What's next, Menopausal Barbie?

As a woman of a 'certain age', I am finding that as I scroll through social media I am being ambushed by sponsored posts promising to “banish hot flashes for good” and “restore youthful balance with one natural pill a day” or, more recently, “balance my cortisol”. It seems I'm not alone.

It is with great dismay that I report that the second season of the Telepathy Tapes podcast has been released, and it's weirder than ever. Topics covered across the 11 available episodes take pseudoscience to new heights, including mediumship, animal telepathy, near-death experiences, energy healing, and plant intelligence. My scan of the transcripts indicates that while the psychic abilities of Autistic children are still discussed, Autism has largely taken a back seat to a broader exploration of fringe science involving human consciousness. As Meghan Boilard for Asterisk Mag put it,

I've been a little slow to pick up on this one, but there's a company in the US, Reflect Orbital, that is offering services based on having mirrors in space. Given that the company's previous name was Tons of Mirrors, it would seem that their aim is likely to be to imitate Elon Musk's Starlink by launching thousands of mirrors into low-earth orbit, and pointing them back at earth. One article reports that the company plans to have 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, with the eventual aim of launching a quarter of a million satellites.