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Techathlon podcast: Future ketchup, fake materials, and digital spring cleaning

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Spring is a great opportunity to make the changes that you meant to implement as part of your New Year’s resolution before you totally gave up in mid-January. On this week’s episode of the Techathlon podcast, we can help with some of those improvements, including improving your nutrition with solidified condiments and cleaning up your digital life by scraping the digital crud out of your phone.



You can check out the latest episode in the player embedded above. You can also subscribe on iTunes, add us on Stitcher, follow on Anchor, or find us wherever quality podcasts live. You should also follow us on Twitter for trash talking purposes.



Here’s a look at what you’ll get with this week’s spoiler-free episode.



The Techathlon Decathlon


As always, we break down the week’s biggest tech news stories into 10 questions that pit our contestants against one another in a cutthroat technology trivia battle. This week’s topics include self-driving cars, the upcoming 5G mobile networks, and just how much screen time a baby should have.



Can anyone dethrone Rob from his winning streak?


Show & Tell: Slice of Sauce



We get a lot of weird stuff around the old Pop Sci offices, and this week we’re doing a vaguely tech-related taste test. Stan brought in a package of Slice of Sauce. The product started as a Kickstarter and it’s almost ready for wide release. It’s like ketchup meant for space.



Marketing Materials



Companies love to make up fake names for the stuff they put in their products. Unobtanium? Really? We have a selection of extravagantly named products and our panel will have to guess whether they’re real or totally made up.



Digital Shame Game



How many unread emails do you have jamming up your box? How many apps have you downloaded that you literally never use? Who the heck are most of the people in your contacts list? In honor of PopSci’s Digital Deep Clean, we expose some of the personal chaos living inside our phones in the hopes it will save you from the mess.



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Written By Stan Horaczek

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