Listen to it
• Let us keep you company whilst:
  • commuting
  • partaking of exercise
  • going to the shops
  • loafing around in bed, or
  • cooking
• Mulling the stories we tell you over in your head.
• Discussing them with your friends, family and colleagues
• And choosing the steadily growing family of regular weird science listeners.

…we would soon have found ourselves not bothering any more. If you stopped being interested in what we had to say we would simply have lost the impetus to keep it up. The research, the preparation, the recording, the editing, the re-listening, the final edit notes, the sound production and the releasing of this podcast, month after month, year after year, was for love not money. So if nobody was loving it, then there’d have been no point in doing it.

A handful of generous benefactors have kindly covered the podcast hosting costs (by contributing at Patreon; so at least we have been saved the indignity of losing money despite working unpaid on this for the past 2 years!). We are particularly grateful to them for opting to give something back to this enterprise.

As for the rest of you… it’s not too late! If you’ve enjoyed any of our podcast over the years then you can show us some love by picking up a copy of The Mice Who Sing For Sex when it’s release at the end of this year – just in time for Christmas. Hey, why not pick up two copies – one for yourself and another as a gift. That is the kindest way you could say thanks for all our hard work.

Last but not least Birdy and I would like to thank Richard Boffin for two years of impeccable support as our sound guru and also Kate McLoughney for being sweet enough to look after our @GCweirdscience Twitter feed.