SGUTranscripts - User contributions [en]

SGU Episode 1055

2026-03-06T21:09:13Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

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|episodeNum = 1055
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|caption = "NASA's cutting-edge command center: where innovation and space exploration come to life."
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|qowText = "Inductive reasoning is, of course, good guessing, not sound reasoning, but the finest results in science have been obtained in this way. Calling the guess a “working hypothesis,” its consequences are tested by experiment in every conceivable way."
|qowAuthor = — Joseph William Mellor
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, September 24th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening everyone.

'''S:''' How's everyone this fine Wednesday?

'''J:''' Pretty good.

'''C:''' Doing well.

'''S:''' So any of you watched the full press conference with RFK Jr., Trump, and Oz?

'''J:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Who could stomach the whole thing.

'''C:''' No, I couldn't do that. I did watch the, did you guys see the cut that they made where they said it to like Bill Nye the science guy, but it was like Don Trump the scientist guy. It's very funny. It's all the best quotes.

'''S:''' It was terrible. I mean, it was a straight up.

'''B:''' It was tragic.

'''E:''' Propaganda.

'''S:''' It was a fire hose of misinformation, propaganda, and all with a very specific purpose as well. Although, I honestly think Trump was sort of rambling off script and giving away the game. Like I could imagine like they had a meeting where they said, this is what we're going to say, and this is the overall strategy. And Trump didn't know what they were supposed to say at that conference versus what was the long term goal. So he sort of gives the game away. But anyway-

'''B:''' What do you mean? How?

'''C:''' Do you think when they prepped him that they told him how to pronounce acetaminophen and he just forgot?

'''S:''' I don't know. I don't think they thought they had to.

'''C:''' But remember, nothing bad can happen. It can only good happen.

'''S:''' It can only good happen. Yeah.

'''E:''' Well, these were all belong to us.

'''S:''' So here's the quickie version. We talked about it on the live stream. I wrote about it on Science Based Medicine and Neurologica. The announcement basically had two components. That they've discovered the cause of autism.

'''E:''' Wrong.

'''S:''' And it's Tylenol, acetaminophen, in pregnant mothers, which is wrong. Again, I talked already about why the evidence for that was preliminary and inconsistent. And then actually the best evidence is that no, there is no causal link between those two things. And pretty much every medical organization and specialty organization in the world has looked at the evidence and come to the same conclusion. But they're, of course, just cherry picking whatever the studies that they want to cherry pick. Again, the RFK promised he was going to find the cause of autism in six months. So boom, here it is, right? Even if he has to just make it up. The second one was a new treatment for autism, which is really a treatment for cerebral folate deficiency, which may have some manifestations of autism. And again, this is preliminary. It has not been proven yet. It requires more research and more evidence. But it looks like they just pressured the FDA into—which is he has his toady in there now—to just give approval for this drug, which is already on the market for other reasons. They're basically giving it a new indication for autism. So there you go. They found the cause of autism and they found a treatment for autism, both of which are complete bullshit. But the deeper game was given away by both RFK and what he said on script and what Trump said off script. You know, RFK basically made the case that—or tried to make the case that autism is primarily an environmental disease, right? It's not genetic. He said that the research showing it's genetic is all fraudulent and it's a conspiracy, and that he's going to direct the NIH now to look for environmental causes of autism, i.e. vaccines, right? But other shit as well. I'm sure whatever. So it'll be drugs and vaccines and toxins, you know? Right? So that's always going to be redirecting the NIH to waste their money on his pet project rather than having scientists and researchers following the evidence where it actually leads. And Trump, of course, goes off on vaccines. You know, how the MMR vaccine is bad, it's just bad, and you have to break it up into three different shots, which I think is the strategy here, right? Because we don't have a separate mumps or measles or rubella vaccine. We just have the MMR vaccine, the combined vaccine. So if you—and RFK's vaccine panel that he packed with his anti-vaxxers already has removed the approval for the—for the recommendation, rather, for the MMRV plus the varicella vaccine saying it's slightly higher risk of fever-associated seizures than the MMR alone.

'''C:''' So what's the endgame there? Is it like—

'''S:''' So the endgame is they're going to do the same thing to MMR. They're going to say, nope, we're going to delay it till after four years old, and you have to give the individual vaccines. But there are no individual vaccines. So if they try to get individual vaccines approved, then kicks in the gold standard science we talked about where you have to have a placebo-controlled trial, which you can't do on something that already has a working competitor, right? You can't do that.

'''C:''' Oh, see, I thought you were going to go Wakefield on this and be like, oh, they're just going to get their own people to make their own vaccines and make a ton of money off of it.

'''S:''' Well, I don't think that's the point. I think he just wants to get—

'''C:''' Interesting. Yeah, just get rid of it altogether. Just get rid of it altogether.

'''S:''' So this is all maneuvering to make it, again, not outright ban vaccines, but just maneuvering to remove them from the recommended schedule, to delay them until an older age, where insurance companies won't cover them, to prevent any new vaccines or variants from coming on the market because you can't do the science, and to direct research into only what he wants, which is only looking for environmental causes of things, because that's what he does.

'''E:''' And what happens to the mortality rate once this all takes effect?

'''S:''' It's all going to be a completely unmitigated disaster. This is a healthcare disaster for the American public. The only question is how much, how far along is he going to get in the time that he has. Also, like, what happens in 2026 when the next election happens? Is the public paying attention? Do they care? Are they full of misinformation? Are they idiots? I mean what combination of these things—as I've said for a very long time, human civilization will destroy itself because of stupidity. That is the most grave threat to humanity.

'''E:''' Carl Sagan said as much as well.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But I think the scary thing here is that for some, not all, but some of these childhood diseases, the manifestation, the public health crisis won't happen until after he's out of office.

'''E:''' Yeah, it'd take many years for it to come to its fruition.

'''S:''' Some of them will be overnight because the minute that people are unable or unwilling to vaccinate their children, children are going to start dying of disease. Like it's going to happen quickly with new births for some diseases, but for other diseases that don't really become an issue until kids are in daycare or in elementary school, there is going to be a delay.

'''E:''' Well, they're not going to—I mean, are they turning off the spigot tomorrow here? Or I mean, does this stuff take years to get to the point that they want to get it to?

'''C:''' Well, I think they're trying to turn off the spigot as quickly as possible, obviously, and kind of like effect change very fast. I guess one of the things that I think, I don't know, maybe we don't talk about enough or we do, but I'm so curious about is the fundamental motivation that's sort of behind the motivation that you often see with key players in anti-vax movements. We go back to Wakefield and we know that the fraud with Wakefield had a financial incentive, right? And there was a power incentive. Very often when we talk about RFK or we talk about his HHS kind of group—Steve, I know I sent you some articles today about—it's not going to be what we talk about later, but about like David and Mark Geyer or about William Parker, these individual anti-vaxxers who themselves were either practicing medicine without a license or committing fraud in their own ways, but had their own, quote, treatments that they were peddling, which were often really dangerous. One of them was using Lupron. It's a hormone blocker and it can basically chemically castrate young children. But so these like horrific experiments and really dark kind of approaches to offering an alternative to an afraid public. That's what scares me the most is when people are told this thing that is safe is actually not safe. It's the cause of all the things you should be afraid of. But here, don't worry. I have something you can do instead. It's the instead that makes me go, let's follow the money and let's figure out why these kind of unproven treatments are being peddled. Do we know what's up with the kind of new treatment that they're starting to tout?

'''S:''' Well, the only thing that came out about that was that Dr. Oz at one point had a stake in the company that sells that, which he then claimed he divested from, but that's never been confirmed. So we don't know. So I don't know if this is specifically about grifting and trying to make money off of alternatives, although that is what's fueling the alternative medicine industry, is selling supplements and stuff like that. RFK Jr. mainly makes his money by being a lawyer defending people suing for toxic exposures and things like that. That's how he makes it. He wants everything to be environmental and toxic, right, because that's how he makes his money.

'''C:''' But I think we need to do, we need to, I'm sure somebody has already done a detailed deep dive of everybody on that vaccine panel, of every single consultant that has been brought in where a legitimate scientist who has dedicated their lives to doing this kind of research was nixed and somebody else was brought in to give their opinion. Maybe it's just because they're towing the party line and they're anti-vax, but I have a feeling that part of the reason they're anti-vax is because there's some sort of incentive in it.

'''S:''' They're often, yeah, they're often intertwined.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I mean, it doesn't matter for the terrible arguments they're making and what the science actually says, but you're right, they are often intertwined.

'''C:''' And I think it matters for the public to better understand this, because if there's just straight up fear mongering, a lot of people go, well, why would they do that if there's not something, if it's not true? A lot of people say, why would this public official say that if it's not true? But if it's like, oh, this is why, it starts to make sense for people.

'''S:''' Yeah. I mean, obviously, we're going to have to keep an eye on this as it unfolds. But I'll just say this, too, that me and my colleagues at Science Based Medicine, especially David Gorski, who's been writing about this, but most all of us have at one point or another been predicting what RFK Jr. is going to do, and we've been pretty spot on. So it's not as if we don't have a good bead on where he's going with this. He is going to do everything he can to limit and minimize Americans' use of vaccines, short of outright banning them. And so far, he's way ahead of schedule. He's doing it faster, even, and just more draconian than we even thought. It's basically at the worst end of the spectrum.

'''E:''' Pedal to the metal.

'''S:''' He's doing the exact thing he promised he wouldn't do when he got approved in the Senate.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

'''S:''' All right.

{{anchor|wtw}}
== What's the Word? (08:34) ==
* Fossil Words

'''S:''' Cara, we're going to do a what's the word. And it's kind of related.

'''C:''' It is, yeah.

'''E:''' Is it grift?

'''C:''' It's not grift. I actually wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the word autism itself. I know we've done deep dives on the show in the past about what autism is, what autism isn't, some of the kind of misinformation in the pseudoscience that we're often hearing peddled about autism. But I was really curious, like, where does the word come from? Because I think most of us can sort of recognize the two components of the word, right? If we break it up into two, it ends in the suffix "-ism," just like many actions or like states of being are "-isms." But the prefix or the first portion of the word comes from the Greek for autos, right? Or auto meaning self. And so why is it selfism? Like, where does that come from? And one thing that I remember learning, sort of, it was somewhere in the recesses of my mind from when I was early on as a psychology student, but was refreshed for me today, is that the term was actually coined way back in 1912. So you know, over 100 years ago, by a Swiss psychiatrist by the name of Paul Bleuler. I'm very bad with like German pronunciation. I have it right here. Bleuler. Okay. Well, fine. Eugen Bleuler. So he actually coined the term autism, but he wasn't referring to what we now know to be autism back in 1912. What he was actually referring to was a symptom that he saw in many of the severe cases of schizophrenia that he was studying. So he also kind of created the concept of schizophrenia. He's the first to sort of look at that and determine it as a syndrome. He said autistic thinking has to do with, and this is back when psychoanalysis was king. And so a lot of psychiatrists thought that there were portions of your mind that would kind of do things in order to avoid facing the harshness of reality. And so he described autistic thinking, this self-ism, as spending time in one's inner life and not being readily accessible to observers. He actually characterized it by quote, infantile wishes to avoid unsatisfying realities and replace them with fantasies and hallucinations. But around the mid century, so the 1950s and 1960s, we saw a big change in the way that that word started to be used. So not only did we know more about schizophrenia at that point, we also saw something big happen in like the 60s, having to do with mental health. Do you guys know what that was? Something really big. A big change.

'''E:''' Oh, electric shock therapy?

'''C:''' No, that's when we closed all of the asylums, right? That's when we had the rise of psychiatric medication. We started to, yes, classify with a little bit more kind of science, but we also were closing the asylums. And so there was a real push for individuals to integrate into society and to be able to do that with appropriate therapies. At that point, that word autism started to shift and mean more what it refers to now, which is, yes, a diagnosis. Some people might say more of a syndrome, right, than an actual like, quote, disease or disorder. And really for a lot of people, I actually read a really lovely, it was on Reddit, somebody talking about how they really like the word autism. They really like going back to the roots because they, as somebody who is neurodivergent, they see it as having an extremely absorbing interior life and that that was something that really related for them. And so now we'll often see that shift and that happened again through a change in psychiatry and also epidemiologic measures that helped us kind of understand incidence rates of these different diagnoses to less have to do with excessive hallucinations or fantasy and more have to do with one's kind of tendency to draw inward or sort of deficits in social interaction or in communication. And so it's interesting that the word still holds and it still does define not all individuals with autism because as we know, many people with autism have very different manifestations of the diagnosis, but that kind of core root of self being kind of on one's own, being somewhat internal, having this like deep relationship with oneself does hold for many people who identify in that way. So it's a pretty interesting, I think, etymology that sort of like left and came back it sort of was a core symptom of schizophrenia back when a lot of psychiatric syndromes and disorders were all sort of mashed together and they weren't well understood. And then over time it was teased apart and better used to describe what we now would call autism as a diagnosis with communication deficits.

'''S:''' I think a lot of it, I know you said this, but just to emphasize, they actually thought it was the early stages of schizophrenia at one point.

'''C:''' Yeah. And back then schizophrenia was kind of everything, you know what I mean?

'''S:''' Yeah. Schizophrenia was like the catch-all. They didn't really know what that was either because, yeah, they were just focusing on the, they're just absorbed in their self.

'''C:''' You had psychotic disorders and you had neurotic disorders and that was pretty much it. Neurosis was things like anxiety, depression nerves, and then psychotic disorders was pretty much anything else, anything that seemed kind of bizarre or odd or just different. And then later that was kind of teased out and we started to have a better understanding of what psychosis actually was and autism emerged as a developmental disability, not as having anything whatsoever to do with schizophrenia, but the root came from that.

'''S:''' Right. Okay. Thanks, Cara.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== New NASA Mission Control (17:51) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-debuts-new-orion-mission-control-room-for-artemis-2-astronauts-journey-to-the-moon-photos
|article_title = NASA debuts new Orion mission control room for Artemis 2 astronaut flight around the moon (photos) | Space
|publication = www.space.com
}}

'''S:''' OK, Thanks, Cara. Jay, tell us about NASA's new Mission Control.

'''J:''' Well, there's a couple of things going on. The first one is very brief, but interesting. NASA has just recently opened the new Orion mission evaluation room and that's called the MER, say MER.

'''E:''' I love it.

'''J:''' This is inside the Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The room was activated on August 15th, 2025. If you know, like they turn the lights on, then you hear all like the that's how I see it. It's fun. Steve, you should try it sometime. This adds 24 engineering console stations. They're staffed around the clock during the 10-day mission, the Artemis II mission. These are meant to augment the standard white flight control room. I guess that's what they call the existing one and this is because they're going to have expert engineers from NASA, Lockheed Martin, ESA, and Airbus that are going to be constantly monitoring the spacecraft data, comparing performance against their expectations, and help troubleshoot unexpected issues that always pop up. It's important to note, like this is not overkill. This represents just how complicated Orion systems are and how many moving parts need simultaneous people looking at them to keep the crew safe and the mission on track, right? It's exactly what mission control is supposed to do. It's just like mission control on steroids. Artemis II is also going to be, as a quick reminder, this is the first crewed flight in NASA's modern lunar program. I'm personally extraordinarily excited about this. All the reasons why I will probably list most of them in what I'm about to tell you. The first reason why I'm super psyched is that this is when things start to get really, really exciting, right? We have the four astronauts that are going to ride Orion on this 10-day mission. It's called a free return, and what happens is they're going to go to the moon, they're going to circumnavigate the moon, they're not getting off the rocket, nothing like that. This is just people in the ship going around the moon and then coming back. This is going to prove that the rocket and then the spacecraft and the ground systems are all ready for sustained deep space work, which from here on out, after the second mission, that's what we're talking about. Even though it might not seem like a big deal, what's going to happen? It's going to ride there and come back. This mission is unbelievably critical, and it's really cool. This is the beginning of crewed missions, and if things go as planned, they're never going to stop. Just think about it. They're building a huge, huge system on the moon. There's so many different giant pieces of the puzzle that need to be constructed and brought to the moon and a moon base and figuring out all of the technology that's needed, and then they're going to go to Mars. If the funding is there and the will is there, it's just going to be crewed flight after crewed flight after crewed flight on and on and on. I think we're all going to get bored with it at some point. It's going to become so common. NASA's schedule is that the flight launches no later than April of 2026. I remember when we were talking about this, guys, I haven't really been bringing it up that much just because there really wasn't that much to say. I was waiting for this milestone. I remember hearing April 2026 and saying to myself, oh, that is so far away, and now it really isn't.

'''S:''' Less than a year.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's going to come very quickly.

'''E:''' Was the Artemis project designed in, what, 2018, I think, is when it first came on the board?

'''J:''' Yeah, I don't remember the date, but the original launch, I think, Artemis II was supposed to go off in late 24 or early 25.

'''E:''' That's what I remember as well.

'''J:''' Yeah, so we had a significant delay. Good for them. Delay it. We're talking about sending people to the moon again with all new technology, so they have to get it right, exactly. The agency left the door open to fly even earlier than April if the work finishes faster, but the official commitment is still April 2026. The crew's set, meaning they're selected, and they have been selected for a while. We have four people going, Commander Reed Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. These guys are going to take Orion out of the garage and take it out on the highway. This will be the first time since Apollo 17 that a crew will travel beyond low Earth orbit. These are all profound moves that are happening here. The hardware status is better than I think a lot of people assume at this point. The Space Launch System core stage, this is the rocket, the single-use rocket. They're going to have to build one specifically for each mission if they don't eventually have SpaceX help. The Space Launch System core stage, you got that, Steve? Space Launch System core stage. That's essentially the rocket without the Orion capsule. This arrived at Kennedy Space Center by a barge in July of 2024. That's a long time ago. The solid rocket boosters were stacked in the Vehicle Assembly Building. These are all things that happened before they start to really build the whole ship out. NASA reports that the core stage and boosters were connected and integrated on the mobile launcher in March of this year. These are the hard milestones and a clear sign that things are definitely a go. Orion is past its assembly phase, meaning it's built. Lockheed Martin says development for the Artemis II spacecraft is not only finished, but it's in launch preparation flow at Kennedy. I like that they call it flow. It's all the things that they got to do to get it prepared before they attach it to the rocket. Now, this matters because most of the open risks after Artemis I centered on Orion, right? Not the rocket. If you guys remember now, during Artemis I, this was back in December of 2022, NASA discovered an issue with Orion's heat shield during reentry. We don't want this problem. It's a really bad problem to have because this is where people could easily die. We don't want them dying literally moments before they touch back down. The shield made of something called AV coat or AV coat ablative material, which basically means it's heat resistant. It's designed to gradually burn away in a controlled manner to protect the spacecraft. However, Orion lost more material than expected because there was chunks of that stuff kind of popping off prematurely in a process that they call a spallation. I've never heard that word before. Now, this didn't endanger the Artemis I because it was first off, it was uncrewed and internal temperatures still remained safe. It was still a big deal. Like the concerns were really high for future missions. There was excessive material loss and that could allow the interior to get superheated, which means the gases are going to dramatically expand. And this would definitely pose a threat to anybody that would actually be on a future mission. So NASA spent over a year investigating the problem. They ran a huge number of tests to recreate these re-entry conditions. They were examining the existing flight data. And back in December 2024, they identified the root cause. So for Artemis II, NASA decided to fly the heat shield as built, which is the same spec as the first one using the same materials and construction as Artemis I while they're essentially relying on updated thermal models. They adjusted re-entry procedures, I guess, changing the angles and stuff like that. They enhanced monitoring to keep risks within safe margins. Although I don't know what the monitoring is going to do if they're on their way in and there's a problem, but I guess they know something I don't. But a permanent hardware fix, which is going to mean manufacturing tweaks, the improvement to how the AV coat tiles are bonded and layered all of these details, these are being developed for later missions, probably Artemis III and IV. It's only going to be implemented until after extensive testing to ensure the reliability, meaning that if they were going to change something that big and that significant, it would not only delay, but it could throw the whole thing, the whole mission series off kilter, right? You don't want to like throw in a three-year delay. Just do it on the next one and they're confident that everything is going to be fine. The crew is now actively preparing for the mission. NASA is showing the crew like running the launch day walkout drills, like what happens when the day comes. This is exactly what's going to happen. So they have to coordinate everything with all the people that go with them, like that entourage. This includes people like getting them into the capsule, buckling them in, giving them a pack of gum, slapping them around all the things that need to happen. They're rehearsing like nighttime operations. There's separate updates that they put out that describe the research plan for the mission. This includes monitoring sleep and the activity during the daytime, collecting biological samples on the astronauts to support the human research for deep space flight, meaning they have to know everything about these people just to make sure that they're perfectly healthy and that nothing is going to come up. They have independent reporting that shows them practicing lunar observation protocols. I know that sounds simple, but these are very useful backup skills. Nothing here is fluff. It's how NASA lowers something called burndown risks. A burndown risk is a potential problem or technical issue that has to be fully resolved, tested, and signed off on before major milestones or launch, and they have them. They have some risks there that they have to work on. There's some unknowns, and some of these are quite big. If anything is going to cause a delay, it's going to be in the next two things I tell you here. So life support performance. NASA has to confirm that the environmental control and life support systems, they have to make sure it works properly inside the fully integrated Orion capsule, and it has to be better than lab testing. It has to be fully put together and 100% functional. Heat shield confidence. Again, I went over this, but the heat shield has to perform safely. For specific reentry trajectory, Artemis 2 will fly. It's going to be a different reentry than Artemis 1, so they have to really, really test that up and make sure it's 100% go. They have something called first crewed mission pacing items. These are slower checks for safety. They're required because this is the first flight with astronauts. This is naturally going to introduce more steps and potential failure points and potential delays, but they have more protocols that they have to go to. The agency's official timeline remains to be no later than April 2026. Of course, it will be pushed if they have to push it, all right? Keep in mind everything I just said. Everything has to be completely greenlit by all of the engineers and everyone's whose skill set matters here. Everyone has to give a thumbs up. If you hear any other dates from outside sources, you have to be very skeptical of that. You should really only listen to the dates that are coming from NASA because there's been a lot of reports of companies, whatever, groups that are trying to say, this is not going to happen. This isn't going to work or whatever, but they don't have the inside information. They don't really know what's going on. I don't think NASA has any real reason to lie. They make it very clear. We're only going to launch if it's safe. We're saying April 2026, and again, we know that they'll delay if there's a problem because they've already done it, and that's the culture at NASA, so I trust them and trust the engineers, and I'm looking forward to some spectacular space adventures moving forward in 2026.

'''S:''' Do you guys all see the picture of the planned mission control?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' No. Does it look cool?

'''S:''' Yeah, it looks pretty cool. I mean, it's basically a bunch of big monitors, right? It's a bunch of computer stations with gigantic monitors.

'''E:''' What games would you play on those monitors?

'''J:''' I mean, those control rooms, they don't really differ that much from the historical ones, right? Like Steve said, giant monitors on the walls, computer monitors and computer desks like everywhere with tons of people with signs above the desks and all that. It's the same thing. It's just better modern technology. I think the old school stuff looked really cool. I just like the layout, but the new one is cool. Take a look at it.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Jay.

{{anchor|news_item2}}
=== Element 120 (30:24) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a67947951/scientists-discover-pathway-element-120-holy-grail-of-chemistry/
|article_title = Scientists Discover the Pathway to the Elusive Element 120
|publication = www.popularmechanics.com
}}
'''S:''' Bob, tell us about Element 120.

'''B:''' If you insist, more accurately, 119. I'm not sure why they're focusing on 120, but that's neither here nor there. Okay. Nevermind all that crap. Steve, a new method of discovering new super heavy elements has recently been tested with positive results. Could this method find new elements that do not exist yet in our periodic table of elements? Okay. This announcement came from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I'm sure all of you have heard about the periodic table of elements, right? Most of these elements, they're essentially just lying around waiting for us to catalog them, right? Just like laying right there. Some of them will never appear naturally on earth though. I was curious. What is that cutoff? I wasn't 100% sure. Do you guys know what's the heaviest naturally occurring element that forms on earth?

'''E:''' 92.

'''B:''' 92 protons, if that's what you meant. That is true. That is correct. Uranium 238 with 92 protons and 146 neutrons. But then what I didn't know is that what is the heaviest natural element that we know of and it's not uranium 238, it's plutonium 244, which we found in some meteorite dust. But apparently plutonium 244 apparently has a half-life of like 80 million years. So if some were created, were on the earth, it's already decayed away. So it's not totally fair to say that. It is correct though that all the elements beyond plutonium were never just found. They had to be synthesized. They had to be created. So have you ever wondered how they create even heavier synthetic elements to add to the periodic table?

'''J:''' All the time.

'''E:''' Yes, I have. I've wondered.

'''B:''' I mean, yeah, I've thought about it. I've read some stuff about it. But what I learned recently though was a lot of it was new to me. What they do at a super high level is they smash elements together one way or the other. They just smash them together and hope that the protons and neutrons of one nucleus can fuse to the nucleus of another atom. That's kind of what we're doing here. And we've talked about that in the context of colliders and things like that plenty of times. So if you add new protons to a nucleus, you have created by definition what?

'''E:''' A new element.

'''B:''' Exactly. A new element since the number of protons defines what an element is. So for example, all elements with six protons are carbon atoms. There's no other way. There's nothing else that they could be except carbon atoms. This number is the atomic number. But if you change the number of neutrons in an element, that just changes the isotope of that element. So say you go from deuterium to tritium. That's all that is. It's still a form of hydrogen. It's just a different isotope. And atomic mass, you don't necessarily need to know that much for this talk. But atomic mass is the protons plus the neutrons. The atomic number is just the protons. That's the critical one. That defines the new element. So all right. So the old method of doing this used a particle beam of calcium-48. I did not know this at all. They essentially used a particle beam weapon. I mean, I don't know how much of a weapon that would be.

'''E:''' I wouldn't want to play it with it.

'''B:''' I wouldn't either. It's a particle beam of calcium-48 with 20 protons and 28 neutrons. So this is a rare isotope of calcium. So imagine you have a beam of calcium atoms with no electrons, right? Just a nucleus. And they all hit other heavy elements like curium or californium. Once you've got millions, billions of these calcium ions that are just impacting onto this californium, say. So once in a while, one of those calcium-48 bullets would fuse to a californium atom instead of just bouncing off. And that's literally like the odds of that happening are one in quadrillions. But if you have enough of these atoms in your calcium beam, it's going to happen. So after fusion takes place, what do you got? You've got a new element since the number of protons has changed. No matter what you do to the protons, if you add one, take away one, or anything like that, you now have a new element. So these super heavy atoms don't last long, but we can detect the decay chain of the elements. Once we can detect what this mysterious thing decayed into, what that decay chain is, the daughter elements and granddaughter elements, if you will, then you can definitively say what had to have existed to create those daughter elements. Right? Do you follow that? So it's like cataloging your daughter's DNA and her son's DNA to conclude that you definitely had to exist. So, right? So they're seeing this decay chain. Do you like that, Cara?

'''C:''' Yeah, that works.

'''B:''' So you see this decay chain, and they say, well, for this decay chain to exist, this element had to have created it. So that's their evidence, and it's pretty damn solid. This specific method that I've been talking about, about this calcium 48 beam, it has actually helped us find elements 113 to 118 in the early 2000s. Or should I say aughts? I just don't like saying aughts. Does anyone like saying aughts?

'''E:''' I do.

'''B:''' Oh, wow. You're a weirdo. Unfortunately, though, unfortunately, this calcium beam technique has reached the end of its useful life in finding new elements. It's just not heavy enough to create an element above the current heaviest element, which is 118, or ganasson is one way to pronounce it.

'''E:''' Wow, I would have never guessed that as true.

'''B:''' Yeah, 118, 118. So we need something heavier. Calcium 48 just isn't cut, it's not enough oomph, there's not enough power behind us. We need something a little bit more formidable, a little bit heavier, and this is where this news item kicks in, and it's called titanium 50. It's a beam, titanium 50, which is a little bit more than 48, right?

'''E:''' Yes. I agree.

'''B:''' Yes. Yes. Thank you for agreeing. This new particle beam, this new particle beam the team has developed, titanium 50. Oh, yeah, I have it right here, 22 protons, 28 neutrons. It's been tested essentially as a proof of concept for creating super heavy atoms beyond 118. So this was their goal. They've been developing this new titanium 50 beam for quite a while, and they're like, let's test this out, let's just see what it can do. They weren't expecting to make any huge major breakthroughs, they just wanted a proof of concept. So to do this, they researched it, they sent a new beam against a target of plutonium 244, the heaviest natural element that we have encountered. They shot the beam against plutonium 244, and when the titanium nucleus and plutonium nucleus fused, they briefly created a new heavier nucleus, and what it created was they found actually two atoms of element 116 called livermorium. I mean, when did that name... I guess I remember the old... Was it the old Latin name for these elements? They must have renamed it, and I miss it because I never heard of livermorium before. It sounds vaguely funereal, doesn't it? Okay.

'''C:''' It must be named for somebody named Livermore.

'''E:''' Well, right. The Livermore Laboratory is supposed to say the same name.

'''B:''' Oh, damn, there you go.

'''C:''' Lawrence Livermore.

'''B:''' Mystery solved.

'''C:''' Is it Lawrence Livermore?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Is that right?

'''E:''' Yeah, I believe it is.

'''S:''' You are correct, sir.

'''E:''' You are technically correct.

'''B:''' So they used this new technique, this new beam, and they found two atoms of element 116. Now, this element, like I said, it's already been found. It was found using the calcium beam probably back in the aughts, but like I said, this was a proof of concept, and they pretty much well proved the concept. The odds, though, were against their success. Like I said, it's like only a few nuclei within a quadrillion of the tris should have done this, and of course, if your beam is big enough and long enough, you're going to eventually hit it. All right. So what does this mean? This means that titanium 50 could work for perhaps at least the next few elements. So we may be able to get to 119, 120, maybe 121 at least. If we are super lucky, it could help us discover a few more after that, but I suspect that we're going to probably need another type of beam after 121 or so. But now, this is one thing that caught me by surprise. These next elements, though, 119 and 120, they could be extra special for a couple of reasons. One is that element 119 would be a new row in the periodic table, a new period, I guess is what they would say, because all seven rows or periods are basically filled up right now. So when they discover 119, then it's going to go to a new row. So who here, which of you guys knows what the rows of a periodic table or what those periods, what do they reflect? What is the significance of a row?

'''S:''' It's the electron shells, right?

'''B:''' Yeah. It's essentially how the electrons are arranged around the atomic nuclei. So all of known chemistry, everything we know about chemistry fits in the seven rows of the periodic table of elements right now. If or when we confirm the next heaviest element, say it's 119 or 120, we're not sure which one it would be, we will then be on a new row, it would be row 8 or period 8.

'''E:''' In which column?

'''B:''' Well, far left. It would probably be the—yeah, 119 would be the farthest left.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''B:''' So it's expected, though. So what's going to happen in row 8, right? We can't be 100% sure, but we do very strongly suspect that relativistic effects could strongly influence the electron behavior. One website was saying that the electrons are essentially traveling close to the speed of light. So that's why they're saying that relativistic effects could have some influence here. So these elements, who knows? They probably won't follow expected chemistry patterns, right? We're not sure what kind of chemistry these things could engage in, but not that we would ever see any chemical reactions, right? These are ultra-heavy atoms. Their half-lives are probably—they're in the microseconds. They're very, very super brief. So there's not going to be any real chemistry going on there, unless, of course, that there's that holy grail of chemistry known as—and I've mentioned it here and there on the show and even just talking with you guys recently—the island of stability. Evan, you and I were talking about this. That's one of the things that some nuclear theories predict. There may be some very heavy elements that might have considerably longer half-lives. Instead of microseconds, it could be whole seconds. Imagine a whole second or minutes or even days. You can't rule that out. Maybe it's unlikely. Some theories point to it, and this would be due to some special—some call it some magical ratio of protons to neutrons. They say that that could make these super-heavy new atoms just extra stable, so stable that they could last far longer than the microseconds that these super-heavy elements typically last. So who knows? I mean, who knows what we could learn if we had that much time to play with a super-heavy element? Even seconds, I think, would allow us to do a lot more testing, far more than what we could accomplish with just microseconds. We could do something more substantial in just looking at the decay of its daughter particles and stuff like that. So I have a silly hope. It's a silly hope. I don't tell too many people, but sometimes I think, imagine if—you know my what-if scenarios here?

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. We all have what-if machines.

'''B:''' Yeah, right? What if, at the highest levels of what's possible with technology, it could be reasonable or feasible to create a technology using these elements with half-lives that go not even seconds, days, or—I'm talking like, imagine half-lives in the years or even decades, which I'm not aware of any theory that says that that's even a reasonable expectation. But imagine that. This is the kind of stuff that I would expect from super-advanced aliens. Having materials with radical new properties based on these relativistic or quantum effects that this super-heavy element in this island of stability could have—I mean, I did some research. What kind of abilities could these have? Could be stuff like super-dense fuels, super—imagine super-compact reactors that you could put in your phone or something crazy like that, whole new branches of chemistry. Oh, here's a good one. Element 126 armor plating. All right. I'm going to stop right there because that's just really goofy. I mean, nobody's saying that this island of stability would be that awesome. I mean, I think they'd be incredibly happy if it lasted for a few seconds or a minute. But who knows? Once we get there, they may be so ridiculously stable that they could have a half-life. Don't count on it. But hopefully we could, at the very least, we can find elements using this new technique, this titanium 50 beam. We could find 119 and 120 and maybe even element 121 and see what this period 8 is all about in the periodic table of elements.

'''E:''' So long, calcium 48. We'll miss you.

'''B:''' Thank you for your help. You've served us well.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Bob.

'''B:''' Sure man.

{{anchor|news_item3}}
=== Scalable Quantum Computer (43:49) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/scalable-quantum-computer/
|article_title = Scalable Quantum Computer - NeuroLogica Blog
|publication = theness.com
}}
'''S:''' Bob, how are you feeling about quantum computers?

'''B:''' Pretty good. Pretty frustrated.

'''E:''' Neither here nor there.

'''B:''' It's frustrating.

'''S:''' Up and down, you know.

'''B:''' They have to focus, and they are focusing to a certain extent, I'm sure. Error correction is key.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''B:''' I mean, you wouldn't even need that many qubits. If you had negligible errors with 200 qubits or even less, you could do some amazing things. The error correction is what's taken up so much of the effort because it's so hard, right? If they can crack that nut, and I really don't know what you're going to be talking about.

'''S:''' Yeah, you don't. So Caltech just set a record with a 6,100 qubit array.

'''E:''' No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait.

'''J:''' What does that mean?

'''E:''' Wait, wait, wait. There was only 1,000 a few months ago.

'''S:''' It's huge. That is huge.

'''B:''' It doesn't mean much. What's the error correction?

'''S:''' But that's not what I'm talking about.

'''B:''' That's what's important. I know.

'''S:''' That's not what I'm talking about.

'''B:''' Yeah. But you know, you should.

'''S:''' And the Australian company, the startup Dirac, has now shown that they can maintain 99% accuracy needed to make quantum computers viable. This is with production of silicon-based quantum chips. That's not what I'm talking about either.

'''B:''' You're talking about something.

'''S:''' But this is the kind of quantum computer news that we see all the time. It's just so hard to know what to make of it. We do appear to be making steady advances. But that doesn't, as you say, Bob, doesn't give us a good feeling for how close are we to really functional quantum computers, where you get quantum supremacy, where it's doing stuff we couldn't do without them.

'''B:''' Some claim that already, but I haven't taken a deep dive in that in a while. I'm not sure how accurate those claims of supremacy are. But OK, continue.

'''S:''' All right. So there's, as you say, just the number of qubits we're lashing together is not the only piece of information that's important to understanding quantum computers. And just for quick background, for those of you who don't know what we're talking about, regular computers use bits of data like ones or zeros, right? Anything that's binary. It could be any state, like a switch is either on or off or a gate is open or closed or whatever. Quantum computers use qubits, which essentially have their bits in a state of superposition. So it's not a one or a zero. It's a superposition of one and zero. That's one of the quantum, weird quantum effects that are critical to quantum computers. The other one is that the qubits need to be entangled. And it's the entanglement that actually makes the quantum computers work, right? That's how you connect them into a circuit. And that entanglement is what both the superposition and the entanglement mean, that we need to maintain these quantum states while the calculations are undergoing. But these quantum states are very fragile. You need to have super cold temperatures single digit degrees Kelvin, for example. That's why it's never going to be sitting on your desktop, or at least no extrapolation of current technology. This is always going to be like governments and countries and wealthy institutions may have these to do, again, the kind of computing that you can't do with classical computers. All right. So this is where the breakthrough comes in now, is in the entanglement part of this. One of the huge limiting factors is how far apart the two entangled qubits can be, because they have to be isolated. So one of the analogies given in the study is, imagine two people in a soundproof booth, right?

'''E:''' Like Get Smart.

'''S:''' Yeah. So they have to be in a soundproof booth in order to limit the noise, because it's the environmental noise which breaks down the entanglement. But that also means they have to be close together. So you can't have somebody far away, because then they'll be outside the soundproof booth. But what if, what if you could connect soundproof booths together so that they can't communicate with each other while still being isolated from outside noise? So that's kind of the idea here. So what they did, so what the researchers did is, they found a way to keep the systems isolated to maintain entanglement and minimize noise, while simultaneously giving them the ability to communicate over much longer distances. So they're using nuclear spin, right, as the information holder. The spin of phosphorus nuclei. That's their qubit, right? The spin of a phosphorus nuclei. And they keep it in a clean quantum system by surrounding it with an electron. And they demonstrated that they could maintain entanglement for 30 seconds, which is a massive amount of time when you're talking about quantum computers, with, Bob, less than 1% errors. So that's a very low error rate, a very long period of time. This is a good workable quantum system. But now they've taken it one step further. They've figured out how to manipulate the electron so that its orbit can essentially surround two phosphorus nuclei, which electrons do, right? Nuclei can share.

'''B:''' They're covalent, right?

'''S:''' Yeah, they can share electrons. But this enables two nuclei to communicate with each other over 20 nanometers. Now, again, 20 nanometers is a very short distance. But you know what that's on a par with? Our current manufacturing techniques for regular silicon computer chips, right?

'''E:''' So we can use the material we've already got.

'''S:''' Yes. So the idea is we could use manufacturing techniques we already have to make stuff at the 20 nanometer scale. And that could be applied to this system. Because you're dealing with the 20 nanometer scale. So they proved that this works, basically, that you can have a quantum entanglement in two qubits separated by 20 nanometers and using this phosphorus nuclei spin as the qubit system. So this could be, again, is this going to be the basis of future quantum computers? It's too early to tell. But they are progressing nicely. The thing about this system, which they say is a massive breakthrough for quantum computers, is that it's scalable. Because you could just keep adding phosphorus nuclei and connecting them with other phosphorus nuclei using this shared electron technique. So they said they see no reason why they can't just keep scaling this up. And the scaling is, of course, that's the main limiting factor with quantum computers is making it bigger and bigger. So we'll see where this plays out. I mean, it may be years before we really see this mature into the kind of thing where you're mass-producing quantum computers.

'''E:''' Neat. But it's the right path.

'''S:''' Yeah. But this seems like a very encouraging path. But even still, I mean, it's still like, just to give people an idea of why do people talk about quantum computers? Or what are they? And how do they work? Nobody knows. Basically, it's complicated. It's super complicated. Every time I think I understand this, I'm like, no, it's not really that. It's really this other thing.

'''E:''' Well, who famously said, like, if you think you understand it, you don't really understand it?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Was it Feynman? I don't remember.

'''S:''' It's super complicated. When I wrote about it recently, I talked about quantum encryption, because this is like the big thing with quantum computers. Once you get a really powerful quantum computer, it kind of breaks all old encryption. And you need a quantum computer to make encryption that another quantum computer can't crack. But then it was pointed out that, yeah, there are ways to make quantum computer resilient encryption that doesn't require a quantum computer.

'''B:''' Exactly. Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, I see.

'''S:''' So we're already working on that. But still, it seems like there could be huge technological advantages to having a quantum computer. You don't want your adversaries to have one when you don't have one. And I think that's what's fueling a lot of this research. So when will we have mature quantum computers? I don't know. It's so hard to tell, even reading these kinds of news items. It's very sexy. It's very exciting. This sounds like a big breakthrough. It all makes sense. Sure. You can have these entangled qubits that are stable over 30 seconds and over long distances at the distance of manufacturing existing computer chips. I get all that. I just don't know how meaningful it really is. Do you have any other thoughts on that, Bob?

'''B:''' No. The error rate is encouraging.

'''S:''' Yeah. The less than 1% error rate is very encouraging.

'''B:''' And the scalability is encouraging as well. So yeah, definitely be tracking this one.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. We'll be tracking it. Maybe one day we'll be able to report that we have a really significant usable quantum computer. All right. Let's move on.

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== Using AI Increases Lying (53:03) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09505-x
|article_title = Delegation to artificial intelligence can increase dishonest behaviour | Nature
|publication = www.nature.com
}}
'''S:''' Evan, tell us about artificial intelligence and lying, but maybe not the way you think.

'''E:''' Yeah, exactly. And there's a study out. It was in Nature. And I made the rounds in the media this past week in which the headline—and this is what drew me in—using AI increases unethical behavior. We know that headlines are never the whole story, so we have to definitely take a closer look at that. What did this study actually show? How worried should we be about a supposed impact of AI on human morality here? So you go to the paper. The paper is titled Delegation to Artificial Intelligence Can Increase Dishonest Behavior. They ran 13 experiments with over 8,000 participants and the researchers explored what happens when people can delegate tasks to AI systems compared to people doing those tasks themselves. I would say that the central question here wasn't just will people cheat if given the chance? You know, we kind of know that answer. But the deeper question was, does delegating tasks to AI change the psychological dynamics in a way that make cheating more likely? So there is a distinction there. And the experiments were built around controlled tasks where participants could benefit financially by being dishonest. This was the test. The die-roll game. Apparently psychologists have been using this for decades. Is this true? Have you heard of the die-roll game? I'll explain how it works.

'''B:''' No.

'''C:''' Yeah, we have a lot of paradigms like that.

'''E:''' Roll a six-sided die and keep the result to yourself. You then report your result to the experimenter. And the higher number you report, the more, say, money you get, as an example. So let's say I roll in secret. There's a three. But I tell the experimenter, hey, I got a six. I'll actually get more cash or whatever the reward is. And there's no way to prove essentially that you're lying. It's almost like liar's dice in a way. You know that game they played in Pirates of the Caribbean in a sense when you can call the bluff. But in any case. So in the study, people rolled and reported directly to another person. There was no AI involved. And then others delegated the reporting to an AI agent. And they used different kinds of interfaces. Some used a rules-based system in which they said, report it honestly. Some used what they're classifying as like a supervised learning. They trained the AI by selecting example data. And then there was goal-based to maximize your profit. Let the AI figure out how best to make it come out in your favor. They also at the same time ran a more realistic, say, tax reporting game. This is where I got interested, in which the participants reported their income and they could choose to under-report it if they wanted to. And you do it with people and you do it with AI agents and to see what the differences are there. How are people going to report that to a person, someone like me, a tax preparer, versus having an AI take care of that reporting for you. So here's what they found. Delegation did increase dishonest behavior, they're saying. They said even with the most explicit rule-based interface, people who used AI were more likely to cheat than those doing the tasks themselves. The effect skyrocketed with the vague goal-based interface. That was the one where basically saying, hey, maximize this for me. And they turned it over to the AI to do that for them. And in that condition, they said 12% to 16% of participants stayed completely honest and everyone else cheated to some degree. So basically the more abstract and hands-off the delegation, the easier it became for people to let the AI do their, quote unquote, dirty work for them. And also the AI agents were far more accommodating than the human agents. And this is where I have a little practical experience with this. When I'm sitting down with someone for a tax appointment and I'm talking to them about it, I would definitely say that they would be less inclined to be more liberal with their answers to me as opposed to me because of the interaction that we have. Because I make sure that they're trying to be as accurate as possible. That's part of my job because I don't want to get my clients in trouble. I'm trying to save them basically from themselves and point out where certain things might be, say, red flags for IRS. For example, somebody comes to me and says, hey, I earned $100,000 last year and I gave $50,000 to qualified charities. So I get a charitable deduction off my – I don't have to pay $50,000 half of my income taxes because I get to write that off. That is outside the boundaries of normal – of the normal statistics and that is an outlier. I would therefore press back and say you need to make sure you can produce your receipts and do all these kinds of things. Make sure you've got it ready because this is a high audit item. The IRS is going to come back and ask you to prove it. So I encourage them to do that or to change their answer. Well, yeah, it wasn't $50,000. It was actually $5,000. OK. That's more of a number that could – that would be believable. Whereas if they go and they do that with a computer and AI or something else like that, an AI will be generally speaking more accommodating and allowing them to go ahead and report that $50,000 without the pushback.

'''S:''' Yes. But to be clear, Evan, the people were no more likely to request unethical behavior from the AI than from people. So they still asked people at the same rate to do the cheating for them.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' Unless there were guardrails. Now, what you're talking about is that you provide guardrails, right?

'''E:''' Right. Yes.

'''S:''' So that's two different things. So as you said, the AI will – may not make people request cheating more but it's more likely to do it and not ask any questions.

'''E:''' And that was my end-

'''S:''' Yes. Great idea. Let's do that.

'''E:''' Yep. The guardrails. That is kind of the point and the authors of the study also definitely point this out that we need to – guardrail – better guardrails need to be incorporated into these systems to protect people from – basically from themselves and because I think the tax reporting example is a good example of this, a practical one that a lot of people can understand and how they can be their own – can be led astray in a sense and get themselves in frankly trouble in this way. The data showed basically – yeah. So again, the data showed delegation to AI lowers psychological barriers to unethical behavior. The effect is strongest when instructions are vague or high level. I don't think any of that is surprising and that the AI systems at the moment are more compliant with say unethical requests than when dealing with humans with this data instead. Now, what about the headline though? Using AI makes people unethical. That's an oversimplification. It definitely always needs more nuance. We've talked about the misleading headlines and things like that. So you really – that's a tough one to swallow right there. Maybe they should have said something like delegating to an AI can increase dishonest requests, especially with vague interfaces. That might have been a more accurate headline in a sense, even though it's a subtle difference but still pretty important one as far as I'm concerned. And again, we need to design systems that minimize moral wiggle room and need accountability mechanisms that keep people inside this loop. So an interesting study, definitely informative, but never go by just the one study and always read a little deeper into it.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan.

'''E:''' Thank you.

{{anchor|news_item5}}
=== Scams and Fraud (1:01:03) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theconversation.com/scams-and-frauds-here-are-the-tactics-criminals-use-on-you-in-the-age-of-ai-and-cryptocurrencies-264867
|article_title = Scams and frauds: Here are the tactics criminals use on you in the age of AI and cryptocurrencies
|publication = theconversation.com
}}
'''S:''' Cara.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Tell us about scams and fraud.

'''C:''' So we often talk about scams and fraud on the show. A new article in The Conversation that was published by Raoul Talang, professor of information systems at Carnegie Mellon. He writes about sort of scams and frauds in the age of AI and crypto. Because of course, we see this all the time, whether we're talking about frauds to make money or pseudoscience, is that the same rhetoric is like repackaged with whatever today's sort of zeitgeist allows it to be. I don't know. I know this isn't a side, but I don't know if you guys were following all of the like rapture stuff on TikTok this past week. And I was like, God, this it's so old hat. It's like all the same stuff, except because it's like Gen Alpha people who are talking about it. There's like a very modern spin.

'''E:''' Maybe their first time hearing about it. This is a regularly occurring thing.

'''C:''' Exactly. Well, I mean, it's just that these things just keep getting repacked over and over with whatever like the technology of today is. And the technology of today is AI. And so the professor who wrote the article, he talks about sort of emotional tactics, first of all. He talks about things like duty, fear and hope. And he says that most scams occur because of an individual target's duty, fear or hope. So duty refers to if you're an employee and your employer asks you to do something, you feel a sense of duty to do that. Fear is the idea that maybe somebody is telling you that like a loved one or somebody that you really care about is in danger, so you need to do something to help them. And then hope is often like investment scams or job opportunity scams. They talk in the article about specifically AI powered scams and deep fakes. And then after that, cryptocurrency scams, both of which are sort of, like I mentioned, repacks of age old scammery. There's got to be another word for that, right? Swindling. What are all the words we often use?

'''E:''' Flim flammery?

'''C:''' Age old. Flim flammery. But repackaged for a modern era. So we've talked about this before. I know, Jay, you've covered like AI and like AI deception quite a lot. So we've got to remember that this is not a, in the future, this could happen. Like this is happening right now. A little bit of statistical data here, just documented well over 100,000 deep fake attacks were recorded back in 2024. And only in the first quarter of this year of 2025, individuals who were swindled. So these are people who actually reported it, said that they were swindled out of 200 million plus dollars. And this is all from individuals using AI generated audio or video to impersonate other people.

'''E:''' Oh no.

'''C:''' So whether it's, hey grandma, I'm in trouble. I'm I'm overseas and I really need some money because I lost my passport. Or it's, hey worker, I'm your CEO and I need you to do X. People are falling for them. You know, very often there are different kinds of ways that they go about it. So we talked about like fake emergencies. That seems to be one of the hardest ones to fight against because there's so much emotional manipulation and it's a lot harder to check against the fraud. But we do see kind of tech support scams happening a lot in corporate settings where somebody will get like a pop up on their screen that says that either there's a virus or there's some sort of identity theft and I need you to call a number or somebody will get called directly from a number. And then while they're on the phone with tech support, they'll be like, okay, I'm going to take over your computer. And you guys have all done this at your actual jobs, right? When something's wrong with your computer, the tech support at your job will like be granted remote access to fix the thing. But when it's a nefarious actor and not actual tech support within your job, they can install malware, they can steal a lot of information. I mean, so many things can happen. There's also examples here of like fraudulent sites that impersonate like ticket sellers or universities or people being offered fake jobs and then having like placement fees taken from them or having personal data stolen. But they also talk about crypto scams. And I mean, I've got to admit, Jay, you may know all of this terminology, but a lot of this was new to me. Like, you know what a pig butchering scam is?

'''J:''' I actually don't. What is that?

'''C:''' Okay. So it's like a hy- It's a hybrid. It's sort of a it's a crypto scam. It's often involves crypto. And then it's usually some sort of like romance scam or catfishing scam. Sometimes it can involve investment fraud. So basically, the scammer builds trust over like weeks, months, maybe even years with a victim because they're either supposedly dating them, or they're investing a lot of time in them. And eventually they have them invest in a fake crypto platform, and then they'll extract a bunch of money and then vanish or otherwise send them money, but usually using crypto because crypto is not traceable, right? And there's really not a lot of recourse. Like if somebody exploits you using crypto, you can't really do a lot about it, right? It's not FDA insured money. Also there's pump and dump scammers, you've probably heard of that. So that's like, we often think of it in terms of the stock market, but like, let's say the scammers will artificially inflate the price of like a crypto that's not really worth a lot through hyping it up on social media. So they'll get a bunch of investors. And then the minute that people start buying it like crazy, they just dump it off their holdings, right? So they pump and then they dump. And then they end up having all of this worthless crypto. And then finally, the author talks quite a bit about phishing scams, which we just had a science or fiction about that. And also, have you guys heard of smishing? I feel like this is just like, this is just a thing.

'''J:''' I do that with my wife.

'''C:''' Right? Like, I feel like this is something that like, isn't just not going to catch on because there's an FCC article about it because I was like, what is smishing? And I googled it. And it's like the FCC is writing about smishing. Basically, smishing is just a portmanteau of phishing and SMS, right, or text messaging. So it's phishing via text as opposed to phishing via email. Phishing I guess is specifically an email scam and smishing are text message scams. But those are rising all the time. And because of tools like AI, whether we're talking about artificial voices, making artificial videos or manipulating imagery, it's just it's cheaper and easier to do now. So you have these sort of like scam farms, these huge organizations that are able to do this and exploit victims cheaply, easily, and then vanish just as quickly as they arrived. So we've talked about this before how do you protect yourself? Well, we know that like, what did we just talk about, Steve? Third party apps using two factor authentication any sort of additional security that you can use, making sure that when you're on a website, it's legitimate. But honestly, that's getting harder. Like back in the day, you could almost be like, you fell victim to a phishing scam. That's embarrassing for you. Did you notice that it was eBork that was asking you for like some payment? But now, people are cloning whole websites and they look the exact same. And they're even cloning interior company videos or sounding like the company CEO and it's coming from emails that look the same. So it's getting harder and harder to recognize that. But of course, don't click on suspicious links. Don't download attachments from people you don't know. Like we said, enable two factor authentication. Remember that most legitimate businesses are not going to ask you for information. They're definitely not going to ask you to send them money. It does seem to be the case that the pig butchering type scams and the personal relationship type scams are just they're just a lot trickier. But more and more, we're seeing organizations and governments are posting some information on what to do, how to avoid it. And if you do feel like you're involved in a scam, who to reach out to, like the FBI. Again, this is age old fraud. It's all the same stuff that always happened. A swindler is going to swindle. You've got to protect yourself. But in the age of AI and cryptocurrency, they can do it faster, easier, cheaper, more efficiently, more effectively, and without a trace. And so we've just got to remember that if we are victims of these types of scams, we probably have less recourse. And it's kind of gone are the days that it's like fool me once shame on you. Because I think a lot of people can be fooled pretty readily, even very savvy people. So you've got to get your heckles up. You got to stay skeptical.

'''S:''' Absolutely. Yeah, you're right. I mean, even like as totally how much radar I have for this up all the time. Every now and then I still almost click things I shouldn't click.

'''C:''' Of course. Because they seem to be coming from a legitimate source where you need to click it.

'''S:''' Or the timing is coincidental. That's usually what gets me.

'''B:''' Yeah. Right.

'''S:''' Like the timing is. But the thing is to realize that there's so much going on, you're going to get that, incidental timing every now and then. You know, like I just did something and then I get an email that might relate to that thing.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And it's just specific enough where you think it's, oh, yeah, this is the follow up of that thing that I just did. But wait a minute, is it? You know.

'''C:''' And that's the ploy, right? Because if we can send out thousands, hundreds of thousands of these emails with scammers.

'''S:''' Playing the odds.

'''C:''' Yeah. Somebody's going to click.

'''S:''' It's terrible.

'''E:''' It's mission impossible.

'''S:''' I mean, I also just think relying on like everybody doing the right thing every time is not a good strategy. Just statistically speaking.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Because then you just overwhelm the statistics by just flooding the zone with scams, you know? And so that's the world we're living in where we're constantly being bombarded with attempts at stealing our information and stealing our money. Who wants to live in that world? There has to be something we could do at the infrastructure side to just lower how easy it is to just mass produce scams.

'''J:''' Steve, I hate to say this, but the political will has to be there.

'''S:''' Yeah, of course.

'''J:''' And it's not.

'''S:''' Yeah. I agree.

'''C:''' And I think that organizations that are offering us the products, the banking products that would allow us to be scammed, they need to see that there is a capitalist incentive to help protect us. I would much rather use one of my credit cards online than a debit card because I know that if somebody steals my credit card.

'''E:''' You have protection with a credit card.

'''C:''' I have protection.

'''E:''' Less with a debit card. Much less.

'''S:''' I think banks, especially online banks, are getting very careful. I've been recently dealing with that. And I had to download an authenticator app that just exists solely to be another layer of authentication for these types of interactions. And that's fine. I'm doing basically three-factor authentication now.

'''C:''' Yeah. Same.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

'''C:''' One of my banking apps is just as intense as my hospital records app.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Like, it's amazing.

'''S:''' I mean, it's annoying, but I'm like, OK, it's like, all right, here's my two licenses. Here's like all this paperwork. I have to prove who I am. Like, all these things. It's like, OK, I get it, though. It's a bank. You need that information.

'''C:''' Yeah. And we get why. We're talking a lot of money. And the truth of the matter is, like, I think we have to be more vigilant. And yes, be more vigilant with clicking links and all of that. But also, like, with your actual information. You know, in the past, I might have been that person who, like, didn't really look at the receipt before I signed it. But now I'm the kind of person who uses software both for my personal banking and my business banking, where every few days I'm going in and I'm reconciling each transaction line. And I'm constantly looking to make sure that everything is up to date.

'''J:''' Are you finding any weird stuff?

'''C:''' No. I mean, if anything, it's just making me a better bookkeeper. Every time there's weird stuff, it's user error.

'''E:''' I'm all for that.

'''S:''' Yeah. You've got to look at your statements.

'''C:''' Yeah. It's because I've listed something as a transaction, this kind of transaction, when it should have been an asset and blah, blah, blah.

'''E:''' An ounce of prevention.

'''C:''' I'm learning a lot. And yeah, it is definitely helping. Because the quicker you can figure these things out, the quicker you can try to do something about it. But I have a feeling the numbers that are reported are exceedingly low.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's probably 10%.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah.

'''E:''' That's right.

'''C:''' It's embarrassing.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' It's embarrassing to say I fell victim to somebody who pretended to be my grandson who was stranded and needed cash from me. And I gave him cash really quickly. Like what a bummer.

'''E:''' Yeah. And the elderly are a high target. It's a...

'''S:''' They're targets because they're not as savvy and sometimes they just have mild cognitive impairment or whatever.

'''C:''' And also...

'''S:''' Or they're more isolated. They're not they're living alone.

'''C:''' And they're more likely to be emotionally manipulated into helping people who depend on them.

'''E:''' Most certainly.

'''C:''' The older you are, the more likely you are to have people who depend on you because you might have children and your children have children.

'''E:''' So we need to watch out for our parents as well or whoever our elders are.

'''S:''' Totally.

'''E:''' We have to be part of that team to help them.

'''C:''' Yeah. But don't think you're immune if you're young.

'''E:''' Nope. None of us are.

'''C:''' Because you're not.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Cara.

{{anchor|wtn}}
{{anchor|futureWTN}}
== Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:14:50) ==

'''S:''' Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] Okay, ha ha. Everybody knows what that sounds like. I got...

'''E:''' I'm glad you...

'''J:''' But I got tons of emails and people are like, it's someone peeing in an airplane flying over New Mexico. You know, it's like, okay, I got it.

'''E:''' No way. That wasn't New Mexico.

'''J:''' It's funny. I know. But it's not what it is. And I would never do a noisy of someone peeing unless it would sound really cool. No, but it's funny. I got you guys. Thanks. But I did get some legitimate guesses. Oh, if you guys can only be a fly on the wall, the wacky emails I get. All right. But before I get into that, I'm going to do a correction of a noisy a couple of weeks. Remember the one I explained to you was a recording of someone who spoke out loud in a room. They recorded themselves. Then they uploaded that sound file and then they downloaded it and then they played it open air again and upload, I guess, or upload it again, whatever. Okay. It's a little complicated, but basically there was like massive distortion going on over the iterations to the point where you couldn't understand anything anymore. Okay. It's Alvin Lucier's, I am sitting in a room bit, right? So the person that wrote in said, well, I'm not many people wrote this in, but this person in particular said, so he's continually rerecording a playback of his own voice and the resulting degradation of the sound is less a case of media lossiness, right? Meaning when I described it, it was that every time they uploaded it, the algorithm inside of like YouTube would, it would lose a little bit of data every time and it would get really messy if you did it like a hundred times, right? But that's not really it. The real thing that's going on is that the room, that room that he was in was of a particular size and geometry and it caused certain resonant frequencies to be emphasized in the playback while others are attenuated, right? Every room has acoustic signatures like this where certain things bounce more readily depending on the objects and the surfaces and all that stuff. So the end result is that the recorded voice gradually morphs into like a natural resonant frequency of the room, not, it wasn't an artifact of the uploading and the algorithm that would be processing that. So if you play the full original recording of that person's voice, he's actually explaining it in the original recording of him sitting in the room, he's telling you exactly what's happening. And I never listened to the whole thing because I was listening to it more as a noisy and not as like a piece of information. So anyway, there it is. It's even more interesting now because it's not just software losing it, it's the acoustics in the room and the effect of those acoustics on, on the recording, which I think is fascinating. All right. So now back to the noisy that sounds like people peeing. So of course, Visto Tutti had to chime in here. He said, this one reminds me of the sound of tropical rain going down a big drain pipe. I've heard similar sounds in Thailand where it can pour down like God himself has been drinking beer. So you are incorrect, sir. But then I got another person that wrote in, this is a listener named James Joyce. And James says, Hey there, Jay, my bro, I'm probably way too late, but I'm going to take a crack at who's that noisy anyway. This week's noisy is the spacecraft Ingenuity, the helicopter on Mars that went with the Perseverance mission. That is not the helicopter, but I do understand why you selected that. I have another person that guesses is Karen Good and Karen says, this week's noisy sounded like water to me, but it also had a high pressure sound. I didn't like that. That reminds me of a drill or the high pressure water plaque remover that's used by dentists. Remember that thing they stick in your mouth and it's like it's like a water pick, right? You guys know that?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''J:''' But you said it sounds bigger than that. So she's going to guess a high pressure water cutter in a shop like a saw. And she points out that with enough power there, it can cut through metal, right? Definitely. Definitely. I've seen it lots of times. It's a really cool sound, but that is not correct. I have a listener named Sierra Asher and Sierra says, hi Jay. And he identifies himself as a man because depending on what culture you're from, Sierra might not be a male name. He's from Melbourne, Australia. He says we're cafes with espresso machines are everywhere. This week's noisy sounds to me like milk being frothed and heated by a steam wand of an espresso machine. I do that at home. My wife and I are coffee fanatics and we have an espresso cappuccino machine, whatever you want to say. And we do that all the time. There are definite similarities. I totally see it, but you sir are not correct. And look at this. I have another listener from Australia. This person is Mark Penny and he says, good day Jay. I'm no Visto Tutti. But to me, this sounds like thousands of bats leaving a cave at night. And he says he's looking forward to Australia 2026. Mark, you are not correct. I do know what you're talking about because the bats flap their wings and there could be like a staccato type of thing happening for sure. And regarding Australia 2026, just so everybody knows it is fully, fully, fully going to happen. It's completely in the works. We have purchased airline tickets. I am finalizing details with the Australian conference, which is going to be NOTACON, right? So let me just quickly explain this while we're in the middle. It's like a break in Who's That Noisy. The conference is going to be in two places. First it's going to be in Sydney. So that conference will start on the 23rd and it'll go to Saturday, the 25th. This is a NOTACON guys. This is a NOTACON that we're running in Australia. This is an SGU conference that is being hosted by the Australian Skeptics. So we're working in coordination with them. But just to make it clear, like it's not going to be like any of their other conferences. It's going to be exactly, if you went to NOTACON, that's what it's going to be. If you haven't, it's going to be us, like all the SGU, George Hrab, Ian will be there and Brian Wecht and Andrea Jones-Roy. We are NOTACON and we will be there. And then the following weekend we will be going to New Zealand, which I'm working with right now. I'm working with Johnny from New Zealand, who's part of the New Zealand Skeptics.

'''S:''' That's right, Johnny.

'''J:''' And we're going to be picking the location and all the details and everything to be announced soon. But tickets will go on sale for the Australian side of this, hopefully, if I can push hard enough, maybe within a week. But I'll keep you updated. Anyway, thank you, Mark, for writing in. And again, no winner, nobody guessed it. It's not an easy one, guys, but I'm going to tell you what it is. This is simple. This is molten metal being poured into cold water, which I was surprised nobody guessed it because I've had, without exaggeration, I must have had a hundred people email me one variation on this noisy or another. But I finally got one that I thought was a really interesting version of it. So it's a dynamic sound because lots of things are happening. First of all it's a liquid metal. So when it hits the water, there's immediately a burst of steam. And you're also hearing like the metal itself, like entering the water. So it's complicated. It has a few different things going on. If you haven't heard it in person or go watch a video of this and you'll see it. There's an interesting little change to the sound. It's not like just dropping coins in the water. It has its own effect, kind of reminds me of the difference between pouring cold water into a cup or pouring hot water into a cup. You can hear the difference. Hot water makes a different sound than cold water. You guys remember that?

'''E:''' Oh yes.

'''J:''' All right. Don't get too excited. All right. I got a new noisy for you guys. This week's noisy was sent in by a listener named Justin Fisher. Yeah. If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. If you guys watch our live streams on Wednesday, Bob, Steve and I recently demoed a video game that a friend of ours and a supporter of the SGU, his name is Alex, him and his team created this game called Platypus Reclayed. And we're trying to help him because he's he's got a small gaming company. We're a bunch of skeptics and we just thought it would be cool to help him promote his game. So first of all, I just want to tell you real quick, it's called Platypus Reclayed. And the cool thing about this game is it doesn't have computer graphics at all. It's all handmade clay.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's cool looking.

'''J:''' It's really cool. You've never seen anything like it. So every frame of it is clay that they've molded into different positions. So it's like it's an incredible amount of work and incredible attention to detail. So that alone is worth checking out. But it's a side scroller. I've played this game at this point quite a bit. It's it is a lot of fun.

'''S:''' It's a good simple game. It's a lot of fun. Absolutely.

'''J:''' Yeah, I think it would actually be good. It's a good like game to as a parent to play with your younger kids because it's accessible to them and it's accessible to you as the parent, like you can actually play it because they have different levels of difficulty and everything. It's interesting because there's lots of different options in the game and you just gotta see it. It's got really cool parallax. Bob was freaking out about the multi-layered parallax. The bottom line is we want to thank Alex for his support and we want to help support their video game. So anyway, if you end up taking a moment to play it and you like it, leave them a good review because that helps more people find them. So anyway, very cool game and I hope you guys enjoy it.

'''S:''' Jay, didn't he say that they're including some kind of SGU shout out in the game?

'''J:''' Yeah, so that was a little secret, but okay, he spilled it. So he is going to put in some SGU Easter eggs into the game, which I don't even know what he's going to do. I mean, God, I just, when he said it, I just thought, how cool would it be if the ship shoots Steve's head out as the weapon? That would be really fun. All right. Anyway, if you have the time, go check it out. Platypus Reclayed.

'''S:''' And Jay, even though we're going to Australia next year, they are having their 2025 conference October 4th to 5th at the University of Melbourne Parkville. You can go to skepticon.org.au to check it out and get tickets.

{{anchor|email}}
== Emails (1:25:46) ==


'''S:''' All right, guys, I'm going to do a quick email. This is a follow up to Bob's news item actually last week about the nuclear propulsion. And we were talking a little bit about hydrogen as a propellant and some people emailed in for some clarification. So one thing for background, right? So sometimes it gets confusing and I had, like Bob and I had to make sure we were consistently using the right terminology here. For rockets, something could be a fuel and or a propellant, right? Usually if like you're burning hydrogen to oxygen, the result of that combustion is the propellant as well, right? So it's the fuel and the propellant. But with the nuclear system, the nuclear reaction is the fuel and the propellant is not the fuel. It's just the propellant. So that's what we were talking about. Hydrogen is a great fuel because it's very light. And so you get the most acceleration change in delta V over for the mass of fuel, which is for rocketry, that's the big deal. The question I had though was like, is it a good propellant alone because it's very light so you don't get that much inertia out of it. But what a couple of people pointed out, I'll just read the one email from Matthew who said, hydrogen is a great propellant if you are optimizing for ISP. With the combustion chamber at a given temperature, the average kinetic energy of the molecules is equal irrespective of the type of gas. If the gas is made up of lighter molecules, those molecules will be moving faster. Faster molecules leads to faster exhaust velocity. Faster exhaust velocity leads to higher ISP. Higher ISP leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

'''E:''' Thank you, Steve. Oh my gosh. I was about to say that.

'''S:''' So that was in his email. So Matthew gets the Star Wars nerd points for that.

'''E:''' I wasn't even reading and that's where exactly where my mind went.

'''S:''' That leads to the dark side. OK. So essentially, yes, it's lighter, but it goes faster. So the temperature is really the key determining factor. Heavier molecules go slower. Lighter molecules go faster as propellant at a given temperature. And so it kind of evens out. Now it's way more complicated than that. It's all kind of gas stuff. It's a lot of complicated equations. It's not just simple like that, but just as a general sort of physics principle. The other thing that is interesting though, that hydrogen as a propellant, really the main downside is that it is volume, is that liquid hydrogen doesn't condense down as well as other propellants might. And you have to keep it very cold and it is very corrosive. So it's just not a great propellant for that reason. It just takes a lot of technology and infrastructure and it's very tricky to deal with.

'''B:''' Is it corrosive? I wasn't aware of that one.

'''S:''' Yeah. And it's hard to contain too because it's so small.

'''B:''' It can get through.

'''S:''' It leaks a lot.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right.

{{anchor|ntlf}}
== Name That Logical Fallacy (1:28:54) ==

Topic: Hi, SGU! I came across the following fallacy used by Douglas Murray and Mosab Yousef in debates against critics of the IDF: "Unless you've been there, you cannot express an opinion on the issue, and since I've been there, I have more credibility than you." Someone made fun of that argument by saying: "Katy Perry therefore knows more about space than Stephen Hawking, because she's been there and he hasn't." I can't quite pinpoint if this just an argument from authority, or if there's something else to it. Max

'''S:''' I'm also going to do a quick Name That Logical Fallacy.

'''B:''' While you're at it, you might as well.

'''S:''' While I'm at it. Now this one comes from Max. He writes, Hi, SGU. I came across the following fallacy used by Douglas Murray and Mossab Youssef in debates against critics of the IDF. Unless you've been there, you cannot express an opinion on the issue. And since I've been there, I have more credibility than you. Someone made fun of that argument by saying Katy Perry therefore knows more about space than Stephen Hawking because she's been there and he hasn't. I can't quite pinpoint if this is just an argument from authority or if there's something else to it, Max. What do you guys think?

'''C:''' Unless you've been there. Is that moving the goalpost?

'''S:''' No, I think it is an argument from authority. It's just kind of a tangential one in a way. I remember Joe Nickell when he would do investigations. He would always go to the place that he was investigating, even if it gave him zero information, just so he could say he was there because he knew that people use this logical fallacy. So for example, he was writing an article about the Bermuda Triangle. You gain absolutely no information by actually going to the Bermuda Triangle.

'''B:''' Unless you get sucked in.

'''E:''' But you eliminate their...

'''S:''' But just to say, right, he had, he always, because I remember I went on a couple of investigations with him and he's like, take a picture of me in front of the house. Like why? Because I'm here. I have to prove that I was here. Otherwise people will say, well, you didn't even go there. So how do you know what's going on? Which is it. So yeah, it's a total logical fallacy. It's kind of a non sequitur, but it's just saying your argument is not valid because of something about you or your argument is valid or more valid because of something about you rather than the argument itself. That's sort of the broad umbrella of the argument from authority. In this case, it's not even genuine authority. It's just that were you physically there or not, even when it doesn't matter for your opinion. It's one thing to say, well, you didn't see something yourself. And so that kind of diminishes your opinion. Like if we're talking about how wondrous the Grand Canyon is, I say, well, did you ever see it in person? Like, no, I saw pictures of it. Well, you really do get a different impression of it if you see it firsthand.

'''C:''' I tried to say that to you guys before the eclipse. I remember.

'''S:''' Yeah. Absolutely.

'''C:''' I was like, you just don't know. Or even when you're like, it's partial.

'''S:''' I intellectually believed you, but until I saw it myself, I didn't appreciate it.

'''B:''' Yeah, you can't fully.

'''S:''' You're 100% right. You have to see it. But this is different. I do think the Katy Perry example is perfect. Like you don't understand space anymore because you went up in a rocket. And Stephen Hawking's knowledge about astrophysics is not diminished because he's never been in space.

'''E:''' There may be other legitimate reasons why a person doesn't understand something, but that's not one of them.

'''S:''' Yeah, but that's not one of them.

'''B:''' And it's so silly because it's so broad. That statement's so broad. I mean, what you could say is that she understands what it's like to launch in that specific rocket into low Earth orbit. Sure, she does, but that's about it.

'''S:''' To go into a suborbital, suborbital, orbital, orbital.

'''B:''' Was that intentional?

'''C:''' I do think you can say something like I hope that you will understand that my perspective on the issue is different than your perspective because I have experience that you don't have.

'''E:''' Experience, right. Yeah.

'''C:''' And I think that's what makes sense, right? Like I do have a different perspective, but not I have more intellectual knowledge than you do.

'''S:''' Right. Or your opinion is invalid. You should defer to my opinion because of some, whatever, tangential relationship I have with the topic.

'''E:''' This is why, right, pilots who say they found seen UFOs and things like that, right? Oh, well, you're not up there in the air, in the cockpit.

'''S:''' Well, they're going beyond it. They're saying they have special perception skills because they're pilots. That totally is an argument from authority.

'''C:''' But what about, I guess here would be a question, and tell me if you think that this is parallel because an example I can think of is if a person, let's say like a white person, tries to make a racial argument about what, about the experience of a black person. And then a black person says, you don't know what it's like to be black. Like your opinion on this is not valid.

'''S:''' Yeah. I mean, I think there are limits to that though. I think it is valid to say like, listen, like it depends on what they're talking about. I think you can understand racism, again, intellectually, and you could make valid arguments that are logical and evidence-based that deal with that, even if you were not personally involved. But you do gain a perspective. It's like you don't know what it's really like until you've lived it. That's valid.

'''C:''' Yeah. And I think the issue is that very often what we'll see happen with sort of intellectual dark web types is that they'll try to make intellectual arguments to counter lived experience arguments to minimize the lived experience and say, no, I know better than you because look at the data. And that person's like, yeah, but I've lived this life. I know what it feels like to have microaggressions committed against me.

'''S:''' But it doesn't cut both ways.

'''C:''' You're just reading about that.

'''S:''' But you shouldn't say, I've lived it, therefore I could make up facts about it and your statistics are wrong because I don't believe your statistics. You can make it a logical fallacy from either way, which is often, again, these are informal logical fallacies. And it all depends on exactly how you're formulating your claims. And it's not a simple formula. Like some arguments from authority are legitimate. Some are not legitimate.

'''C:''' Right. Yeah, because they're informal.

'''S:''' It depends on the details.

'''C:''' And I think just this idea of I know more is such a vague statement. That's the important thing, right? I know more because of X. OK, let's be specific about what you... I have an experience that you don't have, therefore X, Y, and Z. Or I have studied this intellectually, I have a PhD in this, therefore, I've gathered more information about it.

'''S:''' That's valid. Yeah, I just got into an argument in the comments on my blog about autism. And somebody has no idea what they're talking about. Bottom line is they don't know what they're talking about. And they're throwing one link to one study up. I'm like, dude, I have surveyed the literature on this. I've been writing about this for 20 years.

'''E:''' Yeah, you've swam those waters for so long.

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm telling you what all the evidence shows, not just you're just cherry picking this one study. You have no way to put it into context. You just don't know what you're talking about. That's different, you know?

'''C:''' Oh a perfect example of this is that I have a very dear friend who's a young mom. She's not a young mom. She's an older mom. She's my age. But she's a mom of a young child. And she struggles with, shall I say, boundaries with her child. And one of the things that we often I bite my tongue and I don't because I don't have children, right? It's like, it's not my place to judge. It's not my place to give advice because I don't have children. But there are times when she might say, yeah, but you shouldn't blah, blah, blah. And I'll be like, well, I am a psychologist who treats people in family dynamics. And I do have specialized knowledge about parenting styles and about outcomes for children. And so it's one of those really tough things where it's like, no, no, I have intellectual knowledge. She has experiential knowledge. Sometimes my intellectual knowledge is more valid in that setting. But sometimes her experiential knowledge is more valid in that setting.

'''S:''' Exactly. It turns out exactly what you're talking about. Again, where I, as a parent where I think people who they're too young, they haven't had their kids yet or whatever, for whatever reason, they don't have kids. Being judgmental about parents, it's like until you've had to deal with kids, you have absolutely no basis to be judgmental. It doesn't mean that you can't have an opinion about like beating your kids, you know? But I'm just saying, oh, I would never let my kid do that. It's like, yeah, talk to me when you've had kids.

'''C:''' Right, right. But at the same time, when somebody says, I don't know why I just keep doing this and this keeps doing the outcome, it's like, well, because data show, blah, blah, blah.

'''S:''' Right, it's tricky.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Okay, let's go on with science or fiction.

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:37:20) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = None
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = In the first such study in Germany in almost 50 years, a mandatory speed limit of 75 mph would result in a 26% decrease in crashes with severe injuries.
|link1web = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856425002447
|link1title = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856425002447
|link1pub = www.sciencedirect.com

|item2 = Scientists have demonstrated a quantum sensor that is able to determine linked properties, such as position and momentum, to great precision, bypassing the limits of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
|link2web = https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw9757
|link2title = https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw9757
|link2pub = www.science.org

|item3 = A recent study finds that, despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated voices and human voices.
|link3web = https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1099494
|link3title = AI-generated voices now indistinguishable from real human voices | EurekAlert!
|link3pub = www.eurekalert.org

|}}
{{SOFResults

|science1 = In the first such study in Germany in almost 50 years, a mandatory speed limit of 75 mph would result in a 26% decrease in crashes with severe injuries.

|science2 = Scientists have demonstrated a quantum sensor that is able to determine linked properties, such as position and momentum, to great precision, bypassing the limits of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

|fiction = A recent study finds that, despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated voices and human voices.

|rogue1 = Evan
|answer1 = In the first such study in Germany in almost 50 years, a mandatory speed limit of 75 mph would result in a 26% decrease in crashes with severe injuries.

|rogue2 = Cara
|answer2 = Scientists have demonstrated a quantum sensor that is able to determine linked properties, such as position and momentum, to great precision, bypassing the limits of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

|rogue3 = Bob
|answer3 = A recent study finds that, despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated voices and human voices.

|rogue4 = Jay
|answer4 = A recent study finds that, despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated voices and human voices.

|rogue5 = Steve
|answer5 = A recent study finds that, despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated voices and human voices.

|host = Steve
|sweep =
|clever = y
|win =
|swept =
}}

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items. You guys ready?

'''C:''' Mhm.

'''J:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' Here we go. Item number one. In the first such study in Germany in almost 50 years, a mandatory speed limit of 75 miles per hour would result in a 26% decrease in crashes with severe injuries. Item number two, scientists have demonstrated a quantum sensor that is able to determine linked properties such as position and momentum to great precision, bypassing the limits of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And item number three, a recent study finds that despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated voices and human voices. Evan, go first.

'''E:''' Okay. In the first such study in Germany in almost 50 years, okay, a mandatory speed limit of 75 miles per hour, unusual that they're using miles per hour, but that's-

'''S:''' Well, it actually is 120 kilometers per hour. I should say that too, but I think it translates to 75 miles per hour.

'''E:''' Okay. Would result in a 26% decrease in crashes with severe injuries.

'''S:''' Right now there isn't any.

'''E:''' So we're talking an autobahn.

'''S:''' Yeah, there is no speed limit.

'''E:''' Oh, boy. That sounds right. I'm not sure where the trick would be here on this particular one, but this makes sense to me.

'''C:''' And can I ask for clarification? When you say speed limit, you mean upper speed limit?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' You don't mean minimum speed limit?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. Upper. Yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' Maximum speed limit, I suppose. Yeah. Yes. A 26... Okay. I'm buying that one. The second one about scientists have demonstrated a quantum sensor that is able to determine linked properties such as position and momentum to great precision, bypassing the limits of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And I'm sure that... And there's a reason why it's called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

'''S:''' Do you want to know what that is?

'''E:''' Yes, please.

'''S:''' So the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a law of quantum mechanics, basically, that says that there are absolute limits to how much you could know about linked properties. So like position and momentum. So if you're studying a particle, the more you know about its position, the less you know about its momentum. And the more you know about its momentum, the less you know about its position. And you could mathematically calculate how precisely you could know each of those factors.

'''B:''' If you know one with certainty, you can know nothing about the other.

'''S:''' Yeah, basically.

'''E:''' Got it. So it's a hundred percent one, zero percent other. It's a zero-sum game.

'''S:''' It's a zero-sum game. Yeah.

'''B:''' Right.

'''E:''' So they've just demonstrated a quantum sensor able to determine the linked properties. Well, I don't see why that's I mean, you had a news item earlier, Steve, about quantum computing and advances there. Why couldn't they have developed a quantum sensor able to determine this? I don't know. I'm not sure I have a problem with that one either.

'''B:''' Don't just... I'll shut up.

'''E:''' Thank you. That's all I needed. Number three, a recent study finds that despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in as many cases between AI-generated voices and human voices. People are still able to distinguish. Recent study, despite advances. Ooh. Well, this is Cara's news item, right? Weren't we just talking about this? They're using AI to trick people because they can't determine if the grandchild is calling the grandmother, the grandmother isn't going to know between AI and human in certain cases. And this technology is getting better. It will continue to get better. Yeah. All right. I'll say the AI one is the fiction. I have a feeling that in more cases, they weren't able to make the determination between the two. How's that?

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

'''B:''' The Germany one. I mean, what are they... Are they changing it? Like this is the Autobahn territory, right? I mean, with an unlimited...

'''E:''' Correct.

'''B:''' Are they saying that if you take the unlimited speed limit down to 75, then we're seeing this?

'''S:''' Yes.

'''B:''' I'm not sure of the context.

'''S:''' Yes, that's correct.

'''B:''' I mean, yeah. I mean, that sounds entirely unreasonable. So, of course, the second one got my damn attention here, this quantum sensor. Steve, I know you knew I'd be all over this. I'm not going to fall for this one. They're doing some trick. I mean, because normally this should not be possible. This is pretty fundamental, but they're doing something that is not removing... Probably that's not removing the uncertainty, it's just shifting it. Something that makes sense. I'm not sure how they would do that because like you said, these are linked, but it's some trick that they're doing here. That's what I'm thinking is happening here. So, for the third one, I'll just have... I think this is baloney. I think this one's fiction here. I don't think... Let me see if I can make sure. Let me make sure I'm not yet again missing a critical word in this thing here.

'''E:''' They developed a sensor there.

'''B:''' Yeah, people are still able to distinguish many cases between... Yeah, I'll say that this one's fiction. I mean, I've heard some really great stuff. I don't know what the cutting edge is right now, but what I have heard was fairly convincing. Oh, wait. Question then, Steve. Is this like, here's a voice. Is this AI or is it real? Or is it like, here's your brother, Jack. Is this... Is it a voice you know?

'''S:''' It was both.

'''B:''' All right.

'''S:''' They did just AI voices not based on any person and the AI voices that were trying to mimic a specific person.

'''B:''' Okay. I mean, I've heard some done like for you, Steve. And it wasn't perfect. I mean, it seemed like I could tell the difference, but that was like, what, a year ago? I think they're probably good enough where people are not going to easily detect that with any reliability. So, I'll say that's fiction, number three.

'''S:''' Okay, Jay.

'''J:''' Yeah. I mean, this one about in Germany and the speed limit, right? So, they're saying that they're going to change it to 75 and that would result in 26% decrease in crashes. I mean, how can that not be science? I just, I can't imagine that decreasing the speed limit wouldn't result in lowering crashes. I guess the real number here is 26%. All right. A good question in here would be like, how fast were people typically driving on these streets? You know? I just think that's science. There's too much there to agree with. The second one about the Heisenberg principle, I mean-

'''E:''' It's a Heisenberg.

'''J:''' It's the Heisenberg. You know, who am I, I mean, how the hell could they possibly do it, right? I agree with what Bob was saying about like when you know more of one parameter, the other one, the information on the other one decreases. I can't imagine a way for them to get around that. I mean, I'd like to think that they could. That one just seems a little too obvious that that's the one. Going to the third one, a recent study that finds that despite recent advances, I guess people are still able to distinguish AI generated voices and human voices. See, I agree with this. This could be the toupee fallacy, but I know I can do it. What I can do is I can't, if you played a recording for me, there's lots of little subtleties that are in there. And when I've made extensive recordings of all of us AI recordings I know what those little nuances are that it gets wrong.

'''E:''' I'm an AI right now.

'''J:''' Can you hear what I'm saying right now? So I mean, I know that I know your voice is better than most people's voices in my life, but the point being though, is that there are tells still that I think are detectable and I think they're going to go away very soon, but I think that's science too. I feel comfortable going with the second one the Heisenberg one as the fiction just because it's a big longstanding what would you call it? A rule? It's a definitive barrier, right, that has been well documented and gone over so many times. I just can't imagine that that was overturned. That one's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. And Cara.

'''C:''' I think you'd call it a principle, Jay.

'''J:''' Thank you. It's not a maneuver though. It's not like the Heimlich maneuver.

'''E:''' The Heisenberg maneuver.

'''C:''' The Heisenberg principle.

'''E:''' The Kobayashi maneuver.

'''C:''' I feel like I don't have a lot to add to what most folks said. I think that you would really get us on this if the fiction was that putting in a speed limit actually didn't decrease severe injuries from crashes because otherwise, like, is every speed limit in the world not evidence-based? I just think, yeah, we've seen it over and over. We saw the speed limits go down in New York City to like really low and fewer bicycle and pedestrian crashes. So I don't know. That one just seems realistic unless you fudge the numbers somewhere. So really it's between going with Evan and Bob and saying that the AI voices are distinguishable from human voices is the fiction or going with Jay and saying that Heisenberg uncertainty principle has not been bypassed. I guess, I don't know, is a principle different than like a fundamental law? And is anything really fundamental in physics? Like we think it is until it's not, right?

'''E:''' Especially in quantum?

'''C:''' Yeah. Even like gravity, like it worked for Newton. So I don't know. And you did say that they're using a quantum sensor. It's not like a traditional sensor. So maybe you have to fight quantum with quantum. And then, yeah, I think I have to go with Evan and Bob on this. I don't think people are generally good at distinguishing between the voices. And Jay, maybe you are. I mean, the wording says, despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated voices and human voices. I think probably the opposite is true.

'''J:''' That's a good distinction, Cara. I use my anecdote to kind of overlay on what I should have thought it broader.

'''C:''' And so my guess is that people are generally not able to distinguish, but maybe some people still can. But they're the majority, not the minority. So I'll go with the other two guys and say that that one's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. So you all agree on number one. So we'll start there. In the first such study in Germany in almost 50 years, a mandatory speed limit of 75 miles per hour, 120 kilometers per hour, would result in a 26% decrease in crashes with severe injury. You all think this one is science. I guess the question is, is it possible that German drivers are such that they're comfortable driving fast? Or is the Autobahn sort of designed to accommodate faster traffic and forcing it into a lower speed would necessarily make it safer? Or maybe that 26% figure is wrong.

'''C:''' I think the idea is you can go even, you can go way fast on the Autobahn.

'''S:''' There's no limit.

'''C:''' Yeah. But I'm saying like, the shape of it doesn't reduce your speed.

'''S:''' There's a suggested speed limit of 130 kilometers per hour, but there's no mandatory limit. So that's like 87. So this would introduce a mandatory limit.

'''C:''' Which I think by definition, a lot of people choose to take the Autobahn just so they can drive really fast.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' Especially tourists.

'''J:''' I just think it's crazy. I think it's crazy that they let people drive that fast because the people who aren't driving that fast would have a big problem, right?

'''C:''' Oh, they stay in the right lanes.

'''S:''' Well, this one is science. This is science.

'''E:''' That makes sense.

'''S:''' Because of course-

'''C:''' I can't believe they've just now done a study on this.

'''S:''' Well, they haven't. It was 45 years or something from the last study because they didn't want to study it. You know what I mean? It's like, we're driving fast. Leave us alone.

'''B:''' And we like it. Leave us alone.

'''S:''' All right. Let's go to number two. Scientists have demonstrated a quantum sensor that is able to determine linked properties such as position and momentum to great precision bypassing the limits of the Heisenberg uncertainty. And of course, these would be gentlemen, Heisenberg compensators, right?

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''S:''' Hang on. Now, it seems like Jay, Evan, and Cara are not totally clear on what the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is. Bob, would you say it's fair to say that this is as well-established as the speed of light limit as just a fundamental property-

'''B:''' Oh, it's fundamental. You could absolutely say it's fundamental.

'''C:''' Yeah. Like it's not a function of like our tools aren't good enough.

'''B:''' Correct.

'''S:''' No. No, it's not. It's not a technical limit. It is a physical limit.

'''C:''' Right.

'''B:''' It's how the universe presents itself to us. There's no way around it unless, you know-

'''C:''' Unless we have new physics.

'''B:''' No, not even new physics, but just a way to preserve it but gain the information you're still looking for. I don't know. It depends on what Steve says here.

'''S:''' What do you think the one key word is in this item?

'''E:''' Oh, let's see. Ah.

'''B:''' Let's see.

'''S:''' There's a very key word in this item.

'''B:''' Quantity.

'''C:''' It's able to?

'''S:''' No.

'''B:''' One word.

'''E:''' Demonstrated.

'''C:''' To great precision.

'''S:''' Nope.

'''J:''' Hold on.

'''C:''' Bypassing the limits.

'''B:''' Bypassing the limits.

'''S:''' It's bypassing.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It's not-

'''C:''' Instead of breaking.

'''S:''' This one-

'''B:''' Removing. It's bypassing.

'''S:''' -is science because it's not violating the limits of Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It's bypassing them.

'''C:''' It's going around them.

'''S:''' It's going around them. So, Bob, you pretty much nailed it. They figured out a way to spread the uncertainty out to things they don't care about and limit it to the features they do care about.

'''B:''' Amazing. I mean, what else could they do? Given that this is true, which I assume this was true, it had to be something like that. Otherwise, because yeah, you're not going to get rid of it. You can't get rid of it.

'''S:''' You can't get rid of it. And again, they're very specific. This does not violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. All right. The name of the paper is Quantum Enhanced Multiparameter Sensing in a Single Mode. And here's the metaphor they give to sort of explain what's happening. They said, all right, the metaphor is it's like a clock with an hour hand and a minute hand. The hour hand, let's just say you have a clock with just one hand. It has just an hour hand or a minute hand. If you choose the hour hand, it gives you good information about where you are in the day, but it's not precise. Or you could choose the minute hand and you could know precisely what minute it is, but you don't know where you are in the day. So it's a scale issue. So what they do is they said that if you're looking to nail down position and momentum, you can have uncertainty about where you are on the bigger picture. We don't know what grid we're in, but whatever grid we're in, we know exactly where we are in that grid. And they don't really care about the bigger picture. They just want to know the precise momentum and position wherever it is, right? So yeah, so that's it. So they basically said it's like we're spreading the uncertainty out to these other parameters that we don't care about so that we could have more precision with the things we do care about, like position and momentum. So yeah, it's, you know.

'''B:''' It's still puzzling though.

'''S:''' It's still puzzling because frigging quantum mechanics, but yeah, it's just an end run around that limit.

'''J:''' Sounds like BS to me. Seriously, like you're saying, oh, they're just kind of jerking around the corners. Like that doesn't make much sense to me.

'''S:''' It says, we deterministically prepare grid states in the mechanical motion of a trapped ion and demonstrate uncertainties in position and momentum below the standard quantum limit.

'''E:''' There it is. Crystal.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' It's below the limit. So that's, they did something special there.

'''S:''' Yeah. They did it.

'''B:''' So damn, man. I wonder what that implications are for other...

'''S:''' Well, I think you could make sensors with incredible precision. That's where they're. Here's the, I think the other thing they said is that they kind of, Bob, they borrowed principles they learned from quantum computing.

'''B:''' Oh, interesting.

'''S:''' So they kind of developed this technology because they're trying to error reduce in quantum computing and they basically ported it over to sensing technology.

'''B:''' Oh, fantastic.

'''S:''' Hence the quantum sensor. I don't know if that helps, but that's what they said. All this means that at least the study finds despite advances, people are still able to distinguish in many cases between AI generated AI generated voices and human voices is the fiction because what the study found is that people were completely unable to distinguish the AI generated voices from human voices. And that was either just generic voices or specific people. Either way that this is just, this is what the latest greatest like high-end voice, technology, AI voice technology to people in their study had no idea. Interestingly, they talked about looking at AI generated pictures of people and they've gotten so good that not only can people not distinguish, but they're more likely to believe that an AI generated picture is real than a real picture is. AI generated pictures are so-called hyper real. Now in this, in the audio test, they did not see the hyper real phenomenon. So people were not more likely to think AI voices were real over real voices, but it, but they were unable to distinguish the two.

'''C:''' I bet you, I would love to see an experiment done where, because I think my hypothesis is that this plays off of a very human bias where we like things that are slightly more attractive. And I think that we don't have that with an audio bias, but we have it with a vision bias.

'''E:''' And the AI knows what little tweaks to make to enhance that.

'''C:''' The AI can make people look kinder. They smile more with their eyes. They look slightly more attractive and people are going to go, oh yeah, that's more real.

'''E:''' Interesting.

'''C:''' Oh, it would be really interesting to have AI ramp that up and ramp that down.

'''E:''' That's weird. They know what our brains want.

'''B:''' It's not like the uncanny valley. It's like the hypercanny valley or something, right? More real.

'''C:''' We've blown way past that, the uncanny valley.

'''S:''' But here's another hypothesis, Cara. Perhaps we're, and I don't know if they could control for this in a subsequent study. In our media saturated culture, we are so used to photos of people that have been altered and perfected that we think that's real. That that's our standard.

'''C:''' I think we could probably do two studies. I don't think people could distinguish between a Photoshopped picture and a non-Photoshopped picture of like a model, for example. And then I think that people would, or distinguish which is real versus which isn't real. And then you add that to like even a picture of ourselves. I bet you we would have a hard time being like, oh, that's the real me versus that's not the real me. Because it's the slightest little tweaks. And now that we don't have like 17 fingers in AI.

'''S:''' Yeah, once you deal with that issue.

'''B:''' It'd be a better test if it's somebody you know, because how often do you look at yourself compared to looking at other people?

'''C:''' People look at themselves more than they look at other people.

'''S:''' Plus we always see ourselves in the mirror. So when you look at a picture of yourself, it's reversed from what you're typically looking at.

'''C:''' Yeah. Which is why we like selfies.

'''B:''' But I still would think that we would know, like, I think I'd know Jay's face and how it should move more than I would know my own face and how it moves.

'''C:''' And I think that that is generational.

'''S:''' Well, no, but Bob is saying the movement is different. That's a different layer. None of this is dealing with movement.

'''C:''' I know. But even I think like Gen Alphas and around that era, they're watching their faces on videos all the time.

'''S:''' But in terms of being able to distinguish AI, because I recently saw there was this company that we talk about this, they make movies, where you can like dub a foreign movie into English, and then AI changes the lip movements to match them.

'''B:''' Yeah, right.

'''S:''' And it's total uncanny valley.

'''C:''' Like, oh, yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' But we're not there yet with video.

'''C:''' Right. But he wasn't saying video versus photo. He was saying a video of Jay versus a video of him.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And I disagree with you, Bob, or I agree with you, but I think it's a generational difference. I think younger people have a very self gaze when it comes to social media.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:58:10) ==
{{qow
|text = "Inductive reasoning is, of course, good guessing, not sound reasoning, but the finest results in science have been obtained in this way. Calling the guess a “working hypothesis,” its consequences are tested by experiment in every conceivable way."
|author = — Joseph William Mellor
|lived =
|desc =
}}

'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' "Inductive reasoning is, of course, good guessing, not sound reasoning. But the finest results in science have been obtained this way, calling the guesswork a working hypothesis. Its consequences are tested by experiment in every concealable way." And that was penned by Joseph William Mellor, M-E-L-L-O-R, who was an English chemist and an authority on ceramics. Ceramics. And he grew up in New Zealand, 1868 to 1938. Apparently, the what? The an expert. I mean there you go. An expert in this in this particular field and looked upon as a world expert on this. Now, the quote itself, I kind of thought was interesting because I did a little reading about inductive reasoning because I don't know that I really read much about it before. And Einstein was not a proponent of inductive reasoning. In fact, he argued quite extensively, apparently against it. And he was more about deductive reasoning and didn't feel that inductive reasoning brought you to to the true nature of science. And there was kind of a collision there in a sense, in a sense of those two schools of thought. But effectively, I think what modern science is saying is that they're partners in a sense. Induction and deduction.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''E:''' You can have both.

'''S:''' Yeah. Deduction goes from the general to the specific. Inductive goes from the specific to the general. You have to engage in inductive reasoning. That's how you come up with a hypothesis.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' That's bottom up reasoning. But I think the problem is that bottom up does tend to not always be as accurate the more that you kind of generalize.

'''S:''' That's why you got to test it. It doesn't matter how you come up with your hypotheses as long as you test them. Right?

'''C:''' Yeah. No, I guess that's true. But I think there is a difference between using reasoning for hypothesis testing and using reasoning philosophically.

'''S:''' Deductive reasonings are definitely more valid philosophically if you're just trying to reason to a conclusion. That's why inductive reasoning doesn't give you a conclusion. It gives you a hypothesis.

'''C:''' Right. And then you have to still test it.

'''S:''' And as long as you understand that, you're fine. The problem is when people use it to come up with a hypothesis that they think is a conclusion when it isn't.

'''C:''' Right. [inaudible] huge generalizations. Yeah.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' Which is why I think Mellor couched this particular quote correctly and put it in good context.

'''S:''' Yep.

'''B:''' Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' I heard a beep on my phone. I looked down. It was a link to a news item. And the title of the news item is Quantum Limits Redefined.

'''S:''' Yep.

'''E:''' Oh, no.

'''C:''' It's too late. Good timing.

'''S:''' Just made it. Just made it.

'''E:''' Ooh.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''J:''' Yeah, Steve.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

SGU Episode 1041

2025-10-01T06:45:21Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

{{Editing required
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{{InfoBox
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|episodeNum = 1041
|episodeDate = {{1000s|1041|boxdate}}
|episodeIcon = File:1041.jpg
|caption = Gathering for beliefs: the Anti-Evolution League showcases their message and literature.
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|qowText = “I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft, because here we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force itself upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum.”
|qowAuthor = — Clarence Darrow
|downloadLink = {{1000s|1041|download}}
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, Juneth, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' Evan Bernstein...

'''E:''' Good evening everyone.

'''S:''' And we have a special guest rogue on this show, Justin Dobb. Justin, welcome to the SGU.

'''JD:''' Thank you so much. I've been listening for almost the entire time you've been doing this, so this is actually pretty crazy.

'''B:''' Awesome.

'''E:''' Welcome, Justin.

'''JD:''' Thank you.

'''S:''' So, Justin, tell us a little bit about yourself.

'''JD:''' Sure. So, I spent a lot of time in a former career doing everything from brand strategy to innovation consulting and future casting, so helping companies figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up. Last year, I spent a year in a fellowship at the University of Chicago trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. And in that fellowship, I actually developed a graduate-level course on how to do innovation with generative AI tools.

'''S:''' That's nice.

'''JD:''' So, we'll see if I can actually get an adjunct position teaching that. The wheels of academia seem to turn pretty slowly these days.

'''S:''' All right. And you're going to talk to us a little bit later in the show about an artificial intelligence-related news item.

'''JD:''' I am.

'''J:''' Yeah, guys. So, Justin in on here. Why? Because he is a patron of the SGU. He's at the Lugzotic level, and we let Lugzotic members join us after they've been at Lugzotic for six months. And anyway, we really appreciate your patronage and your support for the SGU, and thanks for listening to us from the beginning. I think you get it. You know why we're here.

'''JD:''' I do.

'''J:''' And it's a ton of work, but we're all very happy to be doing it, and we just want to make sure our patrons know how much we can't really do this without them.

'''JD:''' Well, like I said, I've been listening a very, very long time, and, you know, my children are actually—they're older now, they're 22 and 21, but they have gone through many of science-fiction on road trips.

'''S:''' They grew up at the SGU, huh?

'''JD:''' They totally did.

'''E:''' That is good parenting.

'''B:''' Those poor kids.

'''S:''' So we should mention that tomorrow, after—tomorrow night when the show goes up, tomorrow after this recording is Juneteenth.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. That's right.

'''S:''' Which is now a holiday, which means no work. This is the last, I guess, holiday I'll have off.

'''C:''' Oh, wow.

'''E:''' Steve's final work-related holiday.

'''J:''' You're milking the hell out of that.

'''S:''' I'm milking it. Yeah, I'm milking it. So yeah, so Juneteenth is amazing. That's the officially the last—the end of slavery, because Union soldiers marched into Galveston, Texas and said, no slaves, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

{{anchor|tiktok}}
== From TikTok: Mysterious Moon (02:51) ==
https://www.tiktok.com/@filspixel/video/7507104277635026182

'''S:''' So we're going to start off with a quick item from TikTok, which is just a chock full of nonsense.

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''S:''' This one comes from Phil's Pixel. He has a video talking about how the moon is hollow, and probably because it's fake, right?

'''E:''' Cool.

'''S:''' I mean, it was constructed by aliens or something. And what he does—I can't go over everything he says, because he gives this {{w|Gish gallop}} of just mystery-mongering about the moon. Some of it is true, but irrelevant, or it's true, but who cares?

'''E:''' Is he presenting someone else's theory, or this is his own theory, Steve?

'''S:''' No, this is definitely somebody else's theory.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''S:''' And he's just sort of pulling it all together.

'''E:''' I see. He's connecting the dots for us.

'''S:''' But there's a couple of things I wanted to point out, a couple of things he says which are flat-out wrong, but it's a good example of how you can twist bits of information into a conspiracy or anomaly hunt. So he says that the moon is only 25% the size of the Earth, but it only has 1% of the mass of the Earth.

'''E:''' Isn't that wrong and wrong?

'''S:''' Well, it's misleading and misleading, is what it is. So when he says it's 25% the size, size is a vague term.

'''B:''' It is.

'''S:''' Right? What does he mean by that?

'''C:''' Right.

'''B:''' Mass, diameter.

'''S:''' He doesn't mean the one thing that matters, and that's volume, right? Because the moon is about 1.3% the volume of the Earth, and it does have about 1% of the mass of the Earth. But see, that doesn't sound quite as impressive as 25% and 1%, does it?

'''C:''' No.

'''B:''' No.

'''E:''' So what's he mean by 25%?

'''S:''' I think diameter, but not volume. But in any case, he uses that discrepancy, that apparent discrepancy, which he is incorrectly stating to say that the moon doesn't have nearly as much mass as it should for its size, because it's hollow. Right? That's what he's getting to. It's hollow.

'''E:''' I see. Right. Okay.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''S:''' But of course, the moon is just, it's a little bit less dense than the Earth, because, of course it is, because it's smaller than the Earth, and because of gravity, right? Gravity squishes the Earth into a more dense orb than the moon. We have more iron at our core. The substance of the Earth is compressed more by gravity, so the Earth is more dense than the moon. Of course it is. No mystery at all. The numbers are not even that impressive. But he, by saying this sort of true, but misleading bits of information, he makes it seem like there's this deep, dark mystery that nobody, scientists are baffled, kind of thing. He also says things like, well, the apparent size of the moon is the same as the sun. And people think that's just a cosmic coincidence. Like, well, yeah, it kind of is just a cosmic coincidence. What else can you say about it?

'''B:''' Yeah. Well, there is more you could say about it. He actually mentions tidal locking, where the one face of the moon is always looking at the Earth.

'''S:''' So that's a different point.

'''B:''' It's a different point, but he's familiar with tidal locking, but he ignores tidal acceleration, which explains that the moon is moving away from the Earth because of tidal acceleration, that the moon actually steals rotational energy from the Earth and transfer it to the moon's orbital speed, which gets it into a higher orbit. So it's moving away at like a few centimeters a year.

'''E:''' We used to have six-hour days on this planet.

'''B:''' I think it was 10 hours, but that's the shortest day I've read about. But he doesn't mention that, you know, because that just kind of ruins his cool point. The moon will be smaller than the sun at some point in the future, and eventually it'll stop moving away. But I think the Earth-moon system will be burned to a crisp before that happens.

'''S:''' Yeah. So basically, we talked about this before on the show, it's not the same size. It's both are variable in size because the Earth's orbit around the sun is a little bit eccentric and the moon's orbit around the Earth is a little bit eccentric, and their variable apparent sizes overlap, right? So not the same size. They have overlapping apparent sizes. And there's a period of the Earth's history where that is going to be the case. We just have—

'''B:''' We are lucky, and it is a cool coincidence.

'''S:''' Yeah. We just happen to be in that period of history when that is the case.

'''E:''' And we're allowed.

'''S:''' But it sounds less cosmic-y than saying they're the same apparent size, you know. But that's the kind of stuff that he's pulling, right?

'''B:''' Right.

'''S:''' You know, something he said is just not true, like all craters are the same depth. No, that's not true.

'''C:''' What?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Again, the point he's trying to build to this point that that's because there's like an artificial subsurface.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. So the 3D printer only prints one depth, right?

'''B:''' So the craters can't get much deeper.

'''C:''' So what's his great conspiracy? Like, what is he trying to promote here?

'''E:''' The hollow moon.

'''S:''' The hollow moon, because it's actually a constructed artifact by aliens, and NASA's hiding it from us.

'''C:''' I see.

'''E:''' It's a mini Dyson sphere.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''S:''' But he figured it out, Cara. This guy has seen past the veil, connected all the dots. He has partial misconstrued information that he has woven together. And actually, somebody else has woven it for him, and he's repeating it on TikTok as if he's a genius.

'''C:''' And it's always so amazing when people have the hubris to think that they have special knowledge that literally no one else has.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Well, here's a comment from one of the observers on his particular video. He calls it the hollow head theory.

'''J:''' Well, Cara, I think that's part of the allure, you know?

'''C:''' Yeah. Definitely.

'''J:''' You know, once you've jockeyed yourself into thinking of things that way, it's exciting. You know, it's exciting. I have inside knowledge. Nobody really knows it.

'''JD:''' But he did miss the obvious conclusion, though, is that the moon is actually made of ozempic.

'''B:''' Oh, it's so obvious now, yeah.

'''E:''' How modern.

'''S:''' These people need a fantasy life, right? Because they're just-

'''E:''' Yeah, they make up-

'''C:''' Play some video games.

'''B:''' Or they need better Google-fu.

'''S:''' Or, just throwing this out there, critical thinking skills, you know.

'''C:''' That too.

'''E:''' That gets in the way.

'''C:''' Probably number one, yeah.

'''E:''' All that fantastical stuff.

'''S:''' That's a lot of work.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== Scopes 100 Year Anniversary (09:19) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scopes-trial-anniversary-science-attack
|article_title = 100 years after the Scopes trial, science is still under attack
|publication = www.sciencenews.org
}}
'''S:''' All right, Cara. It's kind of an important anniversary this year.

'''C:''' It is. So, can anybody tell me what happened from July 10th to July 21st, 1925?

'''S:''' Yes.

'''C:''' You can. Anybody else?

'''E:''' Well, I-

'''C:''' Evan, you can.

'''E:''' Had you asked me this, say, yesterday, I might have fumbled for this answer.

'''J:''' Isn't that when Cthulhu attacked New York City?

'''C:''' That is when the state of Tennessee versus John Thomas Scopes was heard.

'''E:''' Oh, the Scopes Monkey Trial.

'''C:''' Yeah, otherwise known as the Scopes Trial. I hate that it's called the Scopes Monkey. I've never once in my life called it that. But you are correct. It is like a common kind of name for the Scopes Trial.

'''S:''' That's a press name. The Monkey Trial.

'''C:''' Yeah, but the Scopes Trial was a press trial. Let's be honest. Let's be really honest.

'''E:''' Isn't that how you first learned about it? That's what it was called.

'''C:''' Yeah. A lot of people called it that. Let's talk a little bit about the trial first, and then we can talk about sort of what has happened in the hundred years since the Scopes Trial. So I think probably those of us here talking amongst ourselves on the podcast are aware of the particulars of the trial. But for those who maybe need a bit of a refresher, I think it's important to remember that in Dayton, Tennessee, where the trial was held, this was a deliberate trial. John Thomas Scopes was chosen. Actually he volunteered. You can't do it without being volunteered. So they tried to ask the biology teacher at the school, who was also the principal, who was teaching at the school where evolution was taught. They tried to ask him if he would be willing to be arrested, and he said no. And so they found that John Thomas Scopes had substitute taught for like several days, and so he qualified, and he was like, yeah, I'll do it. And so he incriminated himself and said that he taught evolution so that there would be a defendant in this trial. He was represented by the ACLU originally, because they basically said anybody who violates the standing law in Tennessee at the time, the Butler Act, which says that it's illegal to teach evolution in schools, anyone who violates that, we want to defend you because we want to take this, you know, we know it's going to be appealed and we want to take it to the Supreme Court. We're looking to basically defend the constitutionality or the lack of constitutionality of this law. And do you guys remember who were the, I guess, the famed attorneys on either side?

'''E:''' William Jennings Bryan was the-

'''B:''' Oh yeah.

'''S:''' Clarence Darrow.

'''C:''' And Clarence Darrow.

'''B:''' Yeah. Titans.

'''C:''' So William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution. Famously, he had run for president three times.

'''E:''' Several times.

'''C:''' Yeah. Three. And he had been a secretary of state. But throughout his career, he had become more fundamentalist and he had become more interested in sort of defending kind of like biblical fundamentalism. And then Clarence Darrow was the main defense attorney who defended Scopes. But of course, there were several, obviously, lawyers that were involved in the case. I think there was a quote at one point, but that was that somebody said it might have even been Darrow that like, it's not Scopes that's actually on trial here. It's the law that's on trial. That is what we're trying to do is get this law taken off the books. And okay, cut to now, we're 100 years later. It's a little hard to remember. But do you all remember the outcome of the trial?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' He was found guilty and fined. And then...

'''B:''' Like a hundred bucks.

'''S:''' It was overturned because the fine exceeded this limitation. And so it got thrown out on a technicality, never made its way to the Supreme Court. And so the strategy failed.

'''B:''' And that was it.

'''C:''' So the strategy failed at the time. And I'm reading somewhere that the fine of $100, if we were to look at today's money, it would be around like two grand. So it was a relatively small fine from a legal perspective. Okay, so the Butler Act had been on the books. The Butler Act was, you know, this anti-evolution law. There were other anti-evolution laws that were spreading throughout the country. And ultimately, there was a change to the legislation. Ultimately, the Supreme Court did deem teaching only creationism in schools or punishing those who teach evolution in schools as unconstitutional. But that didn't happen until 40 years later. Yeah. In 1968. So that was when Susan Epperson was actually on trial in... Well, she wasn't on trial, but when sort of that trial took place in Arkansas. There's a really great history here with science news. That's why I pulled some articles from Science News, the publication. Of course, you can read about the Scopes trial anywhere. There's lots of wonderful books that have been written about it. But there's really great history here from Science News, because Science News used to be called Science Newsletter. And it was around during the Scopes trial. So they had two different journalists.

'''B:''' Front row seats.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah. It was, let me see, Watson Davis and Frank Thone. Frank Thone was the biology editor who actually went to Dayton and reported on the trial and wrote about it. And I pulled up an article that was written, let's see, on Saturday, June 6th, 1925, 100 years ago. I'm reading an article from it. This is amazing. Professor M.I. Pupin, president of American Association for Advancement of Science, calls arrest lawless act and says, quote, self-respecting American citizens must aid defense. The scientists of America, 14,300 strong, were called to the support of freedom of teaching and of evolution. And so it's so great. So they talk all about kind of how the trial got started. They talk about how there's good evidence right now that we actually did evolve from a common ancestor, as did apes. And then I love this, because at the end of the article, there are some dashes. And then there's like a couple of other headlines that are listed at the very bottom under the science service. One of them says, by rearranging her kitchen utensils, a Virginia woman recently saved herself 323 steps a day, or nearly three miles of walking a month. And then another one, the United States is using up its timber four times as fast as it is growing. These two things were printed on June 6th, 1925, underneath this article about scientists pledging to support a Tennessee professor who was arrested for teaching evolution. So it's very interesting to look back on the beginnings of the Scopes trial, how it was sort of orchestrated, what happened since then. And of course, the push for creationism to be continued to be taught in schools, even into the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and today, the rebranding of creationism as intelligent design. And of course, new laws that are being attempted to be passed and that are definitely supported by the current administration about, "academic freedom", where individuals are lobbying to be able to teach, "scientific controversies", you know, under the guise of academic freedom, continuing to be able to teach intelligent design and doubts about evolution. So 100 years later, I think we made some progress, probably not as much as we would have liked. And the, I don't know, what do you want to call it? The undermining of scientific teaching? It rages on. We are still having to be vigilant about this 100 years later.

'''E:''' Endless battle.

'''C:''' Mm-hmm.

'''S:''' Yeah, the Scopes trial really has an interesting and complicated legacy, you know, as you say, because it certainly broke this debate out into the public, and I think over time, to the broader public, eventually, I think, you know, evolution won out.

'''C:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' But textbook companies got very risk-averse, and essentially, they just pulled evolution from the textbooks, so we've kind of lost a generation in terms of learning about evolution, right?

'''C:''' And then that continued later.

'''S:''' Until the 60s.

'''B:''' That's horrible.

'''C:''' Yeah, and then later, we saw changes because of Texas. Yeah, so if anybody's not seen, I think the documentary's called The Revisionaries, is that correct? I'm going to just Google that to make sure. Yeah, 2012, Austin, Texas, 15 people influence what is taught to the next generation of American children once every decade, and so PBS airs it, it's the Texas Board of Education who has so much control over textbooks, like a large majority of the textbooks that are printed in public schools across the country, and how their sort of anti-evolution, procreation, in many different aspects of education, there's a rewriting of history, but they do focus quite a bit on evolution there.

'''S:''' All right, thanks, Cara.

'''C:''' Yep.

{{anchor|news_item2}}
=== Smells and Hunger (18:42) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/06/250612031553.htm
|article_title = The hunger switch in your nose: How smells tell your brain to stop eating | ScienceDaily
|publication = www.sciencedaily.com
}}
'''S:''' Jay, tell us about the effects of smells on hunger.

'''J:''' Let me ask you guys, does smelling food make you more or less hungry?

'''S:''' Depends on the food.

'''J:''' Personally.

'''C:''' Well, I mean, it makes the hunger coalesce. That makes sense? I might not know if I'm hungry, and then I might smell really good-smelling food, and I'm like, yep, I'm hungry.

'''J:''' I mean, in my mind, it basically makes me more hungry. You know, I get that, you know, you could smell something, and whether you're hungry or not, you might be like, ooh, that, you know, I want to try that, especially desserts, for Christ's sake. I mean, I don't have to be hungry at all to be seduced by a dessert, you know?

'''S:''' It depends on what you mean by hungry, too. As you say, there's the desire to eat, and then there's, like, physical hungry.

'''J:''' I don't even know what the difference is between those two things, do you?

'''E:''' Yeah, I mean, I have...

'''S:''' I do. I mean, there are...

'''E:''' Yeah, I'm going a day without food, and I've been hungry at the end of that day.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, I've been... Yeah, you know, like, when you're really, really hungry, but certainly I've had the desire to eat something because it's delicious, even though I have no hunger.

'''C:''' But, Steve, you're right. If I smell, like, fish, or if I smell... If I smell, I don't know, brussels, they don't make me hungry.

'''J:''' Justin, what's a food item that you just can't turn down?

'''JD:''' Well, Jay, I'm going to run into your camp of meatballs.

'''J:''' knew I liked you, but now I'm 100% sure.

'''JD:''' You can't eat a meatball.

'''J:''' Meatballs... You know, like, so many people get angry at me because it's meat, and, you know, I get it. I totally get it.

'''JD:''' Agreed.

'''J:''' But, look, I grew up with this food item. It's ingrained in my DNA at this point.

'''S:''' There's also some food that if you see other people eating the food, you want to eat that food.

'''JD:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Even, like, on TV. There's a few that come to mind. Apples.

'''E:''' Noodles.

'''S:''' Spaghetti.

'''E:''' Mm-hmm.

'''S:''' And potato chips.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''JD:''' I'm not sure if I see someone eating spaghetti that makes me want to eat it.

'''S:''' Oh, absolutely.

'''JD:''' Sometimes it...

'''S:''' Spaghetti with sauce?

'''J:''' Noodles do it. It gets me.

'''E:''' Yeah, noodles are it.

'''J:''' Especially when they're doing the thing, you know, when they're, like, twisting their fork, and you just bear down on that. I know. Yeah.

'''JD:''' It might be the Will Smith eating spaghetti kind of AI video that turned me off.

'''B:''' Oh, my God, yeah.

'''J:''' Something recently happened that... It was odd that scientists discovered something that starts with a smell and ends with a full stomach, and there's no chewing required. And this research team in Germany, they're at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research.

'''S:''' Is that anywhere near the Max Planck Institute?

'''J:''' You know, if they want me to pronounce it that way, change the way they spell it. You know what I'm saying?

'''E:''' That's the American embassy, Steve. Max Planck.

'''J:''' Goddamn.

'''C:''' I'm sure Max Planck is equally not correct, though.

'''S:''' I'm just saying.

'''C:''' It is German.

'''S:''' I'm just trying to keep things straight.

'''C:''' But you're right. I tend to say it. Max Planck.

'''J:''' My sweet, mate Christian.

'''C:''' Max Planck.

'''J:''' So these guys, these guys over here at some university over there who study metabolism, they found a brain circuit that suppresses appetite the instant that food is smelled. Now, this was, of course, done in mice, so keep that in mind, you know, but it's still a very interesting thing for us to discuss. This is just smelling it, not tasting it, not eating it, they just smell it. So this is what they figured out. They were studying how smell might influence, you know, common feeding behavior. This isn't new territory and, you know, what they found, lots of other researchers have been doing similar kinds of research and everything, but in this particular instance, they stumbled on something really, really cool. So inside the brain, they traced a line from the olfactory bulb where, you know, scent first gets processed to a small cluster of neurons in a region called the medial septum. Now, Steve, where is that?

'''B:''' In the middle of something.

'''J:''' I mean, it sounds like in the middle of your nose, but this is in the brain, though?

'''S:''' Yes, that is definitely in the brain.

'''J:''' Okay, good.

'''C:''' That's right there in the brain.

'''J:''' Yeah, okay. So these specific neurons had one job, make the animal feel full. And I think this is universally common among mammals. But they were getting it switched on before food ever, you know, touched their mouth. So the moment that the smell hit their brain, the circuit lit up. And in lean mice, that single switch had an immediate effect and it shut down their appetite. But this happened not hours or minutes later, like this was happening within a scant seconds. And the smell of food activated these, what are you, okay, I can't pronounce the word, satiety, satiety, satiation?

'''S:''' Satiety.

'''J:''' Satiety. Christ Almighty.

'''B:''' That's a good one.

'''E:''' From the word satiate?

'''J:''' All right, satiety neurons. So basically eat less, right? And that's the sequence. So why would a brain evolve to do that, which I think is a very important question to ask at this point. So one of the study authors, Janice Bulk, thinks that fast feedback loops were probably there as a survival mechanism. And in the wild, as an animal, you know, an animal might have 30 seconds to grab food before something comes to grab that food or it. So the sooner it can stop eating and get moving again, the better off, the more likely that animal would survive. So being able to trigger feeling full earlier based on smell alone would let them eat quickly without overeating and getting sluggish and basically not only losing their lunch, but they'd lose themselves. So the twist is that the whole system falls apart in obese mice. So that same scent, same neurons, but in obese mice, nothing happens. The medial septum just stays dark, doesn't fire at all. And the smell of food doesn't flip that, you know, full switch. So the mice keep eating and they're completely unaffected. And this is important because it adds to a growing pile of evidence that obesity interferes with olfactory pathways, and in this specific case, with feeling full. So, you know, it's a compounding problem.

'''C:''' Well, wait, wait, but that makes it sound like it's causal, but it could be that the mice were always like that and that's why they have obesity, right? They never feel full, which is why they never stop.

'''J:''' Sure, but they're not born obese, right?

'''S:''' Yeah, but they became obese because they had that.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This could cause obesity. This doesn't have to be a result of obesity.

'''J:''' You should call up Janice Bulk at the Max Planck University in Calgary. Let's see, you know, let me see if I can find anything that addresses that. But I think they're actually, yes, you're saying like that part of the brain doesn't light up as something that they were born with and that's why they're obese.

'''C:''' Yeah, like if you're born with a defective satiety signal, you're not going to know when to stop eating.

'''S:''' We may be running into the difference between what the data shows and what they think the data says. The data shows that obese mice don't have this satiety response to odors. They may be speculating or hypothesizing that it sounds like what they're saying is they think it's that obesity down-regulates that receptor pathway over time.

'''J:''' That's how I read it.

'''S:''' As opposed to they were born that way and that's why they're obese. Either one fits the data.

'''C:''' Which I think is also a viable hypothesis, right?

'''S:''' So how do you separate those two?

'''C:''' Then you have to start doing experiments where you knock out that section of the brain, yeah.

'''B:''' Right.

'''J:''' All right, so-

'''S:''' But the thing is it could also be both.

'''C:''' It probably is.

'''S:''' Yeah, and that's what they say is self-reinforcing. Maybe you're born with that tendency and then it gets worse, if anything, over time.

'''J:''' So the interesting thing here, and I appreciate you saying that, Cara. It's a good thing to think about. Humans have the same medial septum structure in their brains, so in our brains. So we don't know yet whether it's going to react the same way to food smells. But some human studies that have been done have shown that certain odors can curb appetite. And it's not all the time. They're saying that this is sometimes. So there's also evidence that people with obesity are more likely to eat in response to smells than people who are lean. So in other words, something might be broken in the same place, right? The lead researcher, Sophie Steklerum, she said very plainly, olfaction plays a role in appetite regulations and obesity. We found that smell-triggered appetite reduction appears only in lean mice, not in obese ones. So that last part, I guess, is pretty much key there. The system works, but only under certain conditions. So this research is valuable because it basically opens a door, right? Right now, most obesity treatments focus on hormones, appetite-suppressing drugs, or they have metabolic interventions. But this new study could suggest that there might be another route, literally, that it could come through the olfactory bulb. And if we can figure out how to activate it or repair that circuit in people who've lost the signal, we might have a new tool here for reducing overeating. Which I...

'''B:''' The olfactory.

'''J:''' It's pretty interesting because I could tell you... That's why I asked you guys beforehand, before we got into it. I don't think there's... Other than, of course, smelling things that you're supposed to be repulsed by, there isn't any smell-less-hungry thing going on that I've ever observed in general. It just doesn't work that way. Smells typically make you want the food.

'''C:''' Yeah. But that's... Yeah. But again, it depends on if you like the food. I really struggle with smells because I'm very sensitive to them. So if you open a refrigerator and I smell the food, like cold food in a refrigerator, it's pretty repulsive to me and it makes me not hungry. So I think that happens a lot. But what I like about this study is that it does contribute to a growing body of literature that shows the thing that I think a lot of people who have done research in this area for years have always known, and I think psychologists see this, and Steve, I'm sure that you have a view on this too, that culturally, we have blamed and shamed people with severe obesity as a problem with their willpower for so long. And we have done such a disservice by not stopping and thinking about the fact that there have to be biological correlates here. There have to be things going on in the brain. There have to be things going on metabolically. Nobody wants to find themselves in that position.

'''J:''' Yeah, of course.

'''C:''' There's so... And it's probably a confluence of factors. It's so, so many things, but it is not an easy way to live and it's a really painful way to live and there's a lot of shame in our culture around it. And the truth of the matter, I just remember seeing this brilliant interview once with somebody who was talking about Ozempic, I mean, speaking of the joke earlier, and they were saying, you know, what do you say to people who say you took the easy way out by taking Ozempic? And their response was, I would say that those people are naturally thin. You know what I mean? Like, it's very easy to cast those kinds of aspersions.

'''S:''' You were dealt the easy way out.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly. I might need a little bit of help, you know, because I didn't have the same genetics as you or maybe downstream from my olfactory bulb, I didn't have a satiety signal kick in.

'''S:''' Yeah. No, I've had that conversation with thin people who have never dieted a day in their life, have never had to think about regulating their caloric intake, they are just naturally thin. And they don't understand that that's just different, that not everyone is that way.

'''E:''' Yeah, they're the freaks.

'''C:''' Yeah. And I think I had a rude awakening because I was that person. I was that person all the way until I hit that time in my life when many people do. Yeah, when your metabolism changes and I go, oh, I learned no healthy skills.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' I didn't need them when I was younger.

'''S:''' Yeah. Definitely environmental reasons as well. Cultural and environmental.

'''C:''' Oh, for sure. For sure. But I was just going to say it's one of the reasons that people who get bariatric surgery almost always need a psych consult and almost always have mental health support on their teams.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Jay.

{{anchor|news_item3}}
=== Black Hole Supercollider (30:55) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/06/250603114637.htm
|article_title = Black holes could act as natural supercolliders -- and help uncover dark matter | ScienceDaily
|publication = www.sciencedaily.com
}}

'''S:''' Bob, tell us about using black holes as a supercollider.

'''B:''' This was a fun topic to research. So a new study shows that black holes might be able to offer new scientific insights similar to the proposed successor to the Large Hadron Collider. Have you guys heard about this? The Future Circular Collider, FCC. The study also offers an example of how particle physics research can deal with the depressing lack of new particle physics discoveries using increasingly expensive supercolliders, which I'm going to talk about as well. The study was recently published in Physical Review Letters, and the name of the study is Black Hole Supercolliders. To me, this was fascinating, of course, and good news, because I think there's a good chance that mega supercollider successors to the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, will not be approved. I'm specifically referring to CERN's proposed successor to the LHC. It was in the news a while back, the FCC, or Future Circular Collider, which is up for approval in 2028. This collider has a circumference, or would have a circumference, of about 100 kilometers, where LHC is only 27 kilometers, so this is a big boy. It'll have collision energies at 100 tera electron volts, TEV, which is about eight times greater than the LHC, so amazingly powerful. The expected price tag is 15 billion Swiss francs, which is about 18.3 billion USD, so ridiculously expensive. It does sound incredible, but honestly, it's tough to be confident that we're going to get much new science from it. Why is that? Well, I would say look at the LHC. Look at the Large Hadron Collider since 2012, essentially. The LHC had really high hopes. If you were following it back then, there was so many high hopes for it when it was being built. The reasoning, it made sense why that would be the case. The collision energies that were involved were unprecedented at the time, a whopping seven trillion electron volts in the early days, much more than the Tevatron, which used to have the record. The theories at the time also seemed to support this idea that these big discoveries were possible in that energy regime of, say, seven trillion electron volts. Now, these high hopes we had included confirming, I'm sure you remember, the theorized Higgs particle/field. Remember that?The Higgs field imparts mass to fundamental, whoa, fundamental, that's right there, fundamental. The Higgs field imparts mass to fundamental particles via the Higgs boson, right? So we all remember that. But beyond the Higgs, though, there were also lots of expectations for other things like supersymmetric particles predicted by supersymmetry, dark matter candidates like WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles. They also were expectations of at least hints of extraspatial dimensions and more and more. That's just a partial list. Now back in 2012, I'm sure we all remember, right? The LHC confirmed Higgs, and it was momentous, absolutely. I remember reporting about it at TAM in 2012. The discovery even earned a Nobel Prize within, what, a few years, a couple years? The next day? I don't remember, but it was fast. But on the other hand, have you heard me report about any of those other discoveries? No, nope, nothing from the LHC about those. And sure, these are negative results, and these negative results can help narrow down theories. So they do have some utility for sure, but they also frustratingly pointed to what physicists call the nightmare scenario. So now the nightmare scenario is a scenario where increasingly powerful and expensive supercolliders continue only to confirm and refine our current understanding of the standard model of physics, of particle physics, without revealing fundamentally new physics at all, like dark matter or new forces. So that's the nightmare scenario. And it's kind of scary where it's like, yeah, yeah, we knew this, and we got a couple more new decimal points of precision here, but where's the new stuff? Throw us a bone, universe, come on. That's the fear, which I've kind of mentioned briefly on the show from time to time. Now some theoretical models suggest that new physics could require energies far beyond what even the future circular collider could reach at 100 trillion electron volts, which of course is much more than the LHC's meager 14 TeV. So that's scary to think that some of these models were even suggesting that, yeah, we're not going to... We may need to go well beyond 100 to even get anything new. So what do we do now, right? Besides cry a little, of course. One approach, which I think will gain increasing momentum, trying to deal with this gap of energy is more of an emphasis on what they're simply describing as precision physics. So that means that you're looking less for new particles and more of a focus on ultra precise measurements of many things, like Higgs, other force parameters, like electroweak or rare processes, all of which could potentially show these subtle deviations that reveal new physics. And sure, it's not as sexy as like, look, I found a new particle. It's more of like, look, we've refined this calculation or this estimate to 10 decimal places, but look, it may reveal something new. So it's not as inherently interesting, but that's what we may need to focus more on. So like I said, precision physics might not find new particles directly, but it can still help us figure out where to look next. And that could be incredibly valuable. Another approach to deal with this is having a greater emphasis on complementing the current supercollider experiments. And for that, you could use things more like gravitational wave astronomy, which we've talked about. It's super fascinating, helping with multi-messenger astronomy. You know I love gravitational wave astronomy, but also neutrino physics, precision tabletop experiments, and another option here is cosmological observations. This last example finally brings me to the meat of this new study. So cosmological observations of black holes as supercolliders. The idea here is that particles orbiting a rapidly spinning black hole can plunge towards the black hole's horizon very fast if they're orbiting in the opposite direction to spin. You got that? So these retrograde orbits are not typical though, but they do exist. When those particles collide with particles from different orbits, the collision energies can be just off the hook. I mean on the scale of tens or even hundreds of tera electron volts, similar and even greatly exceeding that proposed future circular collider. So that's a tremendous amount of energy, which is not a surprise because we're talking about black holes here. So therefore we can potentially get some relatively cheap insights into particle physics at these extreme energy regimes that don't exist on Earth yet. So the potential of studying particles ejected from black holes in this way is threefold as I see it. It could give us collision data that's roughly comparable to the Large Hadron Collider, maybe more powerful, and guide our theoretical development and current collider experiments, so it could be very valuable in that way. But this could also give us the confidence we need that the future circular collider could indeed expose new physics beyond the standard model. So that would be amazingly valuable because if you're going to spend $18 billion on something, you want your confidence levels to be high enough, and I don't think they're high enough right now to warrant it. So this black hole data could give us that confidence that we don't have now. And finally, kind of a best case scenario here, it could give us insights into energy regimes of many hundreds of tera electron volts, which we probably couldn't otherwise observe for a hundred years or more, assuming technology development stays at its current level of progress. So that's the story here, that using these black holes as super colliders is an example of one of the many different ways we are going to probably start doing research for particle physics, because these super colliders are just getting too expensive, and there's just not a lot of hope these days that we're anywhere near the energy regimes that we might need in order to get some results from them.

'''JD:''' So Bob, how do they propose measuring those collisions at the event horizon?

'''B:''' Well, I mean, we have some high-energy detectors even now that observe black holes, so we may be able to detect some of these particles that are emitted from the — that are ejected, you know, from black holes. We can maybe detect some of them now, so we need to make a concerted effort to look for these high-energy neutrinos, for example, or protons that are, you know, cosmic rays.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Bob.

'''B:''' Thanks. Thanks for the question.

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== Antarctica Radio Pulses (40:19) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/strange-radio-pulses-detected-coming-ice-antarctica
|article_title = Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica | Penn State University
|publication = www.psu.edu
}}
'''S:''' Evan, tell us about this mysterious Antarctica radio pulse.

'''E:''' I would like to introduce you to Anita. Say hi to Anita.

'''C:''' Hi, Anita.

'''J:''' Hi.

'''E:''' If Anita could say hello back, Anita would, but Anita can't. That's because Anita is, or I should say was, a scientific instrument, not programmed for etiquette or protocol, Jay, but — thanks, Bob — but rather, Anita detects neutrinos.

'''B:''' Did she speak Baci?

'''E:''' Yeah. It's like a second language. Anita detects neutrinos, lovely, lovely ultra-high-energy neutrinos, and it does so by capturing radio pulses generated as the neutrinos interact with the Antarctic ice surface. Anita is an acronym, right, Bob? Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna. That would be an acronym. The Anita Project had four separate missions. The first one began in 2006, and the last one, its fourth mission, wrapped up in 2018. Anita consisted of dozens of radio antennas mounted on a 25-foot gondola pointing downward to monitor radio waves in the ice that arise from neutrino interactions. And all of that data was recorded to be studied and studied and studied some more. Okay, so now you know what Anita was and what Anita did. But the question this week, this news item, why is Anita in the headlines this week, a full seven years after its last mission? Well, here's one of the headlines. This one's from Penn State University. Strange radio pulses detected coming from ice in Antarctica. Over at Science Alert, they have strange radio signals detected emanating from deep under Antarctic ice. And IFL Science says anomalous radio pulses detected in Antarctica are coming from underneath the ice. And of course, there's a ton of other articles about this. So, if anyone else – did anyone else read about this or see any headlines about this? And if they did –

'''J:''' Yeah, I read it.

'''E:''' Did your mind immediately jump to John Carpenter's the Thing?

'''S:''' Of course.

'''E:''' Yes, right? I was – I could not have been the only one to think about the thing.

'''S:''' The thing left his radio on and his spaceship under the ice.

'''E:''' Seriously. I mean, I don't think they wrote these –

'''B:''' Dig me up.

'''E:''' Right?

'''B:''' Dig me up. I don't know that they wrote the headlines with that intention, but that's actually what happened in my brain. It's like – so, I'm reading, it's like, oh my gosh, what, malevolent creatures been detected emitting radio waves while it takes over people's bodies in Antarctica? So cool. But no. Anita. Back to Anita. So, it's reported that Anita's data detected radio pulses emerging from beneath the ice at unusually steep angles, they say around 30 degrees below horizontal. That is considered highly unusual. All right. Well, what's newsworthy about that? Well, let's go back to that first Anita mission back in 2006. Almost 20 years ago. Almost as long as we've been making this podcast. As I said before, Anita was designed to detect neutrinos, not directly, but through their interaction with the Antarctic ice. The signal being detected is a radio wave, in this case, a super short burst. And Bob, I saw it referred to as a nanochirp. Never heard nanochirp before. So it's detecting these nanochirp signals being caused by the interaction of the neutrino in the ice. OK. And Bob, I also read this. I had to pull this one sentence out because you'll love this. A quintillion electron volt neutrino slams an atom, triggers a particle avalanche, and that cascade emits an Ascarian radio pulse.

'''B:''' Ascarian? Wait, what's that? I'm not even...

'''E:''' So this phenomenon was discovered, I think, back in the 1960s. It's called the Ascarian effect, the A-S-K-A-R-Y-A-N effect. I guess when the neutrinos interact with the ice and emit that radio signal. So that's basically, that's what it's referring to. So this detection has been around for a long time. So 2006, ANITA-1 mission, it was just a short pulse among the data. It collected a lot of data, but there was this short pulse and it detected some of the nanochirps at such an angle that, according to the angle, it must have come from the direction of the earth.

'''B:''' Like deep, right?

'''E:''' Yes. From the earth.

'''B:''' Well under the ground.

'''E:''' Yes. All right. Well, OK. So what? If it traveled through 7,000 kilometers of planet before it interacted with the ice from below, that would be unusual. All right. Maybe it was a glitch. Maybe something weird with the data. No big deal, right? So you have the ANITA-3 mission in 2014 and the same detection occurred in which there was a bit of data that said basically the same thing. Oh, and it happened two more times in 2016 and 2018 with the last ANITA-4 mission. All right. And according to the professionals, that ain't supposed to happen with these neutrinos, right? I mean, a neutrino, what, might be able to go through a few kilometers of planet, but not thousands, right? It's not like it went through – it was – because they generate from space, from large events that occur in space and travel and travel and travel until they interact with something. And you can get through – and it will penetrate things, but not thousands of kilometers of planet. They're saying no way. Wait.

'''B:''' Are you sure about that? Are you sure?

'''E:''' This corresponds to about 8 to 10 interaction lengths at the required neutrino energy, EV 0.2, causing severe attenuation and requiring a something flux that should have been observed with other instruments.

'''S:''' Evan, they are referring there to the radio signals that result from the neutrino interaction, not the neutrinos themselves. Neutrinos can penetrate light years of lead. They don't have a problem going all the way through the earth. But once they interact, then the subsequent particles of the radio waves and the other particles that they're detecting, those have a decay length. Those have a limit on how far they can go.

'''E:''' Okay. So Anita detects these nanochirps, right, and says, all right, neutrinos are causing these. But there are other detectors at the same time that are in work. One is called IceCube and the other is called the Pierre Auger Observatory, which look directly for sources of neutrinos. And their data, when it lined up, you know, then this was what the new study is about. They analyzed 15 years of cosmic data collected by that observatory in Argentina to try to make sense of the signals. And guess what? The observatory's data found that at the same time Anita was detecting these radio signals supposedly generated by the neutrinos, these other instruments found nothing. They detected no neutrino activity.

'''B:''' Okay. So that sounds like the best argument right there. They basically are saying, no, you really shouldn't think that this is neutrinos because you're ruling that out.

'''E:''' Correct. Right. Right. So this research was done by a team of international scientists, including those from Penn State University researchers, and they recently published their results in the journal Physics Review Letters. Stephanie Whistle, who's an associate professor of physics and astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the Anita team said this, the radio waves that we detected nearly a decade ago were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice. It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos. Okay. Whoa. So not neutrinos. So it's what? Some other, what, particle? That's known to the standard model of physics, right? They must be. Well, apparently they can't make that. They can't make that conclusion either. They don't know what these are.

'''B:''' It's a mystery. Yeah, it's a mystery.

'''E:''' And Whistle says, my guess is that some interesting radio propagation effects occur near ice and also near the horizon that we don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those and we haven't been able to find any of those either. So right now it's one of those longstanding mysteries, and I'm excited when we fly PUEO, which is the payload for ultra high energy observations, we'll have better sensitivity. So that's a new project, a new one. Three times, I think, the power of the sensitivity that Anita had. And she says, in principle, we should pick up more anomalies and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. And I read somewhere that they said, okay, so if this new device, if this new detector or array of detectors picks up the same chirps, then they say, the case for new physics hardens overnight and textbooks get a new chapter. Now that might be a little, what, exciting, an exciting way of saying that maybe. I don't know. Rewriting, you know, that's, that's a big thing to say. However, it is interesting nonetheless.

'''S:''' Evan, let me ask you a question. So how's this motherfucker wake up after thousands of years in the ice?

'''B:''' Where did that come from?

'''S:''' That's a quote from the Thing. Come on.

'''E:''' That is directly from the movie.

'''B:''' Which one? The one from 81?

'''S:''' What do you mean which one? The Thing.

'''E:''' The Thing. Not the original. John Carpenter's.

'''S:''' Do you believe this voodoo bullshit, Jay? All right.

'''J:''' I don't know what it is, but it's weird and pissed off.

'''B:''' Yeah. That's the quote right there.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan.

'''E:''' Yep.

{{anchor|news_item5}}
=== GMOs May Save Florida Citrus (51:52) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/gmos-may-save-florida-citrus/
|article_title = GMOs May Save Florida Citrus - NeuroLogica Blog
|publication = theness.com
}}
'''S:''' All right, Justin, let me ask you a question. Where do you live?

'''JD:''' I live in Chicago, Illinois.

'''S:''' Chicago.

'''JD:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Have you ever been to Florida?

'''JD:''' I have been to Florida, actually.

'''S:''' What industry is Florida known for?

'''JD:''' Besides meth?

'''S:''' We'll narrow your choices. What agricultural industry would you say it's known for?

'''JD:''' Citrus.

'''S:''' Citrus. Yeah. It is the citrus state. Right? Especially when we were younger. Like, Florida was before Disney was as huge as it is. Florida was about oranges.

'''E:''' Oh, it was all orange. Yep. The orange bowl.

'''S:''' Did you associate that? Since 2004, are you aware of the fact that the Florida citrus industry has been reduced by 90%?

'''B:''' What?

'''J:''' How can that be? Where are they coming from now?

'''E:''' Why? Why would they do that to themselves?

'''C:''' Citrus greening, right?

'''S:''' It's citrus greening. Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's a big deal. Kevin Folta talks about it all the time. You guys have not been listening.

'''E:''' He doesn't shut up about it.

'''S:''' It's huge. Production costs have doubled, and it's basically wiped out 90% of the Florida citrus industry. They can't maintain their orchards with the prices. So citrus greening is an infection. It's caused by a bacterium Candidatus liberibacter asiaticus, which does come from Asia. It's spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, which is an invasive fly, an introduced invasive fly.

'''E:''' Oh, boy. Introduced.

'''B:''' On purpose?

'''S:''' Well, I mean, by accident. Right? It's an invasive species. Yeah. It's a fly. Things move around. This is one of the massive downsides of a global economy, especially of agriculture, is that pests get transported along with produce. It's called citrus greening because that's what happens to the fruit that gets infected. So in the last 20 years, there have been multiple methods tried to keep it under control. They have all completely failed. But there is some good news, everyone.

'''E:''' Good news.

'''S:''' What do you think is potentially coming to the rescue?

'''E:''' It's got to be GMOs.

'''B:''' Climate change.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''B:''' Climate change?

'''S:''' Nope. GMOs.

'''E:''' Bob, to the rescue. To rescue.

'''S:''' The University of Florida, in collaboration with a company called SoilSia, has developed a GMO orange that is highly resistant to citrus greening.

'''B:''' Awesome.

'''S:''' They expect to have commercial trees available in spring 2027. The development takes a time because in order to know if their GMO cultivars work, right, you have to wait for the tree to mature enough to produce fruit, which is like 10 years. So you have to make sure that the tree remains resistant and is able to produce fruit, and the fruit is fine. So it's not like you can grow the crop in three months and test it and go from there. You can't iterate it that quickly. So that's the main limiting factor. This is all based upon the work of, well, it's multiple people, but primarily one, Dr. Nian Wang, who's a professor at the University of Florida. He found out that the bacterium is dependent upon interacting with the host and certain specific genes, and then they developed CRISPR, of course, CRISPR to silence those genes so that the bacterium cannot infect the plants.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''B:''' Well, what are the side effects of silencing those genes?

'''S:''' That's the question, right? So far, there doesn't appear to be any negative effects, but they have to make sure that, again, the fruit is fine. Not every gene is critical to life, you know what I mean? It's not like you silence any of your 20,000 genes and you die. Some genes provide some kind of relative advantage, but not a critical advantage, or they may be interacting with other genes, or they may affect the plant but not the fruit, you know what I mean?

'''B:''' So it's like they're knockouts.

'''S:''' Yes, yeah. They were silenced. Yeah. So that's like a way of knocking out a gene. So far, it appears to be working extremely well. The plants that are treated have been growing robustly and seem to show complete resistance to the bacteria. So it looks good. But again, we won't know until we know. It would take a couple more years for the test plants to fully mature.

'''B:''' How diverse are these test plants? Does it have a risk of like a monoculture?

'''S:''' Well, no, it is a monoculture, right? It's a GMO.

'''B:''' So that has its own risks, right?

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean-

'''C:''' That's basically how we farm now.

'''S:''' Yeah. But what they could do is make multiple different cultivars with these genes silenced so that you do have some more-

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. That sounds pretty damn reasonable to me.

'''S:''' Also, good news.

'''E:''' Good news.

'''S:''' The USDA has determined that these genetically altered cultivars do not qualify as subject to regulation under federal rules. So this is a little bit of a complicated backstory. So in 2020, the USDA decided to exempt certain kinds of genetic engineering from requiring USDA approval. For example, just silencing a gene. They said that's not a GMO. We don't need to approve it. However, a court struck down that ruling saying that the USDA still has to approve the cultivars. So what their current decision was is kind of skirting that ruling saying that, well, these don't fall under the USDA's regulatory sphere. So rather than saying this is sort of exempt to our approval, they're saying it's outside the USDA's sphere.

'''B:''' Does that mean that somebody got a bribe from the citrus industry?

'''S:''' No.

'''B:''' Just throwing that out there.

'''E:''' Someone got juiced.

'''C:''' Oh, God.

'''S:''' So GMOs have to be approved by several agencies, by the USDA under sort of agricultural regulation, by the FDA if it's a food, and by the EPA to make sure it's environmentally safe. So there's really no environmental issue here. We're not talking about pesticides or anything. The FDA has to say, yeah, these oranges are basically equivalent to non-GMO oranges. So there's no issue there. And the USDA says, like, agriculturally, these are substantially similar. But they said that because of that, the EPA has to say there's no environmental risk. The FDA has to say they're safe as food. And the USDA basically said they're outside of our jurisdiction. So it's not guaranteed, but it's looking good for getting approval from all of the agencies. So we could be seeing by as early as 2027 orchards planting these plants and replacing the ones that they have.

'''B:''' But for the most part, though, it's going to be a waiting game now for many years.

'''S:''' Couple more years. Yeah.

'''B:''' No, no. Before they're mature enough to produce.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. But it's going to take time before the industry rebounds.

'''J:''' So why haven't we seen a dramatic increase in pricing?

'''S:''' I don't know that we haven't seen increases in pricing. There has been. But I think just California, other parts of the world are just taking up the slack.

'''B:''' So they're not happy right now, then. Right?

'''S:''' Well. You know. But actually.

'''B:''' Damn, Florida's coming back.

'''S:''' But I mean, citrus greening was coming for them eventually as well.

'''B:''' Yeah. Good point.

'''S:''' So this is very similar to what happened to the papaya in Hawaii. The papaya industry was almost completely wiped out because of a virus. And they were able to make a GMO papaya, again, by silencing an existing gene. They didn't introduce any transgene or any new external or novel genetic material. And Hawaii, which is culturally very anti-GMO, quietly said, OK, we're going to say this is OK. We're going to carve out an exception for the GMO papaya because otherwise the papaya industry was going bye bye.

'''E:''' Zero. Right.

'''J:''' So basically money can solve all these problems.

'''S:''' Yeah. The same exact story is playing out in Florida. Like there's no way Florida is going to turn away something which is going to save the Florida citrus industry. The same thing happened with the American chestnut. It was almost wiped out by an Asian fungus and a GMO variety that's resistant to the fungus was created. However, this is not quite a clean success story because as the trees, as those chestnuts, the GMO chestnut trees are aging, there's questions about how sustainable their performance is in the field. So they may need to go back and do more genetic tweaking. They're resistant, but maybe they're not resistant enough to this fungus. And this is also playing out with, as we've said many times on this show, the banana industry. So the Tropical Race 4 fungus is in the process of wiping out the Cavendish banana industry. But there already is a GMO variety of banana that is resistant to Tropical Race 4 that was approved for human consumption in Australia and New Zealand. Because the banana industry is so global, it would need to get approval in many other nations as well. But hopefully, that will happen in a timely enough fashion that we could just basically swap out the resistant GMO banana for the existing ones. Otherwise, in five, 10 years, we may have no banana industry. So I think the good news is, I've been tracking this for the last 10, 15 years, the whole GMO thing, is I think the public is not paying as much attention to this issue as they 10 years ago. There was so much anti-GMO stuff going on. Now, it's like people are just quietly accepting it. And I think that these instances of GMO varieties saving entire industries, nobody could really meaningfully push back against that. And the downside is so massive. No regulators is going to shut down the solution to the entire agricultural industries being wiped out. And I think going forward, this problem is going to just get greater. We are going to need GMO varieties to maintain our agriculture in the face of increasing threat from these kinds of global infections. There's just no other way we're going to be able to keep up, unless you want mass starvation.

'''E:''' Right.

'''J:''' Of course not.

'''B:''' Eventually, we'll need to be making them more heat tolerant, I assume.

'''S:''' Yes, they're working on that as well. There was actually by coincidence, I just saw a study today where they found that global warming is, despite attempts at mitigation, is decreasing global agricultural yields. So our farmlands will be producing fewer crops because of climate change. One way to mitigate that is to GMO crops that are adapted to not only drier climates, but also warmer climates, and also increased CO2. So to take advantage of the increased CO2, just kind of offset the disadvantage of warmer, drier climate. So that's going to be critical as well. Right? Because even if we take like, oh, 5%, 10% hit to productivity, that's huge. That's a lot of extra land that you therefore then need to cultivate in order to produce the same amount of food.

'''E:''' We're quickly running out of that.

'''S:''' We're basically, well, there's no out of land, really. It's just a matter of how good the land is. We're using all of the best agricultural land right now, and expanding into new land gets increasingly problematic. Either it's just not as productive, or we have to cut down forests, or we have to displace people. There's no easy land left to cultivate.

'''E:''' Yeah. There's a lot of trade-offs that go hand in hand with that. Steve, you mentioned chestnuts.

'''S:''' Yep.

'''E:''' I'm a chestnut.

'''S:''' Are you?

'''E:''' I love the game. I play it all the time.

'''S:''' Is that right?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' All right. That's your one dad joke for the week.

'''C:''' He's already done like three.

'''E:''' No, that's, Cara! First of all, stop that. Steve doesn't need you to count for him. Justin, thank you for, I think, laughing.

'''JD:''' It's what I do.

== Special Report (1:04:40) ==
Does AI Think?
None

'''S:''' All right, Justin. You're going to talk to us. You're going to address a very interesting question. Does AI actually think?

'''JD:''' Indeed.

'''S:''' It does?

'''JD:''' No. That's the end. I've done my job. Imagine you're watching a child solve a puzzle. At first, they might struggle a little bit and they try to force pieces where they don't belong. Then you kind of watch them get that moment of insight and you start to see them building a strategy. Finally, they make a plan and they solve the puzzle. We assume, I think rightly so, that's involving thinking. Prior to us having fMRI and things like that, we always had to do these things, just kind inferring from what we're seeing that thinking is happening. We don't have any tools like fMRI for these large language models. In fact, the people who build them really don't know what's happening under the hood most of the time. Now imagine you have an advanced AI, right? A large language model. You ask it a complex question. It doesn't just give you an answer these days, right? It writes out that internal monologue for you. It's called chain of thought and it's explaining its reasoning step-by-step, right? It looks like thinking and it feels like thinking. But some researchers at Apple kind of started to ask a question and they wanted to know what if it's just a clever trick, right? Is it just something performative in the model that imitates thinking? And their approach is really to look and trying to ask what happens when the puzzles get really hard, if they can figure out what's happening inside these models. And so they just released a paper and spoiler alert from the title. The title of the paper is The Illusion of Thinking. And it's causing pretty big stir in the AI community because they suggest that the advanced reasoning we see in these top AI models might be just that, an illusion. And we might be overselling what's really happening in these models. So for years, these researchers have tried to measure intelligence of these AI models by throwing complex math and coding problems at them. And they've gotten, you know, generally pretty good. But the researchers at Apple argue this is like judging a student's deep understanding of physics based on an open book test for which they've already seen all the answers, right? That the data sets that they're using in these models are contaminated as they said. That the models have within them similar problems they've already seen or even the exact solutions built into the training data. So to get a sense of, you know, the real reasoning power that the team at Apple decided they wanted to do something different. And they basically set a few large language models down in a quiet room with a set of classic controllable puzzles like Tower of Hanoi or the river crossing problem, right? And so these are problems that are really good for testing pure logic because you can make them incrementally harder pretty simply like the Tower of Hanoi, right? Is the three rods and you have the cone of wooden disks and you have to move the disks in a way that there is never a larger radius disk on top of a smaller radius disk. And eventually by moving in different ways, you shift to the entire stack of disks from one of the three poles to another. And that gets like geometrically harder every time you add another disk, right? So they did that and they did the crossing the river, right? So you have a fox, a chicken and some grain and you have to figure out how to only get one of them across so that you can't leave the chicken with the grain because the chicken will eat the grain. You can't leave the fox with the chicken and take the grain because the fox will eat the chicken. Those are the problems. And they would make that problem increasingly hard with just more variables thrown in. Anyway, so what they did is they pitted two types of models against these puzzles. So your kind of standard large language models, which I'll call them pre-reasoning models, which if you remember when ChatGPT came out, like ChatGPT-3, you never saw any kind of reasoning or chain of thought. You just put in a prompt and it would spit out an answer. And then they also put these puzzles in front of large reasoning models. And those are like OpenAI's O3 mini or Claude 3.7 Sonnet. And those are the models that are designed to write to think out loud. What they found is pretty fascinating. And they really, they addressed these challenges in three types of problems. In a low complexity problem, a simple puzzle, right? So Tower of Hanoi, you have three disks and something very basic, you know, very easy to solve. Surprisingly, they found that the non-reasoning models were actually faster and more accurate at these low complexity models. The reasoning models tended to overthink, meaning they would find a correct answer early, but then they would start to waste time and kind of ruminate and explore incorrect paths. So they were very inefficient.

'''B:''' But ultimately correct though? Would they stick with their initial correct answer after ruminating?

'''JD:''' Correct. They would get them right, but they would do it, it would take more energy to get them done, which is a huge issue, right? With these models is energy usage. So for the second stage of the kind of research, they, again, they put a medium complexity of models in front of these. And so that's adding a few more disks or adding a few more entities into the river crossing problem. And here, the reasoning models started to shine, right? So the ability to generate that chain of thought and plan and self-correct gave them a pretty clear advantage. Their performance, I think you can argue, probably proves that the thinking process isn't surely an illusion. And that capability helped them better solve moderately difficult problems. So the non-reasoning models, sometimes it would totally fail at this medium complexity. And then they threw high complexity problems at these, which is where potentially this thinking illusion breaks down. And that's because these puzzles, when they became a bit too hard, say stacking 10 disks on the Tower of Hanoi instead of eight. And that's something that I believe requires like 1,032 moves to do correctly. The large thinking models would just collapse. They wouldn't even try. And what was really interesting about this is they started to map, as I mentioned before, energy usage. And you would expect that as you ratchet up the complexity of these problems, that the energy usage trying to solve them would go up. And it would go up for the medium complexity, but it would literally drop to nothing when the complexity of the problem was so high that the model basically somehow, and I use this word kind of figuratively, decided it couldn't solve the problem. What was interesting is they weren't out of tokens, right? So every one of these models, they have a context window, which is the number of tokens that can be used for input and how many of these tokens you can process and what the output length can be. And so it was never a problem that there was a token budget that was exceeded. They just literally gave up. An interesting kind of metaphor that I heard from a YouTuber, Wes Roth, who does a really great kind of analysis of a lot of this research. He likened it to, if I was in a room and I asked all of you guys, right, to, can you tell me what two plus two is? Everyone doesn't take very much energy. Everyone gets the answer. And then I could say, okay, can you multiply seven times 12, right? It takes a little more energy, but you do it. And then if I then next asked you to list all prime numbers between zero and 1 billion, you expend no energy because you're like, that's not something I can do. I'm just gonna stop right now. And so that seems to be what's happening in these models. Where it got really interesting is to kind of prove their point, they gave one of these models at the kind of high intensity problem, they gave the model the exact step-by-step algorithm in the prompt to solve the complex tower of Hanoi. All it had to do was follow the instructions and it still failed. Which suggests the problem isn't necessarily about finding a strategy. There's some deeper limitation in the ability to execute logical steps consistently.

'''B:''' That's weird.

'''JD:''' And so you can imagine, right? So when you see the paper title, The Illusion of Thinking sparked a pretty big debate. So I'm a pretty heavy user of these tools. I do a lot of very complicated kind of business process simulations with large language models. And I decided I have a pretty heavy bias on what I think. So I actually went and had all of the thinking models review the paper and look for problems. So what kind of the consensus when I got out of Claude and Gemini and ChatGPT, they brought up some interesting points. First, they said solving these neat logical puzzles really isn't the same as reasoning. That the kind of consensus among those models was real world reasoning is messy. It involves ambiguity, knowledge and context. These puzzles are purely algorithmic. And so failures may be specific to this type of logical sequential planning, not an indictment of all reasoning. I thought that's an interesting take on it. Second, that the title that they have that it's an illusion may be negated by the fact that the medium complexity zone, the thinking models outperformed the standard ones. So it may be that the more accurate way to describe it isn't that it's an illusion, but it's fragile or brittle, maybe more accurate than illusion. I'll throw in a different perspective here too, that there may be more to this question actually. So there was also some research done pretty recently by Anthropic. And the goal of their research was really to try and figure out if they could figure out what's really happening under the hood behind what you're getting as the kind of narrative of the reasoning. And their goal is based on AI safety, right? They weren't necessarily saying these models aren't reasoning. They were trying to figure out if there's a way they can use the reasoning to have some window into how they can create better guardrails for what's happening with these models. What they found though in their test one were that reasoning models don't always say what they think, which is kind of interesting. And what they did was they found that, reading those transcripts of the thinking and reasoning weren't really a reliable safeguard. So their approach was they gave these models multiple choice questions, but with a twist. In some versions, they'd insert some kind of subtle hint, a bit of metadata in the prompt that says basically, the answer is C. And so what they found is when the models used the hint to change their answer, when they stated their reasoning, the reveal rate for I was given the answer was below 20%. The AI would say like seize the answer and then generate some long convoluted, completely fabricated chain of thought as to how they got to the answer. They even took it a step further and they started using a concept they were calling reward hacking, where they were basically rewarding the models for choosing a specific factually wrong answer. And the models quickly learned to pick the wrong answer, get the reward, and then when they would say why, less than 2% of the time, they would say it was to get the reward, they would start to create an elaborate, plausible sounding justification for the incorrect answer.

'''C:''' I think I remember this. Didn't we, I think I covered this like maybe a month or two ago. It was like, you know, all the headlines were saying that they were quote lying.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''JD:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But really they were just doing what they do.

'''J:''' I mean, they just sound like a bunch of persnickety assholes.

'''C:''' Well, I mean, they just sound like they're gonna do what's most efficient.

'''JD:''' Yeah. So I guess I'll ask you guys this question. Do you think there's actually thinking or reasoning?

'''J:''' No, definitely not.

'''E:''' No, the more I learn about this, the less I think that.

'''JD:''' Yeah, I have to agree with you. I, you know, the metaphor I have in my head is there's like a pachinko machine with bent pins all over the place and you're dropping the balls. And, you know, I've used these things enough to know that there is no going back to the well, right? You have to, if you're not getting an answer you want, you can't reason with the machine. You need to like clear everything out and start over. So I think they're great processing tools for concepts and language. But as far as I, my experience, I don't see any thinking or reasoning necessarily in these models.

'''S:''' Well, I think, but there's another way to look at it. You could say, yeah, this is the illusion of thinking, but at the same time, how do we know that what people are doing isn't the illusion of reasoning?

'''J:''' Well, that makes sense for a lot of people I know, Steve.

'''S:''' No, seriously. And the thing, one of the reasons why I say that, I just wrote about this on Neurologica not too long ago, is a study looking at how people solve problems, right?

'''B:''' Yeah, right.

'''S:''' Yeah, and it showed that what people do is they use a combination of strategies. In this case, they were trying to determine what path the ball is taking. A ball is taking through a maze, but they can't see the path the ball is taking. They only get hints. Like they might see, they might hear a noise or see a flash or whatever. So they have imperfect data, and they have to infer what path the ball is taking. And so people will use two different strategies, and they will switch back and forth between those two different strategies. One is just inferring from the information that they have, but then when they think that strategy is failing, they'll shift to counterfactual reasoning, which is, well, what other options are they and how do they fit the data? And so then they had an AI do the same thing. And the AI just was able to do perfect inference as to what the path, the way the ball was doing. But then they started to, you know, futzing with the dials, they imposed upon the AI the same limitations that people have. In other words, for example, imperfect memory. We will only-

'''B:''' Oh, like shutting down data's internal clock.

'''S:''' Yeah, so like we have imperfect memory. So if we're trying to use that to infer what path it's taking, then, you know, we actually, once we think we've sort of exceeded our memory for the previous bits of data, we shift to the other strategy, for example. But the AI doesn't do that because it has perfect memory. But if you give it the same kind of limitations that people have, it uses the same strategy that people use. And you know what I mean? It wasn't told explicitly, it wasn't programmed explicitly to follow those rules. It just sort of fell into the same pattern of behavior that people follow, right? Given the same constraints. And I think, you know, the whole lying research is the same thing. You know, what Cara was referring to, you know, lying, it's all a metaphor, right? Is it really lying? Does it have an intent to deceive? Or is it just following its algorithm to maximize the output, which included giving incorrect information about what it was doing, right? But aren't people doing that? Again, so, it's just, like, when you understand the neuroscience, it's like, yeah, but, you know, we're just subconscious algorithms. And then floating on top of that, the end of the only, maybe the only real difference is that we have this metacognition where we can experience our own sort of final decision. But even if we didn't even make the decision, we have this powerful illusion that we did. Even those subconscious algorithms really made it for us, right?

'''JD:''' Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more, actually. And the reason that I have this kind of mindset that they're not thinking and reasoning, it changes the way I approach my work with the tools in that, like I said, you know, you need to do a lot more work up front as a user of these tools to narrow that pinboard so that, you know, the only options available are the useful ones that you want to get out of it. And so it just helps me to think of them as not thinking or reasoning. I think of them as concept calculators, you know, for lack of a better term. And it is just a stats model. And, you know, you mentioned algorithms. There's really not even a lot of algorithm built in. It's all the relationship between the tokens and the weights and the biases that are put into the model. It's all just how tightly your gap junctions are in your neurons and how much neurotransmitter you're releasing. And you could reduction, you know, reduce what the brain's doing the same way. You're talking about weights and whatever, but those are neural models that are based on how the brain functions. It's just a different substrate. What I would say is, you know, I struggle with this as well, what's the proper metaphor? What is the proper way to talk about this? We revert to, whenever we talk about AI, we use the language of thinking because those are the metaphors that we have at hand. And it's just the language is sort of built that way. But I think they're probably apt. What I think is probably happening is that these AIs are engaged in a piece of reasoning, but they don't have, they haven't closed the loop because they're not designed to, right? They're not equipped to do that. But if we took a bunch of these AIs and had them network together in such a way that the output of one is the input for another in a continuous self-sustaining loop, that's basically what a human brain is.

'''LD:''' I agree with you. These models basically explode after what, like 10 rounds of input for a lot of different. It strikes me as, and you'll appreciate this, I think of them like the Star Trek transporter. This is where I am in life. I've known my entire life. That where it creates that snapshot of someone, right? The map of someone, that's all we have in these models is the snapshot of this one moment in time for a neural network. And it just collapses because it can't update on its own.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's interesting. Fascinating to see how this evolves. I do think, because it is evolving, and I've had to continuously update my sense of whether or not it's even on a path to sentience or general AI. Because I just think it's what is needed is different than what we thought. You know?

'''LD:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Anyway, it'd be fascinating. 10, 20 years, I mean, it'll be in a completely different place, I think.

'''J:''' I find it really frustrating, though, like in all other coding situations, you could just put comments in there. You could say, okay, at this point, if this happens, then write it into the log, right? So then you can read through that and see what pathway it took to do what it did.

'''B:''' Throw in some troubleshooting code.

'''J:''' But it sounds like these freaking AI models, like from what you were saying, like fake that freaking log.

'''B:''' Diagnostic output.

'''LD:''' So I will say, you can actually create logs and call those logs back. You can do a lot of programming in these large language models. You can set variables. You can have, it's basically object-oriented programming you can do within your prompts. I have prompts that are, I have one that's 160 pages long that does future casting for, and it's calling up, you know, it's multiple documents, and it's calling up the documents as new kind of sub-agent prompts during the process. Most people are not using these tools and really to the extent that you can to do a lot of, anything that requires probabilistic outcomes as a positive versus deterministic outcomes, you can really do a lot of interesting things with these models. But if people want it to do accounting, they're gonna fail miserably.

'''S:''' All right, well-

'''B:''' Yeah, cool.

'''S:''' -thank you, Justin.

{{anchor|wtn}}
{{anchor|futureWTN}}
== Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:26:11) ==

'''S:''' All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time.

'''J:''' All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

[plays Noisy]

Now before you guys say anything.

'''E:''' Okay. Oh, oops.

'''J:''' Someone wrote in, hi, gang, this week's noisy is a small group of women watching Henry Cavill play a tennis match. Now listen again.

[plays Noisy]

Yeah. I love that. All right. So what do you guys think this is?

'''S:''' Is it some kind of bird?

'''J:''' That's not a bad guess, Steve. Anybody else?

'''C:''' Sounds like a record being spun around.

'''J:''' Like a record. Like a like an old turntable record?

'''C:''' Well, like something going like, whoooo, like against a needle.

'''J:''' Okay, that's cool. All right, well, let's get into some guesses here. Visto Tutti wrote in, said this one sounds like small mammals probably begging food from people. This sounds so adorable, I'm sure they will get fed. Which mammal, he guesses lemurs. I think that was a well-thought-out guess, but you're incorrect, Visto. I will give you more chances though, don't worry. Kevin Bergeron said, Hey Kevin, my son Henry was very excited when he heard this, I know it, I know it, he said, it's a ball winding down a spiral in a cylinder that can be flipped upside down for the ball to go down the other way like an hourglass. That is not correct, but I would like to see that thing. Another listener named Hunter Richards wrote in, said, hi Jay, baby puffins. These aren't small edible potato puffs, though they sound like they should be. They're birds, cute little birds. So we had several winners. So yeah, you know, when we get tons of entries, of course, it comes down to, it's always who enters at first, but there were some tight guesses here, like within, you know, minutes of each other. But the ultimate winner here is Anders Wistrand, and he said it's, he gave me the pronunciation and I wasn't even close, guys, it's Anders Wistrand. You know, but my question is, why are things spelled a particular way and not pronounced that particular way? Like, can't we just?

'''C:''' Well, because his name's in a different language.

'''J:''' I know, but why can't we change the spelling to make it match what, no, I don't know. Okay, I got this.

'''S:''' Jay, the real question is, why isn't the word phonetic spelled phonetically?

'''J:''' Correctly, thank you. Okay.

'''E:''' F-U-N-T-E.

'''J:''' A-N-D-E-R-S pronounced undish.

'''C:''' Yeah, because.

'''J:''' No, I get it, because in his language he can, he reads it as undish, but in, you know.

'''S:''' Because languages evolve and merge and, you know.

'''J:''' So he wrote.

'''S:''' Stuff happens.

'''J:''' First time, last time, I got one correct. That was for the Capra Cali, I don't even remember what this was, but he got one correct. So, you know, I know this week's noisy is a bunch of eiders. These are eiders, they're ducks, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' This particular one is the common eider, also called St. Cuthbert's duck or Cuddy's duck.

'''E:''' St. Cuthbert?

'''J:''' It's a large sea duck. It's distributed over the northern coast of Europe, northern America, eastern Siberia. 4.5 pounds. It has a scientific name that you can bet I won't be able to pronounce it. And the conservation status, I guess they're not worried about them. So anyway, listen to this group of ducks and tell me that they don't sound like a bunch of English women wooing over something. Ready? God, I love that.

'''C:''' I don't know, to me they sound like minions.

'''J:''' Yeah, they do.

'''C:''' They don't sound like women.

'''J:''' God, I love that. It's so cute. All right, guys, I have a new noisy this week. This is a noisy that I selected, and I hope you get it.

[plays Noisy]

That's all I'm gonna give you, because-

'''E:''' It's all I need.

'''J:''' Think you know what it is? I know, right? There's a line in the sand, Ev, right?

'''E:''' Oh, yes.

'''J:''' If you think you know what this noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. There's a few things that are happening here that I'm gonna tell you. First off, we have a show going on in Kansas. This is on September 20th of this year. We're gonna be doing a private SGU show, and we will also be doing the live stage show, the Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance. If you haven't seen either of these shows, please do try to make it out to spend some time with us, and I promise you we will thoroughly entertain you regardless of which of these shows you go to, or if you go to both. You can get tickets at [https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ theskepticsguide.org]. There'll be a button on the homepage that will take you there to give you all the information that you need. You can quickly, you can join our mailing list. We send out an email every week where we tell you everything that we did the previous week. There's lots of fun stuff going on in that email. You can go to theskepticsguide.org and find a button there to join that. You could also become a patron of the SGU. If you're interested in helping support the work that we do, you can go to [https://www.patreon.com/SkepticsGuide patreon.com/SkepticsGuide], and this is a really good time to help us because we're starting more projects and gonna be putting in a lot more man hours when Steve finally is ready to hit it hard. You know, we have multiple projects stacked up that we're gonna be starting. More details will come as that becomes available. One final thing, we are planning to, we're considering the idea of coming to Australia and bringing our Nauticon conference there. We're working with the Australian skeptics to make this possible, and we're asking you to do one simple thing. We need you to go to theskepticsguide.org and there'll be a link there to basically fill out a survey to let us know if you're interested, if the pricing is something that you can handle, and is the timing of when we're gonna do it. Like right now, we're talking about May of 2026. You know, as you know, it's very expensive to get nine people out to Australia and then house and feed those people and do everything that we need to do in order to do the conference. It is what it is, but we've been asked to come. We wanna do it, and if you're interested, please fill out the survey because it'll give us the information that we need to know whether or not we should actually do this. So just go to theskepticsguide.org and there'll be a link there for you where you can take that survey.

'''S:''' All right, thank you, Jay. All right, guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction.

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:32:55) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Online Privacy
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.
|link1web =
|link1title = None
|link1pub = None

|item2 = Once you log into a website, it is possible for it to link your account to your browsing activity so that they can track you online activity on other websites.
|link2web =
|link2title = None
|link2pub = None

|item3 = Browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts, to create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet.
|link3web =
|link3title = None
|link3pub = None

|}}
{{SOFResults

|fiction = Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

|science1 = Once you log into a website, it is possible for it to link your account to your browsing activity so that they can track you online activity on other websites.

|science2 = Browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts, to create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet.

|rogue1 = Evan
|answer1 = Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

|rogue2 = Jay
|answer2 = Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

|rogue3 = Bob
|answer3 = Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

|rogue4 = Cara
|answer4 = Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

|rogue5 = Justin
|answer5 = Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes.

|host = Steve
|sweep =
|clever =
|win =
|swept = y
}}

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is online privacy. So these are three methods that websites and companies use to get information about you online. Just keep in mind, I'm not talking about hackers, right? I'm not talking about somebody hacking into your computer. I'm saying that like legal websites can do this. Does that make sense? You'll see what I mean.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''S:''' All right, because obviously a hacker, if they get a hold of your system, they could do anything. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this could happen to you just by visiting a website. Does that make sense?

'''C:''' This is gonna be scary.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' All right, here we go. Item number one. Websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes. Item number two. Once you log into a website, it is possible for it to link your account to your browsing activity so they could track your online activity on other websites. And item number three. Browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts to create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet. So two of these things are actually happening. The other one is not, basically. Evan, go first.

'''E:''' I'm not gonna search the internet anymore knowing this. No, I'm done. What, I'm gonna, oh, this first one. Activate your microphone to gather information about you. Okay, maybe. Including audibly tracking your keystrokes. What, my keystrokes have a sound? In other words, my Q button has a different sound than my I button and my G button. What, my keys, is that right? I never heard of that before. That seems really wonky. Unless you're talking in the general sense, it can hear you typing. So, I mean, are we saying, it says keystrokes. What does keystroke mean here? Like, it can hear typing or a specific key being?

'''S:''' Yeah, that's open to interpretation, isn't it?

'''E:''' See, what do we have to do, Justin? For 20 years we've had to suffer. Second one, logging into website and then link your account to browsing activity so that they can track your online activity on other websites. That one seems very plausible. I don't know, should I be shocked by that? I mean, yeah, I believe there's a tool that will do that. And this last one about browser fingerprinting using features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts. To create a fingerprint they can use to track your activity across the internet. Yeah, I think so. I'll go with my instinct. I don't think this audibly tracking your keystroke, that seems like that's too far reach, no way.

'''S:''' Okay, Jay?

'''J:''' Yeah, I'm gonna agree with Ev right out of the gate. I just can't see how they could possibly activate your microphone when it's, you know, that's an operating system type thing. The website would have to download a piece of software that can then talk to your computer in a different way. So I don't think the website can do that on its own. And I can't see the typing thing, right? The tracking of the keystrokes from sound. I mean, I bet you that there are subtle changes between the keys and all that, but not consistent among all people, right? It would have to, if that could possibly even be done, it would have to be studying one person for a long time, and then it would have to actually have example output, I think, in order to be able to do that in the future, but not blindly, you know? And the webcam is most certainly not looking at people's keyboards. So I'm gonna agree with Evan. Evan, you're a smart man. I like you, and I'm gonna go with you.

'''E:''' Oh, thanks, Jay.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob?

'''B:''' Yeah, it's hard to disagree with that. The second two here, linking your account to your browsing activity to track your online activity on other websites. I'm not too sure about that one, actually. The third one, though, fingerprinting, at least based on the examples you give here about screen resolution and installed fonts. I can't imagine that that's, at least based on those two, it doesn't seem like much of a fingerprint to me. Although, I mean, of course, if you added more variables, then it potentially could be. For the first one, though, I think you're burying the lead here with secretly activate your microphone to gather information, including tracking keystrokes. I mean, big deal, tracking your keystrokes, at least what that sentence literally means. You know, the implication is that you're tracking keys, which I don't think you can audibly, necessarily, at all. So I think the real nasty thing here is that activating a microphone to actually hear what's being said near the computer. That's the real invasion of privacy right there that's kind of hidden, I think. So yeah, I'll join with Steve and Evan and say that's fiction.

'''S:''' With Jay and Evan?

'''C:''' Steve and Evan?

'''B:''' Jay and Evan, what did I say? Steve and Evan, Jay and Evan.

'''E:''' Well, that was a nice way to try to pull it out of Steve. I like that.

'''B:''' Yeah, it didn't work. Give it a try.

'''E:''' It was clever.

'''S:''' Okay, Cara?

'''C:''' I think that my initial instinct was what the two, three now guys already said. And for me, there are two operative words in your news items or in your science or fiction items. So in the first one, you wrote websites can secretly activate your microphone. When you log into Zencaster, it literally asks you if you give it permission to activate your microphone. And I think that legally they have to do that. I could be wrong, but I think websites have to ask for permission. So I don't think they can secretly activate your microphone. To be fair though, you did write they can secretly, but again, earlier you caveat it. It's not that they have the capability to do it. It's that they're legally empowered to do it. So that's why that one I think strikes me as the fiction. The idea of the next one also has operative words in it. Once you log into a website, it's possible for them to link your account. This happens all the time. You're on a website, you're shopping, you fill your shopping cart, you close it because you decide you don't want to buy the stuff. And then you get an email that says, hey, don't leave this behind. Somehow I think that they are able to sort of follow you.

'''J:''' They could save that cart just with cookies.

'''C:''' Yeah, well, that's true. But then they're also emailing you about it. They know that you closed it. And then finally this browser fingerprinting, like what are these different features? I think very often when you're in a browser, you are logged into the browser, or there are other ways that they have access to some amount of your private information. So it wouldn't surprise me that they can then access aspects of your computer to say, oh, this person is a high spender. This person is a low spender. This person is more likely to spend time here, spend time there. They have like these little bits and pieces that have broken off and they're carrying them around with them. So I think that the following two just seem more plausible. And also I feel like that's like the biggest myth is that, oh, your phone is listening to you. Like people are like, man, we were just talking about golf and then I got all these ads for golf. You know, people say that all the time, but I think what's actually happening is that you were near somebody who plays golf and your phone GPS knew that you were near that person and that maybe you like co-mingle with them a lot. And so they're gonna start sending you the same ads they send to them. So that's what I'm gonna say. That one's a fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, and Justin.

'''JD:''' It's probably gonna be a sweep either way this week. So I totally agree with Cara that the secretly is probably a pretty telling word in there. And I'll come back to that one in a minute. Number two, once you log into a website, it's possible to link your account and browsing activity. That's what pays for the internet. That's kind of Facebook, you know, kind of started making all their money doing that with their Facebook sign in all over the web and browser fingerprinting. Again, I believe that's something that's been going on for a long time as well. What I'm guessing is item number one, actually, if I remember correctly, there were some researchers who were able to actually use just audio from keystrokes to, and machine learning to use basically to in pattern recognition, to figure out what people were typing just from the sound of keystrokes, you know, but that was years ago. So I may be conflating a bunch of things in my head now that I see this in front of me, but I'm gonna say number one is the fiction.

'''S:''' So you guys all agree. So let's take this in reverse order. We'll start with the third one. Browser fingerprinting uses features about your computer, such as your screen resolution and installed fonts to create a fingerprint that they can use to track your activity across the internet. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is true. So yeah, so it's not just, obviously it's such as Bob, not exclusively screen resolution and installed fonts.

'''B:''' And I made that clear and that I understood that in my answer, but go ahead.

'''S:''' So they do use-

'''E:''' Wow.

'''S:''' Cara, it's not just like, this is the type of computer you're using. They know it's your computer, right? This is Cara Santamaria's computer because of these hundred features that we have gathered from her. Like it's your operating system, the version of your operating system, the fonts you have installed, all the drivers you have or whatever.

'''E:''' Yeah, that does make sense, yeah.

'''S:''' Gathers all that information into enough variables that it creates a unique fingerprint for your computer. And then they could track when your computer goes to any website. They know it's your computer doing it.

'''C:''' I mean, you gotta give it to them. If they figured out a way to do it legally, you know what I mean? They're not allowed to track something else that's like an invasion of privacy. They'll figure out how to invade your privacy otherwise.

'''S:''' And they do a lot of, it is by cookies, but also there are other ways to do it too. There are these single pixels that they can have on a website. And when you go to that website, basically you download it and that also can track this information. Let's go back to number two. Once you log into a website, it is possible to link your account to your browsing activity so that they can track your online activity on other websites. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is also science, yep. So yeah, and this has been going on for a long time. So basically, they're not just tracking what you're doing on their website. Like you go to Facebook, Facebook is now attached, like you log into the account, it now is linked to your browser activity. So when you go off of Facebook to other websites, Facebook still knows what you're doing.

'''C:''' That's why they serve you perfectly tailored ads.

'''S:''' Right, exactly.

'''C:''' They're like, oh, that thing you almost bought but didn't.

'''S:''' On some other website, on Amazon, we knew you did that because we were tracking your activity across other websites. Right, which means that websites can secretly activate your microphone to gather information about you, including audibly tracking your keystrokes is the fiction. But Evan, it's not because we don't have the technology to audibly track your keystrokes. We do, as Justin said. That isn't the part that's not correct here. It is to secretly activate your microphone. It is not legal to do that. You have to get permission before you activate someone's camera or microphone.

'''C:''' Yeah, which is why every website, like Zoom, they ask you.

'''S:''' They ask you, right, because they have to ask you. But of course, you might give it permission for one thing, and then now, once you've given them permission to activate your microphone while you're in the, that's why it says always, only when using the app, only this one time. You get those options. I always select when using this app because otherwise, it's always, why would you want to use my microphone when I'm not using your app?

'''B:''' Yeah, tricksy.

'''S:''' Yeah, because they want to do something with that information. For your camera, there's a couple of tips. One is some cameras have hoods that you could use to close them, just if you think somebody, because it would be malware that is doing this, but if you're, so it could basically block your camera. But also, the light comes on when their camera is active, so if you're not using your camera, but the light is on, you should note that. It probably means that some software may have activated your camera without your knowledge. You know, and again, with AI, I think this is going to get, this kind of thing, like the fingerprinting. The bottom line is, it's already the case, but it's going to get more so, I guess, is that if you're online, somewhere, some software, some website, somewhere, it's tracking everything you're doing.

'''C:''' Yeah, there's no way to browse privately. It's just not possible anymore.

'''S:''' Right, and even like anonymizing software or browsers-

'''B:''' Incognito and all that.

'''S:''' -are imperfect, right?

'''C:''' Yeah, I don't think Incognito is even really incognito.

'''E:''' Do VPNs help with this?

'''B:''' Well, my understanding, isn't it just incognito to your browser history, basically?

'''C:''' Yeah, it's just, yeah, exactly. It's just like clear your cache. I think that's all it's doing.

'''B:''' Right.

'''C:''' It's like not saving cookies, that's it.

'''S:''' Right. But the cookie is just one method.

'''C:''' Exactly.

''LD:''' And your ISP knows everything you're doing, either way.

'''B:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think I know, as we said before, it's like you are the product, right? When you're using the internet, you are not just a user, you are a product.

'''C:''' Right, like if something is free to you, they're making money off of you.

'''E:''' Yeah, woo-hoo, free.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, it is a huge problem. I do think that, and the only way to deal with it is through regulation. There's no way the industry is going to self-regulate. They're not.

'''E:''' Nah, why would they?

'''C:''' And not only is it through regulation, but it's enforcement of regulation, which is nearly impossible. You remember those FBI warnings at the beginnings of DVDs?

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''C:''' You guys remember the anti-piracy warnings? It's like how often were people getting busted for burning their friend's DVD?

'''J:''' I mean, I think for the most part, people just don't know, they don't want other people to know what porn they're looking at. That's the big secret.

'''C:''' But that's the funniest thing, because literally everybody's looking at porn. And so it's not even an interesting way to extort somebody in porn, you know what I mean? So long as the porn is legal porn, everybody's like, eh, okay.

'''S:''' But have you guys ever gotten those phishing extortion emails?

'''E:''' Yeah, oh, of course.

'''S:''' Where it's like, oh, ho, we've captured this information about you, we're going to send it to everybody. It's like, yeah, if you had it, you would be showing it to me right now.

'''E:''' They sent me once, we have a picture of your house, and they gave me a picture. It was not even close to being my house.

'''C:''' One day.

'''E:''' What is that shaq.

'''B:''' Once in a hundred million tries, you're going to be right.

'''LD:''' Yep, yep.

'''E:''' Crazy.

'''S:''' They're just trying to get people who don't know what they're doing to panic.

'''C:''' Yep.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''B:''' Yep. A quick reaction.

'''E:''' Yeah, the fear, the fear factor.

'''J:''' Well, good job, Evan.

'''E:''' Oh, thanks, yeah. Well, I didn't get it for the right reasons. Cara did, and others did, but glad I was there.

'''C:''' I'm only ever right for the right reasons after three other people who weren't right before me.

'''E:''' Oh, interesting.

'''C:''' Thank you, Evan.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:49:03) ==
{{qow
|text = “I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft, because here we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force itself upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum.”
|author = — Clarence Darrow
|lived =
|desc =
}}
'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' "I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft, because here we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force upon itself, upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum." Clarence Darrow.

'''C:''' That probably is why we remember that case and not the one that actually overturned the law.

'''S:''' Right. Yeah. Well, Justin, thank you so much for joining us on this episode.

'''B:''' Yeah, Justin.

'''JD:''' Thank you. I told Jay, it's been a dream, and if I can chime in on the monkeys versus birds.

'''E:''' Ooh, yeah, please.

'''B:''' Yes, of course.

'''JD:''' I'm on the Hitchcock side, the birds.

'''S:''' Absolutely.

'''E:''' Yeah, you know, as time marches on, it seems like the birds make more powerful arguments.

'''B:''' Terror birds, baby, terror birds.

'''J:''' Look, somebody's got to represent, you know, somebody's got to remember Perry and remember his wisdom. It's just a bit, you know, monkeys eventually develop nukes, and I think ultimately they win.

'''S:''' I have the Merlin app. This has nothing to do with anything we were talking about, except tangentially to birds. So have you guys ever used that, the Merlin app?

'''C:''' No.

'''E:''' Is it hear the bird and tell you which bird?

'''S:''' Just hit the, it's on your phone, right? Of course, you have to give it permission to use your microphone.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah.

'''JD:''' Always.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's put out by the Cornell Ornithology Department. So basically, you hit the record button, and it just listens to, you know, the noise around you, and it tells you every bird in earshot.

'''J:''' That's amazing.

'''C:''' Oh, it's like Shazam, but for nature.

'''E:''' And how accurate, with what degree of accuracy?

'''S:''' So far, 100%.

'''E:''' No, nothing's 100%. We know this.

'''S:''' I said so far.

'''C:''' 100% based on, yeah, well, that's based on Steve's ear, right, like if Steve can hear it.

'''E:''' With your hearing aids?

'''S:''' It's not just ear, it's not just my ear, it's like literally I'm seeing the birds around me, and it's identifying every bird I could see.

'''C:''' Right, but there's, I mean, there's gotta be a bird in the background that neither of you hear, clearly.

'''S:''' Well, whatever, every, every, I don't know what you're saying, actually.

'''C:''' When he's saying, is it 100% accurate, you're saying I'm the validating tool here, like that your human perception is the validating tool. What I'm saying is there's another machine out there that can hear a more distant bird.

'''S:''' Well, I'm not saying it listens to infinity distance.

'''C:''' Well, that's what 100% accurate means.

'''S:''' No, it's not. I'm saying, whatever it is, how would you interpret it that way? What I'm saying is.

'''E:''' Stop mocking him.

'''C:''' You're saying there's no false negatives or false positives.

'''S:''' No, I'm just saying, I'm saying it's accuracy. So, when it recognizes a bird, it pops up and says, you're, you know, whatever, that's a hairy woodpecker. And then whenever it hears it again, it'll light up and say, yep, that was a hairy woodpecker.

'''J:''' Steve, do you like hairy woodpeckers?

'''C:''' Hot time of night.

'''S:''' Just happens to be the one, the most recent one that I heard that I'm looking at.

'''J:''' Sure, Steve, you know what porn you're looking at now.

'''S:''' I could see the birds around me. Plus, I know what birds are in my backyard. I could, sometimes I could literally see the bird making the noise and it says, yep, that's a downy woodpecker, whatever. And I just saw the downy woodpecker make the chirp. And it is uncanny. So, so far, as far as I'm able to tell, all of the positive IDs that it makes conforms with the birds that I know to be and can see in my immediate vicinity.

'''E:''' That's the disclaimer we were looking for.

'''C:''' That is a very scientific answer there, Steve. I like that.

'''JD:''' Can it tell what the birds are typing?

'''S:''' It is amazing because some birds are pretty distinctive, but other birds are like, chirp. That's the downy woodpecker. It's like, that was just a chirp.

'''C:''' Wow, that is really cool.

'''S:''' And it's amazing. I mean, it obviously is analyzing the very, I mean, it's one of those things like to us, to us, to the human ear, it's chirp. But to the software, I'm sure it's breaking it down to specific frequencies and a drop-off rate or whatever. Like, there's a profile.

'''E:''' And taking into your location because it'll eliminate a lot of other species.

'''C:''' Oh, you're right, yeah. The GPS is a big part of it.

'''S:''' Maybe.

'''C:''' Because it's going to say what's the most likely to.

'''E:''' Well, right, it will eliminate a whole, so it's cheating.

'''B:''' So, Steve, you should play with the app on.

'''S:''' I have to go to the zoo.

'''C:''' Yeah, like I was going to say, it may not eliminate them, Evan. It may rank them by probability. And so, it may go down the list, yeah. Because like we have parrots in our trees in LA. Because there's like an introduced. Yeah, it's weird, right? So, you wouldn't think that they would be there, but they are.

'''B:''' All right, let's just stop this nonsense.

'''S:''' All right. Just get the app and play with it. It's a lot of fun. All right, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''J:''' Roger that, Steve.

'''E:''' Chirp.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 1038

2025-07-09T10:08:15Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

{{Editing required
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Thursday, May 29th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Evan Bernstein...

'''E:''' Good evening everyone.

'''S:''' And we have two guest rogues this week, George Hrab.

'''G:''' Hi.

'''S:''' And Andrea Jones-Roy.

'''AJR:''' Hey, everyone.

'''B:''' Andrea.

'''E:''' Woo-hoo. Double our fun tonight.

'''B:''' What a crew. What a crew.

'''S:''' Jay and Cara are both traveling. They're both away this week, so they're unable to record.

'''E:''' I hope they're having a nice time wherever they are.

'''G:''' They're recovering from NOTACON, traveling, yeah, big quotes around that. They're just recovering from the massive time we had at NOTACON. We couldn't handle it.

'''S:''' NOTACON was awesome this year.

'''E:''' Oh, my God.

'''S:''' I have to say.

'''B:''' So, like, essentially perfect, right?

'''AJR:''' Essentially perfect.

'''B:''' Essentially perfect.

'''S:''' Well, that's all that we have to say, essentially. I mean, it was just-

'''AJR:''' Full on. It's a perfect-

'''S:''' Everything we planned came off pretty much without a hitch. Now, I just qualified it with pretty much. But-

'''B:''' There you go.

'''S:''' We're just being knee-jerk skeptical.

'''AJR:''' That's right.

'''S:''' I don't want to say absolutely. No, it was great. Like, nothing failed. Everything came off as we planned, which is always wonderful. You plan something and it works exactly as you plan. Everyone had a great time. The vibe was awesome.

'''AJR:''' It was really fun.

'''G:''' Yes.

'''AJR:''' The skeletons were skeletoning.

'''S:''' Yeah, the skeletons were-

'''E:''' Bob.

'''B:''' I was so obsessed getting those ready.

'''AJR:''' No, it was a lot of fun. And I hope everyone who attended had a good time. Everyone I talked to seemed like they were. But, yeah, it was just super fun.

'''B:''' If they didn't, they're damn good liars because everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time.

'''G:''' And it's like if you attended, now you are able to- You're ready for the apocalypse. You can design your own skeletons. You can speak Mandarin. You can do a shepherd tone. And you can know what birds are on your porch.

'''AJR:''' That's right.

'''E:''' Serious.

'''G:''' Oh, and play a didgeridoo.

'''AJR:''' And host a poker night.

'''G:''' And host a poker night. What else do you want from-

'''S:''' And play jazz.

'''G:''' And play jazz.

'''E:''' And play jazz. Know about- Yeah, well. Yes.

'''S:''' Learn all those things.

'''G:''' All those things. Done. Finished. Ready to go out into the world and do those seven, nine things.

'''S:''' Ni hao.

'''AJR:''' Very good.

'''S:''' Did I say something? I remember that word. I don't know what it means.

'''AJR:''' You almost said hello.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''AJR:''' You said kind of hello.

'''S:''' Okay. How do you say it for real?

'''AJR:''' Ni hao.

'''S:''' Oh, ni hao.

'''E:''' Ni hao.

'''AJR:''' Ni hao.

'''G:''' You just shamed your ancestors there, Steve.

'''S:''' All right.

'''B:''' I mainly just remembered ma.

'''AJR:''' Ma.

'''E:''' Ma.

'''S:''' Ma. Or ma.

'''AJR:''' That's right. Yeah, we did work on tones. People really came a long way in their tones progress. So, I congratulate the group. Well done. We all- Do you remember the phrase that you learned? The very helpful phrase?

'''B:''' Oh, God, no.

'''AJR:''' Okay. That was one of the first phrases we learned in my Chinese textbook. Kai ge kai fung chir ho. Which means after the implementation of the open door policy. That was one of the first phrases we learned in my Chinese textbook. Not exaggerating, it proceeded, take me to the hospital and where is the restroom? We learned-

'''B:''' Wow.

'''E:''' Take me to the hospital.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. Tell me about the open door policy and what it did for the Chinese economy. I would love to.

'''E:''' Oh, boy. Wow.

'''AJR:''' Oh, boy.

'''E:''' That was fun.

'''B:''' That's nuts.

'''S:''' It was fun. That was the first time I was nervous getting on stage. That I could remember.

'''AJR:''' Really?

'''S:''' Definitely in the last 20 years.

'''E:''' Nervous?

'''AJR:''' What were you nervous for?

'''B:''' The drumming.

'''S:''' What do you think?

'''AJR:''' Oh, the drumming.

'''S:''' Doing a solo.

'''AJR:''' Oh, you were great.

'''S:''' Because that's the only thing that I could have totally flamed out on. Right? I mean, nothing else. The thing is, most of the bits that we do, you can't really fail, because whatever happens, we could make fun. You know what I mean?

'''AJR:''' Right. Right.

'''E:''' It builds in safety net.

'''AJR:''' Challenge accepted, but yes.

'''S:''' Yes. But during a drum solo, there's nowhere to hide.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''S:''' If you flame out, it just looks terrible.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''S:''' There's no way to recover from it.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''G:''' So for those that don't know, Steve learned the Ringo drum solo from the song The End, which is the last song on Abbey Road, and he nailed it.

'''AJR:''' He nailed it. It's a beautiful song. It's an awesome solo, and Steve learned it.

'''G:''' I was skeptical. I got to say Steve, because I didn't hear it. I gave you the tune like five months ago, and I heard nothing from you. Like nothing. No response. And I saw you maybe like six weeks ago, and you're like, yeah, I'm going to get to it. And I thought, there's no way this guy's going to do it. Like there's no way. We'll have to cover somehow. And we rehearsed it, and you effing did your homework. And like I said to you that night, like you were more prepared than most musicians I work with. So-

'''S:''' It's nice of you to say that.

'''G:''' You should feel really good.

'''AJR:''' That's awesome.

'''G:''' You should feel really good.

'''E:''' And George-

'''G:''' It's true. It's true.

'''AJR:''' But it was also so fun because so George did an amazing job leading the sing along for two hours of playing thousand instruments like guitar and you were doing the tambourine with your feet and you were singing. And then different members of the organizing committee all went up and did different things. And then Steve was at the very end, and the drums had been on stage covered up. And I don't know if the audience knew that it was a drum set or what, but it was super fun because it was like, all right, this is the end. This is the last song. And then, whoosh, the cloth comes off, and Steve is on stage behind the drum. It was awesome. Just like the suspense, and the way it was done, and the surprise, and the reveal. Super good.

'''S:''' It came off as planned.

'''B:''' Yeah. Absolutely. And then George was like, oh, what the hell? Then we went to the bar, and he sang for another, how many hours, George?

'''AJR:''' Three hours? Five hours?

'''G:''' Five.

'''AJR:''' Five hours?

'''E:''' Five hours.

'''G:''' Till two. Till 2.25. I was like, all right, one more.

'''AJR:''' I'm amazed you can speak right now.

'''G:''' Oh, no. I had a good phone voice for like three days after that. It was great. Good podcasting voice.

'''B:''' Phone voice?

'''G:''' Yeah. That's when you, like, when you, anybody you owe money to, you just call them after that and be like, I'll get you the money when I get it to you. Because it's just like, you've got that nice basso profundo. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' But it was super fun.

'''G:''' I loved it, though. People were singing along. They were throwing out requests. And like, I had them in my folder so I could sing stuff, and that, to me, there's nothing better. There's nothing better. Put me in a corner, and I'll play. I'll play for hours.

'''AJR:''' It's amazing.

'''G:''' I was so happy to do it.

'''AJR:''' You even sang, I believe, in French and also in Ukrainian. Is that right?

'''G:''' I did. I did. Yes. Yeah. Because we had our Canadian friends there. And it was like, what French songs do you have, George? I'm like, uh, I got this one.

'''AJR:''' They were highly offended, and rightly so, when I said, well, why don't we just do the French national anthem? And they're like, no. Wrong country.

'''G:''' They poured syrup all over you. I was like, nope.

'''S:''' You know any songs in Mandarin?

'''AJR:''' I do. I have one karaoke song that's a pretty standard one, and it's Doi Mien Doi Niu Hai Kan Gua Lai, which means, girl over there, look over here. George, we'll learn it for next time. It's extremely fun.

'''G:''' Oh, Mandarin karaoke. Come on. That's 20 minutes right there.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Mandarin karaoke.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, we should do joint SG universities, actually. That's a fun idea.

'''E:''' Ooh, that's an interesting thought.

'''S:''' We can maybe think about that for next time.

'''E:''' That's an interesting thought.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''G:''' Like adjunct faculty.

'''E:''' A combination. You pair up, and we deliver a talk about something and hand it off to each other at certain points. That has merit.

'''AJR:''' Right. Right. And I don't know if it would be something that we already have in common, or if, for example, it would be Evan, you teaching me a board game, and then I'm also teaching something at the same time. Do you know what I mean? Or is it something that you and I both know?

'''E:''' Yeah. We have different appearances or guises.

'''S:''' What I like about that bit is that it's always fun to learn something surprising, right? Something that you never would have gone out of your way specifically to learn.

'''E:''' That's the point.

'''S:''' Yeah, but it's kind of like just a celebration of knowledge itself. It's like here's just something interesting. You may not even care about it. It doesn't matter. Here you go, and it's a lot of fun.

'''G:''' Learning for learning's sake is really good and valuable, and it's like it's never a bad idea to learn something.

'''E:''' Fits a NOTACON theme perfectly, actually.

'''G:''' Yeah. You never regret. It's like you never regret doing the dishes. You never regret exercising, and you never regret learning something, even if you don't use it.

'''AJR:''' George, I have one correction for you, which is that a friend of mine who lost their house in the fires in L.A. She's fine. Her family's fine. Did post a video about how she regretted doing the dishes right before her house burned down.

'''G:''' Oh, jeez.

'''AJR:''' Because she was like, what a waste of energy that was. So that's one dishes-related regret.

'''G:''' Okay. So if there's a once-in-a-century fire, yes.

'''AJR:''' No, but that's the thing. I think one of the promises of the internet was and is any information you want at your fingertips. But I just keep reading about the things I'm already interested in, whereas if someone posted a video about birding, I would probably scroll by just because it's not something that has occurred to me as something to think about. But watching Steve talk about it, because I like watching Steve and we're all there at NOTACON, I really got a great appreciation for why people get so excited about birding. And to the point where I've seen some other birds and been like, I wonder what kind of bird that is. And someone else had like a bird app, like I'm noticing new things. And yeah, it's just, there's so much information I could learn that on my own, I tend to just stick with what I already am interested in. That this like totally different, you know, how am I going to make my skeleton cooler? Like that just is not something I would ever search for on YouTube, but I'm so thrilled to know it now, you know?

'''S:''' Yeah, but so you bring up a good point about the internet, that the internet has caused an unforeseen consequence. Prior to that, a lot of the information we got was pushed to us. And now we are pulling all of our information, right? So we are only getting the information we are going to get for ourselves, rather than just being exposed to stuff because it's on the air, because it's on the TV, because it's on the radio, whatever. So it's all curated and so isolating, you know what I mean? And that's, I think, what's destroying the world today, that we are all in these little bubbles of information, of confirmation bias. Like the internet is a confirmation bias machine.

'''AJR:''' Literally, the algorithms are tuned to be like, did you watch 10 videos on birding? I'm going to give you 10 billion more. Did you watch 10 videos on why the earth is flat? Here are 10 trillion more. I recently found I was using my boyfriend's laptop, and so I ended up on his YouTube. And his recommendations were way more interesting than my video recommendations, just because they were different. And so now I'm watching all this cool stuff that I didn't know about. So borrow a friend's algorithm for a bit, at least.

'''S:''' Even Netflix. Like I'm over at Bob's place or whatever. I go on their Netflix. Like, you have all different shows on here than I do.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Have you ever seen Moms? My mom was addicted to essentially South Korean soap operas. I don't know why, but she's been watching them for years. Her Netflix is all South Korean dramas. And oh my God, it's kind of funny to look at it and think of what I see on my home Netflix.

'''AJR:''' I do wish there was a way to like, and maybe there is, and it probably depends on the platform, but to like reset your algorithm, or be like, tell me what the generic is, or stop tailoring.

'''S:''' Or anonymize it.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. Or like turn up a knob that's like, randomize the stuff that I'm going to get. So I'm not just getting things that are trained for me.

'''B:''' Yeah. They should have categories. It's just random stuff. Unrelated.

'''E:''' Yeah. That's very easy to do with YouTube. Just log off as yourself and just go into YouTube raw and you'll get whatever. If you want a real randomization, there you go.

'''AJR:''' There you go.

'''G:''' That's why I always loved that show. I think it was called How Things Work.

'''B:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Oh gosh. I could watch that.

'''G:''' It's like thimbles, and then shovels, and then air conditioners, and then cars, and then the space shuttle, and then guitars. It's like, this is variety.

'''B:''' I love it.

'''G:''' And each one is fascinating. Like, how do they get the little thing in the whistle? How do they do that? Like, and here they go, they show you how they get the little thing in the whistle. And then they'll show you, yeah, like rocket fuel. And I always loved the randomness of that.

'''AJR:''' If it's a show, the show I'm thinking of, there was one that was like, how to dig a really good hole. The physics of making sure, like, if you want to go deep, you have to have the angles right, and it depends on the surface. And it was just like, yeah, great. Like, you know, if I ever have to bury a body, now I know.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's one of those things everyone does at some point, but nobody really knows how to do it.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' But we all think we do.

'''B:''' I'll tell you this.

'''G:''' It's like poetry.

'''B:''' Don't dig a grave unless you really, really have to, because that is hard. I was digging a grave for my haunted mansion in the graveyard.

'''G:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''B:''' First off, six feet, well, okay, that's my story.

'''E:''' That's what you told the judge, you know.

'''B:''' I mean, first off, six feet deep, forget it. You're not going. I went just a few feet. It's so much dirt. It takes so much time. I appreciate grave diggers so much more now.

'''E:''' Well, especially here in Connecticut, you don't know what you're digging into. You go down a foot, and bam, there's a ledge. You're done.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. Rocks are always in the way.

'''S:''' All right, well, we got some interesting news items that we're going to push to you tonight.

'''AJR:''' That's right.

'''E:''' Yes. Here's your push.

{{anchor|quickie}}
== Quickie with Steve: AMOC Time (13:10) ==

{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01709-0
|article_title = Observational constraints imply limited future Atlantic meridional overturning circulation weakening | Nature Geoscience
|publication = www.nature.com
}}
'''S:''' I'm going to start with a quickie, which I am calling a muck time.

'''E:''' Ah, very clever.

'''S:''' Very clever. This is the AMOC. You guys remember what that stands for?

'''E:''' AMOC.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, out of context. Hint.

'''B:''' Anti-multilingual or out of no idea.

'''S:''' Not even close. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

'''B:''' Yes, I used to know that.

'''S:''' That is basically the water circulation in the Atlantic, right?

'''E:''' Oh, sure.

'''S:''' You have warm, salty water traveling northward along the surface. Then it sinks down and becomes cold water that travels deep back south down to Europe. It's responsible for a lot of the current climate that we have, for example. One of the tipping points or fears of global warming is that the AMOC will collapse, right? It'll stop or will weaken significantly and that this will disrupt climates around the world, right? It'll exacerbate climate change. There's actually quite a bit of variability in how the models predict across different climate models. How they predict how much weakening will happen. And so we talked about this several times on the show. There's a quick update. I just wanted to give the quick update. So there was a recent study which basically found that the differences among these various models all have to do with the starting point. With how they model where the AMOC is today. And the variability there is essentially a couple of things. One is how deep does it go, right? You know, how much overturning is there? So they determine these. But how deep does the cold water go? And the other thing that differs is the temperature gradients. Basically the meridional, which is, you know, the north to south temperature radiance. So what they found was they just used a new equation to try to narrow the uncertainty in modeling where the AMOC is today. And if you apply that to the climate models, it significantly narrows the variability. So it turns out that with this new way of looking at it, the weakening of the AMOC by 2100 is only going to be moderate, right? So the most severe scenarios are ruled out by this new model, basically. Which is good. So it's not going to be as bad as the worst models showed. But it's still going to be severe enough to cause some temperature changes. And it still might eventually get severe, just not by 2100. So this is, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty. This is where the uncertainty comes in in climate modeling, right? Even though we know global warming is happening. We know broad brushstroke what's going to happen. We don't know exactly when and exactly how severe because a lot of these models are very dependent on minute changes in our current information about things like what's the temperature gradient in the Atlantic Ocean, things like that.

'''G:''' Is there a fear that this is going to be seen as like, so we're fine. So don't worry about it.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, I was just thinking that.

'''S:''' Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, you know, certainly the deniers will jump on this and go, see, they were over calling it all along. It's actually not that. And I remember this happened before too. This exact thing happened before in like 20 years ago when a study came out that said that reduced the variability in how much warming there's going to be. Right? So the most extreme came down, but the most mild came up. It narrowed. It didn't change the mean, whatever, like the middle of the distribution. But it was reported in the climate denying media, if you will, that they talked only about, oh, the warming is not going to be as bad as it said it was going to be. It's not going to be six degrees. It's only going to be up to four degrees. Yeah, but it's also not going to be only one degree. It went from like one to six to three to four. So I could see somebody doing the same thing. It's not going to be as bad as they said it was going to be. It's like, yeah, but it's still going to be that. It's still going to happen. It's still going to be moderate. The variability was decreased, which does, you know, chop off the most extreme end. Doesn't mean we don't have to worry about it. But yeah, I'm sure someone will say that.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== Night Vision Infrared Contact Lenses (17:44) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://gizmodo.com/infrared-contacts-let-you-see-in-the-dark-even-with-your-eyes-closed-2000604405
|article_title = These Infrared Night-Vision Contacts Let You See Through Your Eyelids
|publication = gizmodo.com
}}
'''S:''' All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with the news items with these infrared contact lenses. How does that work?

'''E:''' Oh, cool.

'''B:''' Yeah, this obviously caught my attention, especially after my talk at NOTACON about that color Olo. This is definitely not as cool. So, oh, well. But, you know, it's still interesting.

'''S:''' By the way, Bob, somebody sent us an email. I don't know how he missed us. We were talking about fake Olo.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And we didn't think of Folo.

'''B:''' Yeah, OK. Not bad. Not bad.

'''S:''' We missed that one. All right.

'''B:''' Not a major one that we just missed but OK. Not bad. All right. So for this one, scientists have created special contact lenses that allow people to see infrared light even if your eyes are closed. So, yeah, interesting. But what are the details? What are the details? Devils in the details. Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China. I won't read the name of the study because it's just a lot of gobbledygook words. Well, no, I'll read it because that's a stupid thing to say, Bob.

'''E:''' Andrea can read it for you.

'''B:''' The name of it is Near-Infrared Spatiotemporal Color Vision in Humans Enabled by Upconversion Contact Lenses. So what does that mean? Let's talk about infrared light, though, because it's just interesting and kind of integral to this whole thing. Infrared light was discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1800. I did not really know this, but it was the first time we discovered a type of light beyond visible light, first time that that had happened. Now, his technique was really interesting. He used thermometers to see how hot each of the colors of a rainbow were. That's when you separate the color in a prism, right? Shine white light through a prism, and it spreads the light into all the colors of the rainbow. So he put a thermometer by each one, and the colors generally got hotter as you went along. From violet to red, each color had a higher temperature. But after the red part of the rainbow, though, there was obviously no color there, right, because you don't see anything after red. But the thermometer that he put there, I don't know why he put it there, but it was a good move. That thermometer was the hottest. That actually was hotter than the hottest color. And so he correctly hypothesized that there must be another type of invisible light there. We can't see it, but the light's got to be there. Something's got to be there because it was making the thermometer reach temperatures higher than any other color temperature before that in the spectrum. So interesting. All right, so infrared light, it's one of the parts of the glorious electromagnetic spectrum that I love so much. From long to short wavelengths, radio, microwave, infrared, visible, UV, X-ray, gamma ray. Now we don't see infrared light because its wavelengths are essentially too long for our retinous photoreceptors. So we don't see it. We can sort of sense infrared, though, sort of, I say, because we can feel heat, and heat is related to infrared radiation. But they aren't the same thing. And since this is a common misconception, I'm going to spend two sentences on this. So I'll clarify briefly. Any object with a temperature emits infrared radiation. Infrared radiation can transfer heat, but heat itself is energy transferred due to temperature differences, which can also happen in many other ways through conduction, convection, and not just infrared radiation. All right, look it up if you want more details. Okay, so let's get to the real hero of this research that I'm discussing today, and that's the nanoparticles. The nanoparticles in this study were made from rare earth ions like yttrium. That's how you pronounce it, right, Steve? Y-T-T-R-I-U-M. That came up at NOTACON, actually.

'''E:''' I learned that there, yeah.

'''B:''' Yttrium or yttrium. So that has the ability to absorb the shortest infrared light called near-infrared light and emit it as visible light, right? So it absorbs near-infrared and emits it into something we can see in visible light. They call these particles up-conversion nanoparticles because it's essentially converting infrared to visible. For the mice research that they did before the people research, the human research, these nanoparticles were not only embedded into the special contacts, as you may have already surmised, but they were also injected directly into the little retinas for some of the tests. So now speaking of the testing, how did they determine that the mice can see infrared light or not? I mean you can't just ask it, yeah, are you seeing this? What do you think?

'''E:''' They hooked their brains up to an imager.

'''AJR:''' Or they just flashed some infrared light somewhere and see if the mice look in that direction?

'''B:''' Kind of, yeah. You guys are kind of right around it. That was good. One of the ways was to have – they have dark crevices. Now you know mice love dark crevices, but one of the dark crevices were illuminated by infrared and the other one was just a dark crevice. So when they had the ions, the nanoparticles, they avoided the dark crevices that had infrared light on them. And when they didn't have the augmentation, if you will, it was just a random selection of a dark crevice, whether it was truly dark or also infrared dark. So that was one way. The other way they looked at pupil restriction was another way that you could tell that the eye is actually detecting light and restricting itself in reaction to it. And they also even looked at the neural activity in the brain, so the visual processing center. So they definitely confirmed that these critters were seeing this upconverted infrared light. For human testing, they wisely decided to just use the contacts and not do any of the injections into the people's retinas because I think they would probably get no volunteers at all for that. That sounds so nasty. The results of the human testing were interesting. But I have to say though, before I go into the details, do not expect these contacts to give infrared vision like the alien had in the Predator movies or even – right?

'''S:''' Come on.

'''B:''' Or like we've probably all seen those special infrared cameras and the images from them. It's nothing. These people were not seeing anything like that, just throwing that out there. Body heat is associated with longer infrared wavelengths, not the shorter near-infrared wavelengths that these nanoparticles were optimized for. So you're not going to see Arnold Schwarzenegger's infrared light with these contacts. But now that I've lowered your expectations, the human subjects were able to see flashes of infrared light created from LEDs. That's what they saw. Oh, wait. Andrea, I need your help.

'''AJR:''' Okay.

'''B:''' T-I-A-N and then X-U-E is the last name. X-U-E.

'''AJR:''' Tianshui.

'''B:''' Okay. So what she said, a neuroscientist…

'''E:''' Good dodge, Bob.

'''B:''' I'm not even going to try. A neuroscientist at the University of Science and Technology, the senior author of the study said, it's totally clear-cut. Without the contact lenses, the subject cannot see anything. But when they put them on, they can clearly see the flickering of the infrared light. We also found that when the subject closes their eyes, they're even better able to receive the flickering information because the near-infrared light penetrates the eyelid more effectively than visible light, so there's less interference from the visible light. So that's how they could see the light even better with their eyes closed. I'm just trying to imagine that sensation, seeing a flash of light that is essentially infrared light that's been upconverted. But you're seeing a flash of light, and then you close your eye, and it gets even better and brighter. It's like, wow, what the hell.

'''G:''' This will be good for relationships. It's like, no, honey, I'm not sleeping. I'm totally listening to you. I got the lenses in.

'''AJR:''' I just want to see your infrared feelings.

'''B:''' Imagine. You can close your eyes, and you could read things potentially, but not with these contact lenses, though. The researchers even created trichromatic lenses with three different layers to distinguish between different wavelengths of infrared. So one wavelength of infrared was converted to red. Another one was converted. A longer one was converted to green, and a longer one than that was created to blue or vice versa. And they were basically able to create these different colors of infrared. Not really infrared. Specifically, it's upconverted, right? All right. So what's the future for this tech? Say it again, Andrea. XUE.

'''AJR:''' XUE.

'''B:''' XUE. Said in a statement, in the future, by working together with material scientists and optical experts, we hope to make a contact lens with more precise spatial resolution and higher sensitivity. So some predictions were floating around about what this could be used for. Some predict that doctors could use this tech for something specific like near-infrared fluorescence surgery, where they use infrared fluorescence to detect and remove cancerous lesions without having to use bulky equipment. That's the key there. I mean, we have equipment to look at it, but you don't need it if you're using these contacts. So that's something, I guess. Of course, there are some critics who don't think that the lenses will prove very useful. Glenn Jeffrey is a neuroscientist at University College London. He specializes in eye health. He said, I cannot think of any application that would not be fundamentally simpler with infrared goggles. Evolution has avoided this for a good reason. I don't disagree at all with that. Maybe you're surprised. I think powered infrared goggle-type technology will always, I think, be far better than what an unpowered contact could ever do on your eye. Even the bulkiest, most expensive infrared goggles, I think, will eventually get down to something much cheaper and much more manageable, like, say, sunglasses. That's always the goal with this type of technology, something that you can just slip on and you don't need bulky goggles. VR goggles, that's the holy grail for VR, right? It's not these bulky goggles that you have to strap onto your head, but just simple sunglasses that could provide that. I mean, we're heading there. Who knows when we'll ever get there? So it's similar with this. Bulkier, even slightly bulkier technology will always be much better than what these contacts can do. Still, though, this contact technology could eventually reach a point where it's at least helpful in various situations. When I described earlier, that light when you close your eyes, infrared does go through your eyelids. It can go through haze and fog. So maybe just slipping on these contacts at some point, maybe when you're driving, I don't know, it can actually help you cut through the haze or the fog in some scenarios. I don't know. I think it might not come to much because, like I said, they will always be very pale technological examples of what these heavier goggles will be able to do. But it's still interesting, and who knows, farther in the future, what we could do with this, potentially extend our natural vision deeper into the infrared and even into the ultraviolet. Who knows? But it's still interesting to learn about anyway.

'''G:''' Selfishly, the first thing I thought of was an infrared teleprompter. So you're on stage, and you have the lenses in, and the back wall of the venue has your lyrics on it. It's just massive, so you can just look up and it doesn't look like you're reading lyrics. That's the first thing I thought of. How cool would that be?

'''B:''' I love it. I love it.

'''S:''' I agree, George. I thought of not that specific application, but the idea of – from what I understand, Bob, the main limiting factor here is that it's only seeing one specific frequency, right? I mean it's not like seeing the infrared spectrum. It's just responding.

'''B:''' Maybe I didn't stress it enough. It's near infrared. It's near infrared light, so that's the –

'''S:''' It's a very narrow frequency range.

'''B:''' It's narrow. I mean the infrared band is quite broad. Some examples that I saw online, it seemed wider than even visible. So there's near infrared. There's mid-infrared. There's far infrared. This is only for near infrared.

'''S:''' For now, basically, you can see a laser in the correct frequency range.

'''B:''' Yep. It's an LED. They're super bright. That's why – the sensitivity isn't great. You need super bright.

'''S:''' You can see it. As George said, you can see it, and somebody without the contact lenses can't see it.

'''B:''' Right, right.

'''S:''' And so that could have applications like for spies or –

'''AJR:''' I was just thinking that.

'''E:''' And it's not so intense that it does damage?

'''S:''' Because you're not shining the laser in your eyes. You're seeing the laser shown on the wall or something.

'''E:''' Right. You're just – okay.

'''AJR:''' I mean the most exciting is the pitchers in baseball and the catcher no longer have to do those hand signs. You just have lasers to indicate to each other. That's obviously why they developed this technology.

'''E:''' The other team also wears the contacts and steals the signs.

'''AJR:''' Well, yeah.

'''B:''' Well, you could tag people like in a crowd. Let's say you're security, right? And you have an infrared pointer and you have the lenses in. You could like, oh, that guy is being trouble. So you tag him from a distance and every security person sees that guy being illuminated or whatever. Or for teachers or for safety things or – yeah.

'''S:''' And the tech may have applications that have nothing to do with vision.

'''B:''' That's always a classic. Yeah.

'''S:''' Just the idea that you can up-convert the frequency of the light maybe for video technology or sensing technology or whatever but not for wearing over your eyes.

'''B:''' Yeah. There's plenty of technology now that we had no idea that – Steve, we talked about it many times. You can't predict how people are going to use the technology. Right.

'''G:''' The question is now, when do we see the first fake contact lens product claiming to use this tech?

'''AJR:''' To protect you against 5G waves.

'''G:''' Yeah, it will be like a week or two, right? Like, yeah, based on this article. Now they have – you can see into the infrared.

'''S:''' The classic example, of course, of a technology that – because oftentimes technology is developed for a purpose but then it doesn't really serve that purpose well. It serves another purpose, was the microwave which was developed as a cooking tool which nobody uses it for but it turned out to be an awesome heating tool. We just don't cook with it but we do heat with it.

'''B:''' That's true. That's true. It's a great heater.

'''S:''' All right. Let's move on.

{{anchor|news_item2}}
=== Trees Respond to Solar Eclipse (31:38) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.241786
|article_title = https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.241786
|publication = royalsocietypublishing.org
}}
'''S:''' All right, George. You're going to tell us about trees communicating to each other during a solar eclipse. What is this about?

'''G:''' Okay. So this is one of these stories that kind of hits everything for me that I want a story to hit. First off, it feels kind of wooey. It feels like this could be not true. I love things that feel like they're not true or feel like they're wooey and then the more you examine them, they actually might be true and then there's like a paradigm shift for that as cliched as that phrase is. That's the one thing. The second thing is as a Rush fan, one of my favorite songs is The Trees. Evan will understand, of course.

'''E:''' I agree.

'''G:''' The first song is basically the trees talking to each other and that's kind of where we're going with this story. And fighting with each other. And fighting with each other, right. And the third thing is this involves an eclipse and we had such a lovely time in Texas with our eclipse adventures. So it's like this just hits all the – this just hits everything I want a story to hit. So we all – you know about the sort of mycelium that is under mushrooms that kind of communicates with – over vast distances. Well, this is sort of a similar thing that some scientists in Italy were trying to see if trees could sort of communicate with each other especially during an eclipse. So they wanted to measure the bioelectrical impulses of trees that took these spruce trees, spruces during this eclipse. Now, from the information that they've gathered, they're saying – and this is the Prezi. They're saying that like not only are the trees responding to the eclipse but some of the trees actually anticipated and were synchronized together to anticipate the eclipse which is crazy. Which is crazy. So there's two professors here. Professor Alessandro Ciollerio of the Italian Institute of Technology or the IIT and the Professor Monica Gagliano from the Australia Southern Cross University. So like legit places of study. Charged molecules travel through cells and through the cells of organisms and they transmit electrical signals as they go. And they're calling sort of that transmission an electron. And again, it feels kind of wooey because we're starting to get into like terms that sort of sound sciencey but might not be. So, yeah, my skeptical meters were kind of pinned throughout this. They wanted to monitor what these spruces potentially were communicating to each other. So they grabbed three trees. They grabbed two trees that were 70 years old and one tree that was 20 years old. They attached five pairs of electrodes all over on the branches, on the trunks, on the roots that were exposed all over the place. And they mostly measured bioelectrical potentials or the difference in voltage across cell membranes. OK. So they were measuring these things with these sensors. And they said that the electrical activity of all three became significantly more synchronized during the eclipse. Before the eclipse as well as after the eclipse, but around 60 minutes of the entire thing. This was at a microscopic level. These sort of synchronizations were occurring, they said, inside the water and lymph molecules of the tree. OK. One factor that sort of came out was they said the two older trees, the ones that were 70, had an earlier response to the upcoming eclipse than the younger tree, which implied there might be like a sort of, quote-unquote, learning that's happening with these trees. It may mean they learned to anticipate or develop mechanisms unlike the younger trees or the younger tree that hadn't quite developed it. And the wooiness kind of just keeps going. So they detected biological waves traveling between the trees. And not just the trees. They also had monitors on stumps. And the stumps had similar responses, too. There was a lower level, but they had a similar thing where they were kind of lining up together. And after analyzing the data, their computer models reinforced their supposed test results, i.e., the eclipse not only influenced the biological response, but the activity was correlated between the trees. This may mean that a cohesive organism-like reaction exists at a forest level. All right. So there's other studies that have been done sort of to try to reveal the interconnectivity of ecosystems, like I said, the mycelium of mushrooms and things like that. And this might be along that same sort of level. They think that if this is real, that this kind of activity could help the trees' resilience and biodiversity and overall function, in that it can anticipate and warn, quote-unquote, each other of stuff that's happening in the environment. It reinforces this idea that we need to preserve old growth forests because those older trees are smarter, quote-unquote. It seems wacky, and it seems pretty wooey, and I'm sure you're going to tear me apart. So I'm going to stretch and have at it.

'''S:''' It's an interesting study because it is one of those studies where I want to be fair to it. I don't want to have a knee-jerk reaction. I want to try to dig in and say, all right, do I believe this or not? My ultimate conclusion for several reasons is that I think this is probably bullshit. And at the very least, I would be surprised if this replicates. And until it does replicate pretty reliably, I would not hang my hat on this. So a few things. At one point, they have a whole section of the paper where they try to explain what the phenomenon that's happening, like how are these trees communicating with each other. And they invoke quantum field theory, which is a huge red flag.

'''B:''' Really?

'''E:''' They do, don't they? QFT, right there.

'''S:''' At a macroscopic level, I just think they have no idea what they're talking about. The other thing is a red flag for me is when a paper is trying to describe a phenomenon, and their mathematical statistical analysis is incredibly complicated. And they're pulling this little bit of signal out of something by doing all this fancy footwork. It's like, how hard did you have to work to find a signal in this noise? You know what I mean? Could you really predict like this is the thing that was going to show an effect? But also just the premise is silly, in my opinion, that the trees are communicating to each other and they know several hours ahead of time that an eclipse is coming. On average, an eclipse will hit the same spot on the earth every 400 years. There's just no way trees can adapt to that. It makes no sense. At the very least, at the very most rather, you could say, well, maybe they're responding to the gravitational, you know, the tidal forces of the new moon, you know. It has nothing to do with the eclipse per se. It's just that whenever the moon gets close to the sun or, you know, whatever, that they can sense somehow.

'''E:''' You don't need eclipses to measure that.

'''S:''' But I think trees are too small to really detect significantly, detect those kind of tidal forces. They would be really small, tiny at that scale. And who cares? Why would they care? Going on, I don't know that they really can. It's three trees.

'''G:''' That's another thing. It's like such a small sample.

'''S:''' Such a small sample. How do they really know that they're synchronizing versus just all responding to the same environment?

'''G:''' Synchronous, yeah.

'''S:''' Right? And the older trees, I mean, there's so many things that could be different about them other than their knowledge and experience. Like they're probably bigger. They're probably taller.

'''G:''' Right, right.

'''S:''' So there's so many questions that this raises. Their story that they're telling is almost certainly not true. I don't know if they detected something real or not. If they did, it probably has nothing to do with what they're claiming it does.

'''G:''' Right, right.

'''S:''' And you would need to do lots of controls and gather lots of data to see if there's anything even real in there. I think they're just diving into the noise and just making up a lot of bullshit is my guess.

'''G:''' But it's such a good Rush song though.

'''S:''' I agree.

'''G:''' It's such a great song. I was like, ugh. So yeah.

'''S:''' But you've got to dive in pretty deep though to really start to pick it apart. And the reporting on it is pretty much entirely gullible.

'''B:''' Steve, how did they invoke quantum field theory?

'''S:''' Right? They're trying to say, again, they get more complicated than they have to be. This is the thing. I love jargon. Right? I love science jargon. And I always have this question. When there's science jargon, I'm having a hard time parsing. Is that because I'm just way too out of my depth or because it's total bullshit? And sometimes you can tell and sometimes it's hard to tell or you can't tell. In this case, I think it could be both. Like they're talking about stuff that could definitely go over my head. But it seems like they're also just slinging a lot of bullshit.

'''G:''' Yeah. At one point they say, the bioelectrical signals include entropy, diversity, expressiveness, complexity, and fractal measures.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''G:''' Which feels a little bit like a word.

'''S:''' They're just throwing out a lot of shit.

'''G:''' Yeah, a lot of shit. Action potentials, ion channel activities, and electrical potentials across membranes. Where it's like, oh. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

'''AJR:''' It is very tricky, Steve. You make such a good point. And I run into this a lot with sort of data-related things where the temptation is to conclude, well, they did so much math and so many fancy statistics that it's much more precise and accurate and powerful. When very often I appreciate what you said. It's like kind of the rule of thumb is like, of course, sometimes you have to do things that are complicated. But a lot of times if it seems unnecessarily complicated, there's a really forced result in here somewhere.

'''S:''' Right, right, right. And part of this, for me, is informed by me reading neurobabble, right? So there are like neurological chiropractors or whatever, people who are pretending to be neurologists who aren't, and are slinging the neurological jargon. And I can tell completely that it's utter nonsense.

'''E:''' Of course.

'''S:''' And it's just complete nonsense. But you get the vibe of how they're using the jargon, how they're using the terminology. They're being way more complicated. There's no elegance at all.

'''E:''' It's the hallmark of pseudoscience.

'''S:''' Yeah. You can't sort of boil it down to some kind of coherent concept, and then you build out the sort of complexity from there. It's just all like, it's like a big distraction. You know what I mean? So I get the same kind of vibe off of this, that these are biologists who are dabbling in physics they don't understand, but they think that they do. Or they think if they throw out enough math and physics, quantum terms, that it will make it seem science-y. But I'm not buying it for a second.

'''AJR:''' What is the incentive to produce this sort of paper? Is it academic clout, and it's another publication, and so on? Because, you know, normally this is like, seems like it's politically motivated, or they're selling something. But I can't place my finger on why they would write this.

'''S:''' I don't know. Who knows? I mean, speculations. There's always the generic motivation of getting another paper published.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' Plowing new ground, right? You're exploring new areas. It sounds like they have a bit of an ideology that this is aligning with, to be honest with you.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''G:''' Yeah, they were pushing this kind of the value of old growth forests and that kind of ecological angle, which is a good angle, but you can't reinforce that with quantum BS.

'''S:''' With quantum.

'''AJR:''' Maybe you can't, George.

'''G:''' Yeah. That's true. Sorry.

'''AJR:''' I will say as someone who only eats plants. I mean, I don't eat a lot of trees, but any time I hear about plants communicating with each other, I sort of freak out. So I'm very relieved that we don't think this is true.

'''S:''' But having said that, trees do communicate with each other. That's established.

'''AJR:''' Wow. I'm back to eating plastic.

'''S:''' So I think they're building on that.

'''B:''' Don't listen, Andrea.

'''S:''' It is through the mycelium network. They're communicating chemically, right? And they're exchanging nutrients, and it's kind of like a failsafe. Like if one tree's doing better, it'll help its friends out, and then it's a reciprocity kind of thing. This is a different, completely different phenomenon of synchronization of their electron with quantum field theory. This is a completely different phenomenon, but they're sort of building on the basic idea that trees communicate with each other, which is true. Right? So I guess that makes it sound more plausible because of that. But anyway, it is interesting. And again, who knows? Maybe they're onto something, but we would need to see some massive replication before I think anyone's going to take this seriously.

'''AJR:''' What if we look at the trees through Bob's contact lenses?

'''S:''' Infrared thing?

'''E:''' Ooh.

'''B:''' Oh.

'''E:''' Clever.

'''AJR:''' As a follow-up step.

'''S:''' They're all talking to each other in infrared. We're just not looking.

'''AJR:''' That's right.

'''S:''' All right. Andrea, you're up next.

{{anchor|news_item3}}
=== Affective Polarization (45:04) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/new-measure-of-affective-polarization/DEF7FCC26D4F09BDE5603BCC02B4765D
|article_title = A New Measure of Affective Polarization | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
|publication = www.cambridge.org
}}
'''S:''' You're going to tell us about it. Now, tell me, is this real or is this not real? Affective polarization.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''S:''' That sounds jargony to me.

'''AJR:''' Tell you what. You tell me at the end if you think it's real. So affective polarization. So the paper that I want to talk about today. So I'm always excited to come on this show, and I always have a lot of fun finding the news items for when I join the show. And this paper wins the prize. I literally, the minute I saw it, I said, we're doing this. Normally, I consider a bunch of different ones, and what do you think, and what should we do? And the minute I saw this, I gasped and jumped for joy. And so now we're talking about it. So get ready. The title of the paper is A New Measure of Affective Polarization. Drum solo here, right? It's affective polarization is bigger and better than you ever thought it was before. So a new measure of affective polarization. Affective polarization is one of my favorite concepts in political science, and new measures of anything are pretty much my favorite thing in data science. So first, my question for you all, do any of you know what affective polarization is, besides, as Steve says, jargony? And it is jargony. But it is a term that's been around for 10 years.

'''E:''' We can define each of the words, but in its context, I don't know.

'''S:''' Only once I read the paper does that mean.

'''AJR:''' Right. Yeah. So Steve knows. So Evan, let's break it down. Let's do affective. What does that mean?

'''E:''' Affective is having an effect on things. What changes? What makes things go the way they do?

'''S:''' See, it's a neuroscience term. That's why I would know it anyway.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. Steve, let's hear it.

'''S:''' That's a clue. It's emotions. Your affect is the emotions that you're displaying.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. So a way of understanding and measuring emotions in psychology and in political science, which stole it, is to say, what is someone's affect? You could have a positive affect or a negative affect, and then you can divide. If it's a negative affect, there might be anger or fear or anxiety or whatever. Right? So affect is an emotion and polarization. Evan?

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. How things basically gather as a result and become compartmentalized or lean, go in one direction versus another.

'''AJR:''' Right. And you can have the North and South Pole, and you can also have polarization in terms of political polarization, which is what political scientists think about a lot, which is to say that there's this idea out there that Americans, and frankly, a lot of countries, there are people who have ideologies way on one side of a political spectrum, and the rest of the population largely has ideas way on the other side of the political spectrum. So with apologies to listeners not in the United States, this is a U.S.-centric piece of research, but I do believe it applies outside of the United States. But so the idea of affective polarization is something that came into the mainstream political science, like I said, about 10 years ago. And it was a big step forward in understanding partisan polarization in the United States. And when we talk about polarization in the United States politically, what we tend to think about, myself included, is we tend to jump to ideological polarization. So if you see in the news or you see on social media, Americans are more polarized than ever. Political polarization is at an all-time high. Political polarization is bad for democracy. Whatever claim you see, normally when you hear political polarization, we tend to think of it as ideological polarization. So my views are super, super on the left, and other people's views are super, super on the right. Of course, politics is not just this particular, you know, there's many dimensions to politics, but we could simplify it to just this left-right for now. The challenge is that political scientists for literally decades could not find empirical evidence of ideological polarization. With the exception now of two issues, Americans mostly, on average, there are people on the extremes, but if you take any particular issue that comes up in the news, so guns, taxes, government spending, you know, whatever it is that we talk about when we talk about politics and what, you know, candidates are asked about in debates and blah, blah, blah, the vast majority of Americans are kind of in the middle. You know, we see this conversation every time that gun control comes up is that most Americans, yes, there's people on the far left of gun control and people on the far right, but most Americans want some set of common sense gun control, and we can kind of quibble about how far, but most Americans are fairly moderate. That's the case for all issues except for two. There's two issues in American politics where ideologically we are seeing a real split between the left and the right. Do you guys want to guess what those two issues are?

'''S:''' Abortion and guns.

'''AJR:''' Abortion, yes. Not guns. You get one more guess.

'''E:''' Economics.

'''S:''' No.

'''AJR:''' I was going to say close, but not really. Climate. So climate change.

'''B:''' Oh, yes.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. So abortion is one where we see the left and right really split. Climate, we see the left and right really split. But things like guns, things like government spending, things like even immigration and other issues, LGBTQ rights, you know, most Americans, the left is a little to the left and the right is a little to the right, but we really aren't that split. So political scientists were in this conundrum where they said, look, we feel polarized. Things seem awful. But wherever we look in the data, and that's true if you say, like, how strongly do you believe that you're a Democrat versus how strongly do you think you're a Republican? That wasn't really widening either. And it wasn't until some researchers 10 years ago said maybe the polarization issue is not our ideological differences, but it's our emotional differences. And from there, that really opened up a brand new area of research on what is now called affective polarization, where the big finding is it's not that Americans disagree on the policy issues so much. It's that we hate each other, which is kind of good news from a policy perspective. There's a lot of middle ground that we might like. We might come to a compromise. But it's bad news from an implementation and democratic processes and day-to-day life quality perspective where it's like we just hate the other side. And the big measure for that is something that is one of my favorite measures out there in the world. It's called a feeling thermometer. And the feeling thermometer says, hey, Democrats, what do you think about other Democrats? Hey, Democrats, what do you think about other Republicans? And then you say, hey, Republicans, what do you think about your fellow Republicans? Hey, Republicans, what do you think about Democrats? And the feeling thermometer was very, very warm. It's kind of a warmth bias is another way it's talked about, where Democrats and Republicans both thought of their own party as like a 75 degrees, like a warm day, you know, on a scale from 0 to 100, I guess this is pretty Fahrenheit. But the out party feelings was like a 17 and plummeting. Democrats hate Republicans and Republicans hate Democrats.

'''E:''' Sounds tribal.

'''AJR:''' Very tribal. And that's what brings us to today's paper, which said, hold on a second. And this is why I just love this, because I've been thinking about affective polarization forever. I was pretty satisfied with this 0 to 100 warmth bias scale. And then these two researchers, Nicholas Campos and Christopher Federico from the University of Minnesota, recently published a paper in the American Political Science Review, literally came out within the last few weeks. So that's breaking news in peer reviewed timing. That said we can be more specific than just how warm or cold we feel towards the other party. And exactly as you said, Evan, they divided into three categories. They said, we think that based on a bunch of research on psychology and in group, out group research and in group favoritism and the sense of belonging and all this stuff about tribalism, all this research, we think there's actually three elements to this affective polarization. It's deeper than just, ah, we don't like them. The three elements are othering. So othering means I think that there are fundamental differences between people in the other group from my own. Another one is aversion. I dislike and avoid people in the other group. And the third one is moralization, which is a perception that my own partisan identity reflects fundamental values and this idea that I am basing my views on morals and therefore the other group must not be. So there's a lot of overlap, right? If I'm othering, I think there's a fundamental difference between me and people in the party that I'm not in. Then I may avoid them and I may have some moral idea that I'm superior or they're not, but not necessarily. And so the paper details a long process over two years and many, many surveys where they distilled these three measures into nine total questions. This went from 45 questions of like, you know, if I'm at a party and there's someone from the outer, the other political group there, I'll leave the party. I would be uncomfortable if I found out that my best friend was a member of another political party, all these possible types of survey questions. They distilled it down to nine core questions. They did a ton of work to validate the measures, meaning if I think I'm measuring, you know, moralization, am I actually? If so, this is what it would look like. So you do a ton of work to make sure that you're actually picking up the things that you think you're picking up. And then they were able to actually evaluate this three, you know, kind of three part model of affective polarization against some of the research out there about, well, why do we care about polarization in the first place? Well, one reason we care about polarization in the first place is that we think that it might permit people to justify anti-democratic behavior or democratic backsliding. So a lot of the talk in the United States right now is about, gosh, we might be losing our, you know, democratic institutions and we might be seeing a greater tolerance for behaviors that undermine our democratic institutions. A working hypothesis was increased affective polarization, this hatred of the other side, is causing us to be tolerant of or justify doing things that are anti-democratic, like attacking the Capitol or tearing apart, you know, various, you know, bureaucracies or whatever it is, or changing voting rules or whatever it is. We might be becoming more tolerant of that because of affective polarization. But it turns out that if you divide affective polarization into these three questions, these three kind of subcategories, yeah, these three constructs, you end up with a much more nuanced picture where it's actually just the aversion piece. So if I have aversion to the other side, if I dislike the other side, as opposed to particularly think that my side happens to be morally right, or simply think of them as different but I don't necessarily dislike them, I just don't want to hang out with them, it's that dislike that makes us most tolerant of these non-democratic attitudes. So when we think of people, you know, turning away and kind of ignoring things that we think, gosh, you're not even trusting our own political institutions, it's largely to do with this aversion, this hatred of the other side, as opposed to being grounded in some moralistic view or even the othering. The moralistic view, if I think that my side is absolutely right and my beliefs are based in some kind of morality, then we see people actually much more likely to endorse democratic norms, even if it's being enforced by parties they disagree with. And the last thing I'll say is that all of this also maps to how strongly we feel associated with a political party, as well as our knowledge of national politics. So the people who are this high in aversion, like I just dislike and don't trust the other side, were more tolerant of anti-democratic policies and they showed stronger ideological identity. So I strongly identify as a member of this party or that party, but they had very low knowledge of actual national politics. Whereas different groups, so if you're high in moralization, I have a strong party ID but I'm also very knowledgeable. So there's all these different pieces. We've been trying to figure out why Americans on opposite sides of the aisle hate each other. And if you start breaking down, well, hate them how? Why do they hate each other? You actually get a clearer picture where it's this mix of knowledge versus tolerance for democratic backsliding and tolerance of things like violence that's really helping us, I think, break through and get to some kind of solution so we maybe stop hating each other so much. So maybe the aversion people are not a great place to start. But those of us who are more on the moralization or othering side, there's some real interventions where we could start to understand each other and make policy compromises that seemed unreachable till now. So I think this is just amazing. I'm curious if you guys think this is just political scientists coming up with new terms to delight each other or if you think there's actually value there.

'''G:''' The saddest thing is that this is always like when you ask someone what they think of another group, it's in the aggregate. It's this idea. It's like a – like when you break it down to individuals, like individuals will never label other individuals in that same way that you label a group.

'''AJR:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Sure. It's much more nuanced.

'''G:''' Yes. It's like because everyone has a gay friend. Everyone has a – like oh, yeah. But you might not like a particular group of people but even someone that identifies within that group and you know them personally, you're totally different about them because you know them personally and oh, that's Fred. Fred is different. That doesn't count.

'''AJR:''' George, you're absolutely right. I've actually for a different project been doing some research on what works to reduce antisemitism and a lot of the research is about this intergroup contact theory that says hey, if you get people from different groups to talk to each other, blah, blah, blah, they like see that they're all humans and we all have shared fates and we're all in it together and blah, blah, blah. And everyone was really excited that that was going to solve all our problems. Well, it turns out that it's very possible that what's happening is exactly what you described where I go to some event and I say hey, you know, I'm not changing my views about Jewish people. I'm changing my views about that guy.

'''G:''' Right. That Jewish person.

'''AJR:''' And unfortunately it does seem that some of these interventions that we thought were group level interventions are actually not. Another example that I think is – well, you tell me if it's depressing is if you ask Americans what do you think – what is your approval of Congress? It's very low on both sides of the aisle, right? Everyone thinks Congress is terrible. If you ask Americans what do you think of your Congress person and you name that person, they're pretty favorable relative to the overall aggregate. So it's like what's the problem here? It's like we're all mad at Congress but most people are kind of okay with their person in office. Not everyone.

'''G:''' It's the same thing with teachers. The American education system is like, oh, you don't like your kids' teachers. Oh no, my kids' teachers are great. They're phenomenal. But the whole system is just corrupt.

'''S:''' It's true about everything. It's true about doctors. Doctors are this. My doctor is awesome. But doctors in general –

'''G:''' Lawyers.

'''S:''' Lawyers, yeah. Like any group and –

'''G:''' Drummers are definitely –

'''S:''' Drummers are assholes.

'''G:''' The worst.

'''E:''' But this drummer is decent.

'''S:''' Yeah, except for you, George. You're the exception. I even had that. I was in a debate on homeopathy to an audience of homeopaths, right? So it was me and 300 homeopaths.

'''E:''' 300.

'''S:''' And a lot of people came up to me and said, oh, most skeptics are assholes but you're nice. Yeah. It was like you're the – And I'm like, no, I'm typical. They refused to believe that I wasn't the exception. They refused to believe it because they had their stereotype.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''G:''' You can't believe it.

'''S:''' They're a cardboard villain that they had erected that was part of their identity and their worldview and I'm a piece of data that conflicts with that worldview. And so that's an exception to the rule, right? It's not the rule.

'''E:''' You're an outlier.

'''S:''' You're an outlier. It does not challenge the rule. So you're absolutely right. This is where critical – That's why the missing element is critical thinking.

'''AJR:''' Yes. Yes.

'''S:''' Having the awareness, the metacognition to know that this is what we do and you have to break out of that pattern because you're right. People – and I've read this in many contexts as well and people of different political stripes get together and talk to each other. They realize, oh, you're not a three-headed monster. You're an actual human being who believes things that most normal human beings believe. But when you're thinking of like Democrats or Republicans or whatever in the aggregate, just read the comments to any political article online, right?

'''AJR:''' No, it's horrible.

'''S:''' They talk about the other side as like this cartoon villain. Nobody fits that. Nobody believes what you think the other side believes. Nobody is that way.

'''AJR:''' Well, the other challenge is that if you hypothetically go out and say, hey – which I have done is say, hey, I've spoken to people from the other side and I've read about a lot of the work happening on the other side and most people are actually pretty moderate and for example supportive of some level of gun control. We just don't hear about those people because they're not the ones shouting into the algorithms and being amplified. When you say that, the people in my own party get upset and accuse me of being sympathizers of the other side. It's a lose-lose.

'''S:''' You're a combinationist.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Apologist.

'''S:''' Apologist. Yeah, whatever.

'''AJR:''' Exactly. Exactly. And so it's just so – I mean, I think this sort of work is really interesting and we're not there yet, but it's just – I find it so frustrating because we could, from a policy perspective, actually make headway on a lot of things that a lot of people care about, but we just can't because we cannot be seen interacting with someone from the other side. And we tend to – there's other research out there that shows that most Democrats – well, let me do it the other way. Most Republicans think something like 30% of Democrats in the U.S. are LGBTQ, when the real number is like 6% or something tiny, right?

'''G:''' Six, ten, yeah.

'''B:''' Oh, wow.

'''AJR:''' And Democrats tend to think of Republicans as either these ultra-wealthy, out-of-touch or like totally uneducated – just all these stereotypes and really –

'''E:''' Yeah, gun-toting hillbillies.

'''AJR:''' The modal person for both parties is a white Christian and it's like we just mostly have a lot in common. We just don't hear from those other sides and so –

'''G:''' I wonder what countries have the greatest sort of whitest middle in terms of agreement and why that is.

'''AJR:''' I thought you said the whitest middle. I was like Norway.

'''G:''' Like the extremes on either side are minimal, below 5% or whatever it may be and like what is it about those particular environs or the country or the culture or media or the way media is consumed or the way people – maybe there's a homogenization. Like what is it – is our diversity causing this on some level?

'''S:''' I think it's –

'''G:''' Because it doesn't seem like that way because it's not.

'''S:''' I think it's – It's basically two things. In my opinion, although this is obviously a good question to research, one is what we were talking about before about the insulation of the internet. We're in little information ecosystems. The other one is the media. I mean especially –

'''E:''' They want conflict.

'''S:''' They want conflict. Absolutely. You watch the –

'''E:''' They stoke it.

'''S:''' Watch the media from the other side, whatever side you were on and you're shocked. You're shocked about what they're saying about you. It's ridiculous. It's like the degree to which they demonize the other side, the straw man is just absolutely unbelievable. So of course people think this is what they're being told over and over and over again that the other side believes all this ridiculously stupid things. They're trying to – I mean I've heard people on both sides say the other side wants to destroy America.

'''AJR:''' Right. They are an active threat to America. I've heard that too. I mean and that's the tricky thing and that's what's so hard for me is because I'll watch the other side and hear them say things that I just – are cartoonish.

'''S:''' Cartoonish.

'''AJR:''' Characterizations of things that no one actually – no one wants all your kids to be trans or whatever, right?

'''S:''' Whatever. Nobody wants completely open borders or people who just freely flow over the borders.

'''AJR:''' Right. Or like –

'''S:''' Pick your issue.

'''AJR:''' Abortions in a 7-Eleven or whatever it is. But what I need to do a better job of is remind myself that a lot of what I am probably hearing about the other side is also that level of caricature. Maybe not quite that level but near that level.

'''G:''' It's the hardest thing, man. It's like you've got to – whenever you agree with something, that's when you've got to be most diligent.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''G:''' It's the hardest thing.

'''B:''' Good point.

'''G:''' Oh, that makes me feel good. Oh, is that – okay. Trees are talking to each other.

'''AJR:''' Right. That's why I had to be really diligent about your piece, George, because I was like I really want this to be wrong. So I'm sure that I'm not just finding –

'''G:''' The other direction too. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' No. I mean the media piece is such a mess and part of the problem with studying media is – more jargon – is the endogeneity of it, which is to say that, you know, am I more – partisan people tend to watch partisan media. But am I seeking out partisan media because I'm partisan or am I partisan because I've watched partisan media? And like disentangling that is extremely difficult whether you're consuming it on TV or online. A lot of the most partisan people in terms of ideological extremes seem to spend the least amount of time online, which is where we think that a lot of this stuff happens. That said, they spend time on Facebook as opposed to other algorithms, so maybe there's something there. But I did see a very interesting study a couple of weeks ago where I don't know how they got people to agree with this, but they got a whole bunch of Americans who routinely watch Fox News to watch CNN for a month. I don't know how they enforced this. I don't know how they verified that this was happening. But they did seem to report some ideological moderation in those 30 people who were forced to watch CNN.

'''E:''' That would be an expected result.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. I would be curious-

'''S:''' They pry their eyes open and strap their heads in.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. Put in context that just played.

'''S:''' Diddy well with her, brother.

'''AJR:''' Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it would happen the other side. Like, would I become, not to overly talk about my own views, but like, what if I were forced to watch news that, exclusively news that I disagreed with for a month? Like, what would that do to me? I like to think it wouldn't change me, but I don't know.

'''G:''' Well, get back to us.

'''AJR:''' I will. Yeah, yeah. I'll come back in a month and talk about how the earth is flat.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== The Brain’s Motor Switchboard (1:08:14) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09066-z
|article_title = Dynamic basal ganglia output signals license and suppress forelimb movements | Nature
|publication = www.nature.com
}}
'''S:''' I'm going to ask you guys to indulge me in a little bit of neurological jargon now.

'''E:''' You got it.

'''S:''' Yeah, this is a cool item. I'm going to try to explain this to you as simply as I can. Are you guys familiar with the basal ganglia?

'''G:''' Slow down. Slow down.

'''S:''' All right.

'''E:''' Yes, it's a spice.

'''G:''' What the hell?

'''AJR:''' I like it with a little turmeric in it.

'''E:''' I do as well.

'''G:''' That's what you use to think about pasta.

'''S:''' What do you think? If I just throw the term out there, basal ganglia, does that mean anything to you?

'''AJR:''' It's the base of your brain.

'''E:''' It's like insect brain or something.

'''AJR:''' It's like the brain stem or something.

'''E:''' It's like very small part of a piece of a brain.

'''S:''' Not quite. It's above the brain stem. It's part of the brain. It's above the brain stem.

'''AJR:''' It's like an old fear.

'''S:''' No.

'''AJR:''' Okay.

'''S:''' No, movement. Very quickly, there's three systems in the brain that influence voluntary movement. You have what we call the pyramidal system, the primary motor cortex. You have the motor cortex, which then sends signals down the cortical spinal tracts to your muscles. That's the direct motor control of your muscles. It's literally two neurons. These are the longest neurons in your body.

'''E:''' How long are they?

'''S:''' One goes from the brain to your spinal cord. The other goes from the spinal cord to your muscle. That's it. It's a two-neuron system. That's sort of the direct muscle control. That's modified by two other systems. It's modified by the cerebellar system, which allows you to coordinate different muscles together. That's where your muscle memory is. If you do any kind of coordinated movement, rhythm over time, right, George, when you're playing the drums, it's all happening in your cerebellum. Then there's also the basal ganglia. What does that do? How does that modify movement? That's a very interesting question. We've been modifying our models of what the basal ganglia actually does. One way to think about it, and this is probably how I explain it to students, is that part of what it does is modulate the gain of the connection between the premotor and the motor cortex. Basically, your desire to move and the amount that you actually move. Does that make sense? You know what gain is? Gain is just the connection between input and output. That's why on old stereos, some engineer decided to call the volume knob the gain. That's literally what it is.

'''E:''' Is that where it comes from?

'''S:''' Yes. It's the input versus the speaker output.

'''B:''' Kind of annoying.

'''G:''' You don't overshoot the pen when you're trying to grab it.

'''S:''' Exactly. Although, overshooting is more to do with the cerebellum. It gets complicated. Parkinson's disease, that's a disease of the basal ganglia. Their gain is turned way down. At the end stage, they move very little. They even get frozen. They can't move at all. There's something called Huntington's Chrea, for example, which is the opposite disease. It's a lesion in a different part of the basal ganglia where the gain is turned way up. They're constantly moving and wriggling. They can't stay still. That's a simple way to think about it. It's way more complicated than that. The question is, how does the basal ganglia do that? The traditional model is that it primarily works through inhibition, which is how most of the nervous system controls itself. The nervous system, especially the brain, is constantly inhibiting the pathways and conduction that it doesn't want. There's tonic inhibition, meaning baseline, always-on inhibition, basically throughout the nervous system. That's just how it functions. The basal ganglia works primarily through inhibiting unwanted movements. That inhibition could be turned up or turned down. Now we get to the new study, because we have all kinds of new fancy tools that we could use to study how the brain is working. This was looking at the circuitry in the basal ganglia, a specific part of the basal ganglia, the substantia nigra pars reticulata, which is not the part that's affected in Parkinson's disease, by the way. That's the substantia nigra pars compacta, which is right next door. In any case, they were looking at this to see how is it functioning during voluntary movement. What they found was it isn't just inhibition. It's not just inhibiting unwanted movements. It's also potentiating wanted movements. It's actually acting like a very complicated switchboard that is selecting specifically which motor neurons are going to be firing, which ones to enhance and which ones to suppress. It had a very dynamic firing rate. It actually has a much greater level of control than we previously thought over controlling voluntary movement. When you make a precise movement, you have to activate a bunch of motor units in a precise timing and coordination and sequence. A lot of that is happening in the basal ganglia. It's essentially modifying your... When you think about, I want to reach over here and grab a can of Coke and drink it, you don't have to really think too hard about specifically what you're doing. Your conscious control is at a very high level. You're not thinking, I'm going to activate this muscle a little. You're not voluntarily controlling every little muscle fiber and muscle group in all of the different muscles that are required to do that action. You're just thinking, I just want to reach over there. Whereas that level of control must be subconscious. It's partly in the cerebellum and it's partly in the basal ganglia. It turns out that there's way more control happening in the basal ganglia than we previously thought. It's not just a general inhibition, not just a gain up and down. It's actually coordinating a lot of the movement itself.

'''E:''' You mean decade?

'''S:''' It's way more dynamic than we thought it was.

'''G:''' So like an athlete that's learned a skill over time or like if you learn how to type or something like that, does that mean that the gain from the basal ganglia increases over time and kind of takes over the involuntary? Because when you're really good at something, you don't think about it. Whether it's an instrument or pitching or golf or whatever.

'''S:''' Classically, that kind of making a learned movement subconscious is thought to be in the cerebellum. So like when you shoot a basketball 100 times, 1,000 times to the point where you don't think about it, that's because those muscle coordinations all happening at the subconscious and specifically cerebellar level. But now, more of it may be happening in the basal ganglia than we thought. Maybe a combination of the two things. But the next step would be a very interesting question, George, is how much does the basal ganglia learn? Is it just necessary to execute these finessed movements or is it actually learning how to do them as a learned movement?

'''E:''' Getting more efficient as it practices.

'''G:''' Taking over responsibility sort of.

'''S:''' We don't know that yet. So we know the cerebellum does that, but maybe since the basal ganglia is far more complicated than we thought, maybe it's doing some of that too.

'''E:''' Parallel, redundancy, all these things come into it?

'''S:''' It's not redundant. It's because if you miss any piece of it, you know it. There's a deficit associated with a fault in any of these subsystems.

'''B:''' Steve, is this potentially good news for any types of treatment?

'''S:''' Well, the more we understand things at this level, then yes. Especially since we are at the dawn really of the age of, not Aquarius, but of neuromodulation, right? We're using electrical and magnetic stimulation in order to affect how the brain functions.

'''B:''' I got high hopes for that.

'''S:''' And that has two basic limiting factors, right? One is just the hardware, right? Just the technology of interfacing with the brain. And the other is our knowledge at a very fine level of exactly how the brain is wired. And so every bit that we learn about that – so you could imagine like building a computer chip that does the same thing, you know, that the basal ganglia is doing or whatever. I'm just saying theoretically. We obviously don't have the technology to do that now. One of the early technologies of neuromodulation is deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease. We actually put wires in the basal ganglia to, for example, suppress the tremor of Parkinson's disease. So the basal ganglia is one of the first parts of the brain that was targeted by sticking a wire in it and using electrical stimulation to affect its function. So yeah, so this potentially has a lot of implications for neurological treatment, especially because of neuromodulation. But again, it's just cool to understand how complicated the brain is and how it functions.

'''G:''' Aren't you going to miss being able to talk about this when you retire? Because they take your brain card away and you can't talk about this, right? Is that how that works?

'''S:''' I know you're joking, but the serious answer is this is the one thing I think I'm going to miss the most is teaching students, residents, fellows, sort of high-level neuroscience. But you'll probably be hearing more of it on the show.

'''G:''' You'll just have to teach us.

'''E:''' We just have to become your new students.

'''AJR:''' It's the Stephen Novella unlicensed neurological course.

'''G:''' The doctor is in.

'''E:''' No refunds.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''G:''' Five cents.

'''E:''' Yeah, five cents.

'''S:''' Five cents.

{{anchor|news_item5}}
=== New Dwarf Planet Candidate (1:18:44) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.livescience.com/space/planets/scientists-have-discovered-a-new-dwarf-planet-in-our-solar-system-far-beyond-the-orbit-of-neptune
|article_title = Scientists discover new dwarf planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune: Meet 2017 OF201 | Live Science
|publication = www.livescience.com
}}
'''S:''' All right, Evan, tell us about this. You said this is a new dwarf planet, but the pedant in me says, you mean a new dwarf planet candidate.

'''E:''' Yeah, and I think they talk about that in actually the body of the article, but the headline kind of missed the term candidate, which is kind of important here. Yes, an absolute new candidate, new dwarf planet candidate in our solar system. Do you guys know when the first dwarf planet was discovered?

'''S:''' Yeah, like in the 1900s, right? I mean Eris. I mean Ceres. Ceres was discovered a long time ago.

'''E:''' 1801.

'''B:''' Whoa.

'''G:''' Oh, wow.

'''E:''' Way, way back when. And then what? Pluto was the next one, 130 years later.

'''G:''' That's visually? Like through a telescope?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''G:''' Because there was no radiometry or anything. Yeah, wow.

'''E:''' Nope. That was it. And then it was in 2005 they have the third one, Eris. And then what in 2006 happened?

'''AJR:''' Changed everything.

'''E:''' It did change everything. The category called dwarf planet came into existence by the International Astronomical Union. And many people were, you know, upset with that. It's still debated to this day, I think.

'''AJR:''' I was upset until I learned that it was entirely an issue of measurement, my favorite thing in the world. And I said, oh, well, I get it. All right, I'm sold. Yeah.

'''E:''' There are, what, four criteria for dwarf planets? You guys know and you must know most of these.

'''S:''' I know all of them.

'''G:''' Sleepy. Dopey. Sneezy.

'''S:''' So the criteria to be a dwarf planet, you have to orbit the sun and not another body so you can't be a moon.

'''E:''' Correct.

'''S:''' You have to be large enough so that your gravity pulls you into a sphere.

'''E:''' Yes. Or a near sphere, yes.

'''S:''' But you do not clear out your own orbit.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' If you did, you'd be a planet.

'''AJR:''' Oh.

'''E:''' Correct.

'''S:''' And there's a fourth one?

'''E:''' Well, you combine two into one. It was orbiting the sun and not being a moon.

'''S:''' And not being a moon. Okay.

'''G:''' What do you mean clear your own orbit?

'''S:''' So if there's a bunch of other stuff in your orbit and you haven't gravitationally cleared out your zone, then that makes you a dwarf planet. That was the thing that made Pluto.

'''G:''' Oh, it's flying with you. I got you.

'''E:''' That was what knocked Pluto out of the category.

'''S:''' That knocked Pluto out of the category. The reason why they did that was because they were concerned, for whatever reason, that they were going to be discovering dozens, if not score, of planets in the Kuiper Belt.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' And they said, well, we can't have dozens or hundreds of planets. That doesn't feel right.

'''B:''' That'd be annoying.

'''S:''' So let's make them dwarf planets, and we'll just throw in this criteria to make it so that they don't meet the criteria for a planet, a full planet.

'''E:''' Right, right.

'''B:''' It's a man-made definition anyway.

'''AJR:''' I mean, it's all arbitrary.

'''S:''' It's all arbitrary anyway, yeah.

'''E:''' It sort of is. But with this particular new discovery, well, in 2017 is when the images were captured. But they were reanalyzed and now has come forward as part of a paper that appeared on the preprint server ARXIV. I don't even know if that's pronounceable or not.

'''AJR:''' Archive.

'''E:''' Archive, OK. Well, yeah, I guess I suppose that's what it would be. And yeah, they have – so it's designated 2017 OF201. So 2017 for the year that the images were captured. OF201, don't know why. It will – if it ever is officially declared to be a dwarf planet, it will receive a name, a proper name like the others. This one was discovered far beyond Neptune. I mean far beyond. It orbits the Sun every 25,000 years. That is out there. Yep. Yep. And this was all confirmed by, again, the IAUs. Oh, they have a specific department for this, the Minor Planet Center, which I did not know about before. And this was published on May 21st, so just recently. A team of scientists spotted it while poring through our archival data from the Blanco Telescope in Chile and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope based in Hawaii. The researchers tracked the object's motion across 19 sets of images spanning seven years. And, you know, you think about it. Something that is going around the sun every 25,000 years. And you've got, what, seven years' worth of photography for this thing. It's not really moving all that much. That is very, very minor. So to be able to kind of suss that out in itself is kind of incredible. All right. So, yeah, again, it's a candidate. They still have to do more to determine exactly if it fits all the criteria. But here's some interesting data they do have on the planet. The diameter of the planet, they approximate that it's 700 kilometers. And that would be roughly the size of Ceres.

'''S:''' A little bit smaller.

'''E:''' Haumea, a little bit smaller. Yeah, that is an elongated orbit with 25,000. And it's elliptical, like all planets are. When it's closest to the sun, it's 44.9 astronomical units away. But at its farthest distance, 1,630 astronomical units. So if you can envision that inside your head, that is quite a shape it makes. So it has not been direct. It says here its exact shape hasn't been directly observed. So they still need more on that. But its size suggests it's likely in hydrostatic equilibrium, nearly spherical, which would give it one of the criteria it needs to become a dwarf planet.

'''S:''' Interestingly, since you bring up that criterion, Haumea is oval-ish, right? It's actually like a flattened egg. So it's not a sphere.

'''E:''' No, it's not a sphere.

'''S:''' But it still counts.

'''E:''' Has it's on gravity.

'''S:''' Because it would be a sphere if it weren't spinning so fast.

'''E:''' Oh, there you go.

'''S:''' It's actually its theoretical shape not eliminating the factor of a rapid rotation.

'''E:''' What did we talk about?

'''S:''' If that's a factor.

'''E:''' Yeah, we talked about, was it another planet, an exoplanet or something that had a kind of a—

'''B:''' Scientific—

'''S:''' No, it was Haumea. It was— Yeah, we talked about it. I think in one of the private shows.

'''G:''' Yep.

'''S:''' Which haven't aired yet. Yeah, so yeah, we did talk about it.

'''E:''' So they're going to go back and they're going to look at some other potential candidates as well. And they said based on, I guess, this technique that they're using or the research data, Steve, there still could be maybe hundreds or thousands of these that are out there. So what— And I get the point was to make this classification so that we wouldn't have to have hundreds or thousands of these. But what if it turns out there really are hundreds or thousands of these?

'''S:''' I guess they're okay with hundreds of dwarf planets as long as they're not full planets.

'''E:''' Yeah, that makes sense.

'''B:''' Full-fledged planets, yeah.

'''AJR:''' The kids can only memorize up to nine full planets.

'''E:''' I remember that.

'''AJR:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' That was so deeply ingrained in our early—

'''AJR:''' Like fourth grade would be entirely dedicated to memorizing planets if we included all the dwarf planets.

'''S:''' Right.

'''E:''' And when they do achieve their names, they're named after mythological entities or beings, all having to do with fertility for the most part. And so we will have to see exactly where this one will get its name and which name they'll use.

'''S:''' Pluto and all of its moons are named after the underworld.

'''E:''' Yeah, it sort of—I know because it received its name prior to being a dwarf planet.

'''AJR:''' At least we let it keep its name. I mean there's some dignity in that.

'''E:''' It did. It was grandfathered in, I suppose, at that point.

'''S:''' Yeah, but this—2017, blah, blah, blah, may not get an actual name, may not be confirmed for decades.

'''E:''' Yeah, it could be a while.

'''S:''' It takes a long time. We have a bunch of other candidates we haven't confirmed fully yet because it just takes time to really confirm their orbit, their shape, whether they've gravitationally cleared out their zone or not. So it takes time.

'''AJR:''' Do we know what the candidate confirmation or candidate clearance rate is? What percentage of candidates end up being dwarf planets?

'''S:''' Well, it was—they had five at the beginning and there's only been those five. So they haven't cleared a single one yet after the—

'''AJR:''' Okay.

'''S:''' It's taking way longer than I thought it was.

'''AJR:''' I see. All right.

'''G:''' I'm shocked that A-R-X-I-V is pronounced archive and not—

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''G:''' Not A-R-14.

'''E:''' I didn't think of that. Exactly.

'''G:''' I thought it was A-R-14. I was like, okay, that's weird.

'''AJR:''' I know.

'''S:''' A-R-14?

'''AJR:''' It's a website where you put in working papers basically and I've just heard it called archive.

'''G:''' Yeah, that makes sense.

'''E:''' But the X is capitalized. The letter A is not. So you have a capitalization in the dead center of the word.

'''G:''' It's cool.

'''B:''' Kind of like a brand.

'''E:''' I suppose. Yeah.

'''AJR:''' Scientists being wacky.

== Discussion Topic (1:27:55) ==
How has science fiction affected our expectations of technology and the future?
None
'''S:''' All right, guys. We have to know who's that noisy this week because Jay is away.

'''E:''' Hi Jay.

'''S:''' So George proposed a discussion topic, which I like. I want to talk about this. How has science fiction affected or distorted our expectations of technology and the future? George, since you brought this up, do you have a specific example in mind?

'''G:''' I've got a bunch of just – the ones that bother me the most and that I wonder what kind of a disservice is being done. Now, obviously, look, we all love Star Trek. We all love Star Wars. We all love science fiction. That's not a question. I think the question that I'm proposing or the discussion I want to talk about is how much expectation is gained or permitted or brought about because of these amazing stories and the ubiquity of certain kinds of science fiction tropes. The ones I wanted to talk about or at least wanted to propose are the ones that break rules of physics. So like a transporter. We will never have a transporter. It doesn't matter how great the knowledge of quantum will become. You will never have a transporter. We will never have a tractor beam. Like you will never have shields, like shields of some kind around a spaceship. Like we will never have that. We will never have subspace communication. Like I'm sorry.

'''B:''' Faster than light travel.

'''G:''' Right. I'm going to be getting into like warp drive and stuff like even that. The relativistic effect of just space travel of like high velocity travel affecting your age versus the age of loved ones that are on the planets and all that kind of stuff. Artificial gravity that's like not induced by some kind of circular motion. Replicators. Like we're never going to have a replicator. I'm sorry. Like you're not going to be able to make a steak appear on a plate. Like for as much as that would be amazing. And I wonder just how much –

'''B:''' Not quickly anyway.

'''G:''' Not quickly. Right. Yeah. You'd have to have the 3D.

'''E:''' Very rare.

'''G:''' And it's just – They're so ubiquitous, these tropes. And I wonder how much damage it does in terms of our expectations. Lightsaber. We'll never have a lightsaber. There's not enough energy to have a handheld lightsaber, let alone like a laser. Just to have a handheld laser, which you think would be like, oh, yeah. We'll totally have a phaser or a laser. It's like it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.

'''S:''' So I agree. We actually talk about this in our book, The Skeptic Guide to the Future. We go over all of those and talk about their plausibility. And you hit a lot of the big ones. And I think just under the category of space travel, our image of space travel is completely distorted by science fiction.

'''B:''' Completely and utterly distorted.

'''S:''' In the near, medium, or even long-term future, it's not going to be anything like depicted in almost any science fiction except for the hardest of science fiction. And even then, they throw in a gimme or two just to make it work narratively. Right? But yeah. So space travel, it's all about our tolerance for acceleration. Right? There isn't any way to get around that. Artificial gravity, it hasn't been 100% ruled out by the physics that we currently have established. But we're getting damn close. Yeah. The door is only cracked open the smallest amount. It's probably not possible within the laws of physics to have that kind of artificial gravity. And as you say, shields, you can't just have an energy field like that.

'''G:''' Right.

'''E:''' Yeah, that would deflect weaponry and things like that. Right.

'''S:''' It's just not practical.

'''B:''' Directed energy and kinetic energy, it would be extremely limited, if anything, and not anything like that.

'''E:''' I mean, you can have magnetic fields.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' It protects you from some things.

'''S:''' Yeah, but it's not going to be like blocking it, but not as they're depicted in science fiction, where it's like a little barrier made out of energy. And other things, too, like the design of spaceships are always wrong.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh. That is terrible.

'''S:''' You're always standing as if you're on a sailing ship. Right. You would be standing up in the direction of acceleration. And you wouldn't be at the top of the ship. You would be at the middle of the ship.

'''E:''' Of course.

'''S:''' Because the thing that I haven't seen, I've never seen even the hardest of science fiction programs address, is the radiation in space. Space is a very unforgiving environment for biological organisms.

'''E:''' Does the Expanse not deal with that?

'''S:''' They really don't. That's like the one hole. I've never even seen them. And they're constantly being exposed to space.

'''AJR:''' Constantly.

'''E:''' So they just ignore the problem?

'''S:''' They just ignore it. They just completely ignore the problem. Occasionally, I'll read in a book or something where they talk about shielding for the radiation or whatever. But especially when you're in a movie, they always just make things look cool. But they never really design them like you would have to. If you're going to be in space for a while, you've got to be in the center of the ship. You need massive shielding. Actually, you know the one science fiction TV show that talked about shielding?

'''B:''' Avenue 5?

'''S:''' It was Avenue 5, which is a comedy.

'''AJR:''' Really?

'''E:''' I don't even know what that is.

'''AJR:''' I remember that, yeah.

'''S:''' It was actually really good. And they did it because the ship had a poop shield. All of the excrement of all the passengers was stored in the outer layer of the ship as a radiation shield. So they got a joke out of it.

'''B:''' That's hilarious.

'''S:''' But it was right. It was correct. Actually, that show, as silly as it was, made a lot of interesting correct choices. But then they also made some egregious, horrible gaffes as well scientifically.

'''G:''' But the question here is like does the inspiration of science fiction outweigh the practical disappointment or misinformation?

'''E:''' It raises our expectations too high.

'''G:''' What's the right equation or what's the right percentage to be like? Where should that live?

'''B:''' I wouldn't want to limit authors narratively just because of the potential bad influence it could have. It's far too restrictive.

'''G:''' Sure.

'''B:''' Right? I mean, would you restrict other types of narratives because of the bad effect it could have on future development of whatever? I don't know. It just seems like we've got to suck that one up and be like, yeah.

'''G:''' I just wonder what damage has been done. The people that have gone into most probably to a person, if you ask those that work at NASA or those that build rockets or those that become physicists or whatever, many, many, many of them will cite science fiction as being inspirational to them.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''S:''' Yeah. I think you have to tie it though because any proper nerd is going to like revel in discussing the tropes and why they're not scientifically accurate, et cetera.

'''B:''' Don't take that away from us.

'''S:''' But there are areas where, and I think we've mentioned this on the show, that not dealing with space travel is where the science tropes in media are an actual pragmatic problem. The big one is all of the CSI shows.

'''G:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Because now juries expect there's going to be whiz-bang science attached to every case. If it's not there, they think, well, they don't really have a good case. They didn't show me DNA or blah, blah, blah.

'''B:''' It's too boring, you know?

'''G:''' The fingerprint database that's instantaneous.

'''S:''' Yeah. Exactly. You can't get DNA back in hours. I mean, I don't get it.

'''AJR:''' So George, your question reminds me of an area of research that this is going to be very underwhelming because I don't remember what the findings were. But there are people who study the historical impact or the impact of science fiction from the past on like, OK, science fiction from 1900 depicting 1950. Could we possibly trace some kind of influence to what actually happened in 1950 as a result of the way it was imagined 50 or 100 years prior to that? And I don't know what any of the findings are, but I remember being very excited to learn that there were people studying kind of the history of science fiction.

'''G:''' It can be certain. I mean, the flip phone was totally a Star Trek-inspired thing.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''G:''' So you have the fiction then inspiring the actual fact, which then curves in upon itself like an oberus or whatever.

'''AJR:''' It is a kind of like imagining of what's possible and kind of scoping out. And like Evan said, it's like we kind of get anchored to some. Like flying cars and for me, like the Jetsons, the kid that could walk on the ceiling. Like you just have these like ideas that like that's what the future looks like. A biodome, I think, is up there.

'''G:''' Yeah. Where meanwhile, like we're being pummeled now with AI and all the ramifications of what potentially could be happening with AI. And there's, relatively speaking, very little science fiction tropes about that, you know, the availability of AI, AI then replacing people and like the art and music being replaced by AI. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure there are stories that exist. I'm sure that exist. But there's no way there's more stories that exist than have lasers or phasers or shielding or, you know, or lightsabers or whatever. So it's this weird like what are we writing about and learning and worried about and being influenced by and talking about?

'''S:''' I think AI is going to destroy us in a completely different way than was imagined in science fiction. It's not going to become sentient. It doesn't have to become sentient. It doesn't have to destroy us. So I think this problem goes way beyond science fiction and technology. I think we have the same problem with all fiction. For example, I think, and this is my main beef with all medical dramas, is that they instill in people a pretty bad misunderstanding of how medicine works and clinical decision-making works. And people come in with expectations about like, well, I need a diagnosis. Like I need a Dr. House to make this bizarre diagnosis. And that will lead directly to me being cured. And until I get that diagnosis, nothing good can happen. It's not just a false hope. It's also shutting down other pathways of legitimate treatment and evaluation, et cetera. They're thinking in a very narrow narrative way that they see on TV. It's the same thing with lawyers and with courtrooms. Courtroom dramas are mostly bullshit, right? That's not how courtrooms actually function. There's no surprise witnesses or whatever in courtrooms. It can't happen.

'''AJR:''' I'm going to be my own lawyer now. And you're like, it somehow wins.

'''E:''' Perry Mason moment.

'''B:''' Can't handle the truth.

'''AJR:''' No, Steve, when I watched Dr. House, and when I was actually in real life diagnosed with lupus, I thought, it's never lupus, because that's what Dr. House always said. Never lupus. It's always something else. Like I denied my own diagnosis because of that show.

'''S:''' When in reality, it's always lupus.

'''AJR:''' It's always lupus.

'''S:''' Yeah. There's like running jokes. Like in neurology, I can tell you the ones. Like if somebody's presenting a weird case at Grand Rounds, like, oh, you'll never guess what this is. It's like one of three things. It's always like the same few things that are like the mystery diagnoses. And lupus is one of those in medicine, because it can do so many things.

'''AJR:''' Right.

{{anchor|email}}
== Emails (1:39:07) ==

'''S:''' All right. We're going to do one quick email. This comes from Joshua from Tyler, Texas.

'''B:''' Joshua.

'''S:''' And he writes, hi, all. There's so much stupid or malevolence going on right now, it's hard to keep up. Here's the latest stupid. And then he links to an article, I'm sure you guys have heard about this, about Health and Human Services canceling a contract with Moderna to develop a bird flu vaccine.

'''E:''' Can you get more short-sighted than that?

'''B:''' Didn't read it. What's the facts?

'''S:''' Here's the quickie on what's going on. So Moderna, as you may or may not know, was one of the companies that developed the COVID vaccine, one of the mRNA vaccines.

'''B:''' A lot of my shots were Moderna.

'''AJR:''' Same.

'''S:''' Yeah, me too. Yeah, I got a lot of the Moderna shots. And Moderna, you know, was able to develop the vaccine as quickly as it did, probably because there was government funding available, Operation Warp Speed, et cetera. So other companies also developed, like Pfizer, mRNA vaccines. And we talked about the fact that mRNA technology has been in development for like 30 years. And Moderna actually has been in existence for 10 years developing the technology before they came out with the vaccine. So now they're working on an mRNA-based vaccine against the bird flu, which is a strong candidate for the next pandemic.

'''E:''' That's the next one, right?

'''S:''' Not necessarily good, but it's a strong candidate. Like if there's one to worry about, that's the top of the list, right?

'''G:''' Get your sourdough ready.

'''B:''' My money's on that.

'''E:''' Here we go.

'''S:''' Stock up on toilet paper. Get your sourdough starter ready. So it's actually a good thing that we're developing a vaccine now. And the government had given Moderna a grant for like $700 million, something like that, to develop the vaccine. And the Trump administration, HHS, under Jackass, what's his name, RFK Jr., just decided they were going to up and cancel the whole thing. They just canceled the contract.

'''B:''' Sure, why not?

'''S:''' And they did it for the dumbest reasons possible. hey basically, it's all because of RFK Jr.'s conspiracy fear-mongering about mRNA technology and vaccines. They're saying this is too risky.

'''E:''' He doesn't understand it.

'''S:''' It's too risky. There are better ways to go. We're going to use this money to develop safer options. It's complete and utter nonsense. And what they're touting is basically 30-year-old technology instead of using mRNA technology. The big advantage, of course, with the mRNA technology is that it can be developed much faster.

'''AJR:''' And hasn't, I'm sure you guys have covered this a lot on the podcast, but hasn't mRNA, like we haven't used it for vaccines until recently, but hasn't it been around forever and ever? It's not like it's like that new.

'''S:''' Yeah, like 30 years.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Totally. And again, Moderna spent 10 years developing it as a therapeutic before they came out with the COVID vaccine, which was their first product. It's not like they just thought of it yesterday.

'''G:''' We'd rather spend that $700 million on pasteurized milk.

'''S:''' On vitamin A tablets, whatever.

'''G:''' It's more vitamin A.

'''S:''' It's malfeasance. It is malfeasance. And it's because we have a conspiracy theorist, pseudoscientist running healthcare at the federal level. They also, since we're talking about this, RFK Jr. bypassed the CDC and changed the recommendations for who gets the COVID vaccine, saying we're no longer going to recommend it for-

'''E:''' Pregnant women.

'''S:''' For pregnant women and healthy kids.

'''G:''' Consulted no one.

'''S:''' Consulted no one, bypassed the CDC, just decided himself, because he's a jackass, that that's what we're going to do.

'''E:''' There you go.

'''S:''' Yep, this is exactly what we were expecting to happen, and it's happening. It's as bad as anyone feared, probably even worse.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And we're just going to have to, every now and then, we're going to have to report on the latest crazy thing that RFK Jr. did.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''AJR:''' What do we do about this, right? Obviously, raise awareness and help people.

'''B:''' Yeah, not vote for assholes. How about that? Let's try that.

'''S:''' Now, Bob-

'''G:''' He's a legit guy.

'''AJR:''' That sounds like some affective pull.

'''S:''' Yeah, it was very polarizing.

'''B:''' Absolutely objective.

'''S:''' Not vote for people who are basing their policy on misinformation and conspiracy theories.

'''B:''' Right. That too, that too. I just gave you a shorthand of that sentence.

'''AJR:''' And just legitimizing that way of thinking, like the long-term damage of just saying, like, well, if we're going to have this kind of, I don't know, skepticism, not in this, the Skeptic's Guide kind of skepticism, but the cynical pseudoscience skepticism at the national-

'''S:''' Denialism.

'''AJR:''' Denialism, there we go. At the national level, it's like, think of how many young people are going to be trained to think that this is the way to think about the world.

'''G:''' But, like, they want to throw Fauci in- They, I know I'm using the-

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''G:''' But there are people that wanted to throw Fauci into prison because of his supposed connection with the COVID vaccine and its evils, supposed evils. Here's a guy who's, like, legitimately passing, not talking to people in the CDC and passing general kinds of stuff that's going to kill people. It's going to kill people. This could potentially kill millions of people.

'''G:''' Right.

'''S:''' If this delays a vaccine and the pandemic hits fast and we lose six months or a year, that could be millions of people. Absolutely.

'''B:''' Or more.

'''AJR:''' And there's no way the country would respond with the kind of care, and there's arguments to be made that it wasn't enough care in 2020, but there's no way the people in the United States are going to tolerate a kind of shutdown like we had in COVID. And so we're going to see even more deaths. Like, we won't have the vaccine, we won't have the social distancing, or whatever the- Like, I just don't see the public health measures of other kinds, non-vaccine interventions, being at all tolerated.

'''E:''' Unfortunately, the company is going to continue, though, with their work.

'''S:''' They said they're going to keep going forward. Why wouldn't they?

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' But losing, you know, $600, $700 million of funding obviously is going to have a massive impact.

'''E:''' Oh, it's going to have a massive effect. On their development. And on their development, and when it comes time that we need this thing, there's going to be people- It'll be expensive, and there'll be people who can't afford it. Yeah. Because they have to build this-

'''S:''' Or there won't be enough available.

'''E:''' They have to build this into their cost.

'''S:''' Terrible, terrible, terrible decision.

'''G:''' Any other emails there, Steve?

'''S:''' No, that's it.

'''E:''' What else you got?

'''AJR:''' Any good news?

'''E:''' Canceled the Department of Transportation yet?

'''S:''' I have good news. It is time for Science or Fiction.

'''G:''' Whee!

'''AJR:''' Everything you just said was fiction.

'''E:''' Yay!

'''S:''' Unfortunately, no.

'''E:''' It's like that episode, that season of Dallas where the whole thing was a dream.

'''AJR:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Remember that?

'''S:''' Or the last season of Lost.

'''E:''' Oh, God. Spoiler alert.

'''AJR:''' I still haven't even finished Lost, and now I really- I mean, I had 20 years to do it, but-

'''G:''' Don't bother.

'''B:''' It's still a wonderful series.

'''AJR:''' I've seen all but the last two episodes, and people were so upset that I just can't bring myself to watch them, but I feel like I get it.

'''S:''' All right. Let's go on with Science or Fiction.

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:45:36) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Jargon
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.
|link1web = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09030-x
|link1title = Unconventional solitonic high-temperature superfluorescence from perovskites | Nature
|link1pub = www.nature.com

|item2 = Pseudorevertant hyphal morphogenesis – the ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild-type behavior.
|link2web = https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5323341/
|link2title =
cAMP-independent signal pathways stimulate hyphal morphogenesis in Candida albicans - PMC

|link2pub = pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

|item3 = Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.
|link3web = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibole
|link3title = Amphibole - Wikipedia
|link3pub = en.wikipedia.org

|}}
{{SOFResults

|science1 = Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.

|science2 = Pseudorevertant hyphal morphogenesis – the ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild-type behavior.

|fiction = Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.

|rogue1 = Jay
|answer1 = Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.

|rogue2 = Cara
|answer2 = Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.

|rogue3 = SPEAKER_06
|answer3 = Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.

|rogue4 = Evan
|answer4 = Solitonic superfluorescence – localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules.

|rogue5 = Bob
|answer5 = Indurated leucocratic amphibolite – a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions.

|host = Jay
|sweep =
|clever =
|win = y
|swept =
}}

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week. I kind of teased the theme a little bit earlier in the show. I've done this theme before. It's a favorite of mine. The theme is jargon.

'''AJR:''' Yay!

'''S:''' I'm going to give you three bits of scientific jargon and their definition, but of course one of them isn't real.

'''AJR:''' So good.

'''S:''' Okay?

'''E:''' Oh, this is where Steve gets to play pseudoscientist.

'''S:''' Here we go. Item number one, solatonic superfluorescence, localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems allowing for high-temperature coherent bursts of light from excited molecules. Item number two, pseudo-reverent hyphal morphogenesis. Don't you love it? The ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation replicates the wild-type behavior. Item number three, indurated leucocratic amphibolite, a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions. Don't worry.

'''AJR:''' Whichever one is the fiction, the fact that you thought of it is incredible because all three of these words are wild.

'''S:''' So there we go. I got to give it to you in writing.

'''G:''' Yeah, thank you. We've been playing this. I've been playing this for, what, 12 years, 10 years, whatever. I always take little notes and I can always sort of basically encapsulate what each one is, and my page is blank. So thank you for providing the link there. Thank you. Holy Christmas. Really?

'''S:''' Okay. Two of these are real. Keep that in mind.

'''G:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right, Andrea, why don't you go first?

'''AJR:''' I was afraid you'd say that. All right. So the only one that I felt like I had a fighting chance at familiarity with was the one about the fungal strains undergoing branching growth. And the main reason that meant anything to me is because I've been watching The Last of Us and I've seen a lot of CGI of fungal strains growing. And that made me think, well, that one must be real. And then I thought, well, that is a fiction show that I'm watching based on a video game, so maybe it's false. But I'm going to stick with my initial instinct and say that the fungal strains, which is the pseudo-reverent hyphomorphogenesis, I'm going to say that's true. That's the science. And I'm also going to say that the hydrated calcific minerals is the science because minerals feel sciency to me. And so I'm going to go with the solitonic superfluorescence as the fiction, largely because superfluorescence sounds like a word I would have made up in like sixth grade if I was trying to like BS my way through a test I didn't study for. So the localized self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems, I think is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, George.

'''G:''' I'm going to agree with Andrea's reasoning here. The solitonic felt a little hat on a hat. It felt a little hat on a hat. So item one, solitonic superfluorescence, localizing self-sustaining waves in nonlinear systems, this bursts of light thing. Yeah, I'm going to agree with you. I think that is indeed the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

'''E:''' Does no one have a problem with pseudo-revert?

'''S:''' Pseudo-revert.

'''E:''' Pseudo-revert. I mean, I'm trying to think of where else I'm seeing the prefix pseudo in this part of terminology. Pseudo, what else would there be? Pseudo, right? So I don't know about this one. It seems like that one sounds the most made up to me. It doesn't mean it is, but I just don't know where pseudo-prefix has come up before when talking about these weird kinds of terms. Whereas everything else, superfluorescence, that's not so crazy. What's the last one here? Indurated? Indurated? Lusocratic?

'''S:''' Lusocratic.

'''E:''' Lusocratic.

'''S:''' Amphibolite.

'''E:''' Amphibolite. Gee whiz. I'm going to let Bob go and then they'll come back to me. Steve. Oh wait, no, that's not how this game works. Well, I'll tell you what. We have two very special guests this week. You guys are awesome. I've been so happy to be working with you all these years on these various projects. And out of total respect for the both of you, I will join you in saying the solitonic one is the fiction.

'''G:''' Can I change my answer?

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''G:''' No pressure, Bob. No pressure. No pressure, Bob.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, you're either in the in-group or the out-group, Bob.

'''B:''' Oh, I'm totally out-group.

'''E:''' Oh, no.

'''AJR:''' I am moralistically opposed to you.

'''B:''' I don't know what these are. I do know some of these words.

'''E:''' No one knows what they are, Bob.

'''B:''' Right. So I'm just throwing that out there. So this first one, solitonic superfluorescence, I'm familiar with those words and they seem, stress underlined and in bold, they seem to be related to the definition. So to me, this one, the solitonic superfluorescence, seems most genuine to me. So I'm going to say that one is science. Pseudo-reverent hyphomorphogenesis to a lesser degree seems to coincide with the definition, at least some of the words, especially, I don't know what hyphol is in this context, but pseudo-reverent morphogenesis kind of flows with the definition as it's stated here. It seems to go together in my mind. Now these are like correlations. I just can't give anything definite, but it seems to make sense. The third one is the one that makes me say, what? Indurated, leucocratic, amphibolite. I just don't know any of those words. So I can't connect those wacky words. I can't connect that jargon with what follows in terms of the description. I can't make a connection. It may be very nicely connected, but I can't connect it because I can't get anything from those words. So this is probably, maybe it's the wrong approach. So I'll say for that reason, since the first two seem to flow for me, I'm going to say the third one is fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. So you all agree on the second one. So we'll start there. Pseudo-reverent hyphomorphogenesis, the ability of fungal strains to undergo branching growth due to a novel mutation that replicates the wild type behavior. You guys all think that is science-y jargon, and that one is science. So you're all safe so far. So pseudo-reverent, if there is a mutation, so the wild type is what it sounds, that's the strain of a whatever, bacteria, plant, whatever, that exists in the wild. If there's a mutation, that could change the form of that thing. But you could also then have a back mutation, right? You want to go another mutation which reverts it to the wild type, a reverent mutation. But you can have a pseudo-reverent mutation which is different than the original mutation, but it replicates the original phenotype. So it looks like the wild type even though the second mutation was in a different place and sometimes even in a different gene. So that's what pseudo-reverent, it's a genetics term, right? Hyphal just means branching. Hyphae, that's the branching growth, right? And morphogenesis, just changing form. So I got this from a paper which was just published. Here it's camp-independent signal pathways simulate hyphal morphogenesis in candida albicans. Albicans, candida is a fungus. So yeah, they found a pseudo-reverent mutation in the candida albicans that stimulates hyphal morphogenesis similar to the wild type. So yeah, so that one is science. Pseudo-reverent hyphal morphogenesis. All right, let's go on to number three. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. Indurated leucocratic amphibolite, a class of hydrated calcific minerals formed mainly from underwater volcanic eruptions. Now, Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Mainly it sounds because this is geology and you're not familiar with geological terms.

'''B:''' I'm sure, I'm sure.

'''E:''' George is.

'''S:''' George is a geologist.

'''E:''' George has an advantage.

'''AJR:''' 900 plus episodes.

'''E:''' Right, no doubt.

'''S:''' Now, these are all legitimate geological terms. Indurated, what does indurated mean? As in generic, just as a term. Indurated is not specific to geology. In fact, that's a medical term that we use as well. Cemented, hardened, just means hardened. Like any mineral that gets hardened or cemented is indurated. Leucocratic, now leuco means what?

'''AJR:''' Letting light through?

'''S:''' Light-colored, right? So it's a hardened, light-colored amphibolite. Amphibolite is a class of minerals.

'''E:''' No way.

'''S:''' And what does amphi mean? Amphibious?

'''AJR:''' Both. Yeah. Yeah, like double or two-sided.

'''S:''' Or specifically, what's an amphibian?

'''AJR/B:''' Water and air.

'''S:''' Right, right, right. So this one is the fiction. Congratulations.

'''B:''' I knew it sounded off.

'''S:''' I just took three geological terms, crashed them together and made up a fake definition for it.

'''AJR:''' So you're telling superfluorescence is real?

'''B:''' Sure. Yeah, that's a real word. I've seen that one.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. I figured that's why Bob would like it.

'''B:''' And solitons too, yes. All right.

'''S:''' Well. So the big thing is that amphibolites or amphibole, they are silicate minerals, not calcific. They have nothing to do with underwater volcanic eruptions or whatever. And I just combined that with indurated and leucocratic. I just looked up more geological terms to make it sound sciencey jargony.

'''B:''' I'm sure coming up with the definition was a lot harder.

'''S:''' Yeah, it had to sound realistic but be definitely wrong. Yeah.

'''B:''' Right.

'''S:''' Now, solitonic superfluorescence, as Bob said, this is real. This comes from a paper. Unconventional solitonic high temperature superfluorescence from perovskites. Perovskites is a type of crystal. It's currently the best candidate to replace or to be combined with silicon for solar panels. And for a lot of electronics as well. But in any case, yeah, the solitonic is these localized self-sustaining waves in a nonlinear systems. Now, fluorescence, you know, that's when you – fluorescence is when you have molecules that, when excited, emit light, right? They glow. Right. They fluoresce. Usually doesn't happen at high temperatures because high temperature causes – basically breaks the coherence. But if it's in a solitonic system, you can have high temperature coherence which creates these large groups of excited molecules that all burst together causing superfluorescence.

'''B:''' Superfluorescence. Yeah. Cool.

'''S:''' So that one is real.

'''AJR:''' Wow.

'''S:''' That was tricky.

'''B:''' Yeah. For once, go in my gut. It was actually helpful.

'''G:''' Way to go, Bob.

'''S:''' Yeah, you sniffed it out.

'''E:''' You sniffed it out, Bob.

'''AJR:''' Evan, we appreciate your loyalty but it was guided.

'''E:''' Well, I mean had I gone with what I wanted to, I would have also been wrong.

'''S:''' You would have gone with two, yeah.

'''AJR:''' We might as well be wrong together.

'''E:''' Yes. Yes.

'''S:''' But I – real science jargon is like poetry because I –

'''B:''' It is.

'''S:''' I really love the –

'''B:''' I love it.

'''E:''' And people hate poetry.

'''S:''' It's precise. It's unambiguous.

'''E:''' There's no money in poetry.

'''B:''' Right.

'''S:''' It's efficient. It's just lovely. If you understand the words, you understand the concepts. You know what I mean?

'''AJR:''' It's really nice to hear you say that, Steve, because so much of the science communication advice is to avoid jargon. I think as long as you're defining the terms and you're using it on purpose, not just to juggle things up.

'''S:''' I like to lean into it. Lean into the jargon.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, exactly.

'''B:''' For high-level communication between colleagues, that's the way it's got to be.

'''S:''' Even to the general public, just define.

'''AJR:''' Yeah, I agree.

'''S:''' Why do we have this term?

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''S:''' Because it refers specifically to a concept. The concept is what you're teaching and the words go with the concept. I feel like if you avoid jargon rather than explaining it, the idea becomes simplistic and imprecise sometimes.

'''B:''' From our point of view, though, for science communication, and I encounter this for almost every news item I cover, it's like, how much jargon do I throw in there and where is the point?

'''E:''' Where's the threshold?

'''B:''' People are going to just get glazed over and it's going to be counterproductive to my goal.

'''S:''' You don't want gratuitous jargon. I agree.

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''S:''' Don't want gratuitous jargon.

'''B:''' That's all I'm saying.

'''S:''' But selectively, including it and explaining it when it's conceptually helpful when done properly I think is good science communication.

'''B:''' No, I don't disagree with that at all.

'''S:''' I also would avoid it just to avoid it. You know what I mean?

'''AJR:''' Right.

'''B:''' Like everything else, it's a balance. I'm not going to throw five of these into one 10-minute news item. I'll throw a couple and try to focus on one or two but not go too crazy with it. Otherwise, you're going to lose people.

'''AJR:''' And it's sort of the ones that carry the most weight. If we're talking about the basal ganglia and something that it does, using the word basal ganglia is much more important. It's much more useful than the other part of the brain or whatever because it's such a key part of what the finding was. Yeah, I mean, jargon just to use it. If you can use a synonym and not lose any of the meaning, sure. Or talk about, oh, I did an analysis instead of talking about the specifics of the factor and factor analysis, the blah, blah, blah, because that's not really the point that we're making. But if it's like a piece of like affective polarization is a concept that means a lot and understanding that word means you can understand a ton more research that's also about that thing.

'''G:''' I think I need to write like a schoolhouse rock for these terms.

'''B:''' Oh, my God. That's it. You got to.

'''G:''' Just like all different branches and stuff.

'''AJR:''' You did miss an opportunity to have a little skeptics guide spelling bee where you made us spell these terms.

'''S:''' Or pronounce them.

'''G:''' Next NOTACON. Next NOTACON will do that.

'''AJR:''' I would love a spelling. I've wanted to do a spelling bee for a long time. Right? It's a good idea.

'''E:''' Well, that's interesting.

'''G:''' Wow. For everybody.

'''B:''' I'm there.

'''S:''' Unnecessary jargon drives me crazy. It's not more precise. It's just dense.

'''E:''' The confabulary.

'''S:''' You're inhibiting understanding. That drives me crazy.

'''G:''' It's very somatopatalupatous.

'''AJR:''' And not even just. Yeah. Like not even just jargon though. But it's just sort of like. It's the thing that we all did in 12th grade to make our three page paper a five page paper. Which is you just find words with more syllables.

'''G:''' Very, very, very important.

'''E:''' And now we have ChatGPT for that.

'''AJR:''' Exactly. Yeah.

'''E:''' Which is wonderful.

'''G:''' Oh man. When I learned. I could. We had Macs. We had the very first Macs. We had a Mac lab in my high school. The very first Macintoshes in New Jersey. In a school. And when I learned you could change the font size. Oh my God. And a page paper turns to a 10. It's like you go from like the 10 to 10.2 or 10.5. Whole extra page. Phenomenal.

'''B:''' Awesome.

'''G:''' Awful, awful, awful. Awful.

'''S:''' All right, Evan give us a quote.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (2:02:29) ==
{{qow
|text = "The people who are constantly striving to apply skepticism to everything in their lives, the ones who actually care enough about truth and avoid being wrong, and biased, and prejudiced, and clueless; those are the people we need, and need to be."
|author = Matt Dillahunty
|lived =
|desc =
}}

'''E:''' "The people who are constantly striving to apply skepticism to everything in their lives, the ones who actually care enough about truth and avoid being wrong and biased and prejudice and clueless; those are the people we need and need to be." Matt Dillahunty.

'''S:''' Very nice.

'''G:''' Matt.

'''S:''' You know Matt, he was on the show before.

'''E:''' Yes, yeah, Matt's been on the show.

'''AJR:''' That's a great quote.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's a good encapsulation of skeptical philosophy. Basically, it's a way of life. It's a way of trying to go through life. It's thinking about your own thinking.

'''E:''' Yeah, and we all fall short at times. We have to constantly practice this and remind ourselves all the time.

'''AJR:''' And prefer seeking truth over being right.

'''B:''' Yeah, don't become too investigated in your belief or your truth, wherever the evidence lies.

'''AJR:''' Luckily all the evidence lies with what I think, so that hasn't been a problem for me.

'''E:''' Yes, you're in perfect harmony.

'''AJR:''' That's right.

'''B:''' Nice when that happens.

'''S:''' Well, George and Andrea, it's been wonderful having you on the show.

'''E:''' You guys are awesome, always.

'''G:''' I appreciate it.

'''B:''' You guys are awesome.

'''AJR:''' Always fun to hang out with you guys.

'''S:''' I can't wait for our next NOTACON or whatever the next thing is that we do together. Hopefully something before then.

'''G:''' Yes.

'''AJR:''' Yes. Agreed.

'''S:''' And thank everyone for being on the show this week.

'''E:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 1030

2025-06-07T16:11:49Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

{{Editing required
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening everyone.

'''S:''' Cara, how did your test go last week?

'''C:''' It went well. I passed the second of two exams that are required to become a licensed psychologist in the state of California.

'''S:''' Achievement unlocked.

'''C:''' Yep.

'''E:''' Nice.

'''C:''' And so paperwork was delivered today. I sent it on Monday, but I got the, I guess, notification. So now it's just up to the board when they want to issue me the license.

'''S:''' Do you level up as well? Is that how it works?

'''C:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Do you get to wear a badge?

'''C:''' No. Nothing. I get to see patients without a supervisor.

'''S:''' You get to have a career.

'''C:''' Yeah. I get to have a career. And not be a fellow.

'''E:''' You get to charge for your professional services.

'''C:''' Exactly. That's nice.

'''J:''' That's when the fig bucks start rolling in.

'''S:''' So unfortunately, Val Kilmer died. Was it just today that he died or yesterday?

'''C:''' It was yesterday.

'''B:''' Yesterday.

'''E:''' Well, he was suffering a long time with an illness, right? Was it cancer?

'''S:''' He had throat cancer. Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh. He was a fraction of the person he was before. Gee whiz.

'''C:''' But did he die from throat cancer? I thought he was-

'''J:''' No, he died from pneumonia.

'''C:''' Yeah. That's what I thought. I thought that he had, kind of, pneumonia. I thought that he had, kind of, was on the other side of it. I don't know if he was NED, but-

'''E:''' I remember seeing a picture of him from recent... And you could not identify him as Val Kilmer. You just couldn't.

'''S:''' Yeah. But pneumonia is, like, a very common final event for a chronic illness.

'''C:''' For sure.

'''S:''' You know what I mean? That's, like, the approximate cause of death.

'''C:''' Yeah. I just wasn't sure if he had active cancer when he died or if he was no evidence of disease. Because I think the diagnosis was, like, over a decade ago.

'''S:''' Yeah. And he had chemotherapy and everything.

'''E:''' He's been sick a while.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And he made his own documentary, which I haven't seen yet. I don't know if anyone else saw it, called Val, back in 2021.

'''J:''' It was a good documentary.

'''E:''' You know, everything that... All the things that he'd been to that led him up right to that point and to his illness and everything. Gee whiz. I mean...

'''J:''' Yeah. It was very interesting.

'''E:''' You have a favorite movie? You have a favorite...

'''S:''' My favorite Val Kilmer role was Doc Holliday.

'''B:''' Doc Holliday.

'''E:''' Oh, sure.

'''B:''' Yes. Absolutely.

'''S:''' By far.

'''B:''' He's got some good roles. But, man, that character, I just loved him to death.

'''S:''' And there was Mad Mardigan, too, from Willem.

'''E:''' Yes. He was that movie. That movie gets forgotten at times. You know. Maybe the Tolkien people don't like...

'''S:''' It was a good movie.

'''B:''' Do you remember the scene when he first appears? He's supposed to be kind of, like, mean and threatening in that movie. So they gave him, like, kind of, like, classic, you know, medieval teeth where his teeth just did not look good.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. No. Yeah.

'''B:''' And then once that scene is over... I remember he grabbed a towel and he's rubbing his teeth and then his teeth are like Hollywood teeth. It's like, okay. That was easy.

'''S:''' I remember him chewing on leather or something to get that stuff off of his teeth.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. Root. Root Marm, I think I called it.

'''S:''' No, he's definitely a Han Solo kind of character.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' You know. Scoundrel.

'''B:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' Unlikely hero kind of character.

'''E:''' I probably first saw him in Real Genius. That's probably my first record.

'''S:''' Yep.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah, man. Fun character for his mnemonic abilities.

'''E:''' And, of course, Top Gun.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. Top Gun was...

'''S:''' He was fine in Top Gun.

'''E:''' He was fine. No, yeah. But he well became superstar, I think, with those roles.

'''B:''' He didn't even want it. He didn't even like the script when he got it. He changed his mind on that, I'm sure.

'''J:''' For Top Gun?

'''B:''' Yeah. Top Gun was Top Gun, wasn't it?

'''J:''' Yeah. He had to do it. He had to do it.

'''B:''' Yeah. He was contractually obligated.

'''J:''' He was in a contract with the studio. So he owed them a movie. He didn't like the script, but that's what... A lot of actors get sucked into roles that they don't really want because...

'''E:''' Of course.

'''B:''' How about Doors?

'''E:''' Yeah. He was an excellent Doors.

'''B:''' He killed it. He killed it in Doors. Like, wow. What a tour de force. He really became that guy.

'''S:''' Jim Morrison?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' That guy.

'''B:''' Yeah. The name escaped me for a picosecond there. But yeah, he was Morrison. I remember... I mean, I haven't seen it in quite a long time, but I remember being very impressed. You really did a great job there.

'''S:''' Well, let's go right on with our content.

{{anchor|wtw}}
== What's the Word? (04:45) ==
* enantiodromia

'''S:''' Cara, you're going to start us off with a what's the word.

'''C:''' Yeah. I'm going to do this one a little bit differently because a listener, Glenn Ellert, recommended a what's the word and basically did my job for me. So Glenn, thank you. I'm going to present to everybody what you presented to me. Don't worry. I double checked everything. I might add one or two things here and there. But he basically said, I have a suggestion for a word of the day that relates to our current political situation, enantiodromia, E-N-A-N-T-I-O-D-R-O-M-I-A, the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development. And that and is important because it's kind of a weird term that has a specific usage in one sort of esoteric branch of psychology. What Glenn says is that that definition basically reflects the two uses and histories of the word, the first one being ancient and the second one being modern. So when we look at the ancient use of that word, we can break it down in the original Greek into N meaning to contain, anti meaning opposite, O, and then droma, droma referring to like a road or a path or a race, like a running track. So it literally sort of translated to like the path with the properties of oppositeness, the path that is opposite to this one or the opposite running course, for example. Now this was a word that was used historically quite a bit. We see it discussed in a lot of traditional philosophies and religions. Definitely we see it a lot in Eastern philosophy and religion. You know, you think of like yin and yang, for example. But Jung decided, and this was much more recently because Carl Jung, we all know who Carl Jung was?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''B:''' Oh yeah.

'''C:''' Just making sure. So this would have been mid-century, around 1949, he decided to introduce this very old word into a newer understanding where he talked about the idea that somehow if you are doing something consciously, you will have an unconscious principle that is the opposite or vice versa, right? So you have an unconscious drive or an unconscious idea, and then there would be a conscious opposing action. So you know, Jung is known for having had a lot of, let's say, interesting, somewhat magical ideas that did influence modern psychology to an extent. There are actually practicing Jungian psychologists today. I am definitely not one of them. But basically his idea was that if you have this tendency to think in one extreme for long enough, there is going to be an opposite position that develops unconsciously, and it will be equivalent in strength, and then eventually that will erupt into consciousness. Now again, this is based on this earlier meaning, this path of opposites, where we first saw it in Heraclitus, 6th century BCE. He described the unity of opposites, so opposite things being identical, and then also the doctrine of flux, everything being constantly changing. This is very similar to modern ideas that we have of things like equilibrium, right? Balance. Like, these are important, both scientific but also philosophical and psychological concepts. But the idea here, and I love this, so Glenn wrote to us and said, in any case, I thought you might enjoy this word because it seems to describe the current political situation in the United States, as was mentioned on your Wednesday live stream. I'm not sure if they're referring to last Wednesday. The right wing has gone from the party of free trade, balanced budgets, and strong ties with democracies to one of tariffs, deficits, and strong ties with autocracies. I see this as an experience of enantiodromia right now. And then he says, I have to disagree with Jung, however, in that I don't think this is a good thing, because Jung often talked about this idea of balance as a good thing. I dug a little bit deeper, and I found an interesting post on Reddit, where somebody kind of defined it and grappled with the idea of enantiodromia. And a lot of people contributed to that thread and came up with their own examples. One example of enantiodromia is that, like, as a person gets older, let's say a responsible husband and father who's done that his whole life might leave his family and run off into a chaotic relationship with a younger woman, or a person who's working all their life for a charity ends up stealing money from them. And then more people contributed to that, like the Catholic Church being a great example, right? Centuries of sexual shame and repression. We know what that kind of balanced out to, or the pendulum swung in the other direction. And it's interesting, because I think about this, I've never used this term, and I've never thought of it as some sort of unconscious principle. But that's something we all grapple with in our kind of psychological functioning. Very often when I'm working with patients, we will talk about the pendulum swinging, and how, let's say you get in a fight with your partner, and you say something really mean. You can't just expect the pendulum to go back to the neutral state naturally with time. Often it needs to swing equal and opposite, right? There has to be behavior that is equal and opposite to the cruelty in order to sort of restore balance and trust. I wonder too, politically, if we aren't seeing these kinds of swings, you know, Glenn kind of mentioned their example of it, but, you know, is the political milieu right now a direct response to the previous two administrations?

'''S:''' 100%.

'''C:''' Right? And then will we now see an equal and opposite shift farther in the opposite direction as a direct response to this? And where do we sometimes net out in that balance? Like, I guess the real question is why are sometimes the swings quite violent, and why are sometimes the swings a little bit more moderate? But yeah, I do think we often see those kinds of swings in our own personal lives. We see them, like, Steve, you could probably speak to examples of this medically, where equilibrium has to be restored. Obviously physicists can speak about this, but it's an interesting term. You know, when you look at the dictionary descriptions of enantiodromia, it often will say like archaic. I don't think many people are using this term in their regular speech.

'''S:''' It doesn't roll off the tongue.

'''C:''' Yeah, it doesn't really roll off the tongue. But maybe it's one we could bring back, or maybe we could shorten it, or I don't know.

'''S:''' Cara, do you think, what it reminds me of, I don't know if you think it's part of this, is that the psychological phenomenon where if you are, you know, trying to accomplish some goal, but you're doing it in a thoughtless way, you often achieve the opposite. For example, if you are very anxious about your partner leaving you, that will motivate you to be clingy, but the clinginess might drive them away. So you actually accomplish the exact opposite of what you're trying to do. Is that related to this, do you think?

'''C:''' I think it could be. I mean, I don't know if Jung would see it that way, but I see it that way. And almost another example of that that just came to me is sort of, is it a Navy SEAL, or like a, maybe it's a Marine Corps statement, that like, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. That very often if you're trying to do something fast, very active, like rushing, you make so many mistakes that you have to correct that you end up being too slow.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' So if you just slow down and breathe.

'''S:''' It's actually even slower. Yeah, slow down and breathe.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' And in a way, I think that that speaks to it as well.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's like speeding, and you get pulled over for a ticket, and they make it take so long that you lose time.

'''E:''' Gosh, they're so rude when that happens.

'''S:''' No, it's effective.

'''E:''' Yeah, it is.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Cara.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== AI Protein Sequencing (12:37) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-revolution-comes-protein-sequencing
|article_title = https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-revolution-comes-protein-sequencing
|publication = www.science.org
}}
'''S:''' Jay, tell us about artificial intelligence and protein sequencing.

'''J:''' So do you guys remember in 2023, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was given to researchers who were using artificial intelligence to dramatically increase our understanding of protein folding. You guys remember that?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' I have a vague recollection of that.

'''B:''' Alpha fold? Is that alpha fold?

'''J:''' I think that was it. Yeah, that was a big deal. It was a huge step forward. And there has been another one of these AI events happening-

'''E:''' Beta fold?

'''J:''' -that I will tell you about. So recently there's been, it's very significant, and they're saying it's 100% due to artificial intelligence helping. And this time it has to do with protein sequencing. So they have a new generation of AI tools that have been developed, and this was led by a model called Instanova. And it's enabling researchers to identify proteins much faster, more accurately, and without relying on the current incomplete databases that we have that are hugely lacking information to really help them get the job done in the current methodology that they have. They're saying that the implications are wide-reaching because it could be used from medical diagnostics to environmental science, archaeology, you know, there's this long list of sciences that can use this technology to help them do the work that they do. So the number one problem here is that conventional protein sequencing is very time intensive, and that means it costs a lot of money. And scientists usually start this process by, you know, they cut a protein into smaller bits, and these are called peptides. And they measure how heavy those pieces or these individual peptides are using a machine called a mass spectrometer. So after they weigh it, they try to figure out what the protein is by comparing those cut pieces to a database of known protein pieces, right? Does that make sense so far?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' That right there, you know, it's labor intensive. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do. But there's a big problem with that current method. The master list of proteins, of course, don't include all the proteins that are out there. And it certainly doesn't include all of the proteins that could potentially exist. In fact, they say that up to 70% of the pieces that they find, these peptides, don't match anything in the database. And that means that most proteins can't be identified using this common method. That's a big percentage. That is, you know, a huge percentage that go unevaluated to the point where they don't know what it is and they can't gain any information from using the current database. So researchers found that instead of searching for peptide matches, AI models like the one called Instanova, they predict likely peptide sequences based on patterns learned from millions of known proteins. And this seems like, really, is that it? Is that all it took? It's complicated. It sounds kind of easy, but it's complicated because, of course, they have to build this massive database of all of those patterns that exist. But, you know, they did it, which is fantastic. So this new approach accelerates the analysis, but it also opens up the possibility of identifying completely novel proteins, which is another awesome thing that they're finding that it can do. So this was developed by a team that was led by someone named Timothy Patrick Jenkins. Anybody?

'''S:''' Old man Jenkins?

'''J:''' Leroy Jenkins.

'''E:''' That's a 20-year anniversary item right there.

'''C:''' That's probably older than that.

'''J:''' Anyone who doesn't know what that is, look up Leroy Jenkins and you're going to have a good time. So Timothy Jenkins is at the University, the Technical University of Denmark, and Instanova represents this major step forward in AI-powered protonomics, right? You guys have, Steve, you must have heard of this, Cara, I'm sure you've heard of this. So protonomics is the large-scale study of proteins. What they are, how many are there, what do they do, how do they interact with each other, where are they found? You know, there's just a lot of different pieces of information that they will find in catalog and it's super helpful to have this giant database of information. So the model, this AI model uses a deep learning neural network. How many times have you heard that? And it's combined with a technique called diffusion modeling. This is the same strategy behind advanced image generators like DALI and protein structure predictors like AlphaFold. So the precursors have already been out there that some of this technology already existed. Diffusion models work by adding noise to input data and then they learn how to remove the noise, gradually refining the output. So this iterative process boosts accuracy, particularly when data is messy or incomplete. Jenkins team using Instanova with their database, they dubbed that Instanova Plus, which in lab tests identified 42% more peptides than all previous AI models known. And one of them you might recognize was called Casanova. So that's a really, really significant percentage and it's proving to be very successful. So if you don't remember, Casanova developed in 2021 by William Noble and his team at the University of Washington. This was the first AI sequencer to use deep neural networks similar to those behind large language models like ChatGPT. So in a head-to-head test, Instanova Plus was used to analyze a synthetic mixture of proteins from nine organisms in real-world applications. The model identified 1,225 peptides associated with the blood proteins albumin and infected leg wounds. You ever hear about this, Steve?

'''C:''' Do you say albumin?

'''J:''' Albumin, yeah.

'''B:''' Like eggs?

'''J:''' They're saying that the model identified 1,225 peptides associated with the blood protein albumin.

'''C:''' Yeah, albumin.

'''J:''' And infected leg wounds, right? Does that make any sense to you?

'''S:''' Well, albumin is like your most basic blood protein, right? Just have a lot of albumin in your blood and that is responsible for the osmotic pressure of the blood. But that basically keeps fluid in the blood, water in the blood.

'''J:''' So the model identified 1,225 peptides associated with the blood protein in an infected leg wound. So this is 10 times more than conventional methods. And of those 254 peptides, they were previously undocumented. And the AI also detected 52 bacterial proteins from the same sample showing its capacity to parse these complex mixtures, meaning that you can get a sample of blood and it has its own proteins, but there could be lots of other things in the blood, right? Like the bacteria, that it also was able to figure out what the peptides were in those protein chains. So that's a huge thing. It's able to parse through all that, sort it all out, and really give the scientists like a crystal clear picture of what are all the different things that were in this sample. So that said, huge success, you know, this thing could dramatically speed up the process of cataloging proteins and everything, which of course means that it could lead to advances in so many other things, you know, like new drug development, blah, blah, blah. You could just, you know, laundry list of benefits here that lots of different spheres of science could benefit from. Now outside the lab, researchers have already been putting these tools to work, like a researcher named Matthew Collins, he's at the University of Cambridge, and he's been, you know, testing several AI models that analyze his archaeological samples. So traditional sequencing methods have particularly, you know, the ones that they use, of course they fail and, you know, they can't use them to really get to the nitty gritty on the information that they want to get out of these, you know, partial proteins that they find that, youknow, could be thousands of years old and the samples are incomplete. They can't, you know, nothing we have today can really make it all make sense. It takes a lot of time and you have to find multiple samples. It's like just a mess. In this context, ancient proteins, like I said, they degrade or they come from extinct organisms and, you know, they're not found in any modern databases. But the new models have helped his team identify, for example, rabbit proteins at Neanderthal sites and fish muscle proteins in ancient Brazilian pottery, right? Like check, think about that. Researchers are moving, you know, they're moving over to using these AI models exclusively because it's crystal clear how much more powerful it is and how much success that they're seeing. So this is, guys, it's a fantastic example of, you know, these very, very narrow, very specific AI models that are being used in science to speed things up, to fill in huge gaps, to do things exactly like we want them to be able to do. We want these AI models to have the ability to speed up these types of research and make the scientist's jobs easier and less expensive. And you know, damn it, it's working. You know, this stuff is really working. Like when they do it this way, it seems like, oh my God, AI makes perfect sense. Juxtapose that to a lot of the other news items that we talk about where, you know, AI is being used for scary stuff and it's being used, you know, like people are talking about having it run governments. And I wish that humanity had a crystal clear vision on what's best to use AI for. I certainly don't want AI in the short, especially in the short term, like making any decisions that humans should be making, right? But this stuff, you know, chugging through data and, you know, analyzing, you know, huge reams of data and coming up with really brilliant conclusions. It's fantastic. And it's, you know, it's perfectly tuned to do things like this.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Jay.

{{anchor|news_item2}}
=== Solving the Bat Cocktail Party Problem (22:35) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407810122
|article_title = https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407810122
|publication = www.pnas.org
}}
'''S:''' Guys, have you heard about the bat cocktail party problem?

'''J:''' Not at all.

'''S:''' What would you guess that refers to?

'''E:''' I didn't realize it was a problem.

'''J:''' Well, okay. So maybe bats are drinking.

'''B:''' Bats communicating in a cave?

'''S:''' Bob's obviously very close.

'''J:''' Oh, never mind.

'''C:''' Never mind.

'''S:''' It's not in the cave, though. It's when they're leaving the cave, because they all leave at the same time.

'''B:''' How do they coordinate that shit?

'''S:''' And yes, and they're going through a very small space. And yet collisions among the bats is very rare.

'''E:''' Well, sure.

'''B:''' Yeah, I never thought about that. Yeah, that's...

'''S:''' And they leave at the same time because they're trying to basically overwhelm their predators, right? So, you know, like there are raptors, hawks, eagles, whatever, waiting for them. And they'll pick off, you know, a bat here or there, but they're hiding in the crowd, basically. So it's advantageous for each individual bat to leave when all the other bats leave.

'''B:''' Imagine you're the first bat out and you know there's like three million bats behind you. That sounds exciting, doesn't it? Like, ooooh!

'''S:''' So how do they not run into each other? But now the problem is even worse when you consider the fact that they're all navigating with echolocation, right? And so if you have a hundred thousand bats all using echolocation in the same small space...

'''B:''' Cacophony!

'''S:''' Right. It's going to be overwhelming. And that's where the cocktail party analogy comes from. It's like trying to understand the conversation in a cocktail party when there's a ton of background noise. You have a hundred people talking in a room. How can you pick out one voice?

'''E:''' Well, they must have evolved a filter of some kind for it, I would think.

'''S:''' Yeah. So that's the question. Is how... What is the... How did they evolve a way to not all bang into each other? Because that could be fatal, you know, if you have a midair collision.

'''B:''' Talk about a pileup.

'''C:''' Do they have their own sonar sounds?

'''S:''' It's echolocation.

'''C:''' Or echo sounds? Can they hear their own signals?

'''S:''' We're coming up on a study, but the previous research looking at bats in the lab found that bats use slightly different frequency echolocation noises, right? So they could tell their sound from other bats. But that doesn't work when there's a hundred thousand bats in a very tight group. That's okay if there's not that many bats around and you're just trying to distinguish yourself from a few other bats or dozens of other bats, but not tens of thousands of other bats.

'''E:''' Well, maybe there's a physical component to this. Like they emit some kind of, I don't know, dust particle or dander or something that they know to avoid the dander.

'''C:''' So is the question how do they hear where they are in space or how do they hear where all the other bats are in space?

'''S:''' Well, it's really where all the other bats are. They have to avoid hitting any other bat. So the existing research didn't really solve the problem. They said, okay, they have ways of avoiding jamming each other. They call it jamming, right? If you're overwhelming another bat's echolocation with your own echolocation, that's jammed. So why aren't all of the bats being jammed at the same time when they're trying to get... How could they possibly make it through that small space in a very short period of time without having massive pileup? They just basically were not going to be able to solve this problem in the lab. They needed to attach recording devices to bats in the wild.

'''B:''' Oof.

'''E:''' GoPros on bats?

'''S:''' Well, not GoPros because they're not interested in visual information. They're interested in acoustic information, right?

'''E:''' Oh, microphones.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' And audio detectors.

'''S:''' Microphones.

'''B:''' I hope they're small and lightweight.

'''S:''' Yeah, so that's what they did. They attached tiny little microphones to a bunch of bats and then released them near the cave. Now, they couldn't get them into the cave, I think. I think they just had to release them into the flock after they left the cave, and then they used computer modeling to extend the data that they got. What they found was that when the bats are in a very tight, tightly densed group of bats, they use a much higher frequency of echolocation, and they reduce the volume, right? So they increase the frequency and reduce the volume, which basically means they're narrowing the distance that they can see with their echolocation to a very short distance. So essentially, they optimize their echolocation so they could see very precisely where the bats right next to them are.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Does that make sense?

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' Because that's all they care about. In that moment, all they care about are the bats that are right in front of them, right next to them. You know what I mean? That's it. That's all they care about. And it's like a flock of birds, right? In the same thing.

'''E:''' Yeah, I was going to relate to that. It's similar.

'''B:''' The simple rules.

'''S:''' Yeah. Each bat following a simple rule, stay this distance away from the bat right in front of me and to the left and to the right of me. And that's it. They only have to worry about the bats that are right next to them. And they optimize their echolocation for that purpose. They narrow their-

'''B:''' Right. If everyone does that, it works.

'''S:''' If everyone does that, it works, right? The collisions become very, very rare.

'''B:''' So cool.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. So I thought it was interesting just because the question of how do the bats not bump into each other is not necessarily intuitive because there's a bunch of things, like you said, Evan, like maybe they're using some non-echolocation mechanism or something else. But yeah, and they had to go out into the field to answer this question.

'''E:''' Does that also mean there are other scenarios in which they make those kinds of adjustments with their echolocation in other scenarios as well, when they're hunting or-

'''S:''' So clearly they can adjust their echolocation, right? So they will avoid frequencies that other bats are using. They obviously, they will optimize it at other times for prey, right? They're looking for an insect. They need to be able to see an insect at a much bigger distance, right? To zero in on it. And now they have a different paradigm of echolocation when they're flocking in a tight group, you know? So that's really interesting. But also the technology, you know, the idea that they have to, you have to record bats in the field. You're not going to really solve these problems in the lab. And that we have the technology to attach tiny little ultrasound sensors or the sensors for the frequencies of sounds that bats are using in echolocation. Yeah. So it's a cool study.

'''B:''' I hope those poor bats aren't just stuck with those stupid sensors for the rest of their lives.

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''E:''' Should just use their eyes, you know, bat their eyes.

'''B:''' Oh boy.

'''C:''' I'm assuming that, Bob, I'm assuming they fall off after time.

'''E:''' Yeah, they probably don't last that long.

'''S:''' The study was done in the greater mouse-tailed bat.

'''E:''' Oh, right. Yeah. Are all bats, do all bats have a feature like this?

'''S:''' Well, I mean, probably all echolocating bats, especially ones that have really dense populations in caves.

'''E:''' In caves. I can't imagine all bats live in caves or, you know.

'''S:''' No. Like the fruit bats that we saw in Australia.

'''E:''' Those are tree dwellers.

'''S:''' Tree dwellers.

'''E:''' So they wouldn't need that specific ability.

'''S:''' They probably don't have, not all bats have echolocation either.

'''E:''' Aha. There we go.

'''B:''' True.

{{anchor|news_item3}}
=== The Extremely Large Telescope (30:15) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.universetoday.com/articles/the-extremely-large-telescope-could-sense-the-hints-of-life-at-proxima-centauri-in-just-10-hours
|article_title = https://www.universetoday.com/articles/the-extremely-large-telescope-could-sense-the-hints-of-life-at-proxima-centauri-in-just-10-hours
|publication = www.universetoday.com
}}
'''S:''' All right. Bob, tell us about the Extremely Large Telescope.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Is it that big?

'''C:''' Extremely.

'''B:''' All righty. So, guys, a recent study suggests that the Extremely Large Telescope, ELT, which is being built in Chile, could detect signs of life on nearby exoplanets, including those that never transit in front of their stars, which current telescopes struggle with. So the study is, I'll just read the first part of the study title. The first part, it says, there's more to life in reflected light, which I really kind of like that. So I've become even more enamored with the ELT, or Extremely Large Telescope, once I did more of a deep dive the past couple of days. I really am looking forward to this thing being finished. Now it's, of course, it's aptly named. Its primary mirror will have a diameter of a whopping 39 meters, 130 feet primary mirror. What? That's nuts. It'll gather more optical light by an order of magnitude than all previous telescopes. Get this one. Its images will be 16 times sharper than Hubble, 16 times sharper than the Hubble. That's pretty big. All right. So its main superpower, though, will be examining the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets. Now, this is currently being done, for example, by the James Webb Space Telescope. And so what happens is that as the exoplanet transits in front of its star, the starlight goes through, it goes from the star, through the atmosphere, and directly to our instruments. That's the path. Boom. That's how it goes. Now, this creates the very, very clear, very sharp absorption spectra, which means that certain wavelengths of the star are absorbed by gases as it travels through the atmosphere. And then we know, once we get that light, then we can look at the absorption spectra and say, oh, look, these elements are missing when it goes through the atmosphere. That's what must be in the atmosphere, right? Now, the ELT, the Extremely Large Telescope, can do that as well. It can look at light coming directly from a star through the planet's, the exoplanet's atmosphere and right to our instruments. But it would also be able to do something that's impossible for James Webb. Now, many exoplanets don't transit right in front of its star from our point of view, right? I mean, we just happen to be lucky that these transiting exoplanets, we're kind of edge on, right? We're edge on to the solar system so we could see the planet going right in front of it. But non-transiting stars, this does not happen. We are at more at a higher angle, right? More of a perpendicular type of angle, and it just doesn't happen. But now those exoplanets, they will still obviously reflect the star's light as well, and that can be helpful, but not as helpful as the transit spectra. So my question to you guys is, why do you think that this reflected spectra, the light going from the star bouncing off the planet to our instruments, is not as good as the transit spectra, which is the light that's coming directly from the star through the atmosphere and right to our instruments? Why? Why is the reflected spectra not as good?

'''E:''' Diffuse, diffusion, right?

'''B:''' Kind of. Yeah, you're kind of right around the answer, I think. The reflected light, it's important to note that this reflected light does have absorption features. It's there, similar to the transit exoplanets. But the reflected light, those features are far weaker, and it's also more complex due to the reflection, there's scattering, and there's planet surface effects. So it's very like attenuated absorption data. It's very, very difficult and nuanced and complex. So teasing out that data is just not possible for James Webb. It can't look at the reflected light off of an exoplanet and do anything really with it. And that's mainly because James Webb, as awesome as it is, it's just too small. I mean, its mirror is like only, what, I think 10 meters, not near 40 meters. It's got much poorer spatial and spectral resolution. Its contrast detection is not nearly as good as what the extremely large telescopes will be. So the main reason is that the ELT, it's on our planet. It's not in space. So we could just load stuff onto it. It doesn't matter how heavy really it is, because it's on the surface of the earth. It's not like in some Lagrange point out in space. So the extremely large telescope is optimized to detect and find these biosignature gases hidden in this reflected light. It should do very well. That's what it was designed for. And that's all fine and good. But these researchers wanted to be able to predict, you know, how good is this telescope going to be when it looks at this reflected light? They wanted to up their confidence levels to say, all right, now that we know everything that we know about the design of the telescope and what it should do, what will it, you know, what can it really do probably, you know, in terms of just like, what do their instruments tell them it should be able to do once they go through what they did is they went through a special program with a cool name of SPECTRE, which stands for Spectral Planetary ELT Calculator for Terrestrial Retrieval, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It doesn't matter. Okay. So they use a computer program to model and analyze the exoplanet atmosphere. So what this program does is it simulates how different gases absorb or reflect starlight. So with this information, they then can predict with much greater confidence what the extremely large telescope should be able to do. So this is what they did. But this is one of my favorite parts of this is these test cases. They created these atmospheric test cases and they had four of them. So basically four distinct classes of terrestrial planet atmospheres that are possible. So one test case was a non-industrial earth, you know, earth as it was, you know, a couple hundred years ago, rich in water and photosynthesizing plants, yeah, photosynthetic biosphere without anthropogenic fluxes. So there's no, it is no humans, you know, necessarily with their industry mucking about with our atmosphere. So it's kind of before that. All right. The second test case was early Archean earth. Now this is where life was just starting to thrive on the earth, say about, you know, three and a half billion years ago or so. And then let's see, the third test case that they ran through their specter program was an earth-like world where oceans have evaporated. So similar to what, to Mars, to Venus, planets that at one point would have been almost indistinguishable from the earth perhaps, but they had oceans and then they disappeared and things just got worse after that. And then the fourth one was a prebiotic earth. So this is like an earth that's capable of life, but there's no life there. And then for comparison, they threw in another planet atmosphere, but this was more of a Neptune sized world with a very, very thick, much thicker atmosphere. And they threw that in there just for comparison. So why do you think these researchers had these different test cases? Well, they did it because they did it, that's fine, I know, this is, you know.

'''E:''' I was thinking.

'''B:''' They did that to determine if the telescope could distinguish between the different earth-likeworlds, right?

'''E:''' Of course.

'''B:''' They needed to know that no matter what kind of atmosphere was thrown at it, it would do a good job. But even more critical though, they wanted to be able to make sure that the extremely large telescope could distinguish and not trick us into like a false positive or a negative, right? So that was critical because you don't want to, that means that whether a lifeless world would seem to have life or if a living world would appear barren, right? You don't want that, especially you don't want to have a test case where you have this living world and the telescope says, yeah, there's nothing there, just go on to the next one. That's like the worst case scenario to miss something like that. So now the findings. So based on their simulations, the researchers found that the extremely large telescope should be able to make accurate distinctions for nearby star systems. So that's the good news. It should work as advertised, at least according to the spectrum program, it should do very well at distinguishing between these various worlds that have life, that don't have life, that don't have life, but may seem to have life and vice versa. They said that the program said that this is going to do very well. For me, the most interesting part was the closest star Proxima Centauri and its exoplanet called Proxima Centauri B. We've talked about that a couple of times on the show. We don't know much about Proxima Centauri B. It's the closest exoplanet, which is fascinating, but it's also a rocky world. It's within the habitable zone. And we don't know that much more about it, but it's, I mean, this is so encouraging, but we don't know if maybe it doesn't even have an atmosphere. You know, it looks like it's tidally locked and that's also very problematic, but this is the closest exoplanet to the earth. And that means it's going to be about as clear as anything, any other exoplanet is going to be. So the other thing that they found was that this telescope should be able to give us some really good or bad news very, very quickly. They said that it should be able to detect oxygen in 10 hours. It should be able to detect methane in five hours and water vapor in one hour, just in one hour, looking at a planet that's over four light years away. It could say, yep, there's water vapor on that planet with very high confidence. I also love how the survey will take into account important pairs of gases instead of just in isolation. So for example, you often will hear that, oh, you know, this exoplanet might have oxygen or it might have this, but it doesn't, you know, oxygen could be, it could be created by life processes or it could be created from geological processes. You don't know. So what they're doing for this is that they're doing, they're detecting these gases in pairs. They're going to focus on that. So for example, if you have an exoplanet with oxygen and methane, that implies that there's a continuous replenishment of those, of those gases, and that would make an even stronger case for life existing. If you notice, I'm pretty excited about this. It seems like we've been cataloging all, how many thousands of exoplanets have we found by now? Is it 5,000? 5,000 exoplanets? But we've got thousands of exoplanets and we've been discovering them since, what, the 90s? I mean, for so long we've been, I think it's time. It just seems the time is right to seriously take it to the next level and check out all of the closest exoplanets that are inhabitable zones for biosignatures. I mean, it could be, you know, the most tremendous news of the millennium. Imagine finding, hey, yeah, we've got a high probability, 95% probability that there is life on this planet that's only a few light years away, you know, four or five light years away. But let's see, I want to end with the [https://xkcd.com/ XKCD comic] that I came across. And it's funny because they have a list of telescope names and the top three boxes are checked. The Very Large Telescope, checked. The Extremely Large Telescope, we just talked about that, checked. There's also the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. That was actually considered, in place of the ELT that I just talked about, they were going to make it the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. That's the name, the name was going to be that because it was going to be not 39 meters but 100 meters wide. The primary mirror. But it was obviously too expensive. So they had to cancel it and they downsized it to the Extremely Large Telescope. But this comic's got a few more here that aren't checked yet. So guys, scientists, astronomers, these names have not been selected yet. The Oppressively Colossal Telescope, the Mind-Numbingly Vast Telescope, let's see, the Cataclysmic Telescope, and let's see, the Telescope of Devastation, that's interesting, Ominous. And then there's the Final Telescope. All of these are unchecked. But actually that makes me, that reminds me, some people are saying that this telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope, it might be the biggest one we ever create for this type of telescope, a reflector with a, you know, looking at optical frequencies. This is so big and expensive that some people think that we're never going to create anything bigger than that. And that would be, that would be a shame. But I totally get it. I mean, you can't be throwing around, you know, 10, 15, 20 billion dollars on something like this. Yeah, we might not see in our lifetimes anything bigger than this 39-meter behemoth. But I think we got many, you know, once this comes online at the end of this decade, I think, you know, we're going to have many, many years of amazing discoveries. Plus there's other telescopes, four or five other telescopes that I found that would qualify for this Extremely Large Telescope size range, you know, something like 20 to 60 meters or something like that. Or is it, or maybe it's a hundred, I think it goes up to a hundred. Because this is, it's a little confusing because the Extremely Large Telescope is being built in Chile, but there's also a classification of telescopes. When you're in the 20 meter to a hundred meter range, you are an Extremely Large Telescope. So there are like four other Extremely Large Telescopes that will be coming online for the next 10 years. I haven't looked at those two deeply yet, so, but they will also be a big change, I think, in astronomy in terms of just something that are so, they're just so big, so much, they're collecting so much light. We're going to see some amazing discoveries.

'''S:''' Bob, you left one name off the list, a telescope of unusual size.

'''B:''' Yeah. They didn't throw that in that comic, but they probably should have, because that's definitely a nice Douglas Adams.

'''S:''' No, that's not from Douglas Adams.

'''B:''' Oh, no, no. That's a, yeah, that's the princess.

'''S:''' Princess Bride.

'''B:''' You're right. Very good.

'''E:''' I don't think they exist.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''S:''' You don't?

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== CIA and the Ark of the Covenant (44:12) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-found-ark-covenant-using-104441588.html
|article_title = CIA found the Ark of the Covenant by using psychics, declassified files claim
|publication = www.yahoo.com
}}
'''S:''' Well, Evan, but do you believe that the CIA found the Ark of the Covenant using psychics?

'''E:''' I believe part of what you said there, pieces of it. All right. The Ark of the Covenant. What do you, and I mean the four of you folk, know about the Ark of the Covenant that you did not learn from that most wonderful movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark? I know I couldn't.

'''S:''' What do I know about the Ark that I didn't learn from Raiders?

'''E:''' That you didn't, right, right. In other words, was your first real exposure to anything having to do with the Ark of the Covenant, the movie?

'''S:''' No, I knew about it from Bible class, basically, but we didn't, yeah, yeah. We knew about the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I'm sure the actual memory of it probably comes mainly from Raiders.

'''E:''' It's got to be, right, contaminated by Raiders of the Lost Ark in a certain sense. Okay, for those of you who don't-

'''B:''' It's a wonderful contamination.

'''E:''' Oh, it is. It's still one of my favorite action adventure movies. It's a wonderful movie. For those who don't know, I'll tell you what this is. Okay, an Ark. What is an Ark? Ark, A-R-K, from the Hebrew word Aran, and it literally means chest or box. It can also mean a vessel of protection or preservation, all right? That's an Ark. Now, what's a covenant? A covenant, that is a sacred agreement or promise between God and, in this case, the people of Israel. The Ark of the Covenant is a chest made of wood and fashioned in gold, which acts as a vessel of protection. Now, what is it protecting? What is said to be contained in the Ark? Do you know?

'''S:''' The pieces of the Ten Commandments.

'''E:''' Yes. That is one of, or several pieces of, one of the items in there. There are two other items, supposedly, in the Ark. Does anyone know what those are?

'''C:''' Are they also documents?

'''E:''' No, they're not documents.

'''J:''' It's a piece Jesus used at the Last Supper.

'''S:''' No, it's Moses' lunch.

'''B:''' I thought it was a piece.

'''E:''' And a note from his mom.

'''C:''' Is it a shroud?

'''E:''' Not a shroud.

'''S:''' No, that's wrong.

'''C:''' Is it a cup?

'''E:''' You're getting in the right...

'''C:''' Like a chalice? A jar?

'''S:''' That's New Testament, Cara. You gotta go Old Testament.

'''C:''' They had chalices in the Old Testament. They drank out of cups in the Old Testament? What are you talking about?

'''E:''' Along with the stone tablets, or the remnants of the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments that Steve said, there's also something called Aaron's rod, which is, you know, what? Some kind of, you know, like priestly rod. And a jar on mana. I know, isn't that weird? Which is described as the food god provided in the desert. Okay. Because of the time it was the Hebrews who were wandering and they escaped from bondage in Egypt. Spend a lot of time in the desert and supposedly magically I guess food appeared in the jar of mana. So it could help feed the people. Now Steve, my next question was going to be, where is the story or where is the what's the source of the ark? You mentioned it. It's the Bible and specifically the Old Testament. Very good. Do you know which book in the Old Testament the ark is mentioned in?

'''S:''' Are they out of Genesis at that point? I think.

'''E:''' They are definitely out of Genesis.

'''S:''' Deuteronomy, and then...

'''C:''' No, you skipped Exodus, Leviticus...

'''E:''' Exodus, Cara. Yes.

'''S:''' Of course.

'''E:''' And when was and do we know when Exodus was written, approximately?

'''C:''' A long time ago.

'''E:''' Oh yeah, very long time ago. In biblical times.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' 14th century BCE. So we're talking roughly, what, 3,400 to 3,500 years ago from today. Now, final question. Other than the story in the Bible, is there any evidence that the Ark and its contents were real?

'''S:''' No.

'''J:''' I don't think so.

'''B:''' Probably not.

'''E:''' There is no evidence. So it is not mentioned in any contemporary non-biblical sources, and they've looked. They've studied tomes from Egypt and Canaan and Mesopotamia from the time, and nowhere else is it mentioned but in the Bible.

'''B:''' What about the Dead Sea Scrolls?

'''E:''' Some scholars believe it could have been a real actual object, but others think it's symbolic, written into biblical text as a way to show Israel's special connection with God. But the Bible itself treats the Ark as a very real item, and it was built to exact dimensions and handled with very strict rules and linked to many major events in Israel's early history. Some believe that the Ark was lost, destroyed, captured, and for a long time certainly forgotten. Did you know that there is a church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, obviously in Ethiopia, and they claim that they have it, that it's housed in a chapel in a place called Axum, A-X-U-M. However, nobody's allowed to see it.

'''C:''' Of course. But trust us, it's there.

'''E:''' On a tangent to that, there's a story about in World War II, I think it was an officer of the British Army, visited supposedly this place where it was housed, and supposedly saw it and deemed it to be a replica, something that looks like an Ark that they can claim is a holy rock. And we know that that's not unusual for churches throughout history to claim that they have specific relics of importance, but they are all, frankly, replicas of what was supposedly the original relic.

'''B:''' Churches duping people? What, that happened?

'''E:''' Never, ever, ever. So scant evidence, frankly, no evidence at all that it ever existed. But has that stopped people from believing the Ark of the Covenant is real? No, it hasn't. Because why let something like lack of evidence get in the way of a perfectly good belief? Now, of course, people in the latter 20th century, around the time that the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, those sophisticated modern people inhabiting an age of science, technology, and reason would never waste their time and money and government resources looking into objects described in the Bible with no evidence to support that the objects even existed in the first place. Right? Am I right? Well, would you believe the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, or the U.S. Department of Defense, the DoD, would undertake efforts to go looking for the Ark of the Covenant? Oh, yes, they did. And of course, but, you know, well, they're going to use the most sophisticated tools at their disposal, right? The highest technology, sophisticated methods, and calling their most celebrated assets to search for the Lost Ark, right? Well, I'm here to tell you that not exactly. Hey, if you want a movie that more closely resembles reality than Raiders of the Lost Ark, go see the movie or read the book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. And that's a fascinating look at U.S. military's utilization of self-proclaimed psychics who use their so-called powers of remote viewing to see things that are hidden away, no matter where those things are on this planet or in some cases other planets. We'll get to that. And that's what the CIA and Department of Defense did in the 1980s. They called on the services of scammers, I mean psychics, to try and locate, by the power of remote viewing, the Lost Ark of the Covenant. And that is in the news this week, as a slew of declassified documents have been released by our government in recent weeks, some of which admit to these efforts. Now, this is not the first time that these documents have been talked about or parts of them declassified. It was back in 2000, actually, when this was first known and first declassified. However, the thing is, in the year 2000, the Internet is just a shadow of what it is now. I mean, yes, there was the Internet, but I don't know that it had the same cultural saturation sort of that it has today. If something like this hits the Internet now, obviously everybody's going to know about it. But back in 2000, maybe not so much. So it wasn't as easily an accessible story as it is now. But it's experiencing a revival now, and it's why it's a news item now, because it's all part of a slew of other declassified documents that are being released by our government on all kinds of different things. But this one is getting particular attention. Obviously, it's very clickbaity, and a lot of news outlets, tabloid and otherwise, are running with the story because, hey, who doesn't like a good story about the lost Ark of the Covenant? So what did the documents say? What has been revealed? All right. So yes, that they admitted that they paid for these efforts, the CIA and the Department of Defense. They hired these remote viewers to the tune of millions of dollars for these entire projects that ran for the better part of 20 years or so. And that means our tax dollars went ahead and paid for it. But not only did they go searching for it, but they were successful, and they actually found the lost Ark. However, remote viewing of an object is one thing, and the retrieval of a remotely viewed object, that is quite another thing. This isn't about the retrieval, but it's the story about the remote viewer's supposed success in actually finding it through their powers. You got to think back. So this was during the Cold War, like the end tale of the Cold War. And the US government was launching secret psychic research programs under the umbrella of what became eventually known as Project Stargate. The programs were aimed to determine if remote viewing could be used for espionage and mostly having to do with the troop movements and defense movements of the Soviet Union and taking a look at their missile silos and seeing what conditions they were under. But hey, if you could use remote viewing to look for those kinds of things, maybe you could also use this information to look for, oh, I don't know, lost religious artifacts and relics. So that's exactly what they did. In one particular case, they worked with a remote viewer who, let's see how they describe it. Remote viewer number 32, who knows how many hundreds of these remote viewers that they hired over the years. In a remote viewing session on December 5th, 1988, remote viewer 32 was tasked with identifying a hidden object. And they allegedly did not know that the object that they were being tasked to find was the Ark of the Covenant. So without that knowledge, just find this hidden object. The only thing that the remote viewer knew is it was somewhere, something that existed somewhere in the Middle East region, the region of the world known as the Middle East. Okay. So the psychic described a location in the Middle East that claimed housed an object that was being protected by entities. And here's what it says. The target is a container. This is right from the document. This container has another container inside of it. The target is fashioned of wood, gold, and silver, similar in shape to a coffin. And it's decorated with a seraphim, which is like a six winged angel or, you know, these angelic kind of creatures. The declassified document showed that several pages of drawings accompanying this written description would turn out to be something resembling what the Bible described as the lost Ark of the Covenant. That visuals of surrounding buildings indicated the presence of mosque domes. Well, gee, of course, if you're going to be, you know, if you're given the clue that you're looking somewhere in the Middle East, that's a pretty, even I could have probably told you that without any powers. But that the object was hidden underground and in dark, wet conditions. There's an aspect of spirituality, information, lessons, and historical knowledge far beyond what we know. Remote viewer number 32 continued. They described it as being protected by entities that would destroy individuals who attempted to damage the object. The target is protected and can only be opened by those who are authorized to do so.

'''S:''' Did they say it would melt your face off?

'''E:''' Right, exactly, Steve. I mean, come on, it's 1988and the movie, I mean, is it not clear that this remote viewer figured out on their own? And frankly, it doesn't take much if you're being hired to look for an object in the Middle East, why wouldn't you describe something akin to what you saw in Raiders of the Lost Ark and describing the Ark? But this is considered to be, oh my gosh, how could this remote, how could the psychic have known what we were going for when we didn't give him hardly any clues and so forth? Apparently, some people were very impressed by this information that the remote viewer provided. However, to us in the skeptical community, we know this as many things, not the least of which is a cold reading and using those kinds of techniques to come up with something akin to what would be a hit in this case and impressing people who otherwise are unaware of such tricks.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's completely unimaginative. I mean, you could have made that up off the top of your head, just winging it.

'''B:''' She could have asked ChatGPT and done 10 times better.

'''E:''' Totally.

'''S:''' ChatGPT would have been overkill.

'''E:''' So yeah, making the rounds, you know, Ark of the Covenant. Yeah, I never thought we'd be speaking about this on the show, you know, I mean, actually bringing it.

'''S:''' They never went to get it because they didn't say it's here on the map, it's just like they just described the place that it's in.

'''E:''' Right, yeah, give me the longitude, give me the latitude, give me the depth, you know, no details like that, just basically a cold reading.

'''S:''' I'm surprised they didn't say, I see a giant warehouse.

'''E:''' And a man with a hat and a whip.

'''B:''' And a rat in apparent pain.

'''E:''' All right, I'll leave you with this. Tune in next week when we go exploring for more archaeological treasures as those described in that other famous relic hunting movie, Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail. Thank you very much.

'''S:''' That's historically accurate, that one.

'''E:''' Just as much as Raiders of the Lost Ark probably.

'''S:''' Just as much. All right, thanks, Evan.

'''E:''' Yep.

{{anchor|news_item5}}
=== 23&Me Selling Personal Data (58:32) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theconversation.com/23andme-is-potentially-selling-more-than-just-genetic-data-the-personal-survey-info-it-collected-is-just-as-much-a-privacy-problem-253220
|article_title = 23andMe is potentially selling more than just genetic data – the personal survey info it collected is just as much a privacy problem
|publication = theconversation.com
}}
'''S:''' All right, Cara, I don't think we mentioned last week that 23andMe went bankrupt, right? And now we're hearing a lot of stuff about what's going to happen with all that data they got.

'''C:''' So 23andMe, the genetic testing company, filed for bankruptcy on March 23rd, 2025. As you mentioned, a lot of people are kind of questioning what is going to happen. A few days after that filing, a U.S. judge did rule that the company could sell its consumer data as part of that bankruptcy. So could be chopped up for parts and sold to the highest bidder. We're seeing attorneys general across the country warning different state citizens, delete your data, do what you need to do, ask them to destroy the spit samples. A lot of people are talking about the genetic data, right? The actual DNA information as this big source of sort of fear. What's going to happen with the code that makes me? But there's a great article that was written in The Conversation by Kate Spector Bagdadi, I might not be saying that correctly, who's an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan. And she wrote about what's going on with 23andMe and what kinds of things that maybe we haven't thought about and should draw some of our attention to. So the terms and conditions that we all signed up for. And when I say I'm going to say we and be inclusive throughout this process, because I am a 23andMe customer. Any of you four ever do 23andMe?

'''E:''' I did not.

'''J:''' Nope.

'''C:''' None of you. Okay. So when I say we, I'm referring to myself and all of the listeners who are also 23andMe customers. You know, when we originally signed up, we signed a terms and conditions and a privacy notice. And that said all sorts of stuff that we probably wouldn't have wanted it to say if we had read the fine print, right? Like the company can use-

'''E:''' [inaudible] details.

'''C:''' Yep. And I mean, you can't, but you can't say no, or you can't use the product, right? So it's a trade-off, right? So they can use our information for R&D. They can share the data in aggregate with third parties. If you did any additional research, which most people did, individual information could be shared with third parties. The language clearly stated that if there were a sale or a bankruptcy, that consumer information could be sold or transferred to another company's holdings.

'''B:''' That's it. Case closed.

'''C:''' There you go. So what do we do? So the writer of this article is a lawyer and a bioethicist, and she's especially interested in direct-to-consumer genetic testing. She talks a bit about what 23andMe is. We don't really have to get into that. I mean, I guess if you're interested, it started in 2007. Obviously, it's named after, you know, 23 chromosomes in our DNA. And there are other direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies, but it was probably, I think it was one of the first and definitely the largest. Interestingly, a lot of these other genetic testing companies didn't last. They just couldn't figure out the business model. They couldn't make enough money, and so they went by the wayside. But 23andMe had tried to hold on pretty strong. It looks like over 15 million consumers over the course of its life purchased 23andMe. Most of those people consented to research. It was valued at $6 billion at one point, but the stock has been declining, and the company owes a lot of money to its creditors. The author of this article attributes some of that to a 2023 hack, where 7 million people's data was shared, and also just kind of a lack of interest in doing, you know, the collecting and the genetic information. Like, just fewer people are interested. I think it was a big boom, and then it's had a long tail. There's the important statement, if you're not paying, you're the product. You guys have heard that before?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Yep.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''C:''' Right. So we know that when we talk about like social media companies, our data is valuable. Our data are valuable. Yeah, subject-verb agreement there. Our data are valuable. Our buying habits, our, you know, personal information that helps different corporations learn how to market very targeted things to us. There's a note in here that I found really interesting. The author references a book that was written this year by a former meta executive named Sarah Wynne Williams. The book's called Careless People. And she talks about just how deep this goes. And I think we all know this, but it's just kind of a chilling example, that Facebook, for example, would use notion behaviors that they deemed related to self consciousness about personal appearance. Like, let's say you put up a selfie and then you quickly deleted it. If you did that, you were more likely to have beauty products promoted to you. So it's not just demographic data, but it's also behavior online. And really, we're not talking about one datum over here and another datum over there. We're talking about aggregate data and how important a story data in the aggregate can tell about individual users. There are some concerns here, not only about my genetic code becoming available online to, let's say, nefarious actors, or becoming available online to a corporation that I originally did not consent to have that information. But if you've ever been involved in 23andMe, you know that it's not just your genetic data that's present. There are a lot of sort of quizzes and individual data collection experiences to try and hone the health and wellness and lifestyle portions of the of the 23andMe. So it's not just like, hey, here's your genealogy. You are likely to have come from this part of the world this far back and, you know, these different migrations out of Africa. It's also you're likely to have a widow's peak, you're likely to wake up at this time, you're likely to be less affected by caffeine. And they get a lot of that information by collecting vast quantities of self-report data and then comparing that to the genetic data that they have. So we're not just talking about privacy of genetic data. We're also talking about privacy of personal demographic data and survey data as well. I didn't struggle with the accuracy thing at all because the way that 23andMe works is it does sequence your DNA and it does so quite accurately. It's the interpretation that's less accurate, right? It's the way that they determined, oh, you are likely from many generations ago from this part of, you know, this continent because we're looking at extant individuals living in that continent and comparing your DNA to them, which it just doesn't work because there are massive, you know, migrations in and out of places all the time. And we know that the vast majority of users are like probably what we call weird, right? Western, educated, and I can't even remember what it all stands for, whatever, richer white, you know, Western users. And so you have like really specific data about what county from England your ancestors came from. But then it's like, yeah, you're just like broadly West African because they just, they didn't have enough participants in those areas. I was never that concerned about that though because 23andMe does sequence your genome and you have access to the raw data, which then you can plug into other programs if you're looking for specific SNPs, right? Like if I wanted to know if I was BRCA positive, I could find that out with my 23andMe data. I don't have to then go get that specific genetic test. So to me, I saw it as an empowering way for me to have access to my own genetic code. And yes, I had to do it through a third party, but you would have to do that also if you were getting sequenced for medical purposes, right? Yes, the protections are much stronger, but there would still be other individuals who have access to that data. There are still risks of data breaches, all those things. Now, don't get me wrong. My data could already exist on the internet. There is a lot of fear about this leak. I myself am really concerned. But what I am going to do is what, like I mentioned earlier, most of these attorneys general are recommending and what the author of this article in The Conversation recommends, which is to go into your 23andMe and delete your data. So I already started that process before we recorded the podcast, but I didn't want to finish the process because I was afraid I would no longer have access to my settings window. What I want to do is talk folks just really quickly who may already be enrolled in 23andMe and don't realize how much of their private information is actively being shared. I want to help empower you all to log in and figure out what to do. So if you log into your 23andMe and you go to the tab called settings, you're going to have a bunch of different windows. Most of those windows ask about your demographic and personal information, but then things get hairy when you get to privacy sharing, preferences, research and product consents, and 23andMe data. So what I did first is I went through all of my privacy and sharing and I blocked sharing or disallowed sharing for everything. I'm no longer participating in DNA relatives. I'm not allowing my connections to see my results. I've blocked sharing invitations. I'm not connected to any apps or any reports. I have no viewers. Then I went through, obviously changed all my email preferences, and then all of the research and product consents. I revoked consent or declined consent to all of the different research participation that I was actively engaged in and revoked or declined consent for sharing of individual non-aggregated data. So all of that now is blocked or revoked. And then the last step is that you can go in and download your data. And that's what I'm doing right now. There's a report summary. There's ancestry composition raw data. There's the family tree data. And then there's all of your raw data. You can even submit a request to download your imputed genotype data R6 in its uninterpreted format. So they say as a collection of variant calling data files. I'm probably going to do that too, just so that I have access to all of these things. And there's also phased genotype data that you can download.

'''B:''' So what format are all these files in?

'''C:''' So they're all different. Like the raw data is a plain text file. The imputed genotype data R6 and the phased genotype data are, well, the phased genotype data is an uninterpreted plain text file. The imputed genotype data R6 is called, it's a collection of what they call variant calling data files. I don't even know what that is. So you have to use software like BCF tools to be able to use it. I don't know if I would ever be able to, but at least I would have access to that raw data. And then the rest of them, I'm assuming are going to be like PDFs because these are the reports that 23andMe interpreted from your data. So you'll get a download of everything you've ever had access to. You can also request all of that raw data to get it. And then at the very end, you delete it. There's literally a section that says delete data. Caution, data deletion cannot be reversed. You will permanently lose access to your reports. Any pending data download requests you've made will be canceled. So you want to wait and delete it after you've taken everything that you want. There's even a text box. Why are you requesting to delete your data? You can tell them what you think right there, and then you can permanently delete your data. It will be gone. Now the hope is it will be gone from the databases altogether. That's what everybody's recommending doing. And then you will be one less of a massive database that is then sold for parts. And so I highly recommend if you haven't done it yet, start that process now because getting some of this data downloaded, if you want to download the data, can take some time. And that's what I'm doing right now.

'''B:''' All right, cool.

'''S:''' It's a good lesson in reading the fine print, right? I'm sure most people who signed up for it didn't necessarily know that if it goes bankrupt, that all of your stuff could be sold, all your data, all your...

'''C:''' Well, even if it doesn't go bankrupt.

'''S:''' Yeah, even if it doesn't, but I think they get even more ability to do so because they could transfer all of their data to somebody else.

'''C:''' Yeah, but I think it's also worth mentioning because we talk about the difference between efficacy and effectiveness research all the time. We often talk about these things a little bit ideologically. Yes, it is a good lesson in reading the fine print, but also even if we had read the fine print, every word of it, you're making a decision. And that decision is almost always a decision between privacy and convenience. And you can't say, I decline and also still engage or have access. And so for a lot of people, they're willing to take that risk because privacy at this point, especially if you look at folks younger than me, folks who kind of grew up in an internet era, they don't think that privacy is real. They've been hacked so many times. They've seen so many data leaks that they're like, yeah, it's just the cost of doing business. Whereas when you look at generations that are older than me, because I'm right, I'm an elder millennial. I'm not quite a cusper, but I'm an elder millennial. So you look at the older gen Xers and then the boomers who did not grow up with this, there is much more fear and skepticism. You look at the younger folks who always grew up with this, it's not that they're naive. In a way, it's that they're kind of less naive. It's that they know that this is how it is to engage with the world, albeit dangerous.

'''E:''' Ambivalent, maybe.

'''C:''' Maybe that's a good way to put it. And so where is that balance between privacy and convenience? It's different for different people. But I think it's also a little bit naive to believe that we can exist in the world, that we can engage in banking, that we can engage in data transfer, that we can do our jobs online and be perfectly private and protected.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah. Unfortunately, I think that's true. But I don't think that means that we just give up and just do it freely.

'''C:''' I completely agree, which is why I'm deleting all my stuff. And I recommend you do too.

'''E:''' Delete, delete, delete.

'''B:''' You say if you decline, then you really can't even use the service. That's why I seem to get prompted a lot these days when I go to websites. All right, here's our cookie policy. What do you want to do? And I decline everything that I can, but still let you in. It's like, cool. Yeah, that's awesome.

'''C:''' But that's a legal protection. And we have to remember that. That is a legal protection that was fought for by consumer advocacy groups. And it's even stricter in Europe. That's why if you ever travel outside of America, for the American listeners, to certain European countries, you get a pop-up every time you go to a website, and it's kind of annoying. You're like, oh, my God, why do I have to do this? But there are legal protections in other countries where, yes, you have the right to opt out. And there are some legal protections here in the U.S., but they're not as robust. But that didn't happen because these corporations wanted it to. Trust me, they fought tooth and nail not to allow that. That's regulation. That's regulation protecting consumers.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''B:''' Yeah, some companies make it difficult to opt out. I love the ones that just have this checkbox, decline all. Like, yes!

'''C:''' I know. That's so much easier. Unsubscribe from all. Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' But I hate the ones where I hit unsubscribe, and then my malware blocks it. It's like, this is dangerous. What the hell are you taking me to? And the ones I struggle with, it's like, okay, you can opt out. Enter in your email, and we'll opt you out of that email.

'''C:''' Yeah, I don't like that either.

'''S:''' I don't like that either.

'''C:''' Yeah, I don't trust it.

'''S:''' Just unsubscribe me. I know, I don't trust it.

'''J:''' I don't like the ones where they let you choose your preferences. Like, I want to not receive from this, this, this list, this list, right? But they never say, delete your email from our database.

'''C:''' Right, exactly.

'''S:''' Yes, right.

'''C:''' And that's what I'm hoping this 23andMe data deletion, I'm hoping that there was legally baked in early on these abilities for that reason. Because it does say, once you've deleted it, you can't even access it anymore. So maybe that means it's no longer in the database.

'''S:''' Right, but you have your report, so what do you care?

'''C:''' Exactly. That's why I'm downloading them all right now.

'''S:''' Yeah. All right. Thanks, Cara.

{{anchor|wtn}}
{{anchor|futureWTN}}
== Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:15:21) ==

'''S:''' Jay, it's who's that noisy time.

'''E:''' Noisy time.

'''J:''' All right, guys, last week, I played this noisy. I'm about to play a noisy that might really irritate some people. So if you don't want to hear it, or you want to just lower your volume, now's the time to do it. [plays noisy] So what do you think, guys?

'''E:''' Well, I mean-

'''C:''' There's a siren.

'''E:''' Car alarm.

'''C:''' Or an alarm, yeah.

'''E:''' But that couldn't be it, because it wouldn't be that simple, right?

'''C:''' Some sort of alarm. Might not be a car alarm.

'''J:''' I got a lot of people that wrote in on this one. So Brianna Bibel, Bible, B-I-B-E-L.

'''B:''' Bibelbrox?

'''J:''' So Brianna says, this week's who's that noisy sounds like a game of laser tag. And then she has called herself the bumbling biochemist. I've played laser tag, and there's all sorts of noises that happen. Your bass is exploding, whatever. Sure, that kind of klaxon noise is in laser tag. Absolutely. That is not this noise, but it's not a bad guess. A listener named Paul Cycle wrote in and said, in this week's noisy, we hear two men communicating during an alarm. The alarm is operating because of a critical function. So he's trying to parse through it here. And then he finally gets down to, my guess is that this is a flooded power generation facility, and the men are starting up the flood pumps, which we hear at the end. You get two points for how specific you were. You are not correct, but you're not 100% wrong, because you're on the right track. You just didn't get to the right thing. Timothy Jerchishish. I mean, come on. He didn't give me his pronunciation. So that's his name, Jerchishish. Oh, Timon. It's Timon Jerchishish. All right, Cara, J-U-R-S-H-H-I-T-S-C-H.

'''C:''' I have no idea.

'''J:''' Pronounce it correctly. He said, hey, everyone. Pretty sure I am too late, but this week's noisy sounds a lot like the pace setting of defibrillators. This is cool, guys. He said, it's a good audio cue, so people have to perform CPR. People that know how to perform CPR know how fast they should go. He said around 100 BPM. That's pretty cool. Never heard that. Didn't know it existed. Now we do. Evil Eye wrote in and said, in the 70s, my mom bought a Buick Regal that had a theft deterrent alarm. You had to use a key near the front left panel to arm or disarm it. If anyone tried to lift the door handle while it was armed, it made the same noise. So yeah, some of us go back to the 70s on this show. That is not correct, but thank you for reminding me of wood siding on cars that my parents used to own. We do have a winner from last week. The winner is a listener named Andrew Lotus. And the answer is, this is what Andrew said. Jay, I am an air traffic controller and pilot. That sounds like an ELT, emergency locator transmitter signal from an aircraft. So this was close enough. There are more details and more specifics, but Andrew was 100% there for what it was legitimately. And I'm not even sure that it's any different from airplanes to boats because the original noisy comes from a boat. So let me read to you what this is. It's an EPIRB. These are emergency beacons that are mandatory on all boats traveling a certain distance offshore. They can be manually activated or they will automatically activate when a vessel sinks. And once activated, they emit a signal to a satellite, which is then coordinated by rescue parties to assist. Similar devices on land might also be called personal locator beacons or PLB. So yeah, bottom line is, you know, crafts have these airplanes, boats, anything where people might need to be located. And you know, loud clacks on noise always gets people on their toes if an emergency is happening. So anyway, got a lot of guesses, but there was a lot of people guessing around it, but didn't completely hit it. But anyway, that was definitely a cool noisy. I have a new noisy for you guys this week, sent in by a listener named Emma Powers. [plays Noisy] There it is. If you think you know this week's noisy or you heard something cool, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, a few quick announcements.

'''S:''' Sure.

'''J:''' One, NOTACON 2025. There are still tickets available for the conference. You can go to [https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ theskepticsguide.org] or you can go to [https://notaconcon.com/ notaconcon.com] to find out more details. The schedule is up. We have a secret surprise guest, but it's not a secret because we're telling people who he is. And we have all of us at the SGU. We have George Hrab. We have Andrea Jones-Roy. We have Brian Wecht. We have Ian, who you might actually get to see his face if you come to this conference. He will still be hiding it, but sometimes you can see him. You got to just try hard. He's like-

'''E:''' I'll point him out to you.

'''J:''' So we also have a new announcement, guys. We are going to be doing a show in Kansas.

'''E:''' Kansas.

'''J:''' The show is going to be on September 20th. It'll be outside of Kansas City in a town called Lawrence. It's a college town. What university is there, Ev?

'''E:''' University of Kansas, the Jayhawks.

'''J:''' Yep. We'll be right near there. So if you want more information, like I said, you can go to either of those two websites. We will also be announcing a private show, which will probably, the location and all the details will come out next week. But if you're interested in tickets for the extravaganza, just go to [https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ theskepticsguide.org]. You'll see a button there. That's it for now, Steve.

'''S:''' Okay.

{{anchor|email}}
== Emails (1:21:13) ==


'''S:''' Let's start with an email. This one is about RFK Jr. and access to vaccines. And the message is, hello, y'all. I believe I could write you an entire novel of my concerns in life right now and provide an unending list of questions. How much, say, does RFK have to limit or eliminate vaccine access for the U.S.? What could we do to prevent it? If he can remove it, how badly would this affect the manufacturing and supply of vaccines once he is gone from office? An example I look to is the Lyme disease vaccine that did exist and disappeared and seems to be making a comeback now. I just do not understand how someone in power like RFK is so willing to be ignorant. Does he believe seatbelts shouldn't exist because they aren't 100% effective and 50 years of data can be ignored on their effect? I could go on and on and on with the amount of anger that has been building up inside since five years ago. Thank you for doing a good job. I look forward to your weekly release. All right. So we've talked about RFK and vaccines many times before. David Gorski actually did an article exactly on this question. What could RFK do to undermine vaccines in the U.S.? So go to [https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ Science-Based Medicine] if you want all of those details. But there is a lot, unfortunately, that he could do. I mean, he can't directly affect the industry, but he can destroy the support that the federal government, the CDC, gives for vaccines. And it doesn't have to create much increase in vaccine hesitancy to have a big effect. So, for example, I just learned today that the CDC removed its reporting on measles.

'''C:''' Yeah, I saw that.

'''S:''' And which included a be sure to get your measles vaccine. So that's gone. And the CDC public announcement, you know, public service statements on vaccines are vaccines are a personal choice. Talk to your doctor about the risks and the benefits of vaccines.

'''C:''' Well, didn't they also recently cancel, like, the meeting that's necessary for them to determine the flu strains that are going to be included next year? Like, that's the thing. They do have a lot of power.

'''S:''' Yeah. Totally.

'''C:''' It's not just about influence. Like, they're determining where money goes and what decisions are being made about some things, like annual flu shots, right?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' They weigh in on that. That's terrifying.

'''S:''' Now, you could also, you know, again, he's ginning up an anti-vaccine study that's, you know, he's guaranteed is going to produce a result that he wants. We talked about that last week. Again, putting people in charge of the FDA who are also going to be pseudoscientists. There are lots of laws on the books that you could use to you could misuse, misinterpret, in such a way that, you know, just makes it financially or legally difficult to use vaccines or to sell vaccines. But I think the biggest negative effect that RFK is going to have is just hollowing out the institutional knowledge that we've built up over generations, both in research and regulation and, you know, in knowledge about these topics, which is, it will take, it's hard to know, like how much time it will take to reverse this. Definitely years, maybe decades before we actually, I mean, we never fully recover in that. We will always be farther behind than we would have been had this not happened.

'''C:''' And it's not just hollowing out what we know now. It's completely like, I mean, they're gutting funding to anything coming up. So there are whole labs that are going to be shuttered.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Whole, you know, lines of inquiry are going to be abandoned. And maybe, you know, how hard is it to pick those things back up? We don't know. I mean, I definitely, if I got on my vaccine, I just got my titers tested yesterday. So I'm waiting to see if I still have my measles immunity. And if I don't, I'm getting a booster ASAP. Like, do it now while your insurance still pays for it. If you have insurance.

'''S:''' Yep.

'''C:''' See what you're missing. Now's the time. Now's a better time than ever. I think the thing too, that the reader asked about, like, I don't understand how someone in power, like, that is willing to be so ignorant. Does he believe seatbelts shouldn't exist? Because this is not about regulation for RFK. RFK loves regulation. He was an environmental lawyer.

'''S:''' It's also not about ignorance.

'''C:''' No, and it's not about ignorance.

'''S:''' He is a conspiracy theorist.

'''C:''' Yeah, this is intentional.

'''S:''' His thinking is wrong. It's terrible. I mean, you know, he has serious problems when it comes to his ability to logic and to understand science. He cherry picks. He distorts. You know, he has preconceived notions. He basically, unfortunately, his experience as a lawyer is being used for evil, right? He makes a lawyer's case for whatever side he is on. Rather than actually looking at the evidence. Like, his side determines how he sees the evidence. The evidence does not determine what he believes. And that's why it's like he's beyond logic and evidence at this point. One other thing that David points out, he is in charge now of the committee that recommends the childhood vaccine schedule. He could alter those recommendations, which is what schools use in order to require vaccines to attend school. So basically, he could eliminate the need for some or all vaccines for attending public school.

'''C:''' And what kind of mental gymnastics is going to be used when we immediately see the results because, you know-

'''S:''' It's happened already.

'''C:''' Of course, but like, this is going to be a cross-sectional study, not just longitudinal, right? Like, there's always a new generation of kindergartners. And so within no time at all, we will have data that show kids are getting sick, really sick. And kids are dying because they're not vaccinated or because they're not getting their vaccines early enough. And what kind of mental gymnastics is the administration and this specific department going to pull to try to explain that away?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Let's just blame Biden.

'''C:''' Go blame Biden. Yeah, exactly. Blame Obama.

'''S:''' And even if he does anything to rein in industry on food additives or whatever, like if you are still there thinking, oh, he might do something good, it's going to be an order of magnitude worse with the negative effect that he has from the vaccines.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah. You think your red dye number five or whatever is more dangerous than measles? Are you kidding me?

'''B:''' Just another government official with a body count.

'''C:''' Yep. Yeah. I wonder how many websites now we have. We've got to have like a main website and then a drop down where we can click each government.

'''S:''' [http://whatstheharm.net/ What's the harm?]

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' One more quick one. I'm not going to read this whole email, but this email, William from California says that he was on Neil deGrasse Tyson's Facebook page and Neil dropped a math problem. It's one of those counterintuitive math problems, right, where there's an intuitive answer that's wrong and the real answer is hard to wrap your head around. So here's the problem. A driver aims to average 90 miles per hour over two laps, but he completed the first lap at an average of 60 miles per hour. What average speed is needed for the second lap? What do you guys think?

'''B:''' Well, with the knee jerk, it's 120, right?

'''S:''' That's the intuitive wrong answer.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' The correct answer is 180 miles per hour. Why is that?

'''C:''' This is not my forte.

'''S:''' Because you complete the lap in less time, right? You don't average the laps. These laps are artificial. You average the amount of time you spend at each speed. So if he averaged 60 miles per hour completing one lap, if he goes 180 miles per hour, he's going to complete that lap in a third of the time. So it needs to be three times the speed. That make sense? That's why it's 180. It's not 120. But it gets a little bit crazier when you extend it. So he said, for example, then a second meme popped up where the first lap speed was changed to 45 miles per hour. I was the first person to jump on this one and didn't realize that for this reason, there is no solution. For this version, there's no solution. So essentially, if you do the math, it's like you would need to go infinite speed.

'''E:''' Yeah, it can't be done.

'''S:''' Yeah, it can't be done. So you can't get down to an average speed of 60 miles per hour. You would have to go so fast, you know what I mean? But he's saying there are people in that discussion on Facebook who refuse to accept it. Like, no, it's 100 and what's the intuitive? It's 135 miles per hour. That's it. And say, stop confusing me with complexity. That's the answer. No, that's the intuitive wrong answer. Which this one is not that, to me, it's not that hard. Like, once you explain, it's like, oh, yeah, you're going three times as fast. You have to, it's a third of the time, you have to do it that way. It's not just the lap.

'''C:''' It's the idea of the lap being an arbitrary metric, but that's not half.

'''S:''' Perhaps a better way to look at it also is to just, you have to consider the total time and the total speed. So let's say in the first example, each lap was 90 miles. That's how long the lap was. So you have to, he wants to go 90 miles times two, that's 180 miles, averaging 90 miles per hour. That's two hours. That's the total travel time. But if he's going 60 miles an hour for the first 90 mile lap, that's an hour and a half, which means he has to go the second 90 miles in 30 minutes or half an hour, hence 180 miles per hour, right? That way the total time is two hours for, in order for the two, the 180 miles, two times 90 miles per lap to be 90 miles per hour average speed. That's it. And the second one, 45 miles an hour takes up two hours. So there's zero time left, right? You have to get the rest of the second lap in zero seconds in order for you to average 90 miles per hour. That's it, right? That's, that's, once you get that, you're like, okay, yeah. All right. Now the, the, the jump to intuitive answer was wrong. And then you understand it, but people are just doubling, tripling down on the intuitive wrong answer. And he wants to know what fallacy that is. And he says, is this the Dunning-Kruger effect or whatever? Is it just a desire for simplicity? I do think it's partly the people don't want to let go of the intuitive answers because it gives them a sense of control. And it does feel simple and elegant. And when you hear a bunch of complexity that you can't wrap your head around, you're like, that's got to be wrong because it's too complex for me to understand. I'm going to stick with a simple intuitive answer.

'''C:''' And of course, that's not what they're actually overtly thinking, but it is. It's motivated reasoning. This has to be right. Because the other thing is, makes me feel so uncomfortable.

'''S:''' But there's, that's true. But I also think there's something that just feels right about the intuitive answer.

'''C:''' Oh, there is. That's why we all would say it.

'''S:''' And that's why it's hard to let go of that.

'''C:''' But it's the holding on even after you're shown that you're wrong. When you go, nope.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's the Monty Hall thing too. It's like the intuitive answer just feels right. It's like, no, it's 50-50. It's like, no, you just can't give it up.

'''E:''' Run the experiment and you'll see what the result is and you'll see what the answer is.

'''S:''' Which has been done, but still just without doing that, like just trying to think their way around it, they just can't make that connection. But again, these are fun, first of all, because they're fun. But second of all, because they reinforce how counterintuitive math could be. Our brains are not really built for calculus.

'''E:''' Nope, we suck at it.

'''S:''' Our brains are not really built to be able to think up to seven digits or something. But that's pretty much it.

'''C:''' Well, and I think it's even beyond that. Because what we're not talking about is a complex calculation. We're talking about a complex word problem that requires conceptualization of the problem. That's the step folks are missing. It's not a calculation problem they're missing.

'''S:''' They're failing on the word problem.

'''C:''' They're failing on the conception. Yeah.

'''B:''' Reminds me of a Carl Sagan quote I came across today. "Understanding is a kind of ecstasy." Never heard that one before. I love it.

'''S:''' All right. Well, thank you, William. That was a fun one. Let's go on with science or fiction.

{{anchor|theme}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:33:45) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = None
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = A review of health records finds that getting the shingles vaccine is associated with a 20% reduction in the risk of developing dementia.
|link1web = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08800-x
|link1title = A natural experiment on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia | Nature
|link1pub = www.nature.com

|item2 = A new study finds that mortality rates are overall higher in the US than Europe, but these differences disappear for the highest socio-economic groups.
|link2web = https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-richest-americans-shorter-lifespans-european.html
|link2title = Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds
|link2pub = medicalxpress.com

|item3 = A systematic review finds that older adults, >35 years old, do not experience greater exercise induced muscle damage than younger adults age 18-25 from the same exercise.
|link3web = https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/japa/aop/article-10.1123-japa.2024-0165/article-10.1123-japa.2024-0165.xml
|link3title = Advancing Age Is Not Associated With Greater Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage: A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Meta-Regression in: Journal of Aging and Physical Activity - Ahead of print
|link3pub = journals.humankinetics.com

|}}
{{SOFResults

|science1 = A review of health records finds that getting the shingles vaccine is associated with a 20% reduction in the risk of developing dementia.

|fiction = A new study finds that mortality rates are overall higher in the US than Europe, but these differences disappear for the highest socio-economic groups.

|science2 = A systematic review finds that older adults, >35 years old, do not experience greater exercise induced muscle damage than younger adults age 18-25 from the same exercise.

|rogue1 = Cara
|answer1 = A review of health records finds that getting the shingles vaccine is associated with a 20% reduction in the risk of developing dementia.

|rogue2 = Jay
|answer2 = A systematic review finds that older adults, >35 years old, do not experience greater exercise induced muscle damage than younger adults age 18-25 from the same exercise.

|rogue3 = Bob
|answer3 = A systematic review finds that older adults, >35 years old, do not experience greater exercise induced muscle damage than younger adults age 18-25 from the same exercise.

|rogue4 = Evan
|answer4 = A new study finds that mortality rates are overall higher in the US than Europe, but these differences disappear for the highest socio-economic groups.

|host = Steve
|sweep =
|clever = y
|win =
|swept =
}}

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panelists to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items. Cara, you missed a sweep last week.

'''C:''' You swept?

'''S:''' No, they swept me.

'''C:''' Have you had any sweeps yet this year?

'''E:''' Yes, one, I think.

'''S:''' Yeah. I think I've had one. All right. Here we go. Item number one, a review of health records finds that getting the shingles vaccine is associated with a 20% reduction in the risk of developing dementia. Item number two, a new study finds that mortality rates are overall higher in the US than Europe, but these differences disappear for the highest socioeconomic groups. And item number three, a systematic review finds that older adults greater than 35 years old do not experience greater exercise-induced muscle damage than younger adults aged 18 to 25 from the same exercise. Cara, since you're back this week, why don't you go first?

'''C:''' Okey-smokey. So first and foremost, a review of health records, getting shingles vaccine. Is that varicella? Is that shingles?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, varicella associated with the 20. I am still so frustrated that the shingles vaccine is not available here in this country to folks that are younger than, I think it's like 50 or something.

'''S:''' Yeah, something like that.

'''C:''' I want to take it now. So many people I know who had shingles had shingles in their 30s and 40s. Yeah, like I had chicken pox. Oh, yeah, I'm at risk. Anyway, so 20% reduction in the risk of developing dementia. 20% is really high. If that's true, that's good to hear. I kind of could see a connection here with dementia and viral illness and sort of preventing that manifestation. Shingles is brutal. And I don't know, I feel like when it happens, it happens for like a long time. It's pretty intractable. We'll have to take herpes medication to try and reduce its impact. And I don't know. I do think that more and more we're reading about the risk of viral infection and its outcome on developing dementia later on. Mortality rates are overall higher in the US than Europe. Yeah, I buy it. But these differences disappear for the highest SES groups. So you're saying the highest European SES groups compared to the highest American SES groups. You're not saying the highest American SES groups compared to the average European?

'''S:''' Yeah, if you're comparing the same socioeconomic group, it's not different at the highest.

'''C:''' Then we would lose. You're saying we would lose that. I could kind of see it, but I could also see that not being true. I mean, I definitely buy that mortality rates are higher in the US than Europe. But I mean, we don't have universal access to health care. But I think that that affects everybody, even rich people, because there's a lot of social inequity that even rich people are still subject to a lot of systemic problems in this country. So I believe we are only as strong as our most vulnerable. So even the rich people aren't able to kind of get off that boat. So I don't know. That one kind of rubs me the wrong way. And then older adults. I don't like that you said older adults over 35.

'''S:''' That's what the study said.

'''C:''' That is not how you define older adults. They do not experience greater exercise-induced muscle damage than younger adults 18 to 25 from the same exercise. Yeah, I mean, maybe the oldest of old do. But yeah, 35 plus. I think a lot of people are in their prime, 35, 45. Yeah, I kind of buy this one. Why would their muscles be more? I mean, yes, their muscles are older. But does that mean they're more inclined to damage? Or does it just mean that they're more inclined to atrophy? I don't know. Yeah, I think the one that bugs me the most is the mortality rate. When I have a feeling that rich people in the US are not saved by being in the US.

'''S:''' OK, Jay.

'''J:''' Yeah, so the one about the shingles vaccine, I think that one is definitely science. And while Cara was talking about the second one about the people on the highest incomes in the United States versus those in Europe, the basic question here is, can rich people in the United States buy the same level of health care that people can get in Europe? And everything I've read says no to that. So I'm going to agree with Cara and say this one is the fiction.

'''S:''' OK, Bob.

'''B:''' The 20 percent reduction in developing dementia from shingles vaccine. That's dramatic. I don't necessarily want to use the card of like, I would have heard of that, but that's dramatic. Shit. And if it's true, I'll be pissed because that should be out there more.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Wow. All right. The second one here. Oh, yeah. I think on the surface here, it makes a lot of sense because, you know, these upper socioeconomic groups will have a lot better access to better health care. That's my gut reaction to that one. And let's look at this last one here. The third one makes sense to me, although 35 might be a little bit young for it. But yeah, you this is this assumes that that the muscle, the more muscle damage you do, the more hypertrophy you would experience, right? I think it's kind of kind of implying that. So that would make sense then that less damage, less hypertrophy, the older you are, which absolutely makes sense because sarcopenia is a bitch and that's just, you know, sarcopenia is just all that means is that as you get older, you know, you start losing muscle. And this is basically this is downward spiral to death. But yeah, losing muscle. I noticed at my age, building muscle is, you know, it's hard. It's a lot harder than, of course, it was in my teens and 20s. So, yeah. So I think there's still a relatively dramatic comparison between or a contrast between, you know, 35, 40 year old compared to like a 15 year old in the gym. So, yeah. So that was makes the most sense of all of these. So I can totally justify that one. So that one's almost certainly science, I think.

'''S:''' Are you reading it correct, Bob?

'''B:''' Let's see.

'''S:''' It sounds like you're arguing for the opposite of what it says.

'''C:''' Yeah, it sounds like you're arguing for the opposite.

'''B:''' Older adults. So if you're greater than 35, you do. Oh, they don't experience. Yeah, they don't experience greater damage. So the older you are, the less damage, right?

'''C:''' No, the older you are, you don't.

'''S:''' It's the same. It's the same.

'''C:''' It's the same. Yeah. It's no worse than if you're 18.

'''B:''' Oh, okay. Sorry. Oh, crap. Let me rethink this then. So and I don't know what to think about that. I was so confident about that damn thing. But they still might have less damage.

'''S:''' You're right. They could have less damage. It's either the same or less.

'''E:''' No worse.

'''B:''' All right. So based on that, I'm less convinced of it. But I think I'm going to go with the crew, though, with the socioeconomic groups. That one is kind of rubbing me a little bit the wrong way. I think my instincts is going to be wrong with that. So I'll say that that's fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. And Evan?

'''E:''' I'll agree with the group and say that the mortality rates one is the fiction. I'm very curious as to what the association between the shingles vaccine and the reduction in the risk of dementia is. If I knew more about maybe the shingles vaccine, that would make more sense to me. But I'm very curious.

'''S:''' Well, let's start with that one. Then we'll take these in order. A review of health records finds that getting the shingles vaccine is associated with a 20% reduction in the risk of developing dementia. You guys all think this one is science. Let me just say, if this were true, this would be the single most effective way of reducing your risk of dementia, right? That's a pretty significant effect size.

'''E:''' Combined with regular exercise. Sounds good to me.

'''S:''' This one is science. This is science.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''E:''' Get your shingles vaccine, everyone.

'''S:''' This is probably causation. This is probably not just a correlation because of the way they did the study.

'''C:''' Really? So it's the actual infection.

'''S:''' Because it was a natural experiment, it was sort of randomized. In other words, people were not choosing to get the vaccine or not, right? So that eliminates a lot of confounding factors. They used a database where the vaccine wasn't available and then it was available, right? So people didn't get it because it wasn't available. Not because they chose not to get it or couldn't afford it or some other confounding factor. So they just created an opportunity. Oh, let's make a comparison and see what happened. And there was a 20% reduction in the risk of developing dementia later in life. And they think it's directly related to the effects of the herpes zoster virus on the brain. That this is a systemic infection. It can cause brain damage, basically.

'''B:''' Oh, crap. So if you had it, you're still at greater risk.

'''S:''' Yeah. So get your shingles vaccine, basically.

'''C:''' Well, so, and that was...

'''B:''' I had it, goddammit.

'''E:''' I'm going to get it.

'''C:''' Was that irrespective of chicken pox status?

'''S:''' You can't get the shingles unless you had chicken pox in the past.

'''C:''' But I'm saying those who were and were not vaccinated, they all had had chicken pox or no?

'''S:''' Yeah, I don't know.

'''C:''' Because I guess I would be really interested to see... Because obviously, if there's a direct relationship between a shingles infection and increased risk of dementia, is there also a relationship between a chicken pox infection and an increased risk of dementia?

'''S:''' Definitely chicken pox as an adult is really bad.

'''C:''' As an adult, but yeah, maybe not as a child.

'''E:''' I got mine at 12. I was 12 when I had chicken pox.

'''C:''' Yeah, I was a kid too.

'''S:''' Yeah, I was a kid. I was a bambino.

'''E:''' Bob, Jay, did you have chicken pox?

'''J:''' I did not have it. I never had it.

'''S:''' Really, Jay? I don't remember having it for sure.

'''C:''' Can he get vaccinated? There's a chicken pox vaccine now.

'''S:''' Yeah, you can get the chicken pox vaccine.

'''C:''' Yeah, if you never had it, you should get vaccinated. Well, no, none of us had a vaccine.

'''S:''' My wife had chicken pox as an adult.

'''E:''' Oh, it must have been painful.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Jay, you should get vaccinated if it's approved for adults.

'''J:''' I think I did.

'''C:''' Oh, okay.

'''E:''' Consult your physician.

'''S:''' All right, let's go on to number two, a new study finds-

'''B:''' Wait, does it matter if I had a very minor case of shingles? Because it was barely nothing.

'''C:''' Well, that's good.

'''S:''' That matters, right? This is because the chicken pox is because it's severe and it affects your brain.

'''B:''' It was just like a weird feeling in my back. Not even necessarily even painful. Just kind of like, what the hell is that? And I hear people complain about it. I'm like, shit, it wasn't much for me at all.

'''S:''' It could be really painful.

'''C:''' I've had patients who were in active cancer treatment for severe cancers whose shingles was the number one complaint they had. Way worse than their chemo experience. Yeah, it can be really bad.

'''S:''' All right, let's go on to number two. A new study finds that mortality rates are overall higher in the U.S. than Europe, but these differences disappear for the highest socioeconomic groups. You guys all think this one is a fiction. It's interesting that you all assumed and didn't even question that the cause for the difference in mortality rates was healthcare.

'''C:''' Well, no, that's one of many-

'''E:''' I thought you brought it up, Cara.

'''C:''' Yeah, I brought up that that's one reason is that they don't have access, that we don't have access to universal healthcare. But there are a lot of other pressures in the U.S. that are different than that.

'''S:''' If it were just healthcare, then this would make more sense because if you have the money, you get world-class healthcare in the United States.

'''C:''' Totally. But I said towards the end that all of those systemic pressures that we're dealing with here apply to rich people, too.

'''S:''' All right. Like what?

'''C:''' I would say probably like certain things aren't as regulated from an environmental perspective in the U.S. as in certain European countries. Education is also not as socialized here. So fewer people have access to free public education for later in life, child care, post-maternal care. I mean, we pretty much get the shit end of the stick when it comes to social programs.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And I think all those things combined probably do contribute to mortality.

'''S:''' Okay. Well, this one is the fiction. It is the fiction. Because the higher mortality rate in the U.S. was greater at every socioeconomic level. In fact, the highest socioeconomic in the U.S. had the same mortality rate as the lowest socioeconomic group in Europe.

'''E:''' Yikes.

'''C:''' Which means that the lowest SES group is probably like on par with developing countries.

'''S:''' Yeah. That's bad.

'''C:''' That's terrifying. That's so sad.

'''S:''' And it didn't even – I mean, it probably doesn't have really much to do with healthcare, certainly not the higher socioeconomic groups. It has to do with environment. It is a lot of the regulatory things that you're talking about. It's like the lifestyle factors, diet, and environmental factors and things like that. And going at the lower socioeconomic groups, which were definitely much worse in the U.S. than the higher socioeconomic groups, access to healthcare is also increasingly a factor as well. That probably explains a big part of the difference between high and low in the U.S., but there are a lot of the other factors. And it includes things like even social mobility, smoking rates. There's a lot of things that you have to take into effect.

'''C:''' Something as simple as daycare. Access to daycare makes a huge difference if you're having to work three jobs and, yeah.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' It'll burn you out fast.

'''S:''' There are other things as well. We are a large, sprawling nation with very diverse genetic populations. And it's hard to compare that to a country like Sweden, which is very small and homogenous. So there are some legitimate differences that may not be a policy difference, but I do think that there are clearly, I mean, Europe is way more socialized, and that does seem to correlate with better outcomes in terms of-

'''E:''' Longer life.

'''S:''' Healthcare and regulation, et cetera.

'''C:''' And also higher quality of life.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' We see that all the time in studies.

'''S:''' All right. Number, that means that a systematic review finds that older adults greater than 35 years old do not experience greater exercise-induced muscle damage than younger adults aged 18 to 25 from the same exercise. That one is science. This was surprising. This was not what the researchers expected to find. They thought that, like, we're physiologically in our peak, you know, 18 to 25, and that, you know, the exercise-induced muscle damage is, again, what Bob was saying, is sort of how you build muscle. And they thought that that would be superior, basically, in the younger adults. Maybe because they're, even though they're doing the same exercise, they're working their muscles harder or something. But they found no difference. And in fact, in some measures, it was less in the older population.

'''C:''' That's interesting.

'''S:''' So it's, yeah, so they concluded advancing age is not associated with greater symptoms of EIMD. So they said, basically, older adults can pursue physical activity. No problem. You should do it.

'''C:''' Yeah, but this is not a contributor to that lack of muscle or that loss of muscle kind of tone and bulk. Yeah, that's good.

'''S:''' But the younger adults had more muscle soreness and CPK release into their blood, which makes sense if you have more muscle mass at baseline. You'd experience more soreness and you'd have more creatinine kinase in your blood.

'''C:''' I wonder then, too, if probably it is the case that younger people are more at risk of rhabdo than older people, maybe.

'''S:''' Yeah, you have more muscle mass to break down. Although we end up seeing it in the older population because they have more things that could trigger it. Like the most common reason is to fall down and you can't get up. You're laying down for two days.

'''C:''' Oh, that would make sense. Yeah, so I should say exercise-induced rhabdo.

'''S:''' Yeah, I've seen rhabdo many times. I've seen it almost every time it's a, quote unquote, crush injury. It's because you're down or you're literally trapped under something. People who are in building collapses or whatever, get it. I saw one case, probably the worst case of rhabdo I ever saw, was not due to that. It wasn't a young patient who had fulminant myositis. His muscles were so inflamed they were breaking down over days.

'''E:''' Painful.

'''S:''' Kidneys were overwhelmed, could not clear the creatine kinase.

'''C:''' Yeah, the only people I've ever known in life to have had rhabdo, it's like the CrossFit effect. Steve can explain this better, Bob. But is it rhabdomyolysis?

'''S:''' Myolysis.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's where the muscle, physical muscle breaks down and the components are too big for your kidneys to process that.

'''S:''' Yeah, it just overwhelms the kidneys' ability to clear it. So you got to give them a lot of fluid is the big thing.

'''J:''' What does it look like, Steve?

'''C:''' Coca-Cola colored urine. That's good.

'''S:''' It will just shut your kidneys down. It could destroy your kidneys.

'''C:''' But isn't that like the first symptom or like an important symptom is Coca-Cola colored urine? And like severe muscle pain.

'''S:''' All right, good job, everyone.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:49:50) ==
{{qow
|text = “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”
|author = - William Shakespeare, As You Like It
|lived =
|desc =
}}
'''S:''' Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool." Famous quote from William Shakespeare's play, As You Like It.

'''S:''' So you're saying that Shakespeare anticipated Dunning-Kruger by centuries.

'''E:''' I suppose so, yeah.

'''S:''' I mean, it's not exactly the same, but it's the same kind of thing.

'''E:''' No, right idea. Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' Nope, I think it's very wise. I agree with that.

'''E:''' Hey, there you go.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' We all know we're fools here.

'''S:''' Well, that's good. hat's the humility thing that we teach, right?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' When you know enough to realize how little you know compared to how much knowledge there is, whereas people who don't know anything, they don't even know how much knowledge there is. So they think whatever little bit of knowledge they have is all that there is. So they sort of overestimate their relative knowledge.

'''C:''' How sad.

'''S:''' But it's totally fixable.

'''C:''' Yep.

'''S:''' Right?

'''E:''' Yeah, become aware of it, first of all.

'''S:''' It always reminds me of that joke where someone says to a drunk person, you're drunk, and they say, and you're ugly, and I'll be sober in the morning.

'''E:''' I think that's attributed to Churchill.

'''B:''' Attributed to Churchill.

'''S:''' Is it?

'''E:''' Attributed. I don't know for certain if that's the case.

'''S:''' Right. Ignorance is completely treatable.

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you guys for joining me this week.

'''J:''' Right.

'''C:''' Thanks Steve.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 1035

2025-06-03T11:24:01Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

{{Editing required
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|verified = 
|episodeNum = 1035
|episodeDate = {{1000s|1035|boxdate}}
|episodeIcon = File:1035.jpg
|caption = "Stunning microscopic view of a sperm cell surrounded by nutrient-rich particles."
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening everyone.

'''S:''' Cara, welcome back. How was your trip?

'''C:''' It was amazing. I was gone for a month. Did you guys notice?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' We did. What was the most amazing thing?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Oh, I can't pick the most amazing thing.

'''E:''' One of the most amazing things.

'''B:''' Well, then what's the least amazing thing?

'''E:''' Yeah, right.

'''C:''' I mean, for me, it's China. It's not my favorite country to visit, I'm going to be honest. I do love that I went and saw giant pandas at a breeding center. That was kind of cool. And red pandas, like right up close and personal. They're sort of just out in the reserve, but then they'll cross in front of you over little bridges and things. And red pandas are just the cutest. They're my absolute favorite.

'''S:''' Yeah, they are cute.

'''C:''' So yeah, that was pretty fun. But China on the whole is a little bit difficult. It's a closed country. And so it just feels different. You can't access things on the internet. Using money there is very difficult. I think I was really excited about Vietnam. I had never been there. So I went to Hong Kong for two weeks, mainland China up in the Chengdu in the Sichuan region. And I had really good hot pot, spilled it in my lap, got a horrific second degree burn.

'''E:''' Oh, no.

'''B:''' Second.

'''J:''' Cara it's a really good thing you don't have balls.

'''E:''' Did it come with a warning that it was hot?

'''C:''' I mean, I knew it was hot. The bowl was like flower shaped. And so when I put the soup in the bowl, it just like splashed right over the side.

'''B:''' Oh.

'''C:''' Yeah, it was brutal. So that put a little bit of a damper on the trip. But then I spent a week in central Vietnam. I happened to be there during reunification day.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah. That's April 30th.

'''E:''' 50 years, right?

'''C:''' I know, the 50th anniversary of that.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''C:''' So it was kind of a really big deal while I was there. I was interested and surprised. And A, everybody's very, very warm towards Americans. I didn't feel any sort of hostility.

'''B:''' Really?

'''C:''' And I was in central Vietnam. I was near Da Nang hanging out in Hoi An, hanging out in Hue in a small town called Leng Co. This was the front lines in central Vietnam.

'''E:''' Yes. Yeah.

'''C:''' And so, yeah, I was like pleasantly surprised that when I asked people, they were like, it's a big Vietnamese holiday. And I was like, oh, what is it? And they were like, it's kind of like our independence day. But they didn't say like from you.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' So it was really interesting. There were obviously Vietnamese flags everywhere. The hotels were really bumping with a lot of partying and stuff. There was a weird experience where they closed the main road to scooters. And I was there with a friend who lives in Asia and is very comfortable on a scooter. So that's how we rode around the whole time. I was on the back of a scooter. And we had to take a mountain pass to be able to get to different cities, which doubled our length of time. At the top of this one mountain is basically like a military fort, like a post from Vietnam that's now sort of a museum. And there were people doing tours there. And they were doing tours in American Jeeps. Like it was really kitschy. You know, there's a lot of this kind of propaganda posters and a lot of kitsch around Vietnam. But I thought it was really strange that there were Vietnamese folks running Vietnamese tours using American military vehicles with all of the like imagery that goes along with it. So it's interesting, you know, knowing that there are people alive right now, plenty of people, who fought in this war, who lost their lives, who lost limbs, who lost their mental health, who got diseases from the horrific chemicals that were used during this war. But also there are people, so many people alive right now to whom this was, it's history in a history book.

'''E:''' Right.

'''C:''' You know, I wasn't alive during this. I was born very soon after. But to me, you know, it's...

'''E:''' Bob was born on the 4th of July.

'''S:''' That's true. Cara, I just want to point out just because that you said there are people alive today who lost their lives in the Vietnam War.

'''C:''' Oh, I did.

'''B:''' Oh, that's awesome. Write that down.

'''C:''' That doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? You know what I mean.

'''S:''' I do know what you mean. But technically, that's what you said.

'''C:''' I am glad you did point that out. There are people, okay, you're right. There are people alive today who are deeply affected and who lost loved ones in the Vietnam War.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Yes. So it is, I don't know, it's an interesting thing, history and living through history and not having lived through history. And how quickly things can change. Like while I was there, I felt not only so incredibly safe but really welcome. I actually loved Vietnam so much that I've added it to my list of, there are about four countries that I would like to live in if I leave the U.S. And I've added it to my list because I enjoyed it that much. But to think about how unstable it was not that long ago. I mean, and of course, all of the, whatever, we won't get into the politics of it. But how difficult the relationship was and all of the mistakes that, I don't want to call them mistakes, the very bad things that the U.S. did to that country.

'''S:''' Bad choices. Bad choices.

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''S:''' When we were younger, because you think, I was born in 64. So essentially, the Vietnam War was the first 10 years of my life. And in our family, in our household, it was just the war. Right? And so I always just heard reference to the war. I thought there was one war. You know what I mean? Like in my mind, in my childhood, like five, six-year-old mind, there was just this one war.

'''C:''' Yeah. Like the world was at war out there. And yeah, that's always been going on.

'''S:''' And like there's only this one war.

'''C:''' That's very 1984.

'''S:''' When the war ended. It's like, oh, the war ended. There's no more war. You know?

'''E:''' That's that. We'll never see that again.

'''C:''' I went into this one shop that I really, really liked where they had a lot of propaganda and young artists reimagining things. And they sold a lot of t-shirts that had pretty provocative statements about communism or about these different inflection points. But one of the shirts that I really, really loved, it said, Vietnam, it's a country, not a war.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Because so many people only relate to an entire culture of people because of the war in Vietnam. But yes, when I hear the word Vietnam, I think of the country.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' I would like to see that change.

'''S:''' But that's an artifact of media as well. Like if every time you're seeing Vietnam or people speaking Vietnamese, whatever, it's in the context of the Vietnam War, that's what you associate it with. I told you guys like when I went to Vienna and I heard people speaking German there, I realized that, oh, holy shit, every single time, pretty much in my life, I hear somebody speaking German, they're a Nazi in a movie. And so like that association was so strong. I didn't even realize it.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' You know?

'''C:''' And it's so dangerous, you know? I think about just this idea that there's a whole beautiful culture, a whole interesting people, and propaganda did that, right? Like it was all propaganda. And when you see Vietnamese propaganda, that to me was some of the most fascinating, is seeing all this Vietnamese propaganda, you know, that people sell posters. I actually bought some of the posters. I think they're really interesting. And seeing that and thinking, oh, my goodness, look at all of this. And then going, we have the same thing. Like every time there's a war, it's one side making all these claims about how they're superior and that other group is evil. And then it's the other side doing the same thing.

'''E:''' True of everyone.

'''C:''' It's fascinating.

'''S:''' Yeah. And that's why it's so good to visit other cultures and get different perspectives and be cosmopolitan, right? You're not trapped in this very narrow perspective.

'''C:''' Oh, absolutely. And just to be lucky enough to be there on this really important day and to talk to some of the people about it. But yeah, I had a great time. Oh, and I have news. While I was gone, guess what happened? Breaking news. It was only a few days ago, actually. The Board of Psychology issued me my license.

'''B:''' Oh, nice.

'''S:''' Congratulations.

'''C:''' Thank you. I am now a licensed psychologist and do not have to practice under supervision anymore. Hooray.

'''S:''' Awesome. All right.

{{anchor|quickie}}
== Quickie with Bob: Nuclear Fusion Rocket (08:19) ==

{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/pulsar-fusion-unveils-nuclear-fusion-rocket-for-space-travel
|article_title = Pulsar Fusion unveils nuclear fusion rocket concept for space travel - World Nuclear News
|publication = www.world-nuclear-news.org
}}
'''S:''' Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie. What's this about a nuclear fusion rocket? What?

'''E:''' What? No way.

'''B:''' Well, yeah, I mean, they're working on it. They're working on it. They don't have it, obviously.

'''E:''' It's not ready yet.

'''B:''' But I like some of their ideas. So this is, yes, fusion rockets in the news. This is Pulsar Fusion. It's a UK-based aerospace startup. It's founded by entrepreneur Richard Dynan. And they released some plans relatively recently. And I was quite intrigued. So they see nuclear fission rockets as a big thing. They do say that. But big in the midterm. And I've been waiting decades for that damn midterm. And it's not happened yet. But apparently it's coming. They say that if you want to move a lot of equipment to Mars and through deep space, rocket exhaust speeds become even more critical, obviously. And they call fusion the king of propulsion, which I can't disagree with. So they envision – it's interesting. They envision fusion space tugs in orbit, multiple space tugs waiting in orbit to attach to rockets that launch from the Earth and approach them and they will dock to the side of the rocket. And, of course, that would have to be built in a way that they can actually dock and then be used as fusion propulsion to speed them on their way wherever they happen to be going. So that's kind of a different interesting idea. And it makes a lot of sense because you can't launch fusion rockets from the surface of the Earth. So you'd have to kind of do it once you're out into space. So that's an interesting design, kind of creative. I hadn't seen that before. Now their design is magneto-inertial fusion, which we haven't talked about much. It's kind of a hybrid fusion approach.

'''S:''' It's a hybrid.

'''B:''' Yes, yes. Thank you. It uses deuterium and helium-3, and it does that by rapidly compressing a magnetized target. The plasma compression happens in repeated pulses, which creates bursts of fusion energy rather than maintaining this continuous plasma confinement as other methods. So here's some of the stats. I mean, obviously, this is not proven. This hasn't been accomplished yet, but they're working on it. They're planning on making this happen. They didn't give a timeframe of when it could be completed, just steps to get to those final prototypes or whatever. But some of their numbers are interesting. For example, going to Mars with a chemical rocket is typically seven to eight months. They said with their fusion design, it could be four months. So they cut that in half, which is pretty slick. But what really got my attention is their specific impulse measurements, which we've talked about before. It's related to the efficiency of the fuel usage. So the higher the number, which is in seconds, is the better. So chemical rockets have a specific impulse of 450. Their design, they say, is 10,000 to 15,000 seconds specific impulse. Steve, those are some damn big numbers. So that could imply that they could burn their rocket for far, far longer than a chemical rocket, depending on how the fuel is used, though. And typically, in those scenarios, there's less thrust. So there's a lot of variables to take into account. But an ISP of 10,000 to 15,000 is just like, wow, jaw-dropping. This one is even a little bit better. For Saturn, chemical rockets could take six and a half years. They say they could do it in a year with this technology once they perfect it. A year, that's a lot of years saving. And they threw a number out there of how much money it could save in U.S. dollars. They said $1.2 billion it would save.

'''E:''' So faster and less expensive?

'''B:''' Yeah, apparently.

'''E:''' Both.

'''B:''' Yeah, that's what they're saying.

'''S:''' Which makes sense because, you know, you don't have to maintain the mission for five years.

'''B:''' CEO Richard Dynamate, he made an interesting point when he said, people say doing fusion on Earth is proving to be really hard. Doing it in space must be a crazy proposition. But actually, there's a lower bar in space. Part of the problem is doing fusion in the atmosphere. And that's correct. You don't need to create a vacuum in space. It's already there. But if you're going to do this on the Earth, you're going to need that. And that's very—it's expensive. It's complex. It's a pain in the butt, especially when you need big vacuum areas in closer vacuum. The other angle here is that fusion reactors on the Earth, they're being made to make cheap, plentiful energy, right? That's the goal. You want to make as much energy as you can as cheaply as you can. And they will be able to do that once they have a nice reactor working. But for fusion rockets, though, it's a different deal. You don't need to be efficient. You don't need it to be cheap. If you make it work, that's probably going to be good enough. So space-based fusion propulsion seems to have a lower bar technologically and atmospherically. And if you think about that joke for a minute, I think you're going to really like it. This has been your Lower Bar Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's interesting to think about that because using fusion to make electricity on Earth is really hard for a lot of reasons that just don't exist in space. If you're using it just for propulsion, it doesn't have to be sustained. It could be putts, like putt, putt, putt. It doesn't have to be a sustained fusion. You don't have to convert it into electricity, right? You don't have to, again, create a vacuum. And it's actually a lot easier technologically to do that.

'''B:''' Right. But by the way, they also said that it can also be used to generate power. So they said that you can get to your destination with 2 megawatts available. Like, damn. So that's pretty slick.

'''S:''' Right. And it doesn't have to be cheaper than solar. It just has to be cheaper than chemical rockets, which are really expensive.

'''B:''' Right, right. And don't forget, the deeper you go, though, solar becomes less and less helpful. So for deep space, you got to carry your power supply, essentially.

'''S:''' I mean, Bob, what I meant was, like on Earth for power, a fusion reactor would be competing with solar power for energy, for the cost of energy.

'''B:''' Right.

'''S:''' Or with wind. But as a propulsion system, it's competing with other propulsion systems, which are all really expensive.

'''B:''' Yep. Absolutely.

'''S:''' So again, yeah, the calculus gets a lot more favorable. So yeah, we may see fusion rockets before we see fusion power.

'''B:''' I think we might. I think we might. And it's funny because we might even have the potential to create working fusion reactors on the Earth. But it's like it's just not going to be worth it. It might not be worth it for them to do it. It's like, sorry, it's just not going to be worth it. It can't compete with solar and wind and all that stuff. So that's a future we may encounter where like, holy crap, it just never happens on the – it never happens for power generation.

'''S:''' On Earth, it's great in space.

'''B:''' Because it's just not worth it. But it's a good problem to have because that means there's other cheaper alternatives, which is fine. But I want to see it in space. And as we've said in our – forget it.

'''S:''' You're breaking the law of the quickie, Bob. All right. Jay.

'''B:''' This one was on the edge.

'''E:''' The law of quickie dynamics.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== Falling Space Debris (15:10) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.space.com/space-exploration/satellites/scientists-chased-a-falling-spacecraft-with-a-plane-to-understand-satellite-air-pollution
|article_title = Scientists chased a falling spacecraft with a plane to understand satellite air pollution | Space
|publication = www.space.com
}}
'''S:''' Speaking of space, Jay, what comes up has to come down, right?

'''J:''' Right.

'''E:''' On Earth.

'''J:''' That's a very interesting way to put it. All right. I want to start with a question because I'm constantly looking up into the night sky. You guys have seen satellites in orbit, right?

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''E:''' Many times.

'''J:''' Yeah. I mean basically the – other than the space station, which I was tracking for a couple of years. Whenever it was passing overhead, I was watching it.

'''E:''' It is neat to see that thing go zooming by.

'''J:''' I've seen satellites, but they're just literally a pixel of light. There's like nothing to it. However, I have never seen a satellite enter the Earth's atmosphere. Have you guys ever caught that?

'''S:''' No.

'''E:''' No.

'''C:''' I don't think so.

'''B:''' Wait. Yeah. Wait. What did I see? No, I didn't see. You're right. Not entering. No.

'''S:''' Unless something that I thought was a meteor was a satellite re-entering.

'''B:''' That's true.

'''E:''' Or pieces of something that broke-

'''B:''' Steve remember that meteor we saw it back at mom's house.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' That was awesome. That was the best I've ever seen.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Broke in two and it left a trail that persisted. You could see that trail. It was mind-boggling. I loved it. Loved it.

'''J:''' So this is a news item that I stumbled on recently that I found to be really interesting, particularly because of what the future holds. So there was a – considered to be a very rare and complicated field operation that happened. European scientists actually pursued a falling satellite in a business jet. I'm assuming they mean like a Learjet. They did this to collect data on what is considered to be a little understood but potentially pretty serious environmental issue. This is essentially satellite pollution in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Specifically, when the satellite burns up and breaks apart and everything, what is it putting into the atmosphere? So on September 8th of 2024, a retired European space agency, the satellite that was retired called SALSA, S-A-L-S-A. This is one of four satellites in something called the Cluster Mission. This particular satellite reentered Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. So they took off from Easter Island and it was a multinational research team. I guess it was getting some hype because of what they were trying to do. This was a really crazy way to gain data, right? To like fly in a commercial – in a private Learjet-style jet to go up and go super high and see the satellite come down into the Earth's atmosphere. So what they wanted to do and what they successfully did do was they were able to capture the event. They had 26 high-speed multispectral cameras and the team successfully recorded the fragmentation and the chemical signatures of this disintegrating spacecraft. Now their findings were presented in April of 2025 and that's why we're talking about this now. This was at the European Conference on Space Debris in Germany. This is all important data to collect because approximately how many satellites do you think reenter the Earth's atmosphere on a daily basis?

'''C:''' Daily?

'''E:''' Daily?

'''J:''' Daily.

'''E:''' Daily?

'''B:''' Satellites?

'''S:''' 20?

'''J:''' How many?

'''E:''' No. Oh, my gosh. Every day?

'''B:''' That seems too high.

'''J:''' Evan, I'm curious to hear what your number is.

'''E:''' If it's one, that seems high.

'''J:''' So it turns out it's on average three satellites a day.

'''C:''' Jesus.

'''J:''' Which is over – it's pretty much –

'''E:''' I would have never guessed that.

'''J:''' It's over 1,000 a year.

'''C:''' That's insane.

'''J:''' That's right now.

'''E:''' That's crazy.

'''J:''' You have 1,000 satellites reentering the Earth's atmosphere. I think that's a lot. You know what I mean?

'''E:''' Maybe – yeah. I must be woefully ignorant about the number of satellites that are up there. Is there 100,000 items up there?

'''J:''' There is a ton, Evan. Oh, my God. There is so much stuff. Now, keep in mind, we have these mega constellations that are going up now by SpaceX and then Amazon's going to do it.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' And this is going to blow out that three satellite a day number. That number is going to dramatically increase and it's going to be – it's going to happen very quickly, right? It's going to be happening within the next couple of years. We're going to start to see a lot more reentries happening.

'''E:''' Controlled reentries?

'''J:''' Well, you hope that it's controlled enough where they can dump it in the ocean. You definitely don't want any of this happening over populated areas. But they're supposed to – like there's some protocols that have been put in place where they have to meet certain criteria in order to reenter, right? Meaning that they have to have that –

'''C:''' But they're really small, right?

'''E:''' Corridors.

'''J:''' They're not as small as you think.

'''C:''' Really? I figured they'd burn up in the atmosphere. They don't?

'''J:''' Yeah. Well, that's what I thought.

'''C:''' Oh, okay.

'''J:''' So Starlink is launching thousands of these – of their Starlink satellites into orbit and these satellites, they do – technically they burn up in the atmosphere. But that process of them burning up in the atmosphere, even if they do burn up in the atmosphere, it's not like this routine thing that, oh yeah, it comes down, burns up in the atmosphere, whatever's left just hopefully gets dumped in the ocean and we never have to talk about it again. That's not what's actually happening. So when satellites incinerate, unfortunately they release metallic aerosols into the upper atmosphere which is part of the atmosphere you don't want to mess with and particularly aluminum oxide and that can damage the ozone layer and it can alter Earth's thermal balance, by reflecting solar radiation which depending on how you look at it, that could be a good thing, it could be a bad thing. So these are definitely well-known and well-established mechanisms in atmospheric chemistry and the amount of aluminum oxide released into the atmosphere during reentry is – it's a complete mystery. But now we're onto it, right? So we figured out a way to essentially find the data that we need. In this first test that they did, it was definitely – they didn't know what the results were going to be. They had no idea if they were going to even find anything. But here's what happened. I thought it was pretty cool. So they – according to Stefan Lowell at the University of Stuttgart, he said it was unexpectedly faint, meaning they didn't capture a lot of light and this – the reason is that the satellite probably fragmented into super small pieces that would emit less light, right? Because there's – even though there might be more of it, each one individually produces less light and it's not like combined together anymore, right? So the team were able to track up the breakup for about 25 seconds and then they lost sight of it as it descended down to about 25 miles in altitude. So they did collect spectral analysis of that fragmentation cloud and it revealed chemical traces of lithium, potassium, and aluminum. And these are materials that you don't want in the atmosphere. Now it's unclear how much of the vaporized material, you know, turned into an aerosol form and will it have atmospheric effects? At what volume would the material have to be at to have atmospheric effects, you know, versus how much of it, you know, turned into microscopic debris that came all the way down to the earth's surface? The titanium fuel tanks as an example from the Salsa satellite – say that three times fast. They think that those fuel tanks survived and they landed in the Pacific Ocean intact and that is definitely a plausible outcome for larger and sturdier satellites. You know, that is a concern too because that debris could be dangerous. But, you know, this is not what they're specifically studying. So getting back to Starlink and to answer Cara's question, you know, these are new satellites. They're heavier than most people think and they're larger than most people think. So what do you guys think that a Starlink, a single Starlink satellite weighs?

'''E:''' Eight tons.

'''C:''' I was going to say like one ton.

'''J:''' So they're coming in at 2,750 pounds.

'''E:''' Yeah, you're right Cara.

'''C:''' One ton.

'''J:''' Yep. Or, you know, 1,250 kilograms.

'''E:''' Kilos.

'''J:''' Now SpaceX says, yes, they burn up completely and flowers come out when they burn, right? Like there's nothing to see here. But they did acknowledge that some fragments do occasionally reach the ground when they come back in. So, you know, again, these are bigger than we thought. You know, there's a ton of them. There's going to be a ton of these reentering because they don't have an incredibly long lifespan. So they're just going to be constantly coming back down and replenishing and coming down and replenishing. So there is a few things of particular concern. So one of them is molten aluminum, right? So as the satellite disintegrates, the aluminum compounds that are in it, they melt and they can either vaporize into aluminum oxide aerosols or they can cool into nano and micrometer sized droplets. Those two eventually fall to the earth. Of course, the aerosols don't. The aerosols are the ones that pose the most risk to the ozone and to the climate. And the researchers, they just can't quantify how much aluminum takes what form yet, right? Again, because this is the initial study that's going to set off. It's the flick of the marble that's going to set off a whole bunch of studies to come. So that's the real issue. You know, we have a data gap. You know, with over, like I said, with over 1,000 reentries per year, we could potentially be injecting a large amount of these exotic materials into a very sensitive layer of our atmosphere. You know, we don't want to do that. We don't want to do anything that's going to make global warming any worse. We don't want to have any bad negative health effects. If even a small percentage of it is, you know, turned into aerosol and it's up in the upper atmosphere, there could be a cumulative impact that could rival other existing pollutants that we are very well aware of. But of course, we won't know until they do further study. So what comes next? You know, there's other cluster satellites, the Rumba, Tango, and Samba, which are part of that set that I told you about before. They're going to come down this year and next year. And unfortunately, you know, they're going to happen during daylight hours, which is not ideal, but we'll still be able to collect data on it.

'''S:''' Yeah. So whenever you do anything on that scale, you got to really track it. You know, we're putting thousands of satellites up. There's going to be thousands of satellites coming down every year. It adds up.

'''J:''' Just another little thing to worry about, team.

'''S:''' There's a lot of issues with space. You know, just the sheer amount of space debris, we've talked about this before, is becoming a huge problem.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah, man. Just waiting for the event to happen.

'''E:''' The event.

'''S:''' The cascade of satellites crashing into other satellites.

'''B:''' Yeah, Kessler syndrome.

'''S:''' All right.

{{anchor|news_item2}}
=== What Makes People Flourish (25:46) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theconversation.com/what-makes-people-flourish-a-new-survey-of-more-than-200-000-people-across-22-countries-looks-for-global-patterns-and-local-differences-243671
|article_title = What makes people flourish? A new survey of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries looks for global patterns and local differences
|publication = theconversation.com
}}
'''S:''' Cara.

'''C:''' Yep.

'''S:''' What does it take to make people flourish?

'''C:''' You know why I like this story? Because it's a good news everyone.

'''E:''' Yay, good news.

'''C:''' I feel like we don't have that often enough lately.

'''E:''' Not enough.

'''B:''' I got some good news too this week, so you go first.

'''C:''' Okay. So a new study was published. Where was it published? I'm about to tell you. In Nature Mental Health, just about a week or two ago, called the Global Flourishing Study. Study profile and initial results on flourishing. And really, this is one of those large, multinational, multi-research site studies where multiple authors contributed. We're talking a longitudinal panel study of over 200,000 participants across 22 different countries that span all six populated continents. They use nationally representative sampling, and they intend to collect data for five years. And the idea here is to assess aspects of flourishing and possible determinants of flourishing. But what is flourishing? Well, I'm going to read you a quote directly from the publication. Flourishing is an expansive concept. And then there's like six different citations after just those words. And the working definition underpinning the GFS, that is the Global Flourishing Study, has been, quote, the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good, including the contexts in which that person lives. So then they dive into different aspects of that definition, and they further break it down into different what they call well-being domains. So what do you think some of these different domains might be that make up how we measure or how these researchers at least have decided to measure flourishing?

'''S:''' Health.

'''C:''' OK. Yeah. They talk about physical well-being.

'''S:''' Happiness.

'''C:''' Happiness is emotional well-being.

'''B:''' Emotional, mental. Financial.

'''C:''' What's another?

'''S:''' Financial.

'''E:''' Financial.

'''C:''' Financial. Yep. And they talk about what they call material well-being, which they call financial security.

'''S:''' How about liberty, freedom?

'''C:''' Interestingly, they actually don't talk about that, but they do talk about volitional well-being, which they define as character.

'''E:''' OK.

'''C:''' So sort of their choice.

'''E:''' It's not quite the same thing.

'''C:''' And they also talk about cognitive.

'''E:''' Physical?

'''C:''' Yeah, we already did physical.

'''E:''' Oh, cognitive.

'''C:''' Yeah, they also talk about cognitive well-being, which they define—it's a little bit weird. They're well-being domains I wouldn't choose, but basically they talk about meaning. So we've got health, happiness, meaning or purpose, character, financial security, and then what do you think the last one is? We're leaving something really important out here. Do you exist in a vacuum?

'''B:''' What's that?

'''E:''' Oh, social?

'''S:''' Social?

'''C:''' Right. Yeah, relationships.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah. And then they define each of them. So relationships, for example, is the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person's social life are good.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

'''C:''' So they go through, and yeah, what they want to do or what they did is they came up with basically an index of well-being across all these different domains, and they just used—basically this is a big data study, right? 200,000 people ask them a bunch of questions. Ask them all the same questions, which they do later define as both a study limitation, but also I guess a boon for the study. So I kind of want to stop there and not give you all of the results. Before we go into the result, which I can't give you all of them anyway. It would take too long. But before we go into some of the results, why do you think it's both a good thing and a bad thing that they asked all the different people in the study the exact same questions?

'''S:''' Well, you can do statistics and you can compare them.

'''C:''' Right. Yeah. It's much more feasible to do a large statistical analysis when you do a study this way. But as they define it, they did this study in an etic way, not an emic way. Do you guys know the difference between those two sociological concepts?

'''B:''' Say those two words again.

'''C:''' Etic, E-T-I-C, versus emic, E-M-I-C.

'''B:''' Oh, damn.

'''E:''' I don't know the comparison.

'''C:''' So in an etic study, what they're basically doing is they're saying, I am outside of your culture and I'm going to look inward and ask you questions and then make comments about your culture. Whereas an emic study utilizes researchers or individuals living within that culture and formulates the questions to be meaningful or contextualized within the culture. Okay.

'''S:''' Like endemic, same kind of word?

'''C:''' Maybe it's the same word. Yeah, I'm not sure, actually. Well, what's the word on that sometimes? But basically, we do see more of a movement towards emic approaches in sociology over time. When we think back to like super colonial approaches, they were all very etic. But it does, in this specific situation, allow direct comparisons. The problem is some context is probably lost and there's always going to be an implicit bias then because who defined these questions, right? And is that perspective now going to measure that more so in a culture that utilizes some of these different, these measures? We don't know. So it is important that they list that as a limitation of a study, but they also talk about why it made it really easy to compare all 200,000 participants to each other, to compare different countries, different age groups, different genders, all these different ways that you could slice and dice this demographic data. And they asked a lot of questions. They asked things like, let's see, how old are you? What's your gender? Are you married? Are you employed? Do you attend religious services? How much education do you have? What's your immigrant status? What country are you from? What was your relationship like with your mother growing up, your father growing up? What was the financial status of your family growing up? Was there abuse? You know, they asked so many different questions to try and understand what people's life is like now and what they went through throughout the lifespan to get to where they are today. And then they made a bunch of comparisons and they found some kind of interesting outcome. So let's start with what they basically define as who is flourishing and why. That's a big question that they asked. Who is flourishing and why? When it comes to age, what do you think? Who are flourishing the most across the lifespan?

'''S:''' I think generally speaking, the older you get, the more you're going to flourish.

'''C:''' That's true. But a lot of studies previously didn't show that. A lot of studies previously showed that older adults were the ones who were struggling the most. But this study shows that it's relatively flat between about 18 to 50. And then you just see a slow, steady increase in flourishing. And the highest flourishing is amongst the oldest group. In the past, studies showed a U-shaped curve where you had this dip in the middle, in middle age, but you had kind of higher earlier and older. But not this study. It just shows kind of a slow, steady increase.

'''S:''' Yeah. You get better at the whole life thing when you get older.

'''C:''' I find this one really, really interesting. They're showing that being married have higher flourishing scores across the board. So it goes married, then widowed, then domestic partner, then single, never married, then divorced, then separated. But they don't divide it by gender. And so I would be really interested to see because previous studies have shown that married men have the highest at least life satisfaction, followed by single women, followed by single men, followed by married women are at the bottom. So it would be interesting to see their flourishing scores divided not just by marital status, but also by gender. They do look at gender. And they find that gender is pretty even across the board. But there are differences from country to country. So in some countries, women flourish less than men. But across the board, when they look at all of the aggregate data, it's pretty even. 7.19 is, you know, they have this measure that they use. 7.19 for men, 7.12 for women, pretty much the same. This one might surprise you. What do you think across, and I know I didn't tell you what the 22 different countries are, but what countries do you think people are flourishing in the most?

'''S:''' I'd say high socioeconomic status countries.

'''C:''' Right. Yeah. You'd think kind of richer countries, countries with more wealth. So like the United States is on the list, and it is definitely in the bottom third.

'''B:''' That good, huh?

'''C:''' And they look at it with and without financial indicators. And across the board, the number one country was Indonesia, followed by Mexico, and then the Philippines.

'''B:''' Mexico. Excellent.

'''C:''' Yeah. And they, from their write-up in the conversation, quote, Indonesia is thriving. People there scored high in many areas, including meaning, purpose, relationships, and character. Indonesia is one of the highest scoring countries in most of the indicators in the whole study. And Mexico and the Philippines also show strong results. Even though these countries have less money than some others, people report strong family ties, spiritual lives, and community support. The lowest scores were in Japan and Turkey. And even though, for example, Japan has a strong economy, people reported lower happiness and weaker social connections. They also think maybe long work hours and stress contribute to lower flourishing scores. Turkey, obviously there they describe political and financial challenges and, you know, just difficulty with secure, like individual security. So they talk about how it's surprising that richer countries like the US and Sweden aren't actually flourishing, as well as some others. They do well on financial stability, but their scoring…

'''E:''' That doesn't translate necessarily to across-the-board flourishing.

'''C:''' No, because that was only one of the measures. They're showing lower scores in meaning, lower scores in relationships. They found that countries with higher income across the board do tend to show lower levels of meaning and purpose. And then countries with higher fertility rates often show higher ratings of meaning and purpose.

'''E:''' Mm-hmm. Okay. That seems reasonable.

'''C:''' Yeah. I mean, it's interesting when you look at these big takeaways because you can sort of predict some things and other things. It feels a little like science or fiction where you could make a case for it to go either way. Like one of the things that they talk about, and we've seen this across other studies, is that individuals who are highly involved in religious services tend to have higher ratings of flourishing. So those who go more than once a week are higher than those who go one time per week, higher than those one to three times a month, down to a few times a year, down to never. Never is on the very, very bottom. And they saw that this was the case even in secular, countries that were more secular. And so we've talked about this in the past. It doesn't really necessarily have anything to do with religion per se, but it has to do more with community. So they cite the literature in the psychology of religion where they talk about things that they call the four Bs, belonging, bonding, behaving, and believing. So belonging is social support. Bonding is spiritual connection. Behaving is cultivating character and virtue through practices and rituals and norms. And then believing, which does contribute to hope, forgiveness, spiritual convictions. So, you know, they do include the actual act of believing as something that contributes, but this is not the main sort of predictive variable here. We know that people who attend religious services tend to have more community, and that seems to carry a lot of weight there. But they also found that people who go to religious services reported more pain and suffering. And it's hard to know if that's because it's sort of a bias, right? They're going because they're experiencing more pain and suffering. That's why they're seeking out religious community or some other reason. And, of course, adverse childhood experiences do have some impact on flourishing. If you were a kid with excellent health, it's the most predictive of you flourishing later in life. If you're a kid who had a good relationship with your mom, if you went to religious services, if your family was financially comfortable, if you had a good relationship with your dad, that's less predictive. You tend to be flourishing more. If your parents were divorced, you had financial hardships, they were single, your parents died, your health was poorer, or you experienced abuse. Experiencing abuse was the most predictive of low flourishing, which makes sense. Not a lot of big wows here, but the main takeaway is that it's very, very hard to pick one variable. This is a very complex interplay of a lot of things, and it is probably very, very culture-bound. And so this massive group of researchers are excited to continue to dig through the data and to continue to ask questions, because we don't have a lot of studies on things like flourishing. We have a lot of studies on what happens when things go wrong. But it is exciting to say, okay, what are some of the reasons that people are feeling fulfilled in life and that they're doing well, and how can we learn from those reasons?

'''S:''' Yeah, and it's good to look at these big endpoint kinds of studies, like flourishing or happiness or whatever, because I do think that in life, people do a lot of things that they think will make them happy or think will make their life better, but they actually end up doing the opposite. Like working really hard to make money. They think, oh, money's going to make me happy, but you're working yourself to death and you're miserable.

'''E:''' The problem is until you do it, you don't know that.

'''S:''' Well, it's not like you don't have 8 billion other people on the planet that you could look at and you could learn from other people's life experiences. You don't have to necessarily make every mistake yourself. I know generally we do, but that's what mentors are for and parents and whatever.

'''C:''' And reading.

'''S:''' Yeah, and reading.

'''C:''' Science. Like talking to or reading what these researchers are finding. But I will be interested in more kind of culture-bound and culture-specific examples, because I think it's really easy to say, okay, this country versus that country or people who do this versus people who do that. But where are all of the moderating and mediating variables here? Like really understanding not just that these are interesting predictors, but these are how the predictors affect one another. I think it can get complicated really quickly statistically, but it could also give us a wealth of information.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Cara.

'''C:''' Yep.

{{anchor|news_item3}}
=== Pig Heart Xenografts (40:52) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/pig-heart-xenografts-for-infants/
|article_title = Pig Heart Xenografts for Infants | Science-Based Medicine
|publication = sciencebasedmedicine.org
}}
'''S:''' All right, guys, I'm going to talk to you about heart transplant.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''S:''' You know that we have a huge deficit in organs for transplant, right?

'''E:''' I imagine that's always the case.

'''S:''' So in the U.S. alone, there's generally speaking over 100,000 people on the waiting list for an organ transplant, but only about 23,000 organs become available each year, and about 6,000 people die each year while on the waiting list.

'''C:''' And that's for all organs?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''J:''' So this is in the U.S.?

'''S:''' Just the U.S.

'''J:''' Okay.

'''E:''' I'm a donor.

'''S:''' The numbers are a lot bigger in the world. Yeah, and this is a problem that could be solved if just more people become organ donors. There would definitely be a huge benefit to the health of the world if we had essentially an unlimited supply of donor organs, if the supply was greater than the demand. Like that wasn't the limiting factor.

'''C:''' Of course.

'''S:''' Yeah. So how do we get there?

'''C:''' Grow them.

'''E:''' Line them up. Take their organs.

'''C:''' Grow them.

'''E:''' Yeah, grow them.

'''C:''' Well, really, because like if you look at organ donation, I don't know. I work in a hospital, and I've worked with a lot of individuals on the heart transplant list, like with the psychology of what it means to get a new heart. I mean, it's really intense, right? And so I have noticed when I'm doing the inpatient work that there's a massive difference in the parameters and just the like rigidity between the heart transplant patients and, for example, a kidney transplant patient.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Because it's just easier to get a kidney.

'''S:''' It is.

'''C:''' There are more kidneys.

'''S:''' Because people can donate one kidney.

'''C:''' Yep. Like a family member can give you a kidney, and then you have a kidney. You have to wait until somebody dies.

'''E:''' I can't give you a liver.

'''C:''' Exactly. Right. Well, and even liver transplant is a little less intense.

'''S:''' You can give a lobe.

'''C:''' Yeah, because you can give a lobe of a liver, and it regenerates it.

'''E:''' That's enough to keep someone alive?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Ah.

'''C:''' Heart is a very, very different animal.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And the threshold for how healthy you have to be to be able to get that heart, or not healthy, but how capable you have to be to be able to get that heart is much higher.

'''S:''' Yeah, so that's a good point, and that raises another wrinkle here is that the numbers I just gave you are a massive underestimate of the demand because people don't even get on the waiting list if it's like, listen, you're never going to get an organ, right?

'''C:''' Yeah, I saw a lot of patients like that where they fail out of the actual.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're already filtered out at the first level.

'''E:''' Prescreened.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're prescreened out.

'''C:''' Ineligible for transplant.

'''S:''' Not because it couldn't work. It's because there's no way we're going to get that far down the list to get to somebody with your characteristics, right? You're a high risk or whatever, so just forget about it. No point even putting you on the list. But again, if the source were no limit, then a lot of people who don't even get on the list would be able to get a transplant. We know somebody, a very dear friend of ours, Michael Lacelle, who died on the waiting list for a heart transplant, and actually he didn't even get on the list. They were like, yeah, you know.

'''C:''' That's hard.

'''E:''' Yeah, and this didn't develop later in his life. He needed it. They knew early on, right?

'''S:''' It was congenital. He was born with a heart defect. And his whole life was like at some point it's going to get bad enough that you're going to need a transplant. And then they said it's too bad. It's like he was waiting, waiting, waiting. Oh, it's too late is basically what happened.

'''C:''' It's so hard.

'''E:''' He died at like 40.

'''C:''' I've met patients who were eligible, who made it to the top of the list, who got a new heart, and then there was some rejection or some sort of –

'''S:''' Oh, yeah, it's not a guarantee either way. All right. So what are the options for alternatives to organ donation, right? Cara, you mentioned growing them. What do you mean by that?

'''C:''' Well, I mean like organoids or something like that.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' So whether we're growing it in another animal or in a Petri dish, like basically that's been a huge goal, right?

'''S:''' It's tricky because it's hard to get the organ to develop properly outside of the environment of a full organism. But that's one approach. Another approach is to print them with stem cells, right? But then you need a scaffolding, and usually those are obtained from the organ itself, so it doesn't really solve the problem. You need the donor organ to – then you denuded of cells and you 3D print stem cells on it. The only advantage there potentially is that you could use stem cells derived from the ultimate recipient, right? So you don't lose this rejection. We're not anywhere close to that at this point.

'''C:''' What about animals?

'''S:''' There you go.

'''C:''' Right now we're talking about cadavers, but yeah, animals.

'''S:''' Animals are, in my opinion, the best chance and the closest. For some organs, for the heart, the heart is different than the liver and the kidney in that you can make a mechanical heart. You can't really make a mechanical kidney. I mean you can. It's a dialysis.

'''C:''' That would be so complicated.

'''S:''' But it's really – you can't have it inside the patient, right? But yeah, we might be able to at some point make a mechanical kidney, and again, we do have them. They're just not really for transplant. They're more just for dialysis.

'''C:''' But not liver, right?

'''S:''' But not liver. Not anytime soon, like a bionic liver. It's not even on the drawing board at this point in time.

'''C:''' But yeah, lots of patients are on bridge to transplant where they're waiting for a heart and they're on LVAD for like a while.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' Keep them standing, right?

'''S:''' There's a bridge to transplant, and then there's the ultimate transplant, and then there might be a retransplant. So let's talk about pig hearts for xenografts because, again, hearts are difficult, and we definitely don't have enough to go around, and we're nowhere close to printing hearts or growing them in a vat or whatever. But what you can do is genetically engineer, genetically modify a pig so that it has something more like a human immune system, and then you basically are growing. It's a xenograft technically. That means from another species. That's put to an allograft, same species. But it's a xenograft that behaves like an allograft because you've genetically modified the immune markers on it. And then you just raise a pig, right? You just clone these pigs. You raise them up, you know, and then you harvest their organs. It's the lowest tech way to do it, and the highest tech aspect of it is the genetic modification, and we got that. We are all over that. You know what I mean? We have the technology to do the genetic modification.

'''E:''' We have the technology.

'''S:''' We do, and we can make clones. So essentially the technology is you take a pig genome, you make edits to specific genes that, again, alter the immune system so that it won't look like a different species to the intended recipient, and then you clone it. You put that DNA into an embryo where the DNA was removed, and then you induce it to form, you know, to reproduce and divide and then form a fetus, right? So there's a company already doing that, and this is the news item is they've completed a trial where they're donating pig hearts into baboons. They did 14 transplants. The 14 baboon recipients survived for at least several months with the longest surviving one being 21 months, which is a pretty long time. And then in one of the cases they followed up the xenograft with the genetically engineered pig heart with an allograft, basically another baboon heart, because they wanted to just proof of principle show that that could happen and there would be nothing about the xenograft that would prevent the allograft from working. Now why did they do that though? Because as you said, Cara, they're first looking at this as a bridge, not as the final transplant. So if you could get this to work so that on average, you know, the recipient of this genetically modified xenograft, the pig heart, can survive for three or four years, then that's your bridge. That gives you time to be on your waiting list for a permanent human heart for three to four years without requiring the LVAD, right? Which is basically a mechanical heart. It's a left ventricular assist device. It's not a completely mechanical heart. It just helps pump blood through your own ventricle.

'''C:''' And some people have to be like in the hospital the whole time they have it.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're in the hospital for months.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' It's not great. And there's another population where this might be especially useful and that is the pediatric population, especially infants. So some infants are born with congenitally bad hearts that need to be replaced, like they're incompatible with life kind of hearts. Like they have a single ventricle. And those don't make a good connection to the mechanical hearts that we have and don't work well with LVAD. And so a lot of these infants die while they're on the waiting list for a transplant because infant hearts are in really short supply, right? So this may be the first thing that they go for is to do a pig heart, a genetically modified pig heart as a bridge heart for an infant while they're on the waiting list for a donated human heart. Of course, the ultimate goal is to make these so good that it can be your permanent forever heart or organ, any organ. We're just growing and harvesting organs that are as good as allograft transplants and maybe even eventually better. Now the company that did this recent study, they did 10 genetic modifications. Just 10 modifications, that's not a lot. But what happens when we figure out 20 or 50 or 100 modifications that we can do that will essentially eliminate any rejection? So in the ideal world, the ultimate expression of this technology is genetically modified animals like pigs from which we can harvest organs where there's zero rejection and they survive for the lifetime of the recipient. And then we just have essentially an unlimited supply as much as we need of any of those organs to donate without having to do cadaveric donation or somebody donating a kidney or whatever, without having to do any of that, without having to do any bridging maneuvers. We can just say, oh yeah, we'll just grow you a heart. Here you go. I don't know if we can get to that with a generic pig xenograft or if in order to get that good, if you would have to basically give it the recipient's immune system, you know what I mean? Where you have to raise the pig for them. But that's totally plausible, right? Or at the very least, we might have subdivisions, right? Where it's like basically there are people fall into different groups in terms of their immune system markers. And we could say, you know, if you have like one of 10 immune types, we're going to give you a donation from a pig that's in your type. Even though it may not be individual to you as a specific person, it's like blood type. You can think about it that way. We're going to give you a pig that has your type. You're a blood type. You're an immune type. And that will be better than just like a generic human pig. It's not just humanized. It's specific to a subtype and then maybe eventually specific to an actual individual person.

'''C:''' Yeah, I could see getting there. I mean I feel like –

'''S:''' We could absolutely get there.

'''C:''' I know it's different but things like CAR T therapy, you know, CAR T cell, like where we take the information from us and then we modify it and put it right back in us, like modify it, put it in the pig.

'''S:''' The thing is we can do it. We can use CRISPR or whatever to genetically modify these genomes. We can clone them and we can raise viable animals. We can harvest their organs. We can transplant them and they work. The whole thing from soup to nuts works. It's just a matter of getting incrementally better at this point. And the next step they're going to do, they're applying to the FDA for permission to do human trials. So that's the next step. So we could be – I know this is the joke on the show. We could be 5 to 10 years away from this being in the clinic, from actual patients receiving pig xenografts from this technique. That's way closer, decades closer than any of the other techniques. The other techniques may not even ever pan out. But this is happening now, at least at the animal level, and human research is coming up. That's the next step. So we may see this in our lifetime. People start to receive pig xenografts.

'''C:''' So how different are – obviously we talk about rejection being an issue, like an immune issue. But how different is the physical organ? Are all the connections really easy or do we have to modify things?

'''S:''' There's a reason why they chose a pig. It's very similar. It just happens to be very similar to the human. And so their hearts are good. They're mechanically a good fit for a human. And we know how to genetically modify them to make them smaller so they're human-sized.

'''C:''' Yeah. I wasn't sure if, like, because we are bipedal and pigs are quadrupedal, like sometimes that affects the orientation of, like, vessels and things like that. But I guess –

'''S:''' Yeah, as long as the hookups are close enough that you can surgically connect them.

'''C:''' Yeah, you can kind of bend them.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. So it's plug and play basically. And, of course, a living organ is better than, like, a mechanical heart in that it's more physiologically responsive, like moment to moment to the demands of blood flow to the lungs and to the body.

'''C:''' Right. And potentially more resilient too.

'''S:''' Yeah. And gentler on the blood. The biggest limitation with mechanical hearts is that they're very destructive to blood cells. You know, first of all, you've got to give blood thinners so they don't clot. And then, you know, people, their blood cells don't survive as long when they're being pushed around by a mechanical heart. Now, again, that technology may advance to the point where it gets as good as a human heart, and that'd be great. Of course, you know, it's going to be a lot harder to do that for other organs. But I don't know how far away we are from that. That's very, very tough nut to crack. Again, I think this is the best way to go.

'''C:''' Yeah. And we've got to remember that even if you're lucky enough to get a human heart, you are on anti-rejection medication for the rest of your life.

'''S:''' Yeah. Even if you can make this so good that there's no rejection, you don't have to be on any suppressive drugs.

'''E:''' That's the holy grail.

'''S:''' That's the holy grail. Again, that's the ultimate expression of this. It's a new heart, no rejection, no drugs. Have a nice day. You know, that's it. And yeah. And again, we're just incrementally away from that. We just have to keep making advancements. But it works. All the pieces are in play. So very exciting.

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== Chiropractic Stroke (56:25) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://archive.is/hxZsc
|article_title = https://archive.is/hxZsc
|publication = archive.is
}}
'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us an update on chiropractic and stroke, something we've talked about a few times in the past.

'''E:''' We have, and it has come up again in a recent article. But I want to ask you all a couple of things. But I want to, I want to. Let's see how much we all remember about chiropractic. Steve, maybe you should give others a chance to answer these before you. I know you've written quite a bit over the years about the history of chiropractic.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Okay. When do you think it started? What year was the practice invented?

'''B:''' Oh, of chiropractic?

'''C:''' 1920.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Maybe that's too new. 1840.

'''B:''' 1885.

'''E:''' Oh, you're close, Bob.

'''J:''' 1850s, I think.

'''E:''' 1895, Bob. Good job. And who is credited with its invention? What's the name of the film?

'''B:''' Oh, that punk. That dude.

'''C:''' Dr. Chiropractor.

'''E:''' Dr. Punk.

'''S:''' Can I say it now?

'''E:''' You can, Steve.

'''S:''' D.D. Palmer.

'''E:''' D.D. Palmer, yes.

'''B:''' Yup, yup.

'''J:''' Yo, D.D.

'''B:''' It's still in my memory banks.

'''E:''' His first patient had an ailment that was said to be cured by his chiropractic procedure. What was that ailment?

'''S:''' Deafness.

'''E:''' Yes, deafness, hearing loss.

'''C:''' Deafness, what?

'''E:''' That's right.

'''C:''' Come on.

'''E:''' And do we know what the word chiropractic is or from what words you put together to make chiropractic?

'''S:''' Chiro is hand.

'''E:''' Yes, hand.

'''C:''' Hand manipulation? Like practice?

'''E:''' Well, practice, right. And practicus. Yes, done by hand. And finally, the idea that misalignments of the vertebrae, called subluxations, can interfere with the nervous system and cause a wide range of health problems beyond back or neck pain is basically what Palmer came up with. So that's the origin.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And that's the history. Just a little back story for you guys. Now, New Yorker Magazine recently put out an article on their health section in which the headline reads, Instagram has made chiropractic neck adjustments more appealing than ever before, but physicians say the maneuver is dangerous. This is not new news, okay, to us and many people in this audience. The author of this article, her name is Katie Arnold Ratliff. She's a freelance writer and editor for their health section. Here are the relevant parts of this article. Last fall, a tweet by Los Angeles cardiologist Daniel Bilardo, MD, illustrates the stakes involved with chiropractic manipulation and strokes. Quote, here's the tweet from that doctor. Heartbroken after seeing a young patient with no medical history end up with a BIFFL grade two dissection of the vertebral artery and subsequent acute PICA, P-I-C-A, infarct immediately after a neck adjustment from the chiropractor. This has to stop. Chiropractors, you have to stop, in caps. So what does that mean? Yeah, a neck adjustment caused a tear in the tissue lining of the patient's vertebral artery, which is known as a vertebral artery dissection, and the tear impacted their blood flow so severely that it cut off a portion of their brain from oxygen. Immediately, that patient experienced vision changes, difficulty walking, and started to develop weakness on one side of her body. And this person had their neck adjusted, and then they, what, had a stroke.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a lateral medullary stroke, and it's like a brain stem stroke. It's pretty severe.

'''E:''' Pretty severe. I don't recall us speaking about this particular case before. It was also written about in Women's Health magazine. This was back in November of 2024. They covered it. They went on to say in that article, they indicate that this was the fourth time in Dr. Bilardo's career, she's the cardiologist, where one of her patients suffered a stroke due to chiropractic manipulation. Dr. Bilardo says she wished she had spoken up sooner. After seeing the first patient with this condition, she feels guilty for not having alerted people to this health problem sooner. Now, her tweet, Dr. Bilardo's tweet, has been shared almost 6 million times. And we can think, okay, that's good. Her post has been shared quite a bit and hopefully made many more people aware of the risk. However, we have Instagram and we have TikTok and other social media platforms. That is an ocean in which chiropractors and their patients share videos and experience on all the joys and wonderfulness of chiropractic. No mention whatsoever of this particular risk or any other risks associated with chiropractic. Now, I don't have the numbers to share. I tried looking it up to try to quantify it, but that's almost impossible. But a cursory search for chiropractic on these sites opens up the floodgates. So much so to the point that even a respected cardiologist warning people the dangers of stroke via chiropractic and with 6 million views, that really doesn't even hold a candle to those who are promoting the practice. Back to the New Yorker magazine article, we have a local connection here inside of that article for us, the SGU, right here in our home state, Connecticut, University of Bridgeport. Oh, my gosh. How long have we been talking about the University of Bridgeport? Even before we were Skeptics Guide to the Universe, when we were the Connecticut Skeptical Society, basically.

'''S:''' Going on 30 years.

'''E:''' Exactly. I know. 30 years of that as well. We've been skeptical activists for like half of our lives. It's amazing to think of that. The University of Bridgeport, yeah, mainly since the 1980s, which is when the university was basically bought out or taken control of by the Unification Church, Dr. Sung Young Moon, the Moonies. They owned, they operated the university right up through 2019. I didn't realize they were still involved that late into it, but 2019. We are very familiar with the antics and pseudoscience and cult-like atmosphere that has permeated the University of Bridgeport now for decades. Well, in any case, they quote in that article, gentleman James Lehman, a chiropractic orthopedist and the director of the health scientist postgraduate education department at the University of Bridgeport. He is a neck adjustment defender. Here's what he says. Statistically, if you had 57 chiropractors do 100 cervical manipulations a week for 52 weeks for 20 years, one out of those 57 chiropractors would encounter this particular situation, meaning an arterial dissection and subsequent stroke.

'''C:''' That's too many.

'''E:''' Well, yeah, that is too many. And it doesn't exactly jive with other research on this. Now, the research also that has been done on this is a bit spread out. There are studies apparently in which the frequency of this takes place in 1 in 20,000 events, one time out of 20. And then there's another one that I think was like 1 in 2 million. So you have kind of this very large range here. So I imagine that has to do with quality of the study and so many other mitigating factors. Really hard to kind of pinpoint exactly. So I'm not even really sure where he is coming up with this particular set of numbers. I imagine he found the most favorable one and he just kind of parrots that as he goes along in defense of this practice.

'''S:''' But as Cara said, so yeah, first of all, he's probably using the most favorable numbers. And even the worst numbers are probably an underestimate because chiropractors have no motivation and no incentive to track this. And so they don't. So we're basically only most of the data comes from physicians who are on the receiving end of the strokes, of the dissections. So that's just not a thorough sample. And it's probably undercounting them. But even still, even if those numbers were correct, as Cara said, it's too many because medicine is a risk versus benefit game.

'''E:''' That's the bottom line.

'''S:''' And there's no benefit. So zero benefit compared to, yes, statistically rare, but when they do occur, you're basically causing a stroke and or death to an otherwise young healthy person. So there's a pretty bad – it's not like a mild adverse event. This is a serious, potentially fatal adverse event. None of it's justified if there's no proven benefit, and which there isn't. There's no proven benefit to chiropractic manipulation of the neck. And let me clarify that because that's a specific thing. It's not any manipulation of the neck. It's not any physical therapy. Like physical therapists do neck mobilization, for example, right, when they're trying to like, you know, if you have like a locked joint in your neck or you have muscle spasm or whatever, that's different. What chiropractors are doing are high velocity, very rapid manipulations of the neck. It's much more violent. It's way more risky.

'''B:''' It's rough.

'''S:''' Yeah, and it's –

'''E:''' Like a whiplash event almost.

'''S:''' Exactly, and there's no indication for it. There's no theoretical basis for it, and there's no evidence of any benefit from it. It's just pure risk. Saying that the risk is low is not a defense. It's just an illustration of their ignorance of how clinical medicine works.

'''E:''' And Steve, not only do they say that they offer these very low, you know, statistics, but they also said that, look, how do you know the patient didn't already have some kind of tear in there and just the manipulation revealed that issue?

'''C:''' Well, you don't, which is why you don't go manipulating their necks.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' That's not a defense because you absolutely should not be manipulating somebody's neck if they have a dissection. So they're basically saying, no, it's not this kind of malpractice. It's this completely other different kind of malpractice. It's not a defense.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' It is not a defense. But also there are cases, there are plenty of cases where the cause and effect is pretty clear, where the person like basically stroked out on the chiropractor's table.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''S:''' You know? So it's just silly.

'''C:''' It's terrifying. And that's only one of so many possible negative outcomes.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' It's just a pretty violent one.

'''E:''' Right, right. And there does not appear to be either laws or guidance in place in which the chiropractors are supposed to be disclosing this to all of their patients.

'''S:''' They're basically self-regulating.

'''E:''' Right. They self-regulate. And in fact, the person who wrote this particular article said, who said, look, I didn't come into this one way or the other, pro or con, but basically the reason why she said she would not do this is because if she knows about even this very small chance of risk of this stroke, regardless of which set of statistics you want to use, she would choose to not do it based on that. So if you had more people ahead of time being made aware of this or it was mandatory to be made aware of this, then you would have people making better decisions about going to the chiropractor for this specific purpose.

'''C:''' There's also like this whole secondary thing, which I don't think we've talked about, which is that because chiropractors are not physicians, when something bad does happen, they're not trained in what to do. So like there are situations where there are lower risk outpatient procedures, where patients will be working with nurse practitioners or physicians. And sometimes there's a complication, but there's a protocol in place for how to get them to an ED quickly and for what kind of first aid to do in the meantime. But like a chiropractor isn't trained in how to do that. They don't have those pipelines in place.

'''S:''' They don't.

'''C:''' That's so terrifying.

'''S:''' They say they are, but it's a lie. They are absolutely not. They do not have the same training that physicians have.

'''C:''' Terrifying.

'''S:''' They like to pretend that they do. Listen, if all chiropractors were doing was like lower back manipulation for acute uncomplicated lower back strain, which is like the one thing for which you could say that maybe there's some evidence that it's as good as other things that you can do for lower back strain.

'''C:''' What, like massage?

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. Or even giving a pamphlet on good back hygiene is just as effective, you know, in the literature. But whatever, if they were just doing that or if they basically was another avenue to become like a sports medicine person or whatever, then who cares, right? But it's because they do this sort of thing, because they're not science-based and they don't really have the same kind of ethical structure that mainstream medicine has. And, right, they don't really self-police well. There's just so much pseudoscience and crankery and malpractice happening under the umbrella of chiropractic. They just need to just purge themselves of that, get rid of subluxation theory, just practice evidence-based, you know, whatever, chiropractic, and then nobody would care. It would be fine.

'''C:''' But they don't.

'''S:''' But they don't.

'''C:''' And lest we forget that they do this on animals and children too. Children and babies.

'''E:''' Babies. Much higher risk group.

'''S:''' The thing is, it's their fault. It is 100% their fault. So a little bit more of a history lesson. If you go back 120 years, you know, when chiropractic was in early days, there was another similar profession that also believed in manipulation to free up the flow of life energy, but they thought it was flowing through the blood vessels, not the nerves. You know who those were?

'''C:''' The bloodletters?

'''E:''' Not bloodletters, osteopaths.

'''C:''' Oh, osteopaths.

'''E:''' I forgot that. That's how they started.

'''C:''' But they cleaned up their act.

'''E:''' Yeah, they got rid of it.

'''S:''' After medicine, you know, basically there was a huge shakeup where American medicine decided to adopt the standards of European medicine and become very scientific. Half of American medical schools closed down. They merged. The standards were put in place, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, they went to chiropractors and osteopaths and said, well, do you want to join us and become science-based and ethical? And the osteopaths said yes, and the chiropractors said no. They said, screwed nerds to you. We're going our own way. We don't need your stinking science. So they were given the olive branch, and they rejected it. And they've had a hostile relationship with medicine ever since, but it's all on them. It really is. Whereas DOs are basically MDs. And we don't care. I practice side-by-side with DOs. They're basically MDs. It's not about like competition or whatever. It's just about, you know, what they do. It's about being legitimate. And this is one of the reasons if they, you know, there's no way physicians would get away with this. A procedure that doesn't have a proven efficacy that occasionally strokes people's out and kills them, forget about it.

'''E:''' Right.

'''C:''' It's insanity.

'''S:''' It's insanity. All right. Let's move on before I have an aneurysm.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh.

{{anchor|news_item5}}
=== Breathable Algae Drug Delivery (1:11:22) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://phys.org/news/2025-05-hard-meds-lungs-breathable-algae.html
|article_title = It's hard to get meds to the lungs: Breathable algae offers a new path
|publication = phys.org
}}
'''S:''' Bob, tell us about this breathable drug delivery system.

'''B:''' All right. All right, guys. So researchers have developed a noninvasive treatment for respiratory diseases that use, get this, an inhalable form of green algae. How does this work? Why do we even need such a thing? So you can read about it in Nature Communications. The title of the paper is Inhalable Biohybrid Microrobots, a Noninvasive Approach for Lung Treatment. Okay. Now we know respiratory diseases are on the rise. Scientists are increasingly looking for ways to treat ailments like pneumonia, asthma, tuberculosis, COPD. So part of the problem is that the lungs, even though they're inside us, they're potentially at risk with every breath we take from pollutants, viruses, bacteria, irritants, on and on. You know, they are inside us, but they have such a direct line with everything you breathe in. It's like it makes them almost uniquely vulnerable compared to other, you know, internal organs that we have. The evolutionary development of lungs has actually done an impressive job protecting that pathway to our lungs. So tell me, what do you guys think? What are some of the ways that the lungs protect itself from anything getting in? What's going on in the body?

'''S:''' They have a lot of ciliary things that, you know, the cilia that are constantly moving stuff out of the lungs.

'''J:''' And you can cough to expel things from your lungs.

'''B:''' Yeah, all good stuff. So the first line of defense is the nose hairs. They're encountered first. They filter out the largest things like dust and pollen, you know, to a certain extent. They're not perfect, of course. The next step is the mucus in our windpipes, and we know how nasty and sticky that stuff is, right? That just grabs the dust and pollen as well as other micro, you know, as well as microorganisms itself. And they're caught in these little hair-like structures called cilia, and that moves the stuff up, you know, in a coordinated way, up and away from our lungs. Sometimes it's coughed up. So you guys are basically right. Now, whatever makes it past those defenses, though, can end up right in our lungs, but then they face the gatekeepers of our lungs' immune system, the macrophages, the dreaded macrophages. So these guys do many, many beneficial things, but in this context, they clear away anything that you breathe in that you shouldn't, from bacteria, viruses, fungi, and on and on. And they also can do one of the other things that they can do in this way is they could bring in other types of immune cells as needed, like lymphocytes. Ironically, I didn't know this. Ironically, some of these macrophages have actually been implicated in some disease progressions like asthma and COPD. So whoops, evolution. So yeah, nothing's perfect. Kind of weird that the protectors of the lungs can actually damage it in that way. But all of these layered lung defenses, they're great. They're obviously fantastic, but with all these layered defenses, it's really great, but it does have a downside. It makes it harder for doctors to heal the lungs because they have to get by that stuff too. So in order to do that, they often have to take an indirect route to the lungs, right, like injecting antibiotics. But the problem with that is that you have to give a big dose, right, because only some of that medicine that you inject is actually going to find its way to the lungs, which means you need, like I said, you need a larger dose than what is strictly necessary, and that can create unwanted side effects. So you always want to do the minimal dose necessary and indirectly injecting antibiotics to get a pathway to the lungs that's not direct, not ideal. So researchers have actually tried other inhaled forms of medicines like nanoparticles filled with medicine that go straight to the lungs. So that's great, but the problem is that they get cleared away by those damn macrophages. So it doesn't work as good as they wanted it to do. So the researchers needed a new approach, a completely new approach for this direct medical treatment of the lungs, something that's noninvasive, but also with the ability to last long enough to spread this medicine around and get it all over the lungs. So surprisingly, they turned to a tiny green ally. I'm not talking about Yoda or even kazoo. Look that one up. But something much more microscopic, green algae. I did a little bit of a dive into green algae, so to speak. It's really quite fascinating.

'''E:''' Oh, okay.

'''B:''' Yeah, yes.

'''E:''' Right.

'''B:''' They're like plants in that they use photosynthesis to make food, but there's nothing classically plant-like about them. There's no leaves. There's no roots or anything like that. Interestingly, did you know that plants actually evolved from green algae, they think, about 480 million years ago? So I didn't know that. Did you know that plants evolved from green algae? I didn't. So thank you, green algae. So why use green algae for drug delivery? This is a tough one. I don't expect that you would have any idea. So why green algae is the one that they went to probably fairly quickly? That's because they chose green algae because it's better than bacteria and blue-green algae because those two have surface features that make them relatively easy to be detected by our immune system. So green algae does not have any of those structures on its surfaces, so it's just generally safer for biomedical uses. So that's the one that they jumped to. But there's also other reasons. So they take these green algae, and they say in the paper, I love this use of the word, they say they functionalized each cell by coating them with the medicine that they want to deliver to the lungs. But you can't just take any old green algae. You need a green algae that has very specific characteristics. So number one, they had to be very, very small. So they picked this pico-eukaryotic algae, pico-eukaryotic algae, very tiny, about 150th the size of a hair, each one. You can line up 50 of them before it matches the diameter of a hair. So that tiny size was needed so that they can be absorbed by aerosolized water droplets. So you've got these water droplets that can be easily, they're so small, they're just suspended in the air, and you can just breathe them in without even thinking about it by using a nebulizer, and it just bypasses the nose hairs, it bypasses the throat mucus, and it gets inhaled directly right into the lungs. So number two, the green algae needed to have flagella so that they can swim away fast enough to escape the dreaded macrophages. So that was one of the critical benefits of the green algae is that flagella can let them move away at a decent enough speed to escape their macrophages, and that's something that some of the other microorganisms wouldn't have been able to do. So that was a key component right there. There was one other final obstacle, guys. The medicine that they put on the green algae could potentially be detected by the macrophages, and that would just set off its immune alarms, and they wanted to avoid having that happen before the drug can spread itself around in the lungs. So to deal with that, they actually cloaked the drug in a membrane from a platelet cell. So they took the drug, and they coated basically in the membrane of another cell that the macrophages, if they came across it, they would say, oh, okay, that's fine. They would basically say, it's an older platelet code, but it checks out. They would just let it go by, and they wouldn't bother that weird medicine that's on the green algae. So here's the question. So pay attention, punks. This is the question. So we got green algae cells, and they're coated with the medicine, and that medicine has been covered with a common cell membrane to hide it, and the researchers called these micro-robots. Does that annoy you a little bit, calling these micro-robots? It's basically-

'''E:''' Is that a very technical definition?

'''B:''' No, it's not. I don't know. It's not. I mean, it's-

'''C:''' Yeah, that's not a robot.

'''B:''' A robot has baggage. It's got these implications, these things that make you think. I don't think of a natural cell. I mean, this is essentially 99% of natural cells, and they're calling it a robot.

'''C:''' Yeah, call it like a biomedicinal packet or something, a delivery device.

'''J:''' I like that Cara.

'''B:''' Yeah. Now, to be fair to the authors of the study, half the time they refer to it as a bio-hybrid micro-robot, and that's a little bit more palatable to me, that bio-hybrid is nice.

'''C:''' But why is it a robot? It's not programmable.

'''B:''' I know.

'''C:''' It's not-

'''E:''' It's not all caps, like an-

'''B:''' And it's not constructed. It's not- Even though it's funny, though, because even though I think of single cells as very, very complex machines, calling them micro-robots just rubbed me the wrong way, and I wanted to get your take on that. Steve, you didn't say anything about that. What do you think? Robot?

'''S:''' I no likey.

'''B:''' Okay, very good.

'''C:''' He no likey.

'''B:''' We have an accord. Okay, great. So the end result here, good participation, people. The end result here is you end up, we have green algae that has three to five days, a lot of time, a lot more time than ever before, three to five days to distribute the medicine throughout the lungs. The overall dose is lower, which greatly minimizes any side effects. And after a few days, the green algae is cleared out naturally by the lungs. So it's all good. So the next question is how does it work? So they tested these on mice with nasty MRSA infections. That's bad stuff. I guess for people it is. I guess it is for mice as well. Actually, I know it is for mice because of what I'm going to say in about 11 seconds. The results were pretty amazing if you ask me. All the poor control mice that had conventional treatment or no treatment at all died within three days. All of the green algae mice survived. It's like, okay, that's pretty perfect if you ask me, as far as I can tell anyway. All right, so what about the future of this technique? So I'll quote the co-lead of this project, Professor Liangfang Zhang. He said, as basic research in micro-robotics continues to advance, I expect these technologies will gradually move toward clinical testing for a range of biomedical applications, particularly for the localized and active delivery of medicine. So, yes, he's very confident, I think, as he should be. I'm going to end the quote by Liza Labios from University of California, San Diego. She wrote an article about this in PhysOrg. She said, this sort of breakthrough, which could one day be a game-changing medical treatment, is all thanks to federal funding that allows researchers to push past science fiction and into the vault. The vault, she means the lungs are the vault because they're very locked down and very hard to get into. But I just loved that she says – to me, in my mind, she stresses it's all thanks to federal funding. So let's please not cut federal funding because without it, we wouldn't have some potentially life-saving treatments for people in the future. It's all because of federal funding without any necessary endgame. Just like let's see what we can discover by happy accident. It's been done in the past. It's saved so many lives that you can't even count it. So I just want to end with that quote. Thank you.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Bob.

{{anchor|wtn}}
{{anchor|futureWTN}}
== Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:22:38) ==

'''S:''' Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy]

'''E:''' Exterminate.

'''J:''' I know, right?

'''S:''' No, no, no. It's the Millennium Falcon trying to go to light speed.

'''E:''' Oh, yes, and failing.

'''J:''' So a listener named Jason S. wrote in and said, he said his name is Jason, the dual patron here. He said this week's noisy definitely sounds like an electric motor spooling up and shifting through some gears. I think it's Hoover's new five-speed electric ride on vacuum cleaner. Okay, that's not it. He said, seriously, though, it's a kilocycle or similar electric motorcycle. If you haven't seen this thing, it's a drag racer that does zero to 60 in .97 seconds and it pulls 2.5 Gs. Not correct, but that was definitely a cool guess. A listener named Jokrian Zeke, and that is not how his name was spelled. It's just that he gave me the pronunciation. I would never, if my life counted on it and I had a year to research it, I wouldn't have been able to pronounce that name. Love what you do. Whatever comes, please keep going in these weird times, and we will. As a matter of fact, we're going to do more than we're doing right now very soon. Just pay attention and you'll see all the new stuff we have coming down the pike. He said this week's noisy sounds extremely familiar. I think it's an electric motor from a tram train, probably on a test bench in a workshop. You can hear the gears switching up and down exactly like the trams I used to get into Cologne, my hometown, to party as they accelerated and deaccelerated before and after each stop. So, yeah, I mean, you're not 100% wrong, but you didn't get close enough. A listener named Marcus Digny from Parksville, Western Australia says, good day there. Love the show and listen to every episode since discovering it several years ago. First time having a guess, is it the sound from inside the cockpit of a Formula 1 car or some other high-powered racing car? It is not, but you represent many people who wrote a very similar guess to that. So I'm going to click right over to the winner. This winner's name is Frank Burgum, and he said, I'm pretty sure that this noisy is an AC motor controller with a variable frequency three-phase inverter, probably on a large motor such as an electric train engine. And then he goes on to say, like in the 1980s, he worked on developing AC motor speed controllers, which made exactly that noise. The gear changes are required because the switching frequency of the inverter has to be kept in a narrow range. It's technical stuff, but basically, after doing some research and looking up about what this thing is, specifically, it's a variable frequency drive, VFD, an electronic device used to control the speed and torque of an AC electric motor by varying the frequency and voltage of the power supplied to the motor. And this capability allows for precise control of motor operation, leading to improved energy efficiency and performance in various applications. Let me play that back for you guys. I won't play the whole thing, but you'll get the idea. [plays Noisy] It has a Tron noise to it.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah, totally. A Tron cycle. Yeah, totally.

'''E:''' Oh, I remember that now.

'''J:''' I thought that was a really cool sound. All right, guys, I have a new noisy for you, and it was sent in by a listener named Wayne Sibley. [plays Noisy] If you think you know this week's noisy or you heard something cool, don't hesitate, because I need those noisies. Send them to WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

'''J:''' Steve, why am I so freaking excited? What is tonight?

'''S:''' This is the last episode to go up before NOTACON.

'''J:''' Correct. Yeah. So what's happening is this will be the last time you hear us talk about NOTACON before NOTACON. And this is the last time you'll hear us say that there are tickets still available if you're interested. We actually had a lot of people buy tickets over the last week, which is exactly what I predicted, because I've done this so many times. I know that that happens. But please do consider coming if you're free. It's going to be in White Plains, New York, which means that you could use the Westchester Airport or the New York City airports. It's not that long of a wait. And this conference, guys, is essentially we call it NOTACON because it's not like your standard conference. This isn't a bunch of lectures, you know, skeptical and science based lectures. This conference revolves around, you know, basically celebrating our podcast, our patrons, you know, listeners of the show. There's lots of time to socialize. We have a ton of super fun events that we're going to be putting on both Friday and Saturday. And then we have nighttime activities as well. We're going to be doing a Boomer versus Zoomer game show. We're going to pick people out of the audience to be the contestants. And then Saturday night, we have a Beatles sing along. There is going to be heavy activity by all of us involved in the music playing. It's good. It's really a big deal. We're really excited about it. We came up with some awesome bits that we're so psyched about. The content that we have for this year, we're all looking forward to it. There will be some brand new swag. And it's just going to be a great time. So if you're interested, go to [https://notaconcon.com/ notaconcon.com] or go to [https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ theskepticsguide.org]. And you can get a link there to the website. Please join us. It's going to be great. And we hope that everyone has safe travels. And I can't wait to see everybody.

'''C:''' Yey.

'''S:''' Thank you, Jay.

{{anchor|email}}
== Emails (1:28:38) ==


'''S:''' A couple of quick emails. These are both sort of not so much corrections as additional information about two topics. Bob, let's start with you actually. Last week, I think we talked about the email about the Big Bang and the universe expanding at greater than the speed of light. But it's actually more complicated than what we said.

'''B:''' Yeah, there's more to it. I want to approach this from probably a better angle. Primarily, the premise is wrong that the universe was – science says that the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light during the Big Bang. So that premise is – it's a common misconception. The universe's expansion, in fact, does not really have a speed. Its expansion rate doesn't use the same units as speed. So you can't even directly compare the two. Just not meaningful at all. Instead, the universe's expansion rate is all about how distance changes an object's apparent velocity. That's what Hubble's famous parameter tells us. The farther away two objects are, the faster they're separating from each other. We know that at enough of a distance, that speed can be faster than light. General relativities, mathematics tells us that. That faster-than-light separation of objects beyond a certain distance, it's true now. It's true during inflation even though the forces that are driving that expansion are quite different. Dark energy is doing it now. It was not dark energy after the Big Bang. So this expansion of space isn't the same as an object's speed through space. It's kind of like the bottom line maybe for the email writer. So no laws of physics are being broken during the Big Bang.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a nuance, right? I mean you're being a little pedantic, but yeah, we want to be technically accurate here. I just was interpreting that charitably. If you look at two objects within the universe, they can be moving away from each other at greater than the speed of light. If that movement is due to the expansion of the universe. And that's because they're not moving within the universe at greater than the speed of light. They're just being carried along with the expansion of the universe. And that's why at some point, like the visible universe, there's the visible universe. How do you describe the universe that we could theoretically get to? Because the visible universe is more about the age of the universe, right? It's only as far away as the universe is old.

'''B:''' Yeah, let's not even go there, Steve.

'''S:''' I'm just saying there's a point. Something could be so far away that we could never theoretically get there because it's moving away from us as fast as the speed of light.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. There's a big chunk of the universe itself that we will never be able to get to because you would have to go faster than the speed of light. But still, there's something like 18 billion galaxies that we could get to if we started really trying. But, yeah, that number is getting smaller and smaller all the time, which is not a fun fact.

'''S:''' All right. And then the other—we got a bunch of emails about our autism discussion, which is, you know, it was a good conversation because, you know, this is a very, very complicated issue. I tried to reflect that complexity. We're talking about RFK's comments about autism but how narrow his perspective is when, in fact, you know, autism is a very complicated spectrum, right? But at one point, the issue of self-diagnosis came up and several people pushed back on the fact that both Cara and I had the immediate same knee-jerk reaction like, oh, self-diagnosis, you don't want to do that. And they were like, really? Well, what is wrong with somebody self-diagnosing with autism? If you're interested, I wrote an article about it on Neurologica explaining why Cara and I as clinicians both had that reaction, which I think is legitimate. Self-diagnosis is essentially fraught with a lot of logical pitfalls and cognitive biases.

'''C:''' We can't diagnose ourselves with—I don't diagnose myself with anything psychological.

'''S:''' It's generally not a good idea. You could fall for confirmation bias.

'''C:''' Yeah, you don't diagnose yourself with neurological things when you talk to another neurologist.

'''S:''' Exactly. Like, I wouldn't even diagnose myself with something neurological.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' You can't be objective.

'''C:''' No, you can't.

'''S:''' But also, there's so many types of errors that you could make in diagnosis. And, like, for example, you might—there's the representativeness heuristic. There's also the availability heuristic. Like, you're going to settle on a diagnosis that's available to you, that's in the popular culture. You won't necessarily be considering the full differential diagnosis.

'''C:''' True. Yeah, it could be something else. Also, there's the thing—and I'm not saying that this is what our listeners did, but we've all seen this. Every, like, neuro or psych student who goes through training thinks they have a lot of things that they're actively learning about.

'''S:''' Every medical student. It's a joke in medical school.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Medical student syndrome. Like, you think you have every disease. That's the Forer effect, right? Because, you know, you have to learn how to put symptoms into context. And, you know, you have to know the difference between symptoms that are specific versus nonspecific, et cetera, and how predictive value works and all that stuff.

'''C:''' Yeah, but the DSM, it's really hard because things are mostly—

'''S:''' It's even harder.

'''C:''' Dimensional.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''C:''' Yeah, and you can kind of go, well, I've been depressed or I've had anxiety.

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm fidgety. Whatever, yeah.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' Everything requires judgment, and you could see yourself almost in any description. But having said that, that doesn't mean that any self-diagnosis is wrong, and some are easier than others. And, you know, so just putting things into context, like I've been practicing neurology now for 30 years. People come in to see me almost on a daily basis with some kind of self-diagnosis, even if just to say, I'm concerned that I have X, right? So I have a pretty good feel for how people are at thinking about what the diagnosis they might have. There's a massive false positive problem, and there are some diagnoses that people self-diagnose that are almost always incorrect, and there are some that are almost always correct. There are some where it's actually pretty easy to self-diagnose because there are some pretty specific symptoms that people recognize.

'''C:''' Like when I have a UTI or a yeast infection, it's pretty easy for me to tell my doctor my symptoms and say, I think this is a UTI. They go, yeah, it sounds like one. Here's what we'll do about it. But that doesn't mean I'm going to the pharmacist and saying, I think I have a UTI.

'''S:''' Writing yourself a prescription, yeah.

'''C:''' Exactly. That's the difference. I'm coming with a hypothesis, and then I'm working with a professional to determine whether it meets the threshold for diagnosis.

'''S:''' Right. Exactly. Going through a clinical algorithm of workup and treatment and making sure it's not something else.

'''C:''' Because also it doesn't help. If you are somebody with diagnosable autism spectrum disorder and you are looking for accommodations for that diagnosis, you have to have a diagnosis on paper.

'''S:''' Yeah. A few people pointed out, though, that sometimes they were referring to themselves. Like I diagnosed myself because I don't have the resources to get a formal diagnosis. It's hard to find a practitioner who will do it.

'''C:''' True. Yeah, it's hard.

'''S:''' And it's too expensive. Our insurance doesn't really cover it very well, et cetera, et cetera. So it was basically my only choice. And I get that. And of course, I think the solution to that is better resources, not relying on self-diagnosis. But in the world we live in today, that may be your only option. But the thing is, what do you then do about it?

'''C:''' Yeah, it doesn't mean anything in a practical sense. It means something from an identity perspective.

'''S:''' From an identity perspective. That's what I think what they were saying.

'''C:''' Of course.

'''S:''' Just help me deal with my life and understand myself. It's like, okay, that's fine as long as you're not then going for chelation therapy, whatever, like getting a treatment based upon that without going through a professional or like making major life decisions. Or then, again, just got to be aware of the fact that it's like thinking that you're a certain astrological sign. You start to then perceive yourself. Then the confirmation bias kicks in, right?

'''C:''' For sure.

'''S:''' Once you think that you have a label, then you will make it make sense.

'''C:''' And there are things on the spectrum. There are diagnostic criteria that all of us could point to and say, I'm a little bit like that. I've got a little bit of that.

'''S:''' And the other thing is like you may be right but incomplete. You may have autism and you may be correctly seeing the signs and symptoms of that in yourself. But that doesn't mean you don't also have another diagnosis and maybe something else that does need to be treated.

'''C:''' Or you may be neurodivergent and not qualify for a diagnosis. And I think that's a big thing that I talk to a lot of people in my life about where they're like, I want to go get diagnosed. And I'm like, here's what you do. This is the protocol for doing it. But I can tell you right now based on the MIGDAS or the ADOS that I've done in the past, you will not qualify for a diagnosis. And that does happen. And it's a bummer. But there is a minimum threshold.

'''S:''' Yeah. And sometimes they actually make sense in medicine. They're based on the evidence shows at this threshold it predicts your response to treatment or whatever. There's some reason for it. Not always. It always depends on where we are and sort of our understanding of the disease and the availability of treatments, et cetera.

'''C:''' But almost everything in the DSM, and this is a bigger question of whether or not this is, you know, like with deafness, an identity versus a, quote, disorder. And I'm just saying that because it's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But like everything in the DSM, there is a range where you might be on the spectrum of, let's say, anxiety or sadness where you do not have a clinical diagnosis. You do not hit the threshold because everybody gets depressed. Everybody gets sad. Some people are sad more than others. But there's a point where it falls under some form of clinical depression, you know, persistent depressive disorder, whatever.

'''S:''' And I have, you know, seen people misdiagnose family members as autistic because they are based on a superficial understanding of what it is.

'''C:''' For sure.

'''S:''' It happens.

'''C:''' And again, this isn't a perfect system. When we talk about it like this is how you do it. And I know that people will often be like, yeah, but you're relying too heavily on a medical model or you're relying too heavy. This is what we have. It's all constructed, all of it. The labels are constructed. The way that we identify people and put people in different boxes are constructed. The books we use, the way that we – it's all constructed. But we have to work within the same system. Otherwise, we'd be all over the place.

'''S:''' Right. So if you are interested in this topic generally or just for you personally, I do recommend you read my articles because I do go through all of the aspects that we consider when we make a diagnosis of why and all of the potential pitfalls of self-diagnosis. So at least go into it with your eyes open if you feel like you need to do that. All right, guys. Let's go on with science or fiction.

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:39:43) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = None
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = Scientists have developed a micropipette capable of delivering ions only, without fluid, to a single neuron.
|link1web = https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smll.202410906
|link1title = https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smll.202410906
|link1pub = onlinelibrary.wiley.com

|item2 = A new extensive analysis finds that climate change is now the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects.
|link2web = https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.2927
|link2title = https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2024.2927
|link2pub = royalsocietypublishing.org

|item3 = Engineers have developed a process for spinning industry quality cellulose fibers from cow manure.
|link3web = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652625008807?via%3Dihub
|link3title = Harnessing cow manure waste for nanocellulose extraction and sustainable small-structure manufacturing - ScienceDirect
|link3pub = www.sciencedirect.com

|}}
{{SOFResults

|science1 = Scientists have developed a micropipette capable of delivering ions only, without fluid, to a single neuron.

|fiction = A new extensive analysis finds that climate change is now the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects.

|science2 = Engineers have developed a process for spinning industry quality cellulose fibers from cow manure.

|rogue1 = Bob
|answer1 = Scientists have developed a micropipette capable of delivering ions only, without fluid, to a single neuron.

|rogue2 = Evan
|answer2 = Engineers have developed a process for spinning industry quality cellulose fibers from cow manure.

|rogue3 = Cara
|answer3 = A new extensive analysis finds that climate change is now the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects.

|rogue4 = Jay
|answer4 = A new extensive analysis finds that climate change is now the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects.

|host = Steve
|sweep =
|clever = y
|win =
|swept =
}}

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items this week. You guys ready? Here we go. Item number one, scientists have developed a micropipette capable of delivering ions only without fluid to a single neuron. Item number two, a new extensive analysis finds that climate change is now the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects. And item number three, engineers have developed a process for spinning industry quality cellulose fibers from cow manure. Bob, go first.

'''B:''' All right. You know, none of these are leaping out at me in any real way. I mean, of course, this micropipette delivering just an ion, no fluid to a single neuron. What the hell? I really want that to be true. I might not be able to vote against it. So climate change in insects, biodiversity, are they that sensitive? Who knows? Let's see. Let's see. Engineers, industry quality cellulose fiber from cow manure. I mean, you got to be shitting me.

'''S:''' Good one.

'''B:''' Care, what do you think? Never mind. All right. I'm going to say that the micropipette, because if I'm right, I'm happy. And if I'm wrong, I'm also happy. So fiction.

'''S:''' All right. Evan?

'''E:''' All right. The micropipette. That's not a word I come across often in my life. If I knew what the significance of being able to deliver a ion to a single neuron is, perhaps this would be maybe more impressive. Okay. Let's deliver an ion to a neuron. So why? What's big about it? Why is that a big deal? But apparently it is. I'll assume it is. The second one about climate change, now the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects. I have a feeling that one's correct, because if history has shown us everything, we are certainly responsible for the majority of climate change going on. And we are excellent at kind of destroying things. And this would, I think, fit neatly into that package. This last one about spinning industry quality cellulose fibers from cow manure. I guess that'd be a good use for cow manure. Quality cellulose fibers. Maybe, I don't know, it's either going to be the micropipette or the cow manure one. I'll spread it out. I'll spread it around. I'll spread the cow manure around, and I'll say the cow manure one is fiction. But I can't really pinpoint why.

'''S:''' Okay, Cara.

'''C:''' The micropipette capable of delivering ion, that doesn't sound – I mean, it's cool as hell, but I don't understand why this is that different from patch clamping. With patch clamping, you're reading the ion transfer. You're sort of looking at the voltage.

'''E:''' Oh, so you understand what the significance of this is.

'''C:''' Of course, yeah. I mean, this is the kind of research I used to do. If we had a micropipette, like a teeny, tiny glass thing that sucks to the outside of a cell, back in the day, we would already do this, and we'd clamp to the cell, and then we could measure intra versus extracellular voltage changes to understand excitability of the cell. So I don't see why it would be that hard to pump some sodium or potassium in or out.

'''E:''' So if you have some laboratory experience, this means a lot more to most people.

'''C:''' Yeah, I mean, it's probably hard. That's probably why we didn't do it until now, but it doesn't blow my mind or anything. It's cool. Yeah, we could do a lot with it. Like, we could change the excitability of tissue and stuff. And then you chose the process for spinning industry-quality cellulose fibers from cow manure. Yeah, I guess cows eat grass. So if you could take the cellulose back out, there's cellulose. Can they digest it? I don't think so. I don't think animals can digest cellulose. I think the only time you see that is in, like, termites, but it's not actually the termites. It's, like, the bacteria inside of them. I feel like I remember that from somewhere. So, yeah, there's probably a bunch of cellulose in the poop. So they figured out how to recapture the cellulose. I don't know. So that leads me to think that the insect one is not climate change, that it's, like, pesticides or something or, like, monocropping or, I don't know, something that's, like, it's probably climate change is a driver. But I feel like there's all sorts of other stuff. So I'm going to say that one's the fiction.

'''S:''' All right, Jay, so they're all spread out. You're going to break the tie.

'''J:''' Well, I want to first say that I am so happy that they finally found something useful to do with poop.

'''E:''' Finally.

'''J:''' There's a lot. I mean, I'm half joking and half serious because there is a lot of cow poop in the world, guys. Like, lots of cow poop.

'''E:''' Cow manure is for lots of different things, actually.

'''S:''' It fertilizes half of our food.

'''E:''' Yeah. It's an accelerant.

'''J:''' I'm glad they found something else to do with cow poop.

'''E:''' And I think they used to use it in mortar in adobes or something as a thing they would build.

'''J:''' You ever been to a dairy farm? I've been to a couple. And they have poop pits.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''J:''' It's a big deal. It's a lot to manage.

'''E:''' Oh, you have to, yeah, corral that stuff.

'''J:''' So I agree with Cara. Yeah, the grass has a ton of cellulose in it. You know, cows are eating it. I mean, they've got to be able to digest cellulose, though. They have to. I mean, I'm sure they have multiple stomachs.

'''E:''' One of their four stomachs, right?

'''J:''' Or a four-chambered stomach or whatever, right? So, yeah, I think that one is science. I think that – I got to just say I don't know a lot about the micropipette. And I don't really know a lot about that. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me that they were able to do something like this. But it's very hard for me to comment on that. But the one thing that is sticking out to me, it's the one about the climate change and how they're saying it's the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects, right? I thought that pesticides were the number one killer of insects. I don't know about climate change having a massive effect yet on insects. I'm sure it's going to. I just don't think we've hit that marker yet for their habitats. So I think that one's a fiction.

'''S:''' All right, so you guys are nicely spread out. So we'll take these in order. Number one, scientists have developed a micropipette capable of delivering ions only without fluid to a single neuron. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. So you're happy, Bob. It's science.

'''B:''' Cool, man.

'''S:''' Yes. So there's a couple of things here that are new. One of this is smaller than any previous micropipette. And they designed it specifically because they want to be able to manipulate the environment both inside and outside of a single brain cell. Not just the neurons, but also the glia.

'''C:''' That's cool.

'''S:''' Because they haven't really been able to study that before. But the other bit, which none of you commented on, and Cara, you didn't comment on either, was the without fluid part. Like it's just delivering ions. It's not delivering ions in water or in fluid. It's just ions. The reason for that is because if you are studying the reaction of a neuron, let's say, to changing the potassium concentration outside the cell, but you're also injecting fluid at the same time, that also influences the environment.

'''C:''' Yeah, you'd have to calculate it perfectly.

'''S:''' And so many things happen. Pressure and whatever. So you can't really isolate the ions as the variable. But now they can. And so this is going to be a huge boon to research, especially with the glia, actually, even though I mentioned neuron. Because I just say with patch clamping, we can study the electrical activity of neurons. But glia are mostly, they're not electrically active. They are chemically active, right? And they're basically half the brain, right? Half of the cells in the brain are glia. And they're not just support cells. They are support cells, but they're not just support cells. They actually influence the functioning of the brain as well. But chemically more than electrically. And we haven't really been able to study it that well before this reason.

'''B:''' Really? Even now?

'''S:''' No, but it's limited for the reasons that I stated. Like we can't do the kind of like manipulating the environment in order to see how they respond, how they react to it.

'''B:''' Have there been any good discoveries with glia?

'''S:''' Yeah, there have been. But again, it's difficult because you have all these other variables that come into play. We haven't had the level of control we would like to have in order to like really control these variables. So anyway, this is like just taking that research to the next level. Where now we can manipulate the environment inside and outside of single cells with the ionic environment without having to introduce a lot of fluid as another variable. All right. Let's go on. Number two, a new extensive analysis finds that climate change is now the most significant driver of biodiversity loss in insects. Jay and Cara, you think this one is the fiction. Bob and Evan, you think this one is science. Now, of course, the key phrase here is a new extensive analysis. Whoever they used to think about what was the primary cause may be different now. And I think the idea is that climate change is now the most significant driver of biodiversity.

'''E:''' But?

'''S:''' But this one is the fiction.

'''C:''' Is it the other way around?

'''S:''' No, no.

'''C:''' It was climate change?

'''S:''' We're not there yet. Climate change is a contributor, but it's not anywhere near the biggest one.

'''E:''' Is it still pesticides?

'''S:''' It's not pesticides per se. It's a bigger concept. It's agriculture.

'''C:''' Oh, OK. So like pollution kind of or just like—

'''S:''' Well, it's—

'''C:''' Oh, yeah, because I also said like monocrop. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, so monocrop. But not just that. It's basically habitat loss. That's the biggest single—

'''C:''' Yeah, of course. That makes sense.

'''S:''' That's the biggest single contributor is habitat loss because—

'''C:''' We're clear-cutting forest.

'''S:''' Yeah, we're clear-cutting land.

'''C:''' Just the one crop. Yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' And replacing it with monocropping or with agriculture.

'''E:''' And remember, there are a lot of insects.

'''S:''' Yes, there are.

'''E:''' I mean, a lot more than we think.

'''S:''' And then the insects that can thrive in that environment are the ones we kill, right? Because they're the pests.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' We call them pests, and we try to kill them.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh. We must be eliminating insects we don't even know they're there, and we're eliminating them.

'''S:''' Yeah. So there's a pretty significant loss of— So what the study showed was, first of all, yes, the biodiversity is taking a nosedive. But they actually separate out two different kinds of biodiversity, what they call taxonomic diversity and phylogenetic diversity. So it's not just a loss of diversity within a species. Actually, there's less evolutionary branching. You know what I mean? Like you're actually losing evolutionary branches so that you have fewer genera, fewer families, et cetera. It's pretty significant. You know, about 44% total insect species diversity in agricultural landscapes specifically. That's the amount of decline. So it's just land use is the big factor. And everything that goes along with that, of course, yes, absolutely, it's pesticides. It is monocropping. It is climate change now as well. All these things are just all stressors. But land use is the loss of habitat due to land use is the big one. Which means that engineers have developed a process for spinning industry-quality cellulose fibers from cow manure is science. So yes, so first of all, cows do digest cellulose. But Cara, you're correct in that it is also not the cows themselves but the microorganisms in their rumen that are doing it. That's why they have to have different chambers. They have to sit there so that the microorganisms can break down the cellulose.

'''J:''' Well, that goes for all mammals. You know, we have a flora that we can't live without.

'''S:''' Yeah, but we don't eat like the heavy cellulose. We don't eat grass, right?

'''E:''' We're not grass eaters.

'''S:''' Or leaves or things like that. We eat stuff that's easy to digest. We don't have the stomachs to do it.

'''E:''' Or we cook it, right? We process it.

'''S:''' Yeah. But some cellulose still survives. So there's undigested cellulose in cow manure. And they basically modified a preexisting technique. The same researchers, the same people developed about 10 years or so ago developed a technique that uses a jet. They call it pressurized spinning. But it's arranged vertically, like the jet stream is arranged vertically. Basically, all they found is that they have to just make it horizontal. And they got it to work with, they basically, you know, clean up the manure so that they just have just the cellulose left. And then they use now horizontal pressurized fiber spinning in order to turn that into, you know, actual cellulose fibers. And they were able to create what they call industry grade cellulose fibers using this technique. This is huge because this horizontal nozzle pressurized spinning technique can be very easily adapted and cost effective. And this kind of cellulose fibers are widely used in industry from all kinds of textiles and plastics and masks and all kinds of stuff. And so having another method, not just another method, but another source material, feedstock for creating these cellulose fibers could be huge. Yeah. Could be huge. So good job, Cara and Jay.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yey, Jay.

'''E:''' Well done, folks.

'''J:''' Good job, Cara.

'''C:''' Yeah.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:53:57) ==
{{qow
|text = “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing”
|author = T H Huxley
|lived =
|desc =
}}
'''S:''' All right. Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' "Sit down before a fact as a little child. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads or you shall learn nothing." Thomas Henry Huxley.

'''S:''' Evan, this was the quote in my yearbook, my school book at college.

'''E:''' No. Are you kidding me?

'''S:''' Nope. That was my personal quote.

'''E:''' I didn't know you knew this quote for that long.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' From way back.

'''S:''' It's great. It's great. T.H. Huxley.

'''E:''' It's quite a quote.

'''S:''' He was something. Very skeptical philosopher. Darwin's mouthpiece, of course. Instrumental in promoting acceptance of evolutionary theory.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' But also, yeah, just a great critical thinking, logical philosopher. Quotes like this indicate that.

'''E:''' The quote was suggested by a listener, Hannah. Hannah T. Thank you, Hannah.

'''S:''' Thank you, Hannah.

'''E:''' We appreciate that very much.

'''S:''' All right, guys. So when this episode goes up, you'll have one week to buy tickets for NOTACON. There's still time.

'''J:''' Less than a week.

'''C:''' But not much time.

'''E:''' Yeah, right? Yeah, not much time.

'''S:''' And we will do tickets at the door. So if you just want to show up, you can show up. But it does help if you buy tickets. We know how many people are going to be there. And the next episode will be coming out on the Saturday during the second day of NOTACON, essentially.

'''E:''' Yeah, we warp time and space to make that happen when we do live performances on a weekend.

'''S:''' And we'll be recording two live shows during NOTACON.

'''E:''' Oh, that's more reason to come out and see us.

'''S:''' Absolutely. All right. Well, we look forward to that. And thank you all for joining me this week.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''J:''' Thank you brother.

'''E:''' Thank you, Steve.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 1034

2025-05-26T15:37:49Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

{{Editing required
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, April 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone.

'''J:''' Hey, Steve, you know that May, particularly May 4th, is Star Wars Day, right?

'''S:''' May the 4th be with you.

'''J:''' There's a few things happening all at once. So this show comes out on May 3rd, which is one day before Star Wars Day. It also is our 20-year anniversary, and the Volanaut air bike looks like the speeder from Return of the freaking Jedi. It's real. It's real.

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''E:''' Way to lump all those in one phrase.

'''C:''' It's like a hovercraft moped.

'''J:''' Oh, my God.

'''S:''' No, it's not really a moped. I mean, it's a hover bike.

'''C:''' It's a bike, though.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It looks like a speeder. It does look like a speeder.

'''E:''' It looks like the speeder from Episode 6, the Return of the Jedi.

'''S:''' Which was an excellent marketing decision on their part.

'''E:''' No doubt, because they did this in the forest among the trees and things. How could you not think of that when you're watching this video?

'''C:''' I do kind of feel like I've been on one of those hover bikes this whole week that I've been in Vietnam, because we have been riding around on a scooter in the most insane scooter traffic you can imagine. It would be nice to be able to go over the head of the scooter in front of us periodically, I think. Although, what I don't like about these hovercraft is that they're basically like vertical leaf blowers.

'''J:''' Well, so what? That's how they go around.

'''S:''' Yeah. So this is Volanaut. They came out with their promotional video. It looks damn impressive. But yes, you could see the blast of air below the bike as it's going over the ground. It would not be pleasant, I imagine, in an urban environment.

'''C:''' No.

'''E:''' And loud.

'''J:''' We haven't developed anti-gravity yet. Could you give this company a break? This thing is freaking awesome.

'''S:''' I'm just saying.

'''C:''' No, but here's the thing. How feasible is this technology, really, if you have to blast everything directly underneath it? If the whole point is that you want to be able to go over top of things.

'''E:''' But what other technology exists that mitigates that?

'''C:''' No, no, no. But that's not the right question. Do we need this?

'''S:''' It looks to me, honestly, I don't think this is for commuting to work. This is a recreational vehicle.

'''C:''' So long as it remains like an ATV kind of off-road-y, go on dirt paths and have fun. But this doesn't seem like it's going to be great for the environment, and it definitely is not going to be good for any commuters underneath it.

'''E:''' Well, it's electric. It's not gas or petroleum-based.

'''C:''' No, but it's blasting all the foliage it's going over.

'''S:''' Well, most of the video I'm looking at, it's in the desert, it's over a sandbar.

'''C:''' Exactly. But you see the video where there's a little bit of tree something, and there's just leaf bits flying everywhere.

'''E:''' Yes. It's as if you took a leaf blower to it.

'''S:''' Here, he's going over gravelly terrain. And from one camera angle, you see rocks flying all over the place.

'''C:''' Yes. It's just like chipped windshields left and right.

'''J:''' I think you guys are missing the whole point of this thing.

'''C:''' I am missing the point, Jay. This is why it's so fun to have us as a crew.

'''J:''' This thing can go up to 200 kilometers an hour, 124 miles an hour, this thing can go.

'''B:''' Oh my gosh.

'''E:''' You better hold on.

'''S:''' What range?

'''J:''' I'm looking for it. I'm not seeing it. It's seven times lighter.

'''B:''' Is it electric?

'''J:''' It's seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle.

'''E:''' How could it hold the fuel, Bob? I don't know that it could propel itself if it had to hold the weight of that fuel.

'''C:''' Yes. It has to be lighter than a typical motorcycle, or it wouldn't get off the ground.

'''S:''' I bet you it's like five, 10 minutes.

'''E:''' Yes. 20 minutes maybe, something like that.

'''B:''' That's a fair advantage.

'''E:''' But again, this is version 1.0. Like all these other vehicles that are coming down this path, they intend to be able to increase their range.

'''S:''' No time soon is this going to be used for actually traveling from point A to point B.

'''C:''' If at all.

'''S:''' Yes. If at all. This is a recreational vehicle. The only other, just sort of brainstorming, the only other application I could imagine for it would be military. If you need to-

'''B:''' Yes. Search and rescue. Search and rescue.

'''E:''' Yes. Search and rescue, definitely.

'''C:''' Great for that. Or needing to traverse something that's not traversable. You're on some sort of vehicle and then you need to fly over something so that you can continue whatever you're doing.

'''J:''' It says it's jet propulsion, so it might not be electric.

'''E:''' Oh, really? Jet propulsion?

'''S:''' What does that mean though?

'''J:''' Well, we don't know. There's just not enough information.

'''E:''' That can mean that.

'''C:''' Does that mean jet fuel or does that just mean-

'''E:''' It says seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle thanks to advanced use of carbon fiber materials, 3D printing, and minimalistic approach. That-

'''C:''' No, it's not because-

'''E:''' Sounds electric to me.

'''J:''' No, but more importantly, will they sell a kit to make it look like the speeder from Return of the Jedi?

'''E:''' That'll be the first kit that comes out, yes.

'''J:''' Because that-

'''E:''' Oh my gosh.

'''J:''' That is something that I want.

'''E:''' Right?

'''J:''' There's not many things out there that I want at this point in my life.

'''S:''' It looks super fun. I've got to say that.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I'd rent one. I would definitely rent that and check it out.

'''S:''' There might be places like where you go and you pay 20 bucks to get a five minute ride.

'''E:''' Right. You go to Las Vegas, right?

'''B:''' I'd do that in a heartbeat.

'''E:''' You have a spot out in the desert. A bunch of people jump on these things for whatever, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, and you take it up for $10,000.

'''C:''' Don't they already have a water version of this, though, that's been around for ages that nobody uses and is not for sailing?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I wonder how high it can go, too. I would imagine that-

'''B:''' And then make a water hose.

'''C:''' As the resident wet blanket of the group.

'''E:''' No. It's okay. We need you to keep us honest and prevent us from buying-

'''C:''' Keep you grounded.

'''S:''' I agree. This is a product looking for a function, right? Not something we need.

'''C:''' Totally. This is a-

'''S:''' It's just we can do it. It's cool.

'''C:''' It's a solution to a problem we don't have. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' But look at the video.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' As I said-

'''E:''' I mean, that is an impressive video.

'''S:''' And you know, recreational, maybe some niche things like search and rescue or storming a castle or something like that.

'''J:''' It's about freaking time, too. I mean, come on.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' We've been watching all of these products come and go and you're like, this is going to do this and that and everything. This thing looks like it's ready to go.

'''C:''' We'll see.

'''S:''' It looks like it's working.

'''B:''' I wonder if you could fit a ballistic parachute in it.

'''C:''' I will say one thing that's so strange to me being here. So I'm in Vietnam right now. I'm in a really remote kind of area outside of Lang Co, which is somewhat near about an hour from Da Nang. I know that's terrible pronunciation, but I don't speak Vietnamese, which is near Hoi An and Hue. Jay, when you first introduced this, you said three things, right? You talked about our anniversary. You talked about this hover bike and then you mentioned the date. And Steve, when you introduced the show at April 30th, it was really jarring for me because again, I am in the future, which really weirds me out for some reason.

'''S:''' You're in May 1st.

'''C:''' Yes, it's May 1st where I am. And I realized when I was coordinating getting home that I arrive home before I leave.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' That's cool.

'''C:''' It's so weird.

'''B:''' That's freaking cool.

'''E:''' It's a great quirk.

'''S:''' You're just getting back time that you lost.

'''C:''' I'm just getting back time. Yeah. Because I got here two days after I left. That's true. But yeah, Jay, I definitely had one of those like, what time is it in the North Pole moments?

'''J:''' Oh my God. I still think about that from time to time.

'''S:''' All right. Well, we have a good interview coming up later in the show, but let's get started with our news items.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== Internet Fakes Precede Violence (07:58) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theconversation.com/memes-and-conflict-study-shows-surge-of-imagery-and-fakes-can-precede-international-and-political-violence-233055
|article_title = Memes and conflict: Study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence
|publication = theconversation.com
}}

'''S:''' Cara, you're going to start us off with internet fakes and their effects on public violence.

'''C:''' Yeah. This is an interesting article that I stumbled across. It was recently published in Information, Communication, and Society. That's an open access journal, or maybe it's not, but at least the article itself is open access, published by a group out of Notre Dame and a couple of other kind of allied universities called Visual Narratives and Political Instability, a case study of visual media prior to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. So these researchers who wrote about it in the conversation, one of them is a professor of engineering at Notre Dame and the other is a professor of peace studies and global politics. They were interested in kind of investigating a new way to maybe not predict, but to understand violence and mass conflict by looking at propaganda online. And apparently using AI, which many researchers have been using because it allows you to comb through just like mass quantities of big data, oftentimes when we use AI, we're relying only on written text because it's much easier for these models to be able to comb through all this written text and categorize it or understand it. But as we know, when things go viral, what's usually going viral?

'''E:''' Videos of cats?

'''C:''' Videos of cats, that's one of them, yeah, but like visual imagery, right? We're usually seeing like memes with photographs or drawings and there might be some text included, but there's not even always text necessary to convey a pretty complex kind of political message. And so what they're interested in understanding is how memes or how these different online propaganda approaches promote, this is how they list it, promote beliefs and goals, gain support, dehumanize opponents, justify violence, and create doubt or dismiss inconvenient facts. And so again, because these different technologies are more and more sophisticated, like these deep fakes are getting better and better, AI is still pretty good at understanding this image is manipulated versus this image is genuine. But what it struggles with is understanding context. So an example that they use is, they already know how to program to track posts online that say something like, quote, and this is the example they use, Ukrainians are Nazis. But what's harder is to find images of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi insignia on them. Does that make sense? Like it's just tougher for them to be able to comb through that. So combined with AI, they used basically a team of computer scientists and social scientists, and they looked at a massive, massive kind of trove of data. So what they did for this, it's sort of like a proof of concept study, it's a case study, is they looked at accounts of 989 Russian mill bloggers. Have you guys heard that term, mill blogger, before?

'''E:''' Yes, I have. We mentioned it back in 20...

'''S:''' Like a blogging sweatshop kind of thing?

'''C:''' Yeah, basically. Like a propaganda sort of machine. So these mill bloggers, they specifically focused on Telegram, which is a messaging app. Well, it's much more than that. They combed through the accounts of 989 Russian mill bloggers. So they came out with about 6 million posts, including about 3 million images. And then they analyzed them in a detailed way by categorizing them, timestamping them, and then using a suite of AI tools that could detect image manipulation. So they were able to know if the image was changed. And then they also used actual people, physical people, to try and understand the context. And they put that information together. There's a couple of examples in the conversation write up. Like for example, there's an anti-Putin journalist, actually, an ex-Russian soldier named Arkady Babchenko. And they show... So apparently, Ukrainian security services faked his death to expose an assassination plot against him. And so because his death was faked, and that was discovered, there's a meme of him wearing like a t-shirt that says, gamers don't die, they respawn, right? And the idea here is to kind of like, A, be quote unquote funny, B, sow division and kind of increase that distrust that was already starting to form. And they show other examples as well, doctored images of political officials from Ukraine spending time in kind of more like submissive positions with Western leaders. And also, we mentioned kind of the nazification, which is very kind of low-hanging fruit, classic online meme. And here's the big takeaway. So they found, this is really, really interesting, that leading up to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I think in the two weeks, yeah, only two weeks leading up to it, there was a 9,000% increase in the number of posts that were just produced by these nearly 1,000 Russian millbloggers, and a 5,000% increase in manipulated images from these Russian millbloggers. They could only figure that out, yeah, by actually screening to see what was manipulated.

'''E:''' And they would do things like take footage of prior incidents that didn't even have anything to do with that conflict and re-tag them and basically call it current. That was a very popular method that they would employ quite a bit.

'''C:''' And we see that now. We see that in our kind of American political discourse right now.

'''E:''' All the time.

'''C:''' Yeah, you'll see like some sort of march or some sort of rally. And it turns out that wasn't even in the same country, or it was from three years previous for a different reason. So basically what they were trying to proof of concept in this study was, how can we analyze this visual content? How can we understand it contextually? Because that's the really kind of sophisticated portion that they show in this study. AI just simply can't do yet. It can't look at an image and understand the underlying propaganda message and understand how it might sow division, how it might dehumanize, how it might increase distrust. But what they also showed, which is really interesting, and it's not that they didn't explain why, it's that the point of the study was not to try and understand why. But that this massive spike two weeks prior to the invasion was meaningful. I mean, it was like deeply statistically significant. And so, you know, as the title implies, memes and conflict study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence. You know, whether it's a chicken and egg situation, whether these millbloggers knew what was coming, and they were trying to increase, I guess, in some ways, intentionally increase support from the citizenship, or whether there was a lockstep kind of unrest that was occurring amongst the people that helped, I guess, codify, maybe that's not quite the right word, but justify the military action. You know, we don't know the cause and effect here. But what we do know is that prior to a breaking point in this situation, at least, where violence erupted in a meaningful way, there was a lot of online chatter and a lot of sowing of distrust and a lot of just, you know, negative memes that were being flown all around the internet. And so, this may be a way, as the authors argue, to predict conflict, to predict unrest, and to understand better where those thresholds and those breaking points are in a real world way, like a measurable kind of geopolitical conflict way, we may be able to take that temperature online, just in terms of the quantity of this type of chatter. It's disheartening. It's scary. But it's also fascinating, and I think could be incredibly useful for promoting peace.

'''S:''' It reminds me a little bit of that show Person of Interest, which features an AI just surveying the internet and seeing patterns. The kind of contrived bit was that, for reasons of confidentiality, whatever, you can't violate people's privacy. It was skirting the laws on privacy by not telling the police, oh, this person is going to murder that person, so you better do something about it. It would just spit out a social security number and say, this is a person of interest.

'''C:''' Oh, I see.

'''S:''' And then the police had to figure out who was going to kill who and why and when, and then keep it from happening. But it was just the basic idea of you have artificial intelligence monitoring all internet traffic and picking up on these patterns and predicting what's going to happen, which I think is highly plausible, given...

'''C:''' It's already happening.

'''S:''' It's already happening. Yeah.

'''C:''' These researchers could do it with probably minimal clearance. So you can imagine that these NSA programs, I mean, we've been talking about this for decades, these NSA programs that are collecting large data from citizens, and they would claim, oh, we only look at the metadata, and whether that's true or not, you know, I'm skeptical.

'''S:''' It's bullshit, because, I mean, Amazon works that I want to buy. I mean, how does it know that?

'''C:''' Exactly. Exactly. And there's also a big difference...

'''E:''' That's what my relatives are shopping for and hits me with it.

'''C:''' Right.

'''E:''' How does it know I'm even related to these people? Of course, they look.

'''C:''' But we have to be careful, because what we're conflating here is like a national security military spy on your own citizen's big brother thing versus a monetary capitalist.

'''E:''' But they have the data. That is...

'''C:''' Of course.

'''E:''' I don't think that's...

'''C:''' It exists. And we have probably, in the terms and conditions, given them permission to do this already.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Oh, no doubt.

'''J:''' They hear everything that you say.

'''E:''' Including this?

'''C:''' What'd you say, Jay?

'''J:''' I mean, you know, it's no mystery. Like, our phones are constantly monitoring what we say. I mean...

'''C:''' Well, when you say what we say, you mean in multiple ways. You don't mean physically our voices. You mean all the things we're saying with our internet activity, right?

'''J:''' Well...

'''S:''' I don't think he meant...

'''J:''' No, I meant that our phones are here. You know, we have Alexa devices and Google devices in our phones. Their phones know where we are at all times.

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So through all these different... Yeah. And you're right. They do physically listen to our voices, too, through things like Alexa and Siri. We do have a microphone there. Yeah. Whether it's listening in the background, I think you're right. We've yet to...

'''S:''' Well, it's listening in the background enough that it gets activated when you say, like, okay, Google.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' It gets activated.

'''C:''' True, true, true, true, yeah.

'''S:''' What's probably the most disturbing thing is how comfortable we're getting with all of this.

'''C:''' Well, and that's part of why I have a level, and this feels a little weird, talking about this in a hotel room in Vietnam prior to hopefully gaining reentry to my country where I am a natural-born citizen in only a few days, but having been in China and Hong Kong. Because one of the reasons that I feel a little bit of just discomfort when I travel to China is the normalcy of... And maybe it's just because it's much more out in front, like the same kind of stuff is happening in the background in a lot of Western countries, but the normalcy and the comfort level of large monitoring, and of having all of your banking transactions on the same app across the whole country in a closed way, and being behind this great firewall, and having facial recognition, yeah, to get into your apartment building, and swiping the same card for all of the transit. And that's not to say that it's not like that in the US. Maybe we just have more of a sheen of privacy, and more of a... Whereas there's just sort of an openness to that, quote, big brother vibe. But I definitely, when I'm in China, I do feel a little like I'm in a Black Mirror episode. And that's an uncomfortable feeling for me.

'''S:''' In a very bad way.

'''C:''' Yeah. But again, I don't know how much of that is a real difference, or just a feeling difference between all these nations at this point.

'''E:''' Isn't that the point? How can you know?

'''C:''' Exactly. Yeah.

'''S:''' I think it's a real difference.

'''C:''' I think it's both. You're right. There is a demonstrably measurable difference. But I do think that we sometimes assume that while we have a lot of freedoms, which we can question whether or not they're dwindling, but that we have a lot of freedoms in like the United States, for example, and other Western nations.

'''E:''' Comparatively.

'''C:''' Comparatively, exactly. I think we often conflate freedom with lack of oversight. And that's just not... I don't think we can do that anymore.

'''S:''' Two quick things. One is, just to make a point, when I just said, okay, Google, a minute ago, my phone popped up with the assistant. And it just...

'''C:''' I was going to say, how did you undo that after seeing it's listening to that?

'''S:''' And then the microphone pops up listening to what I'm saying. And the other thing is, since you mentioned Black Mirror, the new season is out, and it's awesome.

'''C:''' Oh, good. I need to watch when I get home.

'''S:''' So good.

'''B:''' I'm still working my way through.

'''C:''' I guess I could watch here on a VPN.

'''S:''' First episode is brutal. But it's brutal in that Black Mirror, just a very realistic, uncomfortably realistic way. Anyway.

'''B:''' Totally believable.

'''S:''' Yeah. The fact that it was believable is what made it so brutal, made it so scary.

'''C:''' That's so many of those episodes. It's like, uh-oh, we are right on the precipice of this. Or I can feel it because five out of the 10 aspects of this episode have already happened.

'''J:''' Oh, my God. I mean, we're literally saying, guys, that our reality here in the United States is kind of similar to Black Mirror now.

'''E:''' Yeah. It's a quasi-documentary.

'''C:''' It's terrifying. I'm reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler right now. Aren't you guys proud of me?

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''C:''' I'm reading sci-fi.

'''S:''' Proud of you.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''B:''' Liz, you've got to talk to Liz about that.

'''C:''' And part of the reason that this book is such a bestseller, impression, I mean, granted, she wrote about it in the 90s. It's not like it's hundreds of years old, but it takes place today. That's what's the weird thing, is you're reading these journal entries labeled 2025, 2026, and you're like, ugh, this might be where we're going.

'''B:''' I mean, isn't there someone who specifically says, make America great again?

'''C:''' Yeah. I haven't gotten to that part yet. But yeah, I think so. It may not be in The Sower, but there's, yeah, because it's a, what's a duology? That's not a thing. It's a two-part book series.

'''E:''' Two?

'''C:''' Yeah. But part of the reason that I think these kinds of books are so jarring, and things like Black Mirror are so hard, is that Octavia Butler didn't sit down and come up with something fantastic. She was like, mm, you know, a few left turns, and this is where we could be.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' And we took those left hand turns.

'''C:''' We did.

'''B:''' I think even she would have been shocked at where we're at right now.

'''C:''' She probably didn't expect it to happen so soon.

'''S:''' Let's move on.

{{anchor|news_item2}}
=== Lab Grown Teeth (23:51) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.livescience.com/health/lab-grown-teeth-could-offer-alternative-to-fillings-and-implants-scientists-say
|article_title = Lab-grown teeth could offer alternative to fillings and implants, scientists say | Live Science
|publication = www.livescience.com
}}

'''S:''' Jay, tell us about lab-grown teeth.

'''C:''' Yeah. Thanks, Jay.

'''E:''' Oh, cool. Do they get up and walk around?

'''J:''' We'll click over to something a little bit more positive. So guys, what was your worst dental experience?

'''S:''' I don't know. I haven't really had any. They're all about the same. I haven't had any.

'''E:''' I had one root canal, and it was not fun.

'''J:''' I had a root canal.

'''C:''' Oh, no.

'''B:''' Some teeth cleaning is going to be brutal.

'''C:''' But don't root canals, from what I understand, and I've never had a root canal, but my dentist, I almost had to have one. My dentist told me they feel the same as when you have to get a deep cavity drilled out. The only difference is your pocketbook. They cost three times as much.

'''B:''' I had one, and it was not nearly as bad as I had anticipated. I'd say it was worse than a typical cleaning.

'''C:''' Well, yeah. Than a cleaning.

'''B:''' It was unusual, but-

'''C:''' But not than a filling, right? If you have to get the shots and get the drilling and get a partial or a crown or something.

'''E:''' You know what I don't like about dentistry?

'''B:''' It's a little bit more dramatic.

'''E:''' I don't like being prone for long periods of time like that, and I have gone through things. I remember when I had my braces and I had to have all those impressions done and things like that. It's felt like hours that I had to remain in that chair and my head tilted a certain way and don't move and do this. I hate that constraint.

'''C:''' Is it the body being... For me, it's the holding your mouth open and trying not to choke on your own spit.

'''S:''' Right. Yeah, I hate that.

'''E:''' That's part of it.

'''C:''' It's the breathing through your nose trying not to gag the whole time. That's what bothers me.

'''J:''' Well, there are a lot of people, guys. The world is filled with people that are having dental nightmares. You got to take care of your teeth and you got to do it every freaking day. It is a lot of work and it's a commitment. I'm trying to train my kids right now to really want to do it.

'''B:''' Ah, they don't have to. They got these tooth replacement things coming up, man. It's definitely going to be fine.

'''J:''' But the point-

'''C:''' Just get the new chompers.

'''J:''' The point is, though, we're lucky that we haven't had really bad dental surgery and stuff. There's a lot of things that people have to go through in order to have some zemblance of teeth in their mouth.

'''C:''' Yeah, my mom has implants and things like that. It's funny. She's in her mid-70s and she refuses. She does not want dentures, right? Every time she has a tooth problem, she has to go through the implant thing. You guys know about these? Where you get the post and you've got the bone graft.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's terrible. It's terrible.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''J:''' So the point is these researchers that I'm about to talk to you about, the vision that they have is one day you'd go to the dentist and they're not going to be giving you fillings or giving you these hardcore implants and stuff like that. That they're going to do something where your body regrows a legitimate biological tooth that occupies that space and it is a tooth. That's it. It's a new tooth. So their long-term goal is that the researchers at King's College London, they recently developed a new type of hydrogel that is a key factor in supporting the growth of teeth from stem cells in the lab. And the study that they published, it was published in ACS Macro Letters and it marks what, I mean, I would consider this to be a significant step towards biological tooth replacement using their regenerative tissue engineering. So this is significant. Again, you know, we're not talking about you're going to go out and get this next year at the dentist. This is a step, but this was a big one. This was a really important step that they made. Today tooth loss is treated with, you know, the interventions like fillings and crowns and implants. You know, they work, right? You know, some of us have, you know, I definitely had to get a root canal as well, you know, and I've been hyper taking care of my teeth my whole life. It just, you know, it can happen to anybody. But these treatments, of course, you know, they work, but they have limitations. You know, fillings, they weaken over time and you could need to get them replaced. It's not uncommon for people to get their fillings replaced. You know, implants that people get, they can fail. And that is actually more common than I think most people who don't get implants don't realize that they do and can fail. And none of them really are restoring the structure or the real function of real teeth, right? You know, you get a root canal and now you have a numb spot in your mouth, right? Those teeth are no longer registering the information that all the other teeth in your mouth give you, right? Your teeth actually give you quite a bit of information about temperature and, you know, chewing sensation and everything. The study's co-author, Dr. Zhuqian Zhang said, fillings and implants are stopgap measures, but they don't regenerate, they don't grow, and they don't integrate like natural tissue. And in nature, tooth development, it begins in the embryo through a complex exchange of chemical signals between two types of stem cells. Steve, you've probably heard of these. We have the epithelial and the mensechymal.

'''S:''' Mensechymal.

'''J:''' Mensechymal, yeah, it's a tough word, huh? So these are two different types of stem cells that are set into motion in an embryo and that eventually turn into teeth. And there's a very specific environment that teeth need to grow in. And there's actually quite a complex thing going on for teeth to do what they do. So these cells that I mentioned, these two different types of cells, they self-organize into a tooth bud and they progress through these developmental stages, right? It starts with a bud, then there's a cap, and then eventually, you know, the bell will grow. And then they're forming the layers and structure of a complete tooth. And it absolutely doesn't just happen. It needs a specific environment and it has to be coaxed by the body in order for it to work. So the researchers had to replicate this process in the lab and it requires more than just putting the right cells together. It requires the right environment. And they came up with something that mimics the body's extracellular matrix, which supports the cell viability and enables this slow coordinated signaling necessary for the tissue growth to take place. And that's where this hydrogel stuff comes into play. So the researchers at King's College London, they created this special gel-like material that's made from gelatin that acts as a support structure for growing teeth in the lab. So they used a chemical technique called click chemistry to connect parts of the gel in a precise way using two ingredients, tetrazine and norbarine. Have you guys heard of those two chemicals?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' I've heard of tetrazine.

'''J:''' Right. Okay. So there's these two chemicals, ingredients that they're using to make this happen. So by changing how much gelatin they used and adjusting the balance of the tetrazine and the norbarine, they were able to control how stiff or soft the gel was and how much it could swell and how quickly it released the signals to the cells inside. Right? You get a picture here. So it's like a lattice that they have control over where they can regulate its stiffness and how well, how firm it is, how much support it's giving. And this was like a thing where they were like just trying to get it through this particular keyhole so it works perfectly with how these two stem cells need to grow in order to successfully produce a tooth. Now the physical traits turned out to be critical here, right? Softer gels gave the dental stem cells room to talk to each other and arrange themselves into early tooth-like structures, which are called tooth organoids. I've never heard of that before. Tooth organoids.

'''B:''' Cool.

'''S:''' Well, you've heard of organoids because you've talked about it on the show.

'''J:''' Of course I've heard of organoids, but tooth organoids, it's like a doll that I would play with or a kid's, a boy's toy from the 90s. You know what I mean?

'''E:''' I've heard of cavity.

'''J:''' Remember the Micronauts? You guys remember those?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, sure.

'''J:''' Tooth organoids.

'''C:''' I don't remember that.

'''J:''' So gels that were too stiff made it harder for the cells to...

'''E:''' That's okay, Cara.

'''J:''' All right. So they tested all different types of gels and changing the stiffness of these gels. And what they found was if the gel was too stiff, it made it harder for the cells to develop properly. So the best results came from a gel that was made with 8% gelatin and a 0.5 to 1 ratio of the tetrazine and the norbumine. Within eight days, this setup that they came up with consistently produced organized cell structures that showed the early building blocks of real teeth. And that is it right there. That is the incredible feat that they did. It's easy for me to talk about this and basically talking here for a couple of minutes about something that was an incredible amount of time and energy and research that it took to get to the point where they realized the environment that needed to be there and how to simulate that environment. The researchers confirmed that the tooth organoid formation was happening using a couple of techniques, histological staining and fluorescein imaging, right? These are just ways for them to be able to kind of see what's going on inside of the gel. Only the softer hydrogel group produced organized structures that had both of the two types of stem cells needed. And they also were able to detect that they were interacting properly. And this indicated that the scaffolding that they created successfully replicated the signaling environment of natural tooth formation because stem cells need to communicate with the environment that they're in and other stem cells in order to do the things that they do to build basically any part of our biology. So when you think about it, to grow a tooth, there's a little microcosm universe that has to exist there in order for everything to be just right in order for the cells to function the proper way to do what we want them to do. So this was a very difficult thing that they pulled off. Now, the hydrogels that had higher stiffness produced either poorly organized tissue or they failed to generate the tooth organoids at all, right? They couldn't, it just didn't work. So the conclusion here is that the physical characteristics of the hydrogel scaffolding that they were able to figure out, it directly impacted the developmental outcomes. And therefore, and the good news is now that they can go on to the next step with moving on to the next phase here, which is actually going to be to fully grow the tooth. So the team said that they haven't implanted any lab-grown teeth into a living subject yet, but their work demonstrates they basically created a bioengineered tooth, at least in the early stages. It's possible. And this was the hard part. This was the part I think that if this didn't work, nothing was going to work. And they were able to actually make it happen, which is fantastic. So the next round of research will focus on developing methods to transplant these organoids into the jaw and guide their full maturation into a functional tooth. So I don't know, man, it doesn't sound like it's that far away. Hopefully once they do this, the body will take over and actually finish the job. According to the authors of the study though, they said this approach could definitely someday offer a biological alternative to regular dental procedures. You go into the dentist, they probably would have to take samples of your biology to grow the culture, say, to get that beginning thing happening. And it's like a little implant that they put in there that you probably can't even feel because it's tiny.

'''B:''' Yeah, but in your jaw.

'''J:''' And they pop it in there. Yeah. Hell yeah, Bob. They pop it in there. And you know what? They take out the root canal, they pop this in there, and I don't know how long it would take for your body to grow a tooth, but imagine a tooth just comes up and out of your gum and you've got a new tooth.

'''B:''' Yeah, but Jay, it may be functional. But my question is, is it aesthetic? Is it just like some freaky snaggle tooth that works, but you don't want to smile because it's like, what's happening in there?

'''J:''' Well, the real question, Bob, is can you grow vampire teeth?

'''E:''' Or shark teeth.

'''J:''' Yes, or shark teeth. Imagine they just keep folding out like shark teeth. That would be freaking awesome. All right, but all kidding aside, I know I'm being enthusiastic about this, but I happen to be like, I'm a big toothbrusher and teeth, you know, I take care of my teeth. You know what I mean? I really do. You know, there's nothing better than having a clean mouth and dental, you know, having your dentistry, your mouth be healthy is very important. Lots of things can go wrong in your health if you don't have healthy teeth. And you know, it's been documented, you know, they're saying that heart disease could be affected by the health of your teeth and the cleanliness. You get cavities and you have like, you know, that going on in your mouth, not only does it give you bad breath, but it is a health risk. So I just think this is awesome. I really hope that, you know, my kids at least get to experience this if they ever have any major problems, which everyone will, you know, most people have some type of thing go wrong. You know, you can't really get through unless you're like a complete, completely religiously like going in there and flossing and taking care of your teeth from childhood.

'''C:''' But even then, yeah, even then it doesn't always matter because a lot of this stuff is genetic.

'''J:''' Yeah, you're right.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' What bacteria do you happen to have living in your mouth?

'''J:''' I asked my, the last time I got a tooth cleaning, well, I've talked to the hygienists on and off, like just out of curiosity, my whole life, usually make friends with them as they're in there. You know how they make small talk?

'''E:''' They're in there.

'''J:''' But I talk to them because they see.

'''E:''' They're all up and in there.

'''J:''' And I had a hygienist tell me, I said, come on, what was the worst, what was the worst thing you ever saw? You know, and the first thing she did, she went, oh, you know, she was like, oh, oh, that reaction. She goes, the person had not taken care of their teeth at all. And all of the tartar and the buildup, which can be as hard as your teeth, you know, like it's unbelievable like that stuff that grows on your teeth.

'''B:''' Calculus.

'''J:''' Right. She said that when she tried to do the initial cleaning for the person that the back, like the inside of their teeth, like the backside of their teeth, there were no bumps or ridges from their teeth. It was all smooth. From the buildup of that material, yeah. And when they cleaned it out and it took, it was an incredible amount of work and there was lots of bleeding and terrible stuff going on. The person touched their tongue to the back of their teeth and commented, oh my God, I feel bumps in my mouth. Right?

'''E:''' As opposed to this kind of wad of crud that was otherwise occupying that space.

'''J:''' You can't feel the difference between one tooth to the next. There's this one slick little situation going on there. And I guarantee you that's not even close to the worst stuff that's going on. But I mean, that, you gotta take care of your teeth, folks. I mean, they will take care of you. You know, you don't wanna like have chewing problems. Can you imagine like every time you chew, it's painful? That's a nightmare.

'''B:''' I want a new damn biome. I want a biome that is benign and doesn't create goddamn tartar and calculus on my teeth. That's what I want.

'''C:''' I want a biome that makes them like, I don't know, calcified better. Like, I want a biome that's strong and strengthened. Yeah, that's not just benign. That's like beneficial. That would be great.

'''S:''' Yeah, can you imagine if you replace all the oral flora? Firstly, get rid of anything that secretes acid, anything that will eat away your enamel, anything that will give you bad breath, anything that will cause a buildup of the tartar, and replace them with ones that will actually protect your mouth, take care of it, make it smell nice, and repair your enamel.

'''C:''' It would be amazing.

'''E:''' If I made a product like that, I would call it tartar sauce.

'''J:''' Guys, keep in mind, you taking care of your teeth goes an incredibly long way. Get a cleaning a couple of times a year. You know, go to the dentist, listen to what they have to say. They don't just tell you, they're telling you about your oral health, not just like, how's your tooth doing? You know what I mean? It's like, they're checking your gums or looking for cancer. You know, this is an important thing to do.

'''B:''' And Jay, my hygienist told me that you could be perfect, brush floss every day, and you still need to go get a cleaning, because it only helps slow it down. The calculus will still build up, no matter how good you are. So, you gotta still go in, no matter how good, like twice a year, at least.

'''E:''' I went last month. My hygienist said my gums look great.

'''C:''' Oh, good.

'''E:''' Thank you, because I pay attention.

{{anchor|news_item3}}
=== RFK on Autism (40:22) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/how-should-we-talk-about-autism/
|article_title = How Should We Talk About Autism - NeuroLogica Blog
|publication = theness.com
}}

'''S:''' So guys, have any of you heard what RFK Jr. had to say about autism in the last couple weeks?

'''J:''' Yeah, it was all over that stage.

'''B:''' Was it something new and stupid, or old and stupid? What now?

'''S:''' Well, what he said was old, but he did say it recently. It's bad, it's really bad. So, it's vintage RFK Jr., right? He, as I like to say, I didn't make up this term, so I forget who said it first. He uses scientific data as a drunk uses a lamppost for support, rather than illumination. Yeah, he makes a lawyer's case for whatever his narrative is, because that's what he is. He's not a scientist, he's a conspiracy theorist, he's a lawyer, and that's what he's doing. So, he said, this is how he characterized autism. He's like, you have a normal child who regresses into autism when they're two years old, and these are kids who will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem.

'''B:''' Never write poetry.

'''S:''' They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.

'''C:''' What?

'''S:''' And he goes on to say, so I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami, or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don't understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors.

'''E:''' Wow, oh boy.

'''S:''' He further said that he's gonna figure out what the cause of autism is by September, so don't worry about it. He's gonna have it all smoothed out.

'''E:''' Oh, good, why is he waiting?

'''B:''' Finally.

'''S:''' He's gonna surpass 50 years of research in five months.

'''C:''' God, there's so much, Steve. There's so much.

'''S:''' I know, it's a tsunami of misinformation is what it is. So let's break this down a little bit. So first of all, he's talking about autism, and he's describing the absolutely most extreme end of the spectrum, right? Because autism is a spectrum. It's the autism spectrum disorder, which is interesting, the fact that they, I understand why they include such a broad spectrum under one diagnostic name, because there is a neurological similarity going on. There's a phenomenologically speaking, there is some commonality there, but it does create a lot of confusion, right? If you're at one end of the spectrum, you have people who are above average in intelligence, completely functional, very successful in life, doing all the things he says that people with autism will never do, but they are just neurodivergent, right? They're not neurotypical.

'''C:''' Yeah, but let's be fair, Steve. Those people usually are not diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

'''S:''' No, no, but increasingly they are, Cara. That's part of the point here.

'''C:''' But what I'm saying is that part of the diagnostic criteria is that you require support. So if you don't require any support, you can't qualify for diagnosis.

'''S:''' I didn't say these people don't require any support. You can have all of those things that I said, but still have different sets of strengths and weaknesses. You still may have difficulty with social engagement, have difficulty with maintaining your cognitive attention, et cetera.

'''C:''' I just wanted to clarify, because it kind of sounded like you were saying they were high-functioning across everything.

'''S:''' No, they're not. Otherwise, they wouldn't have a diagnosis.

'''C:''' Otherwise, they don't have autism spectrum disorder.

'''S:''' Yeah, as I say, they're neurodivergent. That's what I meant by that, and that neurodivergence can include lots of things that are just, they have different challenges than people who are neurotypical.

'''C:''' But that's the pop psychology concern that I have lately is that so many people are self-diagnosing ASD because they're neurodivergent when really they have ADHD or some other form of neurodivergence, and they're like, oh, but I'm on the spectrum, and it's confusing.

'''S:''' You shouldn't self-diagnose, and we don't have that. But the point being is that you can get diagnosed with autism beyond the spectrum and be extremely high-functioning, even though you do need some, you might need accommodations for the challenges that you have. And then there's the entire spectrum down to people who are nonverbal, right? So he's talking about that end of the spectrum. We struggle with language here, which I'm gonna get into in a minute, because again, because we're trying to capture this broad spectrum under one label, there's no way to make everybody happy all at once. And when you say, well, this person has severe autism or a level three autism or a profound autism, the people at the neurodivergent end of the spectrum that I described, like, well, that implies that it's a bad thing, or that even just using the term severe, they take exception to it, pathologizes it. And so it makes it challenging to even discuss it. And there's legitimate points on all sides here. There's no perfect answer because there are just different trade-offs. We don't have the perfect language for it.

'''C:''' I see a lot of parallels with deafness, don't you?

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. The deaf community says, this is part of us. We are deaf. This is our identity. We have a deaf culture. We don't need to be fixed. We don't need to be cured. We are what we are. And it's the same thing. The neurodivergent community, they support each other with that kind of approach. It was like, yeah, we're not diseased. We are just different.

'''C:''' Yet there still is a requirement of support, even in the deaf community, right? Like if you are deaf, you need closed captioning in certain situations. You need types of support.

'''S:''' Some of them will say, Cara, that the only reason they need quote-unquote support is because civilization was built by neurotypicals for neurotypicals and they're neurodivergent trying to survive in a neurotypical world that's not adapted to them. So-

'''C:''' Absolutely, yeah. And that's in some ways how you can define support.

'''S:''' There's some legitimacy to that as well.

'''C:''' I agree.

'''B:''' Right-handed, left-handed.

'''S:''' Right, it's like considering left-handedness a disorder because the world is made by right-handed people.

'''C:''' Right. But which is why the levels are, at least in the DSM, defined as level one requiring support, level two requiring substantial rapport, and level three requiring very substantial support.

'''S:''' So that's how the language has evolved, the level of support you need, not the level of disease or disability-

'''C:''' Exactly, yeah.

'''S:''' Or severity or whatever. There's high support and higher support or low support, whatever. So in any case, RFK Jr. is living in 2005, right? He's living in a world before we even had this conversation, and he is looking at autism through the lens of the anti-vaccine movement, 100%.

'''C:''' Oh, that's a great way, yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' Everything he just said is from, is the, again, we dealt with this in 2005 from the anti-vaccine movement. He is still locked into that narrative, that his narrative is you have normal children, right? Typical children, healthy children, who then regress into autism and it destroys their lives, it destroys their families, and this is something that is the environment that we are doing to them. That's literally what he said during that talk. That's his narrative.

'''C:''' And his narrative, let's be honest, is propagandizing something in a really major way. He's describing level three autism in the same breath that he's talking about all these new cases and some sort of epidemic, but all these new cases are not level three cases.

'''S:''' Exactly, exactly. So that's one-

'''C:''' It's infuriating.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's one of the problems with what he's saying. He's saying that there's, the autism diagnoses are quote-unquote surging. Epidemic, wrong term, it implies, epidemic is a term you use if you're trying to imply that there's an environmental cause, or that it's contagious.

'''C:''' And an infectious disease.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's contagious in some way. But even if you're saying, yeah, there's an increase in the autism diagnoses, that's a fact, nobody denies that. But what the evidence shows is a few things. One is that it could mostly be explained by diagnostic substitution, increased surveillance, and the increased availability of support, of services. And every way you look at the question, that's sort of the answer that we get. And the best studies are ones that take a look at different cohorts and apply the exact same diagnostic criteria. And they find that when you do that, right, you look at people from 20 years ago versus today, and you apply the exact same diagnostic criteria, the rate is the same, right? It's flat. The difference is not in a real increase. It's an-

'''B:''' That's a huge point.

'''S:''' It's a shift in diagnostic patterns in several ways. But the evidence also shows that the increase in the number of diagnoses is way skewed towards the level one end of the spectrum, right, the-

'''C:''' Yeah, the people that weren't caught before.

'''B:''' Right, exactly.

'''C:''' The people that we didn't, that we just go like, oh yeah, that person-

'''E:''' That's where you would expect them to.

'''C:''' Doesn't make eye contact. Yeah, exactly, and we just didn't diagnose them.

'''S:''' They would have had no diagnosis or they would have had some other diagnosis. There is-

'''C:''' Or like, I just interviewed a wonderful woman on my podcast recently who specializes in neuroimaging, and she talked all about the female autism spectrum kind of pattern and how it's just been missed historically.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''C:''' Everything, it was all about boys, boys, boys, boys, boys. So we just didn't recognize it in young girls who were more trained in sort of-

'''S:''' It manifests differently.

'''C:''' Yeah, totally.

'''S:''' We don't diagnose as many heart attacks in women because the criteria are all male-centric. It's all an artifact.

'''C:''' And so the fact that we're getting better at this is a good thing. It's a good thing that we're diagnosing it more.

'''E:''' Oh, that's the point.

'''S:''' There was an increase at the level three end of the spectrum. The profound is what some people call profound autism end of the spectrum, but it's much, much, much, much less. And again, that's explained by diagnostic substitution. These people were diagnosed 30, 40, 50 years ago. They were just diagnosed with something else.

'''C:''' Oh, like with schizophrenia or catatonia, yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''S:''' Schizophrenia or just mental retardation, you know, just something even less specific, just not autism. So, but he conflates it all. He says there's a surge at the mild end of the spectrum, and therefore there must be a cause at the severe end of the spectrum, but he completely gets it wrong. Because again, he's not a scientist, he's not a critical thinker, he's a conspiracy theorist, and he's a crank. And he completely gets it wrong. But again, he is starting with this 30-year-old narrative that is right out of the anti-vaccine movement. So what about the regressed into autism thing? So first of all, he's getting that wrong on multiple layers as well. First of all, most people with autism do not regress. It's like 20% or so, 30%. And what that doesn't mean, when we say regress, that's just any loss of milestones or any loss of function. It doesn't mean that they were typical or normal to start, right? He's misinterpreting regression as going from not having autism to having autism.

'''C:''' But not just like the autism manifesting in a worse way.

'''S:''' It's like if you have autism and then you have more difficulty with language. You have autism, you have more difficulty with socialization as you get older. That's a complicated phenomenon. It has to do with, things can get more challenging as you get older, but there may be also something in a subset of people in terms of what's going on. But in any case, they're not going from not having autism to having autism. But he's misinterpreting it that way deliberately. Because again, this is all about blaming vaccines. Let's not forget that, right? But we know from data that if you look back at evidence that we have, or if you follow cohorts longitudinally, that you can see clinically the signs of autism as early as six months. So not two, not two years old. And you can see it in, if you look at the brain, and if you look at biomarkers, you could see it, guess how early you could see it?

'''C:''' Oh, like in utero.

'''S:''' In utero, in the womb.

'''B:''' I was right.

'''S:''' In the fetal stage. So it's, and also there's pretty overwhelming evidence at this point that it is a complicated multi-gene genetic disorder. It is dominantly genetic. There's like 150, 200 genes that have been implicated. And here's the thing, a lot of those genes, they're not bad alleles or bad genes. They're not like, oh, if you have this, the only thing it does is increase your risk of autism. A lot of them are beneficial in other ways, right? That's kind of how evolution works, right? People who get sickle cell anemia, that gene persists because it also protects you from malaria. It's the same kind of thing, where genes that might make you more intelligent or whatever, high-functioning in some ways, make it more likely for you to develop neurodivergent traits as well. It's complicated, it's super complicated. But it's not going away, it's mostly genetic, right? So we know it's really, it's not increasing. It's not happening to children who are not, who do not have autism in age two. They're not regressing from non-autistic to autistic. So he basically gets every aspect of this story wrong. He basically pissed off everybody with autism, and everybody who is connected to the neurodivergent community. And now he's selling this complete snake oil thing of he's gonna find the cause of autism by September. Again, everyone, and he hired, of course, he hired an anti-vaccine fake doctor, charlatan, Guyer, to do the study. Everyone knows what the outcome of this fake study is gonna do.

'''C:''' Of course. He's starting with the conclusion.

'''S:''' He's starting with the conclusion, absolutely. That's what he does. That is what he does. There is a wrinkle to this, though. While everyone's getting pissed off at RFK, I read an interesting opinion piece, op-ed in the New York Times, by a mother of a child with profound autism, who's like, sometimes she feels like that end of the spectrum gets lost in the discussion, right? And the lost in the neurodivergent approach. Which includes things like, we don't need a cure, we just need accommodation. And she's like, my child, yes, he needs accommodation, but he's, again, non-verbal, not independent for anything. And it's like, this is not just neurodivergence. My child is impaired. And absolutely, this is something that I would want to prevent or treat if we had a treatment for it. So let's not lose sight of that. And I do think, what's the solution here? I don't know, because again, it's different trade-offs. I do think we need to make it more clear, though, that autism is such a broad spectrum. And we might need to have more distinct subset names that we use.

'''C:''' Well, and we used to, but we got away from that.

'''S:'' I know, we went in the wrong direction.

'''C:''' Yeah, we used to say Asperger's.

'''B:''' What were they?

'''S:''' Like Asperger's, yeah.

'''C:''' We would say Asperger's for, no, for individuals who were verbal. I mean, that's the general distinction.

'''S:''' It's now level one autism, basically.

'''C:''' Now it's level one autism. Whereas if somebody is level three, for example, they would probably have all these specifications on their diagnosis. They would have, perhaps, with accompanying intellectual impairment, with accompanying language impairment, with catatonia, maybe, or with, so there are all these specifiers. But that minutia gets lost, you're right.

'''S:''' But the label, I go into this in some detail on Neurologica, but just very, very quickly, how we make diagnoses depends on what you're using those diagnoses for, because there's different ways you could make diagnoses. Then again, they're not one's right and the other one's wrong, they're just different trade-offs. I feel like we've moved in the direction of a diagnostic scheme that was designed by researchers and not necessarily clinicians, and certainly not people who are dealing with the public or regulations. And so, you know what I mean? It's like, they're emphasizing what is helpful for research, not necessarily what's helpful in terms of dealing with this as a society. And so we end up, right? So we end up with a diagnostic scheme that's confusing in every context except for research, where it's emphasizing the phenomenological.

'''C:''' Yeah, I think the DSM is trying to please both.

'''S:''' It is, it is, but I remember very distinctly the director of the NIMH complaining that the DSM, that's the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Psychiatric Diagnoses, that it was specifically blaming it for problems with research, because it was not optimized for research sufficiently.

'''C:''' And that's the thing, it has to be both, because what we know about what to do clinically comes from the research, and what we do research-wise comes from clinical feedback. And it's like they have to talk to each other.

'''S:''' es, but you can't optimize it for both.

'''C:''' No, I know, and that's the hard thing. Yeah, something's got to give. And we've moved away, I mean, this is really in the weeds, but like really quickly, we've moved away from more, DSM was historically very categorical. If you have these things, you have this. And now we've moved into more dimensional, which is more clinical. I mean, it's like, it is a move in the right direction, but it maybe hasn't gone far enough.

'''S:''' So, yeah, so it's tricky, it's tricky, but there's one thing we can say for sure, and that RFK has no idea what he's talking about, but he's worse than ignorant, full of a misinformation and a completely biased narrative that is all about being anti-vaccine, essentially. He is a dangerous, dangerous quack, that guy, really.

'''C:''' Yes, yes, yes, yes.

'''S:''' All right, let's move on.

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== AI Designed Gravitational Wave Detectors (58:31) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://scitechdaily.com/when-machines-dream-ai-designs-strange-new-tools-to-listen-to-the-cosmos/
|article_title = https://scitechdaily.com/when-machines-dream-ai-designs-strange-new-tools-to-listen-to-the-cosmos/
|publication = scitechdaily.com
}}

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us how AI is gonna help transform astronomy.

'''B:''' Sure, man, I really dig this one. All right, guys, what if researchers handed off the redesign of the most sensitive instrument we've ever created to an AI? That's exactly what researchers have done for gravitational wave detectors, and these new designs seem better than any we have come up with. The next gravitational wave detectors we build might not just represent the next generation, but a leap to the one after that. And imagine if after the baby boomer generation, we went directly to millennials. This would absolutely not be like that. The paper is published on Physical Review X, Digital Discovery of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors. It's a good read. Most of it, of course, is jargon everywhere, but some parts of it are eminently understandable, at least by me. So gravitational wave detectors, we've gone over them many times, so let's do a brief overview. They detect those mind-bogglingly faint ripples in space-time caused by accelerating masses. Our current detectors like LIGO can now detect the ripples caused by neutron stars or some black holes that are orbiting each other ever closer until they collide. We can detect them, and we have. To do this, they use laser beams at right angles, L-shaped, right? L-shaped, they say, to act as interferometers. Now, gravitational waves change the length of one of the beams, changing the interference pattern between the two beams that we can detect and then interpret and figure out what exactly caused them. Now, these machines are fiendishly complex, but so sensitive, they can detect changes less than the width of a frickin' proton, less than the width of a proton. Incredible. We have plans for future gravitational wave detectors, but they use tried-and-true design principles for the most part, even the ones that are space-based. The lead researcher here is Dr. Mario Kren, who helms the artificial scientist lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. For this research, he and his team joined forces with LIGO researchers, which of course makes sense, because that's their babies. So together, they made Urania. Hmm, or is it Urania? U-R-A-N-I-A. Urania is pretty slick. It's not an LLM, not a large-language model, or it's not even a neural net. It's based on machine learning methods, and that means that it's a subset of AI that uses algorithms and statistical methods which learn from data to make decisions, which is just a basic overview of what that is. Now, Urania doesn't look at gravitational wave detectors and try to improve it. This is key. It starts with a performance goal, and then it works backward to discover the optical designs that can reach that goal. That's critical here. So it's like an evolutionary algorithm. There's a lot of similarities between that and evolutionary algorithms that are based on physics that incrementally builds better and better gravitational wave detectors based on the performance feedback with every generation that's created. So what did Urania discover? What do you think, guys? Tell me what you think would be the first thing researchers would love for Urania to discover, the first thing. I would wanna see, and what they saw was, the gravitational wave detectors that we already have, like basically, hey, here's LIGO. That was very, very important because if it designs LIGO from scratch, that means that you're doing something right because you know LIGO works when you use it every day. And if it says, hey, this will work, then you know that you're probably, it's gonna increase your confidence level that you were on the right track with Urania, okay? So that's exactly what they got. They got designs that they know they've already created and they know it works.

'''S:''' Yeah, so that's like any model, the first thing you wanna do is show that it predicts what you already know.

'''B:''' Right.

'''E:''' That's fair.

'''S:''' That's not enough, that's not enough. That just means that at least there's nothing broken about it.

'''B:''' Right, so yeah, so it gives you, so this gives, the fact that it predicted or created designs that you know already work gives you confidence that other designs that it might come up with are probably, probably have a greater chance of actually being actually decent. And Urania did absolutely do that. But it made designs, the cool thing here is that it created these designs that nobody thought of and nobody probably would have thought of maybe ever or for a very long time. And I'll describe some of the designs that they came up with. It had designs that were very, that had very non-intuitive light paths. So they weren't the typical L-shaped, right angle laser paths. They were like weirdly intricate nested paths that don't use any type of normal beam splitter logic, right? Some designs had optical components that were arranged in such a way that no designer would ever put them together that way. It just didn't make any sense. So the optimization logic for some of the designs were totally opaque to the researchers. They're like, why this optimization design doesn't make, doesn't seem to make any sense. Why would this optimize this detector? They didn't know. The next step, the next critical step here was testing the designs. And they, of course, they have a way of testing them without spending millions of dollars by building them and testing them that way, right? You don't want to do that. That's ridiculous. They would have built 50 of these. So to do that, to test these designs that Urania came up with, they use the tools and the simulations that they use, that they already use for LIGO upgrades. And they use these tools to test other observatories like Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescope, which is a next generation interferometric gravitational wave detector. So we use those tools that we know that they work extremely well. And they know that these tools can say, this design will most likely work. And you can make, you can spend, it's worth risking millions of dollars because the tests have been so successful. So these are the kind of tests that they brought to bear on these new designs, on these weird, intricate, bizarre, unintuitive, non-intuitive designs that Urania came up with. That's what the tools that they used. The result of this was designs that were shown to be using these tools that were not only better than current instruments, but better than anything that we have on the drawing board by like two generations beyond anything that they were even thinking of. So one of the designs that Urania made extended the sensitivity band deeper into the sub 10 Hertz range. So that sub 10 Hertz range would be critical for observing heavier black hole mergers earlier in their co-orbiting in spiral. And that's one of the problems with current gravitational wave detectors is the mass range of black holes that you can detect. So this would help with that. But one of the most intriguing findings had really novel topologies, you know, design, detector designs that looked like they could expand our current observable volume in space up to 50 times our current detectors. Because right now these detectors can find, you know, amazingly faint gravitational waves from certain size black holes, but you can't just detect them at any distance in space because eventually it's gonna be so attenuated, we can't even detect it. These designs or some of these designs seem to be able to potentially increase our observable volume in space up to 50 times, which is amazing. 50 times, that's incredible. Okay, so how exciting is this? This is, I think it's pretty amazing. This reminds me specifically of Ted Chiang's short story. Gotta talk about my buddy Ted Chiang here, one of my favorite authors. He created a super short, short story called The Evolution of Human Science. And the parallels here are really interesting. So in his story, human science discoveries stop. And it has stopped because there is these benign metahumans that have been born, you know, genetically engineered. And these metahumans make all the new discoveries and they make all the inventions because they're just so ridiculously smart. But they're also incomprehensible to us. So in order for neurotypical humans, if you will, to learn any new scientific principles, what they have to do is they have to employ what's called hermeneutics, which Cara had mentioned, I think, a couple years ago. Awesome word. So they employ hermeneutics. And that means that they try to interpret and understand the science and technology of the metahumans who are so smart that we can't understand what they create or publish. So we have to try to infer new scientific principles by the objects that they create and what little documentation there is that's comprehensible. So that's the story. And it seems like that's kind of like this era of scientific discovery that we're creating here with AI, we're kind of going down that road to a certain extent. And let me just say here a quote by Crenn, who seems to agree with me. He said, we are in an era where machines can discover new superhuman solutions in science. And the task of humans is to understand what the machine has done. This will certainly become a very prominent part of the future of science. So very interesting point of view there that I obviously agree with. So humans, let me just try to describe this in another way. Humans have relatively easy access to a portion of the design space for gravitational wave detectors, right? We've created them, we've theorized them, we use them. So we kind of have this ability to access a portion of this design space. However, we don't know how big that is, but we obviously can have some insight into a part of it. But we're also in a bit of a straitjacket of old assumptions and design traditions, right? And even the limitations of the human brain is also kind of a straitjacket for solving some of these issues. So these AI tools don't have these limitations. It just optimizes based on physics and performance goals. That's what it does. So how much more of that total possible design space will they see? I wanna see that. I wanna see how far they can go in creating these designs that we will, may have never even dreamt up in a million years. So the researchers took, the next step was the researchers took the top 50 designs and put them in a catalog called the Detector Zoo. Now this is public. Other researchers, other scientific institutions can look at these designs, study them, and learn from them, and maybe even refine them, and hopefully, eventually even construct some of them. So I'll end my talk here with a ChatGPT quote on this topic, which I liked. So my ChatGPT said to me, he's like, it's like we taught AI the language of mirrors and lasers, and it spoke back to us in a dialect we barely understand, which I thought was a pretty good quote. When it said that to me, I said, where did you get that quote? Give me the reference to that quote. And it's like, and my ChatGPT said, I thought it up myself. This is from me. Probably telling me the truth. I'm not, you can't be 100% sure, but.

'''E:''' Thought Mark Twain said that.

'''B:''' There you go. No, it was Abraham Lincoln. So yeah, this is really fascinating. We're starting to see this, Steve, you'll agree. We're starting to see this in other fields where the assistance that we are getting from AI is quite dramatic in scientific discovery. And I think we're just barely scratching the surface here. And this, to me, this Urania was one of the better examples that I've come across, and it's also being applied to particle physics and quantum physics as well. So I am really excited over the next 10 or 20 years to see what these machine learning tools, these AI tools can come up with and design and think about in a way that we may never be able to do. We may struggle, and I assume in the future we're gonna be struggling even harder as these designs become even more complex and obtuse to our way of thinking. It's gonna be fascinating to have these advances that we may never even be able to figure out. We know that they work, but like those characters in Ted Chiang's novel, we know that they work amazingly well we just can't understand at all what's going on inside.

'''S:''' Bob, can we use this method to design a better hover bike?

'''B:''' I would think absolutely. You just give it a lot of data on hover bike data and studies and everything, and I think it probably could come up with one that we never would have thought of.

'''S:''' All right, thanks.

{{anchor|wtn}}
{{anchor|futureWTN}}
== Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:11:27) ==

'''S:''' Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' All right guys, last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] Okay.

'''E:''' Dr. Zayas would an ape make a human doll that talked?

'''J:''' A listener named Benjamin Davu said, hey guys, Ben here, the Frenchie from Japan. I think I got this one. This is a bamboo leaf held between two thumbs and the user blows on it to make it vibrate. Also seems like a pinched rubber balloon, but I really think it's the leaf. This one and a ton of people guessed that this was a blade of grass in a similar situation. This is not correct, but there is a definite similarity between that noise and, you know, basically creating like a reed instrument with some type of plant or grass or whatever. Another listener named Braden Ellis said, I think this week's sound is a baby goat having its teeth brushed. That sounds like a video that I missed. But sure, yeah, I could see that. Ben Borger wrote in and said, hello everyone, this week's noisy is a rubber chicken. The change in pitch is controlled by how hard you squeeze the rubber chicken. I've had so many people email in the rubber chicken answer. I think this might be the first time I mentioned it. I'm not sure, but it does kind of sound like a rubber chicken a little bit. And I think it was a good guess.

'''C:''' I don't think it sounds like a rubber chicken. To me, whatever it is, I do not want it to be behind me on the airplane.

'''J:''' Yeah, of course not, of course not.

'''C:''' It would be a nightmare flight.

'''J:''' Alexis Collins wrote in and said to Jay, we'd like to listen to your podcast with our dad in Kildare, Ireland. We think this week's noisy is a rollout party blower that has a small hole in it at the end. You know, those little party things you blow and the thing rolls out and it goes bleh.

'''C:''' Oh yeah.

'''J:''' It's not that, but there's a little bit of that in there. I can hear that. Another listener wrote in named Stephen. Stephen said, Jay, it's a cat pretending to be a baby. My cat is always pretending to be a baby. So I want to hear that. So if your cat pretends to be a baby and makes baby noises, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. Listener named Omar Moinuddin. Omar, you got to tell me how to pronounce your last name. He says, hey Jay, this noisy sounds just like my two-year-old when you give him a mic and a speaker. He puts his mouth directly on the mic and makes these sounds. So this, that guess is actually not that far from what's going on here. Just keep that in mind. And then, you know, the closest one that we got was a listener named Michael Saucedo. Michael said, hey Jay, it sounds like a small mammal. I'm going to say a porcupine getting its belly tickled. Okay, so what this actually is, is this is a baby otter playing with its hand and its mouth.

'''B:''' What?

'''J:''' It's a little baby otter who's using his hand to kind of go like that in his mouth. Listen again, and you'll hear it.

'''B:''' Yeah, Jay, I caught a little bit of the la, la, la, la, la.

'''S:''' I think that's utterly ridiculous.

'''J:''' Yes, it is.

'''E:''' Thank you. Steve did the heavy lifting.

'''J:''' Baby otter.

'''C:''' I know, I love how you're like, thanks, man.

'''S:''' I got you covered, Evan.

'''C:''' Solid.

'''E:''' You're a good man, Steve.

'''J:''' But I would rather have a baby otter than one of those, what is it, a French bulldog? You know the ones that talk a lot?

'''C:''' Oh, they do sound like that.

'''J:''' Yeah, man.

'''C:''' They're like, na, na, na, na. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''J:''' All sorts of crazy stuff, those dogs. There's one of them I like in particular. This woman carries him around in a baby carriage, and he goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, literally sounds like a guy with no teeth saying blah, blah, blah. Incredible.

'''C:''' Oh, I know that lady on the internet, and she's always like, you're embarrassing me, stop.

'''J:''' Oh, that's, yeah, my son and I listen to him all the time. He's the one that did that song. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Right, if you know it, you know it.

'''C:''' Yes, yes, that one, in the car, yeah.

'''J:''' That dog is awesome, but never would I own one of those dogs, just never, because they are so vocal and bad. They sound like they're angry and upset all the time. All right, I have a new noisy for you guys. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Kenny Haberman. It's a little long, but you gotta hear the whole thing. [plays Noisy]

'''B:''' Wow.

'''E:''' That's the hover bike.

'''J:''' Yeah, I love those types of sounds, they are so freaking, I don't know, they're just very powerful. Anyway, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email us at theskepticsguide.org, did I say that correctly? Email us at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. Now you might wonder, Jay, how did you screw that up after doing Who's That Noisy for so long? I am so busy that I can't see straight, getting ready for the conference, I've got so many details that I've got to handle, but the thing that you need to hear from me right now is that it's still not too late to go. You could hear this within a few days of when this show comes out, and easily buy some tickets and show up in White Plains and have the time of your life. We are really excited, I mean, we just, we're going through all the details, you know, we have nine people involved as directors for this conference, and, you know, we're just constantly upping the ante on all the bits that we're doing and refining everything, and it's really, really coming out awesome. I'm so psyched, guys, I can't wait, we're going to have such a good time. So if you're interested, just go to [https://notaconcon.com/ notaconcon.com], or you can go to [https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ theskepticsguide.org], and there'll be a button on there on the homepage for you to get more information. But tickets are available, we'd love to have you. A couple more quick things, you could join our mailing list, you can go to theskepticsguide.org, and we have a way for you to join our mailing list on there. We send out a mailer every week that goes over everything that the SGU has done the previous week. You could also become a patron to help show your support, especially during these times when skepticism and critical thinking need to be out there, you know, we are expanding the amount of things that we're doing, we have new shows that we're working on, I told you guys this, they're going to be happening over the next few months, we're very excited, but your support would help a lot, so go to [https://www.patreon.com/SkepticsGuide patreon.com/SkepticsGuide]. Steve, what else we got? We have the Kansas show.

'''S:''' Kansas.

'''J:''' Yeah. We will be in Kansas, we'll be not too far from Kansas City in a town called Lawrence, and we will be doing a private show, and we will be doing a skeptical extravaganza of special significance. That means the entire cast of the SGU, Cara, Evan, Bob, Steve, me, George, Rob, and if you look quick, you might catch a glimpse of Ian doing some fancy stuff behind the mixing board. Everybody loves Ian. Every single one of us thinks Ian is awesome, and he hates when I say this, but that's the truth.

'''E:''' He's listening right now.

'''C:''' That's why we love him.

'''J:''' And if you know, you know, but Ian might have another watermelon incident. You don't want to not be there, because if another cool thing like that happens again, you want to be on home plate to see it happen for yourself. Anyway, those dates, the weekend of September 19th, I believe both of our shows are happening on the Saturday of that weekend. Please consider coming. It's going to be a great time, and who knows when we'll be out to Kansas again. This might be a very long time, so please try to join us if you're local. There you go.

'''S:''' Thank you, Jay.

{{anchor|email}}
== Emails (1:19:32) ==


'''S:''' One really quick email. This one comes from Jim from Michigan, and Jim writes, thanks for the informative and entertaining show. I had a friend recently question to me about miracles. I told him that I had not seen any evidence of a miracle. He then asked me if I believed the Big Bang Theory, not the show. I told him that I did and that it was, in my opinion, the most likely explanation for the beginning of our universe. He then stated that the cosmic inflation aspect violated our physics laws because it expanded faster than the speed of light. He stated that this would qualify as a miracle. I did not have a reply other than to thank him for giving me something to think about. I'm curious what your thoughts are regarding this. Keep up the good work. So what do you guys think?

'''B:''' That does not break any laws of physics because space can expand faster than light. You just can't move within that space faster than light.

'''S:''' Exactly. So the premise is wrong. It's a faulty premise.

'''B:''' Next letter.

'''S:''' But there's also a logical fallacy in there. What is that? The good bet whenever someone's claiming a miracle is what is a logical fallacy.

'''E:''' God of the gaps.

'''B:''' Yeah, the fact that we don't understand it, the fact that we don't understand something doesn't mean that you have to then...

'''C:''' Therefore God.

'''B:''' Therefore God. God of the gaps.

'''S:''' So, yeah, it's an argument from ignorance. The specific version of that being what we call a God of the gaps argument. You know, we insert God or a miracle into something that we don't currently understand. Could also frame it as confusing, currently unexplained with unexplainable. Like there's no possible way to explain it, therefore it's magic. But yeah, so the premise is wrong, but even if it were correct, even if we didn't currently understand it, that just means that we don't have a complete set of laws of physics for the universe, which we don't, right? Our laws are at present incomplete and things like the Big Bang are where those laws break down, right? We don't have a quantum gravity law in physics, for example. We do not yet have a theory of everything. So it's also like saying, well, black holes couldn't exist, therefore there are miracles. It's like, no, that's pointing in the direction of we need more complete physics in order to describe what happens in weird situations like black holes and the Big Bang. But in this case, he's not even up to bat because as Bob said, the universe can expand faster than the speed of light. That's not the same thing as traveling faster than the speed of light within the universe. So he got his premise wrong too. Okay, guys, let's go on with our interview. Double failure.

{{anchor|interview}}
== Interview with Melanie Trecek-King (1:22:04) ==
Website: www.ThinkingIsPower.com

'''S:''' Joining us now is Melanie Trecic-King. Melanie, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide.

'''MTH:''' Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

'''S:''' And Melanie, you're an associate professor of biology at Massasoit Community College and you are also an activist skeptic running the multiple things, Thinking is Power, would you say that's your main outlet?

'''MTH:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So tell us how you got started in all this and why did you decide to incorporate thiswhole skeptical thing into your academic career?

'''MTH:''' My background is ecology and I'm from the Midwest. And when my husband got a job across the country, I'm from Iowa, we moved across the country to Massachusetts. I started teaching at a community college and I love teaching at a community college, but I was finding myself teaching the science courses for people who don't want to be scientists when they grow up and love those courses. But I finally realized with as much as I love biology, that was probably not the best use of their time. And so I thought if I had a single semester to teach the average person what they need to know about science, what would that look like? And I'm a bit ashamed to say that I actually didn't know about the skeptic movement during that time. And so...

'''S:''' How long ago are we talking about?

'''MTH:''' Oh, this was five years ago, maybe six.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''MTH:''' Yeah, not very long. When I finally, when I found the skeptic movement, I found so many resources that I didn't know were there and I was incorporating basic concepts anyway, but this gave me so much more to include in class. And so yeah, then I started communicating that online on Thinking is Power, thinking maybe people who weren't my students would be interested. And yeah, that's where I am.

'''S:''' Just took off from there. Do you have a specialty within the whole scientific skeptical thing that you focus on or are you trying to really hit any issue? Like I said, a lot of your videos range from alternative medicine to more biological topics to climate change. Are you trying to cover it all or do you have a specialty?

'''MTH:''' I mean, so I think broadly speaking, my specialty would just be misinformation, but I joke that my science communication is for the normals. I mean, that's who my students are. They're just people who are mildly curious, don't have lots of time to spend looking into these things and are open to things. And so there's a lot of them out there. And so what I try and do is just take a lot of the different concepts that other people specialize in and then distill them to where maybe somebody who doesn't have a lot of time and interest can learn something about.

'''S:''' So starting off, say, five, six years ago, basically as just a scientist, a biologist, and then trying to get into the whole skeptical thing. How do you feel your science background prepared you for all of the content that is necessary to understand in order to fight misinformation and pseudoscience? Did you feel like, oh, you're basically, we're starting from scratch or did you feel well prepared for that transition?

'''MTH:''' That's a really good question. I feel like, so the class that I designed ended up being, it's four non-majors. But what I realized in the process was that I didn't know a lot. Like there was a lot about pseudoscience and science denial and conspiratorial thinking that I didn't know about and actually even basic philosophy of science. And so learning those things, I think, made me a better science educator. But then I actually think that we need to do a better job, I'd be curious your thoughts on this too, but we need to teach more science majors these things. We see way too many medical professionals falling for, for example, anti-vaccine or even thinking homeopathy works. And so I think we could do a better job teaching our future scientists. Me personally, I feel like my science background prepared me for a little niche within science, but not necessarily to help understand the misinformation in the science.

'''S:''' Yeah. I mean, I think that's my experience as well. All the critical thinking, media savvy, science versus pseudoscience, logical fallacies, all of that stuff. I was not taught that in school, you know, as part of my education, either undergraduate or medical school or whatever at any time during that extensive education, right? That was all just completely separate from formal education. That information's out there. And I think you had a lot easier time in 2020 than we had in 1990 or 1995.

'''E:''' Internet.

'''S:''' Yeah. The amount of resources that are out there now are massive, but you're right. It's very hit or miss. What I find like with my own residence fellow students or whatever is that they could be all over the map. Some of them, I think it's just all like what mentors you happen to come across, you know, in your training. Some of them are very well equipped, you know, to deal with misinformation and pseudoscience. Others have absolutely no idea. Not only straight, not only pseudoscience, but even pathological science within mainstream science, which, you know, these are two sides of the same coin, right? So there's no systematic way of teaching it, which we absolutely need.

'''MTH:''' Yeah. I actually, I did have something that you did not have for sure, which is your book. Honestly, your book was so helpful in my process. Yeah. So thank you.

'''S:''' Yeah. Well, that was why we wrote it. You've got to put all this in one space. Yeah. I mean, we had predecessors too. We obviously read The Demon Haunted World, Why People Leave Weird Things. There were books along the way. And so this, I think there's, you know, we like talking with younger skeptical activists because it does provide a lot of continuity, you know, like generational continuity. We've got to keep this movement going, right? You know, we're not going to be here forever. And so even though it's a lot of it is, you know, feels like reinventing the wheel, but it is, it's important, I think, for each generation to have new voices. Yes, we're going, we're debunking the same shit. We've been doing it for 200 years. I mean, it's amazing. You know, when we, sometimes I do a deep dive on a topic, like I remember I was looking at magnet, you know, devices like fraudulent, you know, snake oil magnet devices. And I found a reference to a book that was written in 1850, systematically debunking snake oil magnetic healing devices, all the same shit we're dealing with today. It's like, wow, they, they did this 200 years ago. And it was amazing. It's like, it's all just, so it's, we're just passing it forward. You know what I mean? And we are building, I think, a knowledge base. And I do think we are more knowledgeable how to do this than previous generations.

'''J:''' Yeah, of course.

'''S:''' Yeah, we're standing on their shoulders.

'''MTH:''' I think one of the things the skeptic music movement really taught me was that, so as a science educator, I, nearly every science course, especially for the introductory stuff starts with chapter one, the scientific method. For those of you who can't hear me, I'm now air quoting, scientific method, right? Here are the steps that you do to do a science. And then it gets done. And then like, here's everything that we know. And it's presented like a collection of facts that are tried and true and never going to change. And this is what we know for certain. And but the skeptic movement really taught me was, why do we need the scientific method? Right? We need it because we are irrational and biased and flawed and emotional and unreliable narrators of our own experience. Like, why isn't I tried it and felt better sufficient evidence or why isn't I saw it so I know it's real. And so, you know, I designed the course and I, it kind of scared me at first, because I now spend probably the first, I want to say like third of the semester on what I call critical thinking, but it's basically epistemology, metacognition, the limits of perception and memory, cognitive biases. All of that then gets to a place where when I introduce science, students know why we need science. And so other classes when I start, you know, day one, here's a scientific method, I think I'm missing some really important stuff here. Because how are students to know why this information is more reliable than anything else? And so, so that was an important lesson. And the other thing was just the basic idea of including misinformation. A lot of classes don't include them. So how are students to know the difference between reliable and unreliable information? If you don't bring that into the classroom and help them grapple with it, help them understand the differences.

'''S:''' Absolutely. And, but I still think there's a bit of a stigma within academia about, you know, touching upon fringe topics or talking about pseudoscience or bring, as you say, you got to bring it into the classroom. They just feel uncomfortable with it. You know, I still get that a lot. Or at best, it's like, well, I'm glad you're doing it. You know, do you get that a lot? Do you get the, well, good thing you're, I don't have to worry about it now because you're taking care of it, you know. Which is unfortunate. It's like, no, you should, we shouldn't be embracing this with both hands. This is the most important thing that we need to do is to teach people how to tell the difference between what's real and what's not real. That is what science is all about. So why would, do you not want to do that?

'''MTH:''' When I start the semester, day one, I start by fooling students. I do the Randy, James Randy made it famous, but it came from Bertram Foer, the fake personality or astrology reading.

'''E:''' Astrology?

'''MTH:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Classic.

'''MTH:''' Yeah, it's great. They fall for it hook, line, and sinker, right? And it turns out I'm a decent liar, but it's for a good cause, right? So I tell students, I give this giant backstory, I have a friend who's a great astrologer and I'm not going to tell you who she is, but you know, and I get some basic information from them. I make them think I'm really deep diving into their personality. The next class I give them their readings. How accurate is she? And I've been doing this for a long time and about 4.3 to 4.5 out of five, which is about what Foer found. So now get with somebody around you and talk about reading and why do you think it's reliable? Why do you think she was able to know this? And sometimes it takes them like 10 minutes before they realize they all got the same reading. Because they're cherry picking. Like this worked for me, this didn't, they're denying that. It's a game though. It's a joke. Like it's a low stakes environment where I'm able to, okay, yes, I lied to you. Am I sorry? You know, like not really. Will I do it again? I might, you know? Right? So I want you to be skeptical. I don't want you to just trust what I'm saying. But the real lesson is I could tell you I could fool you and you'd be like, oh sure. I'm writing a book on misinformation right now. And every time I talk to somebody about misinformation, they're like, oh, that's fascinating. Oh, can you believe what people fall for? Oh my God. People are so stupid. And it's like, how long until I get to the misinformation that they believe? Right? Because we all have something. So with the students, it's like, if I told you I could fool you, you wouldn't believe me. So I fool you to prove to you I can fool you. Now if you don't want to be fooled, have the humility to recognize that. And now we need to practice our skepticism. And here's how we do that.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, that is a tried and true method within skeptical seminars to lecture. I do it all the time. What I find a little challenging, you have to really up your game. So yeah, I love talking to naive audiences, meaning they're not steeped in skepticism because everything works on them because they haven't seen any of it before. But then when you're talking to people who are in the skeptical movement or who you're telling them ahead of time, I'm giving you a lecture on how you could be fooled. So then their guard is way up or they, you know, it becomes a lot harder to get away with that. But you still can do it. You just got to know which ones will sell even to a prepared audience.

'''MTH:''' And so if you find something that works on more skeptical audiences, you simply must share because you're right. The ones in the skeptic movement, they know these tricks. And even if you find one where they know you're fooling them, they just maybe not are able to figure out how that even works.

'''S:''' Yeah. Like you're not going to get them on the astrology one, on the floor effect, like they don't even bother. Or even like there's a, you have to go one level deeper. It's like, for example, you know, that, you know, the gorilla video, right? The invisible gorilla. Well, there's a, there's a followup to that where it's meant for people who know the invisible gorilla video where they throw another deception in there, another inattentional blindness that, so people think they know it, but they really don't. So that's the kind of thing that you have to do. You could find that on the website. We're giving it away now to anyone listening to this episode, but-

'''E:''' Spoiler alert.

'''S:''' -but that's the kind of thing you got to do. You got to figure out, all right, you got to get more obscure or you got to do it in a way they don't realize you're doing it. Or you got to do it. You got to divert their attention to this thing you, they think they know while you're doing something else. It becomes, yeah, it's a little tricky and you're not going to get them on everything either. So you got to accept that and just say, this is a demonstration. I know you guys are skeptical. You've heard all these before, but for what it's worth, right? And then you got to pick the ones too. The last thing I'll say is you got to pick the ones that work even when you know what's happening. For example, like anchoring is a great one. You know about anchoring. Like you show people a picture of a house and you tell, you know, half the people without the other half knowing, does this house cost more or less cost than a million dollars? You ask the other people, does this cost more or less than $200,000? And then you ask them to guess the actual price. And of course, they're going to anchor to whatever you told them. And so even if they kind of know about anchoring and they know about the demonstration, it'll still influence them. It's kind of hard for it not to. So you'd still get a good effect out of it. Or there's all the priming stuff. Like you can't not, you can't make yourself immune to that, you know, even when you know what's happening. You know, it's like, have you ever seen a really good mentalist like Banachek?

'''MTH:''' I was going to bring up mentalism because you know they're fooling you, you just don't know how.

'''S:''' Right. Exactly. If they're really good, they have to be good though. Like the one, the bad ones, not so much, but the good ones like Banaczek doesn't matter. You could know, you know, even, even have an idea of the kinds of things they could be doing. It doesn't matter. They still, they're just, they're good enough to fool you. There's just too many ways to do it.

'''J:''' So Melanie, you mentioned your book. So you're currently writing this book or is it, is it coming out soon? What's the status on that?

'''MTH:''' Yeah, it's coming out next fall. So I'm in the midst of writing.

'''J:''' How's it going?

'''MTH:''' Goodness. I have newfound respect for people who've written books. This is an emotional rollercoaster. I'm having a great time doing it. On other days, I may tell you something else, but the book is a field guide to misinformation. And it's basically about understanding the different forms that misinformation takes and not just, so there's a lot of great organizations that focus on specific kinds of misinformation and they do great work, but I feel like a lot of what's missing there is why we fall for misinformation. And so it's also understanding ourselves and our own vulnerabilities to different kinds of misinformation. So the threading the needle of why might I be vulnerable to this and how to understand how this particular kind of misinformation works.

'''J:''' Out of curiosity, are you discussing politics at all?

'''MTH:''' Oh, that's actually a really good question. I try, I use what I call a trading wheels approach, which is I purposefully wade people into the shallow end. I'm giving lots of metaphors here and I don't mean to. I teach people how to think and how misinformation works using examples that aren't emotionally or identity triggering so that they learn the skills and then hopefully graduate to something else. That's why I start with like the astrology reading. And then I go into like witchcraft and psychics and I work my way to like evolution denial or climate change denial or vaccines, but I don't start there. So with a book, I'm trying really hard to spend most of my time on examples that would not trigger the vast majority of people. I'm also very aware that we're in a time where the concept of misinformation itself has become political and is the subject of a lot of conspiracies, skepticism, and that the people who most need to read a book like this, I don't want to turn them off right away.

'''J:''' Yeah. I mean, you have to thread that needle. We all have to do it from time to time. I mean, it's, for us, it's been very much like we don't discuss politics on the SGU.

'''S:''' To clarify, we are nonpartisan. A lot of the topics that we deal with, like we've talked about gun violence, for example, you know, and gun safety laws. That's massively political, but we say we try to talk about the science and to try to stay as nonpartisan and politically neutral as possible, which is impossible, but you know, we do the best we can. So at least let's talk about the science. Then there are topics where, you could tell me what you think about this, it's just unavoidable. It's so unavoidable that even within the skeptical community, everyone has taken political corners, which is incredible. Like the whole trans issue. Everyone has taken to their political corner on that issue. And we're not supposed to do that. Like we're the one movement who's not supposed to do that, and yet here we are.

'''MTH:''' Something like climate change comes to mind, too. Climate change, like the one predictor, the single most predictive factor of whether somebody accepts or denies climate change is political affiliation. And as soon as issues become attached to our identity, they're very hard to dislodge, and especially if they become a tribal issue. And we obviously, we need to be able to address those issues. But something else with addressing those issues is that, like somebody who denies climate change or denies evolution, going in with the facts on those issues or going in with the science is not going to convince somebody, because that's not how they got there.

'''S:''' It's not a knowledge deficit problem.

'''MTH:''' Right. And so helping them understand their own thinking, why they might, why they may have gotten there without following the science, it certainly feels like we did, right? Because none of us think, oh, I'm denying science or I'm falling for pseudoscience. Yeah. So it's a dicey issue. I joke that with my class, it's way easier. My students are captive. For a semester, they want a grade, and so they have to stick with me for four months as I walk them through and then finally get them to the deep end and we can take off the training wheels. Online and in real world, it's much harder than that. And it requires somebody to take a deep dive into their own thinking and really be willing to be skeptical, not of what they've heard, but of their own thinking processes.

'''S:''' And so what, and you have your, you're mainly on YouTube, you're putting out your series of videos. I mean, you probably, you have to do all the social media these days. You can't just do one.

'''MTH:''' As far as social media channels, my biggest platform is Facebook. I try on Instagram. I don't understand Instagram. I am on TikTok and I'm trying on YouTube.

'''E:''' Stick with it.

'''S:''' It is funny how they all have their own sort of personality and they skew to different demographics and they're different little subcultures. They all have their own little online subculture. Again, we try to do everything, but like currently we're doing a lot of TikTok. It's very frustrating because the culture on TikTok is so anti-intellectual. It's overwhelming. It's really overwhelming.

'''MTH:''' I've watched your videos on TikTok, if that makes you feel better.

'''S:''' Thank you. No, I mean, we're there. Obviously we think we're getting something done, but man, it's rough some weeks. Facebook is great. It's just old. I mean, it's just for old people, which is fine, you know, but you can't just, you know, you can't just do Facebook because you're going to be missing a whole generation. Once their parents got on Facebook, the kids all got off Facebook basically.

'''MTH:''' Well, there are at least a lot of people on Facebook.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. So we do everything as well, but you just got to figure out whatever works for you. It's all an experiment. There's no formula.

'''MTH:''' And I have heard for what it's worth that the largest podcasting platform is actually YouTube.

'''S:''' So Melanie, tell us where is the best place that our listeners can find you.

'''MTH:''' So my major platform is Facebook. I'm also on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. All of those are at Thinking Powers, and I have a website, thinkingispower.com.

'''S:''' Great. So if they go to Thinking is Power, they'll get to everything.

'''MTH:''' Yes, everything.

'''S:''' Awesome. Okay. Well, Melanie, thank you so much for joining us today.

'''MTH:''' Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

'''E:''' Thank you, Melanie.

{{anchor|sof}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:43:41) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Metallurgy
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%.
|link1web = https://www.mpie.de/5078921/green-nickel-for-electrification?c=2914286
|link1title = Green nickel for sustainable electrification
|link1pub = www.mpie.de

|item2 = Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, using nanopore membranes, that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy.
|link2web = https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.4c17675
|link2title = https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.4c17675
|link2pub = pubs.acs.org

|item3 = Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods.
|link3web = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1385894725004607?via%3Dihub
|link3title = Direct lithium extraction from α-Spodumene using NaOH roasting and water leaching - ScienceDirect
|link3pub = www.sciencedirect.com

|}}
{{SOFResults

|science1 = Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%.

|fiction = Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, using nanopore membranes, that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy.

|science2 = Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods.

|rogue1 = Cara
|answer1 = Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, using nanopore membranes, that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy.

|rogue2 = Evan
|answer2 = Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%.

|rogue3 = Jay
|answer3 = Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods.

|rogue4 = Bob
|answer4 = Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods.

|rogue5 = Steve
|answer5 = Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%.

|host = Steve
|sweep =
|clever = y
|win =
|swept =
}}

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. I have three news items, but they all happen to be in the same theme. These all have to do with metallurgy. All right, here we go. Item number one, researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%. Item number two, scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. And item number three, researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods. Cara, go first.

'''C:''' So in Max Planck or at Max Planck, they devised a single-step method for extracting, you said that was nickel? Can you hear me?

'''S:''' Nickel.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Okay, cool. For extracting nickel from ore, it reduces the total carbon footprint by 84%, energy usage by 18%. The total carbon footprint of the extraction process, I'm assuming is what you mean. Okay. UT scientists developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions. Oh my God. I don't know. Nanopore membranes. So that would be like trace amounts of rare earth metals. Three times faster than existing methods, half the energy. Okay. So we've got 84% carbon reduction, 18% energy reduction. Then we've got three times faster, half the energy. And then at Penn State, we've got lithium extraction, minutes rather than hours, no toxic chemicals, much less energy. So that one's vaguer. That one doesn't have any specific numbers. I don't know. Which of these things is harder to do? To extract nickel from ore, to separate rare earth metals, or to extract lithium? And which one do we need the most? I mean, we need the rare earth metals. So I think people are probably working on that faster. I'm going to say that that one is the science. It might be the fiction because who freaking knows, but I'm going to say that one's the science because that's probably what there's more effort in right now and more money being put towards is the rare earth metals. So then that leaves nickel and lithium. I think we need lithium even more. I don't know if we need as much nickel. We probably do, but I'll call the nickel one the fiction. I don't know. It's a total shot in the dark.

'''S:''' Okay. Evan?

'''E:''' It would be easier if I knew what the multi-step method for extracting nickel was. So I could make some kind of a good comparison here to the carbon footprint, 84% reduction and the energy usage of 18% savings. The second one, the industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, nanopore. Nanopore membranes. I don't know that. Three times faster than existing methods. Half as much energy. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Metallurgy. Really, Steve? Can we have a different topic?

'''S:''' They're all news items from this week. This all happened to be around.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. That's right. These were all over TikTok.

'''S:''' Metallurgy and also involving things that we really need.

'''E:''' And the last one here about the new technique for extracting lithium. All right. When I see something like new technique for something, that leans me towards the science section. Because, yeah, you could have the technique down, doesn't mean you're going to necessarily have the immediate results. It's more like a proof of concept kind of things. And I think those things turn out to be more science rather than fiction. So therefore, tell you what, Cara, I'm going to join you. I'm going to say nickel. Extracting nickel is the fiction. And I don't know why.

'''C:''' Same. Same.

'''S:''' Okay. Jay.

'''J:''' I think it's the last one here. Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium. They could do it in minutes rather than hours.

'''E:''' Oh, that's right. The researchers were from some other university.

'''J:''' Yeah. I think that one is the fake.

'''S:''' Which one?

'''J:''' Penn State one.

'''S:''' Okay. All right. And Bob.

'''B:''' Yeah. I mean, I don't know enough about any of these technologies to have any big red flags. The main thing that stuck out to me is the lithium one, the third one. And my attitude is it's probably too good to be true or, you know, because it'd be great for batteries. So I'll say that one's fiction. I'll join with Jay.

'''S:''' So you all agree on the second one.

'''E:''' So you have a chance to sweep us right now, Steve.

'''S:''' We'll start there. We'll see. Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes. That is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is the fiction.

'''C:''' Oh, wow. Good job.

'''J:''' Just like that, people.

'''S:''' Just like that.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''S:''' But this is based on a real news item. That does have to do with rare earth metals and nanopore membranes. But it's not an industrial process. This is just a laboratory proof of concept. So there's no data on how much faster, how much energy, nothing, because they just didn't do it on any scale. It was just like the basic science of trying to figure out how to make pores that will be selective in terms of which kinds of ions can pass through. So it's a good start. You know, it might be the kind of thing where down to five, 10 years from now, you might have something. It was able to have greater affinity for, again, for rare earths versus potassium, magnesium, like calcium, those kinds of irons. But also it was able to have differential preference for the lighter rare earths versus the middle rare earths, not the middle earths, and the heavy rare earths. So yeah, it has potential, has potential, but this is still a ways off. So yeah, the big problem with the rare earths, they're critical for tons of modern technology, electronics, for batteries, for lots of things. But they're very difficult to purify from ore. And they're also very difficult to reclaim from recycled electronics. They require a lot of toxic chemicals, they're very bad for the environment, and they're slow, right? So in fact, it's the refining of the rare earths is really more the limiting factor in terms of supply than mining the ore, right? We actually have rare earths in the U.S., not as much as in other parts of the world like China.

'''E:''' It's a minor point.

'''S:''' Yeah, but we just have no capacity to refine it. You know, China has most of the world's ability to refine rare earths. So being able to come up with a process that's more environmentally friendly, and that is, you know, more, of course, efficient, would be fantastic. But there's a lot of work to do before we get there. All right, let's go back to number one, research that the Max Planck...

'''B:''' That's all right, China will steal it and then make it work.

'''S:''' Yeah, they'll make it work. Research that the Max Planck Institute have devised a single step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and use and energy usage by 18% is science. This is a pretty significant advance, and this is, you know, well on its way to application. So this process has a number of advantages. If one thing it can use lower quality ores, like right now we have to use sort of the high quality nickel ores because the lower quality ones are way more complicated to extract the nickel. There's more complex chemical compounds, you know, with nickel in them. And so it takes multiple steps using a lot of carbon and a lot of energy. In fact, if we make batteries, you know, batteries and EVs have a lot of nickel in them, you know, arguably we're not actually reducing the carbon by much. We're just shifting it to the battery production, right? Because we're just shifting it to mainly the nickel production. It's still a net advantage, right? There's still a net gain, but a huge part of the carbon footprint of EVs is processing the nickel that's going in the batteries, you know? So they came up with a process that if you use green hydrogen, that's a huge if, right? If you use green hydrogen, use hydrogen plasma instead of carbon. So it uses zero carbon. So the only carbon release would be in the production of the hydrogen itself. But if you use green hydrogen, then actually the process itself, this one step process, which uses a lot less energy and is a lot faster, which is also very important, releases no carbon. But if they include the mining and the shipping and all the other stuff, there's still a carbon footprint, but all the carbon from the actual processing of the nickel itself and extracting it from the ore would be gone. Of course, if we're using gray hydrogen, it's not as much of an advantage. Still an advantage. Still better, but just not as much.

'''B:''' Is that like the difference between gray hulk and red hulk?

'''S:''' Remember, gray hydrogen is like you make it from you're stripping the hydrogen off of hydrocarbons.

'''B:''' Oh, yes.

'''S:''' Versus electrolyzing water versus pulling it out of the ground. There's like all different kinds of hydrogen depending on where you get it from.

'''B:''' Can we institute a laugh track for the jokes that I make that fail horribly? Just checking. Just checking.

'''E:''' Bob, come on. We've been playing without a safety net for 20 years now. I'm not about to start now.

'''S:''' So demand for nickel is probably going to double by 2040, which is not that far off. Double.

'''E:''' Double your nickel is a dime. See, Bob? No laugh track.

'''B:''' Yeah. It sucks, doesn't it?

'''S:''' Which means that-

'''B:''' I tell you, I'm getting depressed. No, no. We're saying nickel so many times, I keep thinking of Joe Nickel every time you say it.

'''E:''' Oh.

'''S:''' All right. This means that research that Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods is science. And this is also potentially huge because-

'''B:''' Awesome.

'''S:''' Yeah. Right now, the way they purify lithium, there's a couple of methods. They both suck. So one is you can, well, they're both energy intensive. So if you can purify it from lithium-rich brine, but that requires evaporating it, which means pouring a ton of energy into heating it up for hours in order to evaporate it off. And then you get left with sort of the lithium cake, and then you have to purify the lithium further from there. The other thing you could do is if you get the lithium ore, is you have to bake it at high temperature with sulfuric acid. You're baking it in sulfuric acid, and then you bleach it with water. It's a multiple step process. Then you have to add a basic chemical, what is that, sodium hydroxide, and then to neutralize it, and then you have to heat it again, and it's a multi-step process, uses a lot of energy. They figured out a way, and what they did was first they modeled it, and then they tested it, is they found that if you combine it first with sodium hydroxide, then you can go from that compound with a single step at a low temperature to a purified lithium without having to go through an acidic phase and then neutralizing the acid and all that. So the whole process is an order of magnitude faster, does not use any toxic chemicals, uses a lot less energy. So this is obviously critical. The demand for lithium is going to increase even more than demand for nickel.

'''E:''' But we keep finding more and more of it.

'''S:''' Again, the limiting factor is the processing of the lithium. It's not necessarily the source of it.

'''E:''' The deposits.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's not the lithium deposits. It's turning it into battery-grade lithium. It's got to be relatively pure. We have millions of metric tons of lithium deposits in the US. We just cannot process it fast enough to meet our needs. So we get 97% of our lithium comes from Chile and Argentina, even though we have lots of lithium in the US. So yeah, we need to develop these techniques and get them at an industrial scale so that we can be more independent, but also just increase the world's supply.

'''E:''' It helps everything.

'''S:''' It helps everybody. Yeah. We need multiple times the amount of lithium. We need twice as much nickel. We need multiple times the rare earths. We're having the same problem with copper. We don't have enough copper right now. If you calculate how much copper we need to get to our climate goals by 2050, we don't have enough. We have a third of the copper that we need. So we would have to triple the world's production of copper, which again, the limiting factor is not the mining of copper. It's more the refining of it. And so we need to do it faster and it needs to be energy and carbon efficient. If we spend a lot of our carbon budget making this transition, we could actually make things worse in the short term. It still might be worth it in the long term for electrifying these various industries, these various sectors, but certainly if we could dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the transition itself, that would be a huge help. So all these news items are good news. They're all moving in the right direction and hopefully they will pan out really well. So good news, everyone.

'''J:''' That's great.

'''E:''' It's actually quite a positive science or fiction.

'''S:''' Even though I did sweep you.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:58:32) ==
{{qow
|text = "It is truth that I seek, and truth never yet hurt any man. What does hurt is persistence in error or ignorance."
|author = —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6
|lived =
|desc =
}}

'''S:''' Okay. Evan, get the quote.

'''E:''' "It is truth that I seek and truth never yet hurt any man. What does hurt is persistence in error and ignorance." Written by my favorite emperor and should be yours, Marcus Aurelius.

'''S:''' Yep. He was cool dude.

'''E:''' The Sixth Book of Meditations.

'''S:''' He was a real skeptical philosopher.

'''E:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' 2,000 years ago. It's amazing.

'''E:''' Yes. Yep. And a leader.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And a real leader of government.

'''S:''' I think he's from the future.

'''E:''' Is that right? Because we have a chance then. Let's hope the future comes quickly.

'''S:''' Not to diminish the intellect of the ancients. He was just a very, very... He was a philosopher and a leader and very accomplished.

'''E:''' Very.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you all for joining me this week.

'''E:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''B:''' Finally.

'''J:''' Thanks, Steve.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 1025

2025-05-19T14:01:24Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

{{Editing required
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|links = y
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|episodeNum = 1025
|episodeDate = {{1000s|1025|boxdate}}
|episodeIcon = File:1025.jpg
|caption = "Next-gen cargo ship: efficient, innovative design sailing towards a sustainable future."
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|qowText = "One of the few universal characteristics is a healthy skepticism toward unverified speculations. These are regarded as topics for conversation until tests can be devised. Only then do they attain the dignity of subjects for investigation."
|qowAuthor = Edwin Hubbel, The Realm of the Nebulae (Yale University Press: 1936)
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

'''Voice-over:''' You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, February 26th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, everyone.

'''S:''' So unfortunately, we've got some sad news today. Just today as we're recording this, Michelle Trachtenberg died.

'''E:''' I read it and I didn't believe it at first.

'''S:''' Yeah, so she played Dawn on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

'''B:''' That's how I know her. And she was great. She was so good.

'''S:''' Yeah, she was really good. She had a whole acting career, obviously, not just Buffy. But yeah, apparently she was only 39. Apparently she had a liver transplant and so probably died of complications of that. I'm not seeing any specific information, but that's probably has something to do that. Although I couldn't find why she had the liver transplant in the first place.

'''E:''' Does it seem, I imagine by average it's young to be having a liver transplant.

'''C:''' No, I mean it can be, but some liver transplants are related to lifestyle and some liver transplants are not. People can have things wrong with their liver for a lot of different reasons.

'''E:''' I imagine there's a genetic disposition for liver disease or other factors like that.

'''C:''' I actually recently saw a patient in the hospital who had a form of cirrhosis that is non-alcohol related cirrhosis. It can just happen.

'''E:''' Yeah, oh boy.

'''S:''' Or you can get an infection or you just have some other liver disease. No information. But yeah, that's sad.

'''B:''' Yeah, it blows.

'''S:''' Yeah, if you're younger than me, by definition, you're young.

'''C:''' And if you're younger than me, you're really young.

'''S:''' Yeah, you're really young.

'''C:''' You remember my friend Holly?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' A rocket just launched, like just now. She was posting about it.

'''S:''' Oh yeah?

'''E:''' Like 10 minutes ago?

'''C:''' No, like today. There was a rocket launch with like going to the moon, I think. Yeah, SpaceX Falcon 9 launches the IM-2 moon mission and there's a bunch of like science on it.

'''S:''' That's a lunar lander. Yeah, intuitive machines.

'''C:''' So I don't know. I think I might have mentioned a friend of mine who is an optical engineer. Her name's Holly Bender on the show before. I've definitely had her on Talk Nerdy, but gosh, that was probably like almost 10 years ago now. So I should probably have her back on.

'''E:''' Where did we meet her in Washington, DC?

'''C:''' Yeah, you guys met Holly. So she worked on an instrument, the Lunar Trailblazer. I guess the instrument that she was working on is looking to see how much water there is in this one crater in the moon. Where did the water possibly come from? Could it be used? And so, yeah, I got to watch the launch, you know, through her Instagram feed, which was only, it looks like just an hour ago, she posted the launch and said, we're going to the moon, which is like just really, really cool. What a cool thing to be involved, to be an engineer who worked on something and then watch it go off to space.

'''B:''' That would just, I can't even relate to how awesome that would be.

'''J:''' I know, right? Could you imagine?

'''E:''' And nerve wracking.

'''C:''' Yeah, that too. Yeah, for sure. So I don't know much about the instrument or about the actual, like what's all going to, in the payload on this rocket.

'''S:''' So it was a Falcon 9 rocket that launched two probes, right? So it was, I would call them a ride share. So it was the Intuitive Machines Lunar Lander and NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, which is the one that your friend worked on. That's the one that's going to be looking at the water. But they're both basically missions to support the eventual Artemis getting people back to the moon.

'''B:''' Yeah, if it ever happens.

'''C:''' Well, these are the kinds of things that make it happen.

'''B:''' Well, I mean, Musk doesn't want it to happen. So what Musk wants...

'''C:''' Well, it looks like this is on Musk's rocket.

'''E:''' Do you think he would want it to happen then?

'''B:''' He does not. He wants to go right to Mars. He does not want Artemis. That's my understanding. He does not think we need to go to the moon at all.

'''S:''' It's too late. We are so committed.

'''E:''' Haven't we talked about this before? You have to have the moon before you have Mars, right?

'''B:''' Of course it does. But he does not, I don't think, I haven't read about it in a little while, but I don't think he agrees with that.

'''E:''' Let me call him. I'm getting him on the show here.

'''B:''' He wants to just go straight to Mars, which is, of course, utterly ridiculous.

'''E:''' His line's busy. I'll try him later.

'''S:''' All right. Let us know if you get in touch with him.

'''E:''' Yeah. I'll let you know. I'll pipe him in.

'''B:''' And another thing.

'''S:''' And another thing.

'''E:''' And about that asteroid.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah. Sorry.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. Did you guys hear about the news about that asteroid? Well, it looks like, you know, we're not going to get hit at all.

'''C:''' Why do you sound disappointed, Bob?

'''E:''' Good.

'''B:''' I'm going to own this. I'm disappointed. It's down to four one-thousandth of a percent chance to hit Earth.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Good.

'''B:''' And that's fine. That's fine. But I forget what venue I said this at, but I was like, you know, I can't help but be a little disappointed. Because for me, a best case scenario would be like, yeah, we're nervous. And we're like, you know, a little bit of like, holy crap. But I like the idea of countries uniting to address this and have a rocket ready within a couple of years to like a dart type mission, to deal with like a kinetic impactor, right? To deal with an asteroid that's heading towards the Earth. And then, you know, in 2028, like, oh, look, oh, yeah, it's not going to hit us. But we got a rocket ready to go. That's what I wanted. I wanted for us to take even more seriously this idea that we need to be ready to go with an impactor to push away or change the trajectory of any asteroid that we might find and not have enough time. And it's great that, you know, getting hit would have that would have been horrible. I mean, not, you know, an extinction level event, but we could have lost a city. So yeah, obviously, I wouldn't want anything like that. But I wouldn't mind a little bit of a scare for a couple of years to be prepared for something that could potentially hit us. You know, who knows?

'''S:''' Could it still hit the moon? Or is that ruled out too now?

'''B:''' I just read about the Earth. I'm not sure.

'''E:''' Bob, the estimate not long ago was as high as 3.2% chance.

'''B:''' Yeah, the highest ever calculated probability for something like that, which was-

'''E:''' So that's what got you all worked up and going, right?

'''B:''' No, that one I got actually a little scared because we had gone-

'''E:''' That was a little too much?

'''B:''' Yeah, I mean, because we went from one in, when I started tracking the news, it went from one in 88 to one in 72. Then it was down to one in 32 or something. I'm like, holy crap, this is like going in the wrong direction, which is common. That happens for these things. It seems to get even more likely, then it's like gone, like, oh yeah, it's not going to happen. Yeah, but one percent, that was the big point. That was the important percentage because over one percent, that's when these agencies get involved and start making plans and stuff. If it stayed at like 1.5%, then we probably would have made serious plans, including potentially getting a rocket ready with a kinetic impactor, if it stayed at 1.5%. So whatever, it's just weird to be even just a little bit disappointed about that. It was kind of a weird thing, but I think I've related my reasoning behind that.

'''S:''' But it's not going to hit us.

'''B:''' Probably not. Overwhelmingly unlikely, but not impossible.

'''S:''' Not impossible.

'''B:''' Just saying.

'''S:''' Is it possible that the percentage will start going up again as we get more data?

'''B:''' Probably not.

'''S:''' Usually does not happen.

'''B:''' I'd put some good money against that once they get it down that low.

'''S:''' But don't worry, Bob, eventually another asteroid will threaten to kill millions of people.

'''B:''' It's basically inevitable. So yeah, that's why, dude, that's why I think we need to be even more prepared. We are much more prepared than we used to be, but I want to be even more prepared than that.

'''S:''' Double prepared. Double super prepared.

'''B:''' It's one of these existential crises that we could do something about.

'''S:''' Yes, we could actually prevent.

'''B:''' Right? If there's a wicked Carrington level, solar flare level event, well, we can actually do a little bit about that too. But we probably won't.

'''S:''' We could do a lot about that.

'''B:''' That's true.

'''S:''' That's not a good example. That's another thing that's going to happen eventually, is going to be really bad, and we can completely 100% prevent, not from happening, but we can prevent any damage from it. We just have to harden our infrastructure against it.

'''B:''' The difference is that we are making really good strides in tracking these near-Earth objects, but I don't think we're doing much. We're not doing near enough, in my opinion, to guard against such a solar event.

'''S:''' Actually, Bob, I've been reading that we are doing a lot about that.

'''B:''' Really?

'''S:''' Actually, we've been hardening the grid and the infrastructure the last 20 years or so significantly. Again, not enough, but it-

'''B:''' Yeah. I think it's not enough. It's glad that it's a little bit better than what I had thought, based on what you've said. But still, I think we can get fried. Even for an EMP, electromagnetic pulse, you don't even need a solar flare to induce those currents. You can just basically explode one nuke over the country, and you're back into the 1700s. That level of hardening, we're nowhere near the hardening required for that. That's something that is not unlikely, unfortunately.

'''E:''' Yeah. We'll probably do ourselves in before-

'''B:''' That's scary.

'''E:''' -any kind of cosmic event does us in.

'''B:''' Yeah. I can't disagree with that, but yeah, there are events, though, that we really can't do anything about. Those are the ones that, yeah, just like, you know, whatever. It feels good, though, just to do stuff-

'''S:''' Even being in the crosshairs of a gamma ray burst, didn't know how much we could do about that.

'''B:''' GRPA, yeah. They're about a light-year wide. Yeah, there's not much you could do about that. You don't even know what's coming, really.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Right? It's like, oh, there it is. We're done.

'''E:''' Turn into the Hulk.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== Congestion Pricing (09:55) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-widening-highways-doesnt-fix-traffic-but-congestion-pricing-can/
|article_title = Why Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic—But Congestion Pricing Can | Scientific American
|publication = www.scientificamerican.com
}}
'''S:''' All right. Jay, start us off by telling us about congestion pricing. What is that, and does it work?

'''J:''' Well, you know when you get a stuffed-up nose?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''J:''' It has nothing to do with that.

'''E:''' Thank goodness.

'''J:''' Everybody knows about traffic congestion, especially if you live near any cities in the United States. You know, it's a constant problem. This is happening in cities around the world, and the standard response is typically to do what? To add more lanes, right?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' We've all seen it happen.

'''B:''' Double the lanes.

'''J:''' It works for a little while, but what happens after a period of time is it stops working, which is a big problem. And a lot of people might think that adding lanes is actually a good thing to do, but research and real-world evidence tells us a completely different story. Ultimately, it makes the congestion even worse, which I really think is amazing when you think about it. The reason is something called induced demand. Bob, have you ever had induced demand?

'''B:''' Have I had it? I'm going to have to say, I'll guess yes.

'''J:''' Okay.

'''S:''' I have. Actually, I've experienced induced demand, exactly the same phenomenon in a completely different context. Our clinic is backed up, especially for new referrals, right? If you want an appointment and you're a new patient, you might have to wait six months to get an appointment. And over the years, I've been there, again, I've been there for 30 years. So I've had to experience this cycle many, many times. We hire new clinic clinicians, which opens up a whole bunch of new slots. The wait time goes down, and then it goes right back up. The idea is that if there is basically a bottomless pit of pent-up demand, people will basically wait a certain amount of time for their appointment, and so the wait time is always going to inflate to that point, no matter how many slots or people we bring on or whatever we do. The question is, is there a limit to that? At some point, it is not literally bottomless, it's just much larger than the supply. The same question comes up with traffic. If you keep doing that, if you keep adding lanes, at some point, will you outstrip the pent-up demand or not? And then the other question I have, if adding lanes makes it rebound and even worse, then would reducing lanes make it better?

'''J:''' I don't think so.

'''S:''' Does it work the other direction, it's not reversible?

'''J:''' In the sense of traffic-induced demand, it's well-documented. It's where you increase the road space, which then encourages more people to drive, because people are aware that the projects are happening, and then they think, okay, I could drive on that road during times I normally wouldn't, because they expanded it, it should be fine. So over time, the roads become just as clogged as they were, because essentially people were waiting for the opportunity.

'''B:''' We're taking back roads too, isn't that a player factor?

'''J:''' All the behavior that people have to avoid the traffic jam.

'''S:''' Or they may make less of an effort to carpool, or they'll take trips they wouldn't have otherwise taken.

'''J:''' Yeah, and the list that the researchers were talking about, they're saying these are people who previously avoided rush hour, or who switched from public transit. In some cases, the expanded highway entices people to take jobs from farther away, particularly if they're driving to their interview during off-peak times, and like, oh, this was great, and the commute is fine. This actually happened to me once, where it really bit me in the ass. The research shows that over time, the highway fills up again, and congestion is back to where it started, or worse. So we've observed this repeatedly. It's been happening so much, and it's so well-documented that there's zero question about whether or not this is happening. A study of expanded highways in the US found that traffic volumes tend to rise in direct proportion to the new capacity, which is basically what Steve was saying. So in other words, for every 10% increase in lane miles, traffic increases by about 10 or more percent. So road expansion doesn't eliminate congestion. It kind of fuels it, if you think about it from that perspective. So beyond traffic, expansion has other unintended consequences, like more vehicles on the road mean more pollution, and encouraging suburban sprawl leads to longer commutes and higher infrastructure costs. Like, there's all these dominoes that fall once you start doing this. Cities end up in a really expensive cycle of expansion that never actually solves the problem. And I was talking to Bob about this. Like, when you talk about road expansion and the cost that it takes to do, like, these three, five, 10-year projects to expand the roads, we could be talking about billions of dollars.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, absolutely. No doubt about it.

'''J:''' It's not cheap.

'''E:''' And chances are they'll go over budget in more cases than not.

'''J:''' All right. So hold on to your pants, guys, because you might not like what I'm about to say. So the researchers concluded that the most effective way to help congested roads is something called congestion pricing. All right? Are you guessing where I'm going with this?

'''E:''' Yeah, it's a toll.

'''J:''' Exactly. So it's a toll to drivers who use the roads during these high traffic peak hours. And what this does, it's an incentive for drivers to adjust their driving habits. So if you want to look at it in a very nice way, you're saying, look, we got to charge a toll during these particular times on these particular roads, because the goal here is to help the congestion problem. And people who have to take those drives at that time, no matter what, they can't deviate, they're going to be really unhappy about it, because it's going to add up. And it could be a problem for certain income levels, absolutely.

'''C:''' How is that different than, like, here in California, it's really common on the larger freeways that there are HOV lanes that are toll lanes?

'''J:''' Yeah, I don't know how effective those HOV lanes are. I mean, I always use them when I can.

'''C:''' But you have to pay for them here.

'''J:''' Oh, you do have to pay for them?

'''C:''' That's what I'm saying. Yeah, they're like fast track lanes.

'''E:''' Do they work?

'''C:''' Well, yeah, they're not nearly as congested as the rest of the traffic.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah, I don't know if they didn't say anything about it in this study, and I'm sure that there's a ton of different things that states do. Like I know some states have stoplights on the entrance ramps.

'''C:''' Yeah, we have those too in California. We have all the things that you need for congestion in LA.

'''E:''' The point seems to be, though, that it's tied to what price someone's willing to pay. And it's enough people, it's a discouragement for them to not want to pay.

'''C:''' Yeah, and if it wasn't, I think that because LA is an interesting case because we have it side by side, right? Like if you're driving down the 110, on the left side of the 110, there are paid lanes, and the rest of the 110 are not paid. And the left side is less traffic-y than the main side. So people are willing to sit.

'''E:''' Here's your free internet, but if you want the fast internet, pay more.

'''C:''' Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know it works.

'''B:''' I kind of like that idea, though. You have the option.

'''E:''' Yeah, you build your own.

'''J:''' Well, what they're trying to do is encourage people to take options that they probably wouldn't take without a little nudge, right? So can you drive off peak times? Can you work from home? Can you shift to public transport? Can you carpool? Because all of these things have directly shown to help reduce congestion if people are exercising them. But what it turns out to is we're animals of convenience, and we usually pick the most convenient thing. And sometimes that's not in the better good for our society. So unlike expansion, this congestion pricing, it actively manages traffic rather than passively accommodating it. And as we know, the accommodating part doesn't really work anyway. So cities that have implemented this congestion pricing have seen some really good measurable improvements. London introduced a congestion charge back in 2003, and the traffic in the city center dropped measurably quite a bit. Air pollution improved, and public transit investments increased.

'''E:''' I didn't realize it's been 20 years that they've had that. Interesting.

'''J:''' Then they did it in Stockholm back in 2006, and traffic declined by 20%. And the policy became permanent after the public support grew. And then they did it in Singapore. They have one of the most advanced congestion pricing systems. They have adjusting tolls in real time based on traffic levels and keeping roads flowing efficiently. So we could clearly see that this works. And the question is, why aren't more cities doing this? So I think the real problem here is there's political resistance. Like, look what happened in New York City recently, right? We had, you want to go to New York City, you got to pay, what was it, $10 or something to get into the city?

'''S:''' It was initially $15.

'''J:''' Or $15?

'''E:''' And then they reduced it to $9, I believe. And that's on top of whatever tolls you're paying to cross bridges and other things. This is on top of that.

'''J:''' You know, but the thing that society has to realize is, you know, it's like you turn this thing on and it costs money, but it is a solution though, right? Like, we can't just not do things because we don't want to pay more money. Like, there is really no option if you think about it. Cities will become so crowded that there will not be another way to fix them. Like, there's only so much that a city can handle traffic-wise and foot traffic-wise and everything. Like, there's just, it's going to be a limit. There's an upper limit to all of these things. What are the other solutions that we could do? That there really, as far as I could tell, there aren't any.

'''C:''' I think what's hard about this is a similar argument that you'll see regarding our prison systems, which is that unintentionally or intentionally, what we often do is either criminalize or financially penalize poverty in our cities. And so the very people who are like, let's say you're going to work and you need to be there at a particular time and you can't afford the time it takes to drop your kids off at school and then get on the bus to get to work and you can't carpool because you don't know anybody else, you know, at your work, you know, whatever the case may be, they're the very people who can't afford this and they have to do it.

'''S:''' Yeah, but you can apply for a discount, basically.

'''C:''' Okay, that's good to hear.

'''S:''' Yeah, so what I've been reading, like, yeah, the congestion pricing can work if implemented correctly, right? If it's not implemented smartly, then yes, it's a regressive tax and it can hurt low-income people, especially if you're a worker, it's barely hanging on and now you've got to spend 10 bucks a day just to get to work. That could be huge. But if you handle it so that, let's say, the revenue is used to expand public transportation and people who would have a hard time affording it can get an exemption or a discount, etc. But there's lots of things that you could do that would amplify its effectiveness and minimize any downside. And so that's, you know, that's just always the nuts and bolts of smart management, right? It just takes thought, it takes the ability to make changes, to evolve, to react to how things work.

'''C:''' And to adapt to that particular, the needs of that particular city, because, you know, you think about New York, and yes, maybe I'm wrong here, but it probably is more of a privilege to be able to ride around in a car in New York, if you can afford a taxi, an Uber, a driver. Like, because you can get anywhere in New York on foot or in the subway, and you can do it fast. Like, usually it's actually faster to take the subway somewhere than it is to take a car. Because of the traffic.

'''B:''' Forget about parking. Oh, my God.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' Yeah, parking's a nightmare.

'''C:''' But I think about Los Angeles, it's a wildly different scenario.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''C:''' Right? You have to have a car. You cannot get by without a car in Los Angeles. And so-

'''S:''' But that's a choice too. That is a choice as well that, you know, we collectively make. And we could, you know, especially in cities and in large metropolitan areas, we could invest in public transportation, have dedicated bike lanes, have e-bikes and e-scooters or whatever, have other options that make walking and using these other forms of transportation way more convenient, and not just rely on cars.

'''C:''' But within reason. Like-

'''S:''' Yeah, within reason.

'''C:''' L.A. is also just an enormous city. And I think that, like, we have to sometimes remember too that, like, different geographic locations have different struggles.

'''S:''' But yeah, I mean, congestion pricing should be on the table as one of the options. Right?

'''C:''' Yeah, it makes sense. And now we have the technology to do it. I don't see how we could have done this, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

'''E:''' Well, London did it. I mean-

'''C:''' That long ago?

'''E:''' Yeah. 2003, right?

'''C:''' And how did they adjust that? Was it adjusting, like, minute by minute?

'''E:''' That's a good question.

'''S:''' Well, it's usually, like, in New York, it was just basically, like, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. or something. Like, it's just pretty much most of the day.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Oh, so it wasn't really- See, I'm thinking of it as, like, an adaptive rate.

'''S:''' No.

'''C:''' Kind of like surge pricing on a new car.

'''S:''' No, it's not surge pricing. It's just-

'''C:''' I see.

'''S:''' In this zone, during, you know, the day and the weekdays or whatever, they carve out basically most time. Not at 2 in the morning, but basically whenever there was-

'''C:''' Right.

'''S:''' There would actually be traffic there. Yeah, it's not surge pricing. That's-

'''C:''' I see.

'''S:''' So, that's where, like, AI comes in and that kind of analysis, which also needs to be part of the equation here, is, like, really managing traffic light timing, having turn lanes, things like that that could also really mitigate congestion.

'''C:''' Ugh, turn lanes. That's our biggest complaint in L.A. We just don't have that many of them.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' We do something called, like, anti-gridlock, which is during morning and evening rush hour, the parking lane, you cannot park in or you'll get towed.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And that's really helpful. Like, they turn an entire parking lane into a lane of traffic. But of course, there's always, like, that one asshole, you know, and it's like, well, until they're towed, they're just blocking miles of traffic.

'''S:''' Yeah, but that's a setup for disaster, right?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' But you might, and you can sometimes just turn a traffic lane into a turning lane, and even though you're taking away one traffic lane, that could still improve congestion.

'''C:''' Oh, massively. Yeah. At these huge intersections where everybody's going left, for sure.

'''S:''' Okay. AI will solve it all. Don't worry.

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=== AI Therapists '''(TW)''' (24:04) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/health/ai-therapists-chatbots.html
|article_title = Human Therapists Prepare for Battle Against A.I. Pretenders - The New York Times
|publication = www.nytimes.com
}}
'''S:''' Speaking of AI.

'''C:''' Speaking of AI not solving things. It's quite the turn.

'''E:''' Wait. AI solves everything.

'''S:''' So, are AI therapists coming, and how do they work?

'''C:''' AI therapists are pretty much already here. But yeah, there's a lot of conflict around this topic, and I think part of the reason why this is a good topic for the show, you know, it has all the things. It has all the ingredients that we talk about a lot on the show, but also I think it lends itself to hearty debate. So I hope that my fellow rogues will engage and give me your two cents on what you guys think about this as well. So there's a recent article in the New York Times. It was actually just published on the 24th, so two days ago, by Ellen Barry, titled Human Therapists Prepare for Battle Against AI Pretenders. And the subtitle is, Chatbots Posing as Therapists May Encourage Users to Commit Harmful Acts. The Nation's Largest Psychological Organization Warned Federal Regulators. So what she's referencing there is a recent presentation to a Federal Trade Commission panel in which Arthur Evans, Arthur Evans Jr., who's the chief executive of the APA, and specifically in this case, I'm talking about the American Psychological Association, which is the, let's call it the professional organization. It's not really a union. It's more of an advocacy group. But the professional organization that I belong to, the APA, for psychologists here. The other APA is the American Psychiatric Association, because that's not confusing at all. But here we're talking about the psychological APA. In this presentation, specifically, Dr. Evans cited court cases involving two teenagers, and these teenagers used an app called Character.ai. Character.ai allows people to create fictional characters and then interact with them, chat with them, and the fictional characters chat with each other. But those fictional characters aren't just avatars. Very often, the characters have AI technology behind them. And so what happens, and happened in this case, and it's cited that it's happened in other cases, is that those chatbots start to sort of sprout up, and they sprout up with different roles. And because of the nature of being involved in an app where there are avatars, where there is anonymity, people start to talk about stuff that's hard to talk about. And when they start to talk about their mental health, what's going to happen? These sort of chatbot therapists start to pop up like weeds. And very often, they use terms like therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist. They claim to have advanced degrees from universities. They claim to offer particular types of interventions. In this particular case, the one that was cited at this APA presentation, they were talking about Character.ai, but there are other apps, obviously ChatGPT is one that we use a lot, Replica. Because they use generative AI technology, they're not programmed to have particular guardrails, right? Their outputs are coming from a black box, and they learn from the user. One of the things that often happens is that they follow, it's not encoded, but it's something that's been observed by computer scientists over and over. They observe a tendency of chatbots to utilize a phenomenon called sycophancy. So it's this tendency for the chatbots to mirror, amplify, and validate whatever the person interacting with them says, right? That's what's going to enamor you to the chatbot. That's what's going to make you feel like it is safe. Of course, right?

'''E:''' A safe space.

'''C:''' You're not going to want to engage in a chatbot that's like, you're wrong and let me tell you why, or I'm going to challenge that belief of yours, right? You're going to want to engage in a chatbot that's validating what you're saying, that's amplifying what you're saying, that's reinforcing what you're saying. Now, don't get me wrong, that is a fundamental principle in mental health intervention. Any psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, or other mental health worker that has legitimate training that is a licensed provider will tell you that part of what they do is validate the patient, client, whatever term that they use within their profession. They validate the very human components, their fears, they validate their worries, they validate their emotional expressions. It's important to establish rapport, but we know the difference between psychologically beneficial or fundamentally human experiences and unhelpful or sometimes dangerous negative self-talk, unhelpful or sometimes dangerous beliefs and narratives, and we know what to look for, the red flags we need to look for if somebody is at risk for engaging in harmful behavior towards themselves or towards others. Not only are we trained in how to see that, we're trained in what to do about it. We have a duty, right? We are legally bound to protect individuals from themselves and from others in particular situations.

'''S:''' Now, Cara, it sounds like these are not AI therapists, they're chatbots that people are using as therapists, but they're not programmed to be therapists, they're programmed to be chatbots. Is that fair?

'''C:''' They're just chatbots that are getting labeled as therapists and are generatively moving more and more into that role. But the point, I guess, here that's important is you make an important distinction, but to the end user, they don't know the difference.

'''S:''' Right. But something shouldn't be offered as an AI therapist unless it's programmed to at least follow the standard of care.

'''E:''' Yeah. Why allow this confusion to reign?

'''C:''' Well, and that's the question, right? So character AI is simply a platform where people go and they chat to each other. And so you may be chatting to a person behind an avatar, you may be chatting to a chatbot. You don't know. Because they say, hi, my name's Dr. whatever, Dr. Laptop. And I-

'''E:''' Well, should it be obligated to disclose?

'''C:''' Right. So here are some guardrails that character AI says that they, since these, and I didn't even tell you about the scenarios, but have said that they are using these new safety features that they say they're using within the last year. They said that they have a disclaimer present in every chat that reminds users that, quote, characters are not real people. And that, quote, what the model says should be treated as fiction. They also said that when users are dealing with mental health issues, a disclaimer is added to any character that calls themselves a psychologist, a therapist, or a doctor that says, quote, users should not rely on these characters for any type of professional advice. And also if the, I guess they're able to scrub the content of the chats, if references to suicide or self-harm come up, a pop-up will direct users to a suicide prevention helpline, likely 988 or an online version of that. But some people argue that that's not enough because what ended up happening in the two cases that were cited by the APA chief executive, they cited two teenagers, a 14-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy. The 14-year-old boy, and I'm going to, and I probably should have said this at the top of the show, but I'll say it now that there's a kind of trigger warning here because I am going to be discussing suicide. The 14-year-old boy in Florida died by suicide after interacting with a character claiming to be a licensed therapist. And the 17-year-old boy in Texas had what they're calling, quote, high-functioning autism. And after interacting with a chatbot that claimed to be a psychologist, there was a lot of kind of hostile and violent behavior that started to develop and that was particularly targeted towards his parents. So both of the boy's parents are now suing Character AI because of what happened. That raised alarm bells for the APA as a whole. Like he was saying, basically, if this was a real therapist, they would have lost their license. But because it's an AI chatbot, there's no recourse. What do we do here? It's almost like it's a part of the design that these chatbots are going to mirror, mirror, mirror. So if you have a person saying, I'm concerned about this, I'm worried that I might do this, is there sort of a bug within the actual black box that is generative AI where they would say things like, that sounds like a good idea? That's concerning. It's deeply concerning. And so how do we regulate something like this? That's an important question. It's one thing if a company is building an AI therapist and they're trying to market it. It's another thing if chatbots within a platform are popping up, whether it's the users themselves that are creating them, or I don't even know if they're sort of like self-creation within these platforms, how do we police that information? Are disclaimers enough, especially when we're talking about children on the platforms who may not understand the difference and honestly shouldn't be engaging in anything, even remotely claiming to be therapy, without consent of their parents?

'''S:''' If you make the companies that produce the chatbot liable, they'll find a way to keep it from happening.

'''C:''' And that's the interesting thing about what's happening right now is that the parents are engaging in civil suits against the company. And so money talks. And so in this particular situation, I guess time will tell what comes from that. So the APA said part of the concern right now is that generative AI is just too damn good. Ten years ago, you knew. You knew when you were talking to a bot. That's just not the case anymore because of generative AI. In this New York Times article, the author also talks about some examples of when this happened in the past that were really problematic. So of course, organizations that are concerned about the mental health of the citizenship or of the citizenry, they cite the National Eating Disorders Organization. This is an organization that is legitimately concerned about eating disorders in America and wants to enable or provide intervention or at least screening for individuals so that they can get the help that they need. We know that we have a mental health crisis in this country. We know, Steve, you just mentioned this in the very last segment. We know that people sometimes wait months to see a professional. Of course, as professionals, we want to make it so that people can get access to help sooner. We're not trying to bottleneck access to services here. The problem is, here's an example that was cited, in 2023, a chatbot was developed by the National Eating Disorders Association and it utilized generative AI and doing what generative AI does, ultimately, they found that it was offering users weight loss tips. That is not what you want from an eating disorder chatbot therapist. There's a lot of screenshots up on Reddit. You can search for them, but showing chatbots encouraging suicide, encouraging eating disorders, encouraging self-harm, encouraging violence. Some of these may not have intended to be therapeutic chatbots. They may have had a totally different intention, but there is a real risk there. Basically, the APA is asking the FTC to start an investigation into chatbots claiming to be psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals. They're hoping that this inquiry will then compel companies to share this data so that then there can either be new legislation or the legislation that already exists on the books can actually be enforced by law enforcement and we can start to see a change. Because we are at a point where this can be really, really dangerous and we have seen some changes before. For example, during the Biden administration, they cite that the FTC chairwoman, Linda Kahn, was really focusing on AI and fraud and that only recently within the past month, the FTC imposed penalties on Do Not Pay, which is, I don't know if it's an app or a website, but they claim to offer, quote, the world's first robot lawyer. And they're like, you cannot say that. That robot is not a lawyer. They did not pass the bar.

'''E:''' Pass the bar? In what state and where?

'''C:''' And so now they are prohibiting the company from using that language and making that claim. And so that is sort of one direction that we're hoping, we, they, are hoping that this goes. The article talks a lot about the two tragic cases with these teenagers and how they were harmed. But the article also does the thing that I sometimes struggle with in media, which is that they, in an effort to provide, I think, balance, they tell the other side of the argument and the other side of the story. Now, to be fair, on the one side, they're talking about the APA, this massive organization that represents tens of thousands of psychologists. And on the other side, they talk to one psychologist, somebody named S. Gabe Hatch, who is both a clinical psychologist and also an AI entrepreneur. And they talked to him about some of the computer or the AI work that he's been doing, where he's been trying to design experiments that test people's ability to get help from AI chatbots. So in this experiment, he asked both human clinicians and ChatGPT to comment on vignettes where there were like fictional couples in therapy. And then they asked 830 human subjects to look at the answers and choose which ones were more helpful. Now, in his study, which was recently published in PLOS Mental Health, they found that the bots received higher ratings. And the subjects said that they were more, quote, empathetic, connecting, and culturally competent.

'''S:''' Cara, my wife, as you know, is a PhD counselor and she teaches counseling students, right, to get their degree. She's been using ChatGPT to create her vignettes for teaching purposes, and she says they're awesome. Like, it just saves her so much work.

'''C:''' Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

'''S:''' Completely nails it. It's like, whatever, it has access to that information. So yeah, if, again, in the hands of a professional who could then read it and evaluate it, it can function in that way.

'''C:''' And that's an important point. And that caveat should not be lost in the hands of a professional. And here's a quote from Dr. Hatch. He said, I want to be able to help as many people as possible. In doing a one-hour therapy session, I can only help at most 40 individuals a week, which, by the way, is insane. There's no way you'd think 40 people a week.

'''E:''' Yeah, when you go to the bathroom, my gosh.

'''C:''' But yeah, then he says, we have to find ways to meet the needs of people in crisis and generative AI is a way to do that. And what I say to that is, not yet, not yet.

'''E:''' More bugs to work out.

'''C:''' We need stronger regulation. We need more research into this area. And just like when we talk about robotic surgery, just like when we talk about all of these other ways that technology is really, really helping provide increased access, we need to be able to have a human being at the helm. Checks and balances are necessary. You know, they didn't talk about this in the article, but one thing that I think AI would be brilliant at is the assessment component.

'''S:''' Yeah, the triage.

'''C:''' Of course. Because a lot of people don't make the distinction, and it is harder to make when we're talking about psychology, psychiatry, less so with counseling and like LMFTs and LCSWs, but sometimes this is the case as well. When we're talking about psychiatry and psychology, a large component of what we do is psychodiagnostics. And then another component of what we do is psychotherapeutic intervention. But oftentimes, while we were doing psychodiagnostic work, we are also therapeutically engaging with our patients and vice versa. When we are doing intervention, we may see the need to tweak a diagnosis or to dig a little bit deeper. But sure, screening tools. Does this person seem to be at high risk for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia? A decision tree of questions that are answered to help flag somebody who's at risk. Of course an AI could do that. I do not like the idea of AI intervention yet. I think that there are probably going to be cases, kind of very, very fundamental CBT, ACT, DBT interventions that are already quite manualized, where this may actually be really, really helpful. And maybe this is my own bias. I see it being tough to do the type of existential work that I do with cancer patients and end of life patients. If you're an AI chatbot, I could be wrong though. That's probably my own hubris.

'''S:''' What I think is that I think the technology is there. It just hasn't been adapted to purpose yet. And as you say, evaluated, regulated. And you also have to think about how is it going to be used by whom, what's the workflow going to be, et cetera. You can't just throw it at the problem and hope that it works. This is too critical an area. You have to use it intelligently.

'''C:''' And you can't assume that just because generative AI is really good at providing information or producing a piece of art or producing a song, that they're also good at ethics. And that's a huge part of mental health intervention.

'''S:''' What I can't see a role for it in the nearer future is, let's say, in conjunction with a therapist or a psychiatrist or whatever, that they do the assessment and whatever. They get the patient to a point where they say, all right, I'm going to see you once a month now. And you have access to this AI therapist that you could use in the meantime. And that program is designed to flag concerning language and alert the therapist or whatever. And that way, it could be an increase, it's like an extender of the physician, not a replacement. And it makes them more effective. They could see more patients.

'''C:''' And you can have a bigger caseload. Yeah, exactly.

'''S:''' Yeah, you can have a bigger caseload because 75% or 80% of the work is being done by AI, et cetera. So yeah, used correctly, it could be huge. But yeah, you can't just throw it at the problem. All right. Thanks, Cara.

{{anchor|news_item3}}

=== Redefining Dyslexia (43:31) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/redefining-dyslexia/
|article_title = Redefining Dyslexia | Science-Based Medicine
|publication = sciencebasedmedicine.org
}}
'''S:''' Guys, let me ask you a question. Cara, I don't want you to answer this question.

'''C:''' Okay. I always do that to you, Steve. Everybody but Steve.

'''B:''' Four for one.

'''S:''' How would you define dyslexia? What is... Well, phenomenologically, what is dyslexia?

'''E:''' I think the common understanding is that people will read words and get the characters either in the incorrect order, and they interpret... Their brain can't interpret the words that they're trying to read.

'''S:''' What do you think, Bob and Jay?

'''B:''' Transposition, is that the proper word for that, of letters and words? Misidentification of word strings, letter strings, and within words, I mean, it's a pretty superficial understanding of it.

'''E:''' Do they see letters upside down? Is that part of it? I've never really known.

'''B:''' I don't think so.

'''S:''' So you guys are reflecting the common public conception of what dyslexia is. That idea is about a hundred years old.

'''E:''' Oh, happy birthday.

'''S:''' And it's amazing the cultural inertia of that idea.

'''C:''' Yeah, it is incredible. Because you're right.

'''E:''' It takes 10% of my brain to figure that one out.

'''C:''' I don't think about it that way at all, but it was probably beaten out of me.

'''S:''' That's why I didn't ask you.

'''C:''' Yeah. That's so interesting. But most people think it's like transposing around letters.

'''S:''' Reversing words or transposing words or letters, reversing letters.

'''E:''' Let's see what Sigmund Freud had to say about it.

'''C:''' It's a reading disorder.

'''S:''' Yeah. So now I'm going to ask you, Cara, see how up to date you are. This is kind of more neurological than psychological, but...

'''C:''' Oh, okay. I'm thinking from the DSM. That's when we diagnose it. It's identified in the DSM-5 as a specific learning disability, and it's specific to reading. So there are different kinds of learning disabilities. Dyslexia is the one that's specific to reading.

'''S:''' Okay. Yeah. So you're up to the 1960s, 70s kind of level.

'''C:''' So reading comprehension, things like that.

'''S:''' Yeah. So it's very interesting because, obviously, I'm very interested in neuroscience in general, but also just definitions, how we define things and how that shapes how we think about it. Dyslexia was first identified and named, that name was coined in 1887 by a German ophthalmologist, that's important, Rudolf Berlin, by an ophthalmologist. And he thought that this inability to read that he was detecting in some specific cases was due to, quote unquote, word blindness. And he thought it was a difficulty of visual processing, right? And that part of that was like that they reverse things or get them in the wrong order. That idea from 1887, which was never correct, then got stuck in the public consciousness and will just not go away. But it's not correct. In 1925, next milestone, now very interesting, a neuro-ophthalmologist, right? So this is somebody who's both a neurologist and an ophthalmologist.

'''E:''' That is 100 years from right now.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's 100 years ago.

'''C:''' Oh, stop.

'''S:''' Advanced a theory that it's not due to word blindness, so it's not a visual problem. It's not an eye problem. It's a neurological problem. And he thought it was due to a problem of cortical dominance, which is not correct. But he did shift the conversation from the eye to the brain, basically. Not a visual processing problem. It's a word, a language processing problem. And so then that became the dominant theory. Then of course it moved to neurology entirely, like it has nothing to do with ophthalmology. And you know, by, you know, more research was done by the 1960s, you have kind of the definition that Cara was talking about, where it, the definition focused on the fact that it was a specific learning disability, meaning there were children who had, and this is still part of the definition.

'''C:''' Oh yeah, this is a specific learning disability still in all of the diagnostic criteria.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. So in other words, you have more of a problem with language than your general IQ or your learning level would indicate, right? Does that make sense?

'''C:''' Right. So you could do a full neuropsych battery and it shows that you, we would predict that you would have this level of, you know, reading comprehension, language understanding, but for some reason there's a decrement there.

'''S:''' Yeah. So there's a specific decrement in language. But that definition is just, not that it's wrong, it's just inadequate because it doesn't address-

'''C:''' It doesn't say why.

'''S:''' It doesn't address the why. Exactly. It is completely agnostic as to the why. It's a purely clinical diagnosis of you have this specific problem. But of course, that's not enough because we want to research and think about, and especially if we're going to treat it, we want to know what's causing it. What kind of a problem is it? Not just what the deficit is, but what actually is producing the problem. So when we go beyond the 1960s, more research gets done. By the 1990s, the term phonological awareness comes about, and Cara, have you heard that before?

'''C:''' I mean, I've heard of the phonological loop. I know phonological and I know awareness.

'''S:''' All right. But yeah. But you've never heard of like dyslexia is a problem of phonological awareness.

'''C:''' No. I don't think I have.

'''S:''' Yeah. I think that's when it really became a neurological disorder.

'''C:''' Yeah. I don't think we use that. Even in neuropsych. I don't know if I've heard my neuropsych colleagues.

'''S:''' But that's since the 90s. That's been, that's when I was in medical school in the 90s. I remember there were two husband and wife doctors at Yale, pediatric neurologists, very good, who specialized in dyslexia. And that's what they taught me in 1990. You know?

'''C:''' Yeah. I guess it's the awareness part that I don't often hear. I do hear people-

'''S:''' Phonological awareness.

'''C:''' Talking about-

'''S:''' It's the problem. And the way it was described to me at the time was that these are children who have difficulty understanding at a conceptual level that words are made up of sounds. And so they have difficulty going from phonemes to words. That's the problem. And so if you're decoding the letters in a word, you don't know how that relates to the sounds. And you can't build a word out of the sounds, out of the letters. So they never get to that point where they can go from the written word to knowing what the word is. And then, of course, everything flows from that.

'''C:''' And you know what? The more... I'm actually... Now I'm interested, and I'm looking up a few things from neuropsych rehab, and I am seeing that term used a lot.

'''S:''' Yeah. Oh, yeah.

'''C:''' I'm seeing phonological awareness, but I'm also seeing things like, obviously, visual processing, auditory processing, orthographic processing, executive function, and even something called rapid automatized naming. So there are a lot of different domains.

'''S:''' There are. And this gets to where I'm eventually getting. So-

'''C:''' Okay.

'''S:''' So the definition, this is the sort of the official definition of dyslexia was, dyslexia is a specific learning disability, and it's still part of that, that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and or fluent word recognition, and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. In 2002, this was expanded a little bit. The definition then became, a deficit in processing and phonological component of language resulted directly in difficulty with decoding, spelling, accuracy, and fluency that, in turn, impacted comprehension and reading experience. Impoverished reading experience further impacted the development of vocabulary and background knowledge, which also had a negative influence on comprehension. So it's just a more of a holistic, if you will, view of language and dyslexia. So it's like, yeah, at its core, it's a specific deficit of phonological awareness, but you have to see this in the context of how language develops, how people learn, their culture, their language, because it affects different languages differently. Some languages are easier to read than others, and it doesn't have as much of an impact.

'''B:''' Interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah. For example. And the child's other intellectual abilities, right? So it's in the context of each individual child. But at its core, yep, they're just that the part of the brain that turns letters into sounds and sounds into words is not working well, and that has all these downstream effects.

'''B:''' It sounds almost an all-or-nothing thing, but the way I've seen it in modern culture, though, it's like...

'''S:''' It's a spectrum.

'''C:''' It's totally a spectrum.

'''B:''' Huh?

'''S:''' It's totally a spectrum.

'''C:''' It's a spectrum.

'''B:''' Yeah. So why would some words... Why would they have trouble decoding some words but not other words?

'''S:''' Well, some words... I mean, think about English. English is a horrible language. I mean...

'''C:''' Yeah, we all have trouble decoding some words and not other words.

'''S:''' Some words are more phonetic than others, right? I can't remember who it was that said, why is the word phonetic and not spelled phonetically?

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''E:''' Exactly.

'''B:''' That's pretty funny.

'''C:''' Yeah. So somebody with dyslexia is going to... Somebody without dyslexia is still going to struggle with encoding certain words. Somebody with dyslexia is going to struggle with more of them. Yeah.

'''S:''' And again, you could have mild, moderate, severe, like dyslexia is a continuum. And interestingly, even up into the 2000s, even the 2000 teens, people deny that dyslexia even exists as an actual neurological disorder.

'''C:''' What did they think? It's a disorder of will?

'''S:''' Well, here, I'll tell you. In the 2000s, a UK labor MP, Graham Stringer, called the diagnosis of dyslexia a cruel fiction and stated to label children as dyslexic because they're confused by poor teaching methods is wicked. So basically, poor reading ability was blamed on poor teaching and poor parenting. Now where have we heard that before? So blaming neurological disorders on bad parenting or bad teaching has a very long pedigree from ADHD to autism, right? Pretty much any...

'''C:''' To schizophrenia, refrigerator mothers.

'''S:''' To schizophrenia.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' There are so many things.

'''C:''' And it doesn't make sense because you have a class with the same teacher and some kids are struggling and some aren't.

'''S:''' Right. But they're just a bad teacher.

'''B:''' Right. You think it'd be widespread in the classroom.

'''C:''' Right.

'''S:''' But it's just easy just to blame the parents or blame the teachers. And plus, some people just don't understand neuroscience, like, no, these are specific abilities. We're not blank slates. Our brains have strengths and weaknesses. They have abilities. And everything is on a spectrum. Everything is a bell curve, basically, of ability.

'''C:''' Yeah. And I think that there's a cultural phenomenon here, which this taps into as well, which I struggle with a lot being a psychology researcher who both has a foot in the very medical model, but also a foot in the very phenomenologic philosophy side of psychology, which is that we do have a tendency as a culture to talk about things as if they're, quote, real and or in your head and not real, which is insane to me. Yeah. It's totally false. Everything is real. Like, unless we're talking about pure malingering, right, feigning a mental illness for secondary gain or for primary gain, actually, just for primary gain.

'''S:''' Even then, like, it's complicated.

'''C:''' It's even complicated then.

'''S:''' Is Munchausen disease, is that a...

'''C:''' Well, Munchausen is secondary gain. So let's get rid of secondary.

'''S:''' But wait, but that could be a disorder unto itself.

'''C:''' It could be. It could be. It could be just straight up primary gain. Just straight up malingering.

'''S:''' Deliberate fraud for primary gain.

'''C:''' Fully faking so they can get out of prison or so they can make money or something like that.

'''S:''' But that aside, which is not...

'''C:''' Which is super rare.

'''S:''' Super rare compared to all the more complicated...

'''C:''' Yeah. Like functional neurological disorder. I'm sorry. There's something going on there.

'''S:''' And the distinction between psychiatric and neurological is also kind of a fiction. It's all the same. It's all the brain.

'''C:''' It is. It's all the brain.

'''S:''' It's just different specialties about how we treat it and the kinds of things that we're familiar with. But it's all the brain.

'''C:''' And it's really dangerous, I think, not only to my profession, but also to the patients who need help to talk about something being legitimate over here and just in somebody's head over there.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''C:''' That's super dangerous.

'''S:''' It's a very harmful false dichotomy. And we have, as a profession, we have tried to move as far away from that as possible. Like even calling it a functional neurological disorder or non-epileptic seizures. We use terms that are not judgmental, just describing the phenomenon, not saying like, this is fake seizures or this is psychogenic or whatever.

'''C:''' Yeah. Some people still use those.

'''S:''' I know. It takes time. It takes time. All right. So in 2009, there was the Rose Report, which was an overview of dyslexia. It basically reinforced the phonemic awareness theory and that dyslexia is a specific neurodevelopmental disorder with genetic predisposition. It made focus, however, I'm just making a number of very specific recommendations for interventions at the individual and societal school level, et cetera, et cetera. That's basically where the definition of dyslexia sat until today, right? Until this year. But there's been research going on and every now and then, so much research gets done. It's like, okay, we have to now retool our definition based upon the last 10, 15, whatever years of research. So there's a new study that is called Toward a Consensus on Dyslexia Findings from a Delphi Study. So this is basically looking at a lot of data and saying, all right, what can we say about dyslexia given all the latest research? Basically a consensus of an expert panel on dyslexia. So here's their conclusion. They conclude with a proposed definition, which has a lot of pieces to it. I'm going to read you the ones that they emphasize. Here's the consensus statement. Dyslexia is a set of processing difficulties that affect the acquisition of reading and spelling. It's a little bit more broad than just phonemic awareness, because that's not the whole picture. It's only part of the picture. They say, in dyslexia, some or all aspects of literacy attainment are weak in relation to age, standard teaching and instruction, and the level of other attainments. That's the specific disorder part of it. Across languages and age groups, difficulties in reading, fluency, and spelling are a key marker of dyslexia. Difficulties exist on a continuum and can be experienced to various degrees of severity. The nature and developmental trajectory of dyslexia depends on multiple genetic and environmental influences. Dyslexia can affect the acquisition of other skills, such as mathematics, reading, comprehension, or learning another language. The most commonly observed cognitive impairment in dyslexia is a difficulty in phonological processing. In phonological awareness, phonological processing speed, or phonological memory. However, phonological difficulties do not fully explain the variability that is observed. That's kind of the new bit. Working memory, processing speed, and orthographic skills can contribute to the impact of dyslexia. So that's now the modern sort of synthesis, the consensus on what we're doing. It's more complicated, more nuanced.

'''C:''' Yeah, but it's also like, honestly, it's clunky AF.

'''S:''' Oh yeah, it is.

'''C:''' What do you say to a parent when they go, what does it mean that my kid has dyslexia?

'''S:''' Well, translating that to the family, to the patient, to the parents, that's part of the skill of the job.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I don't know what to tell you.

'''C:''' Exactly. You still gotta give them the elevator answer.

'''S:''' But when we're talking to each other, that's not meant for a public-facing, concise definition. That's professionals talking to professionals. So it has evolved over time, and basically tracking with the research, I think it's really important to know what the professionals say now about what it is. And it's really fascinating also to think about how persistent that hundred and whatever 40-year-old myth about dyslexia being a visual processing problem is. It's really interesting.

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== Small Modular Reactors for Cargo Ships (59:40) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/korean-smr-powered-container-ship-design-revealed
|article_title = Korean SMR-powered container ship design revealed - World Nuclear News
|publication = www.world-nuclear-news.org
}}
'''S:''' All right, Bob, you're going to tell us about using small modular reactors for cargo ships.

'''B:''' Yes, I am. Earlier this month, a Korean shipbuilding company unveiled a bold new design, a nuclear-powered container ship using a small modular reactor coupled with an innovative propulsion system using carbon dioxide. Now, of course, I had to do a deep dive on this. Doing that, though, it kind of reinforced the idea in me that if nuclear reactors are cool, mobile nuclear reactors are even cooler. And so not just reactors that sit in one spot to power cities or research labs or whatever, but ones that are integral to propulsion. It's just such a fascinating idea. One iconic version in history that I found and reminded myself about was the atomic car from the 1950s. You guys remember that? There was actually a few ideas tossed around. The one that stood out for me was the Ford Nucleon. What a great name. The Ford Nucleon was a concept car. It was designed as a fission-powered car of the future. The reactor was in the back. It would power a steam engine for propulsion. It seems ridiculous now, right? Just thinking about that, it's like, really? Obviously, technical and safety issues make a car like that impossible. Even 70 years later, it's like we could not pull that off. If you go through those years, though, nuclear planes and tanks were seriously studied as well, especially during the Cold War. But those designs always had issues like weight, shielding, radiation, size, just not practical at all. With all that said, we do have mobile nuclear reactor-powered vehicles today. And by nuclear reactor, I'm talking fission. A nuclear reactor is basically fission or fusion or other even more sci-fi ones like antimatter or whatever. So I'm talking fission when I say nuclear reactor. So we do have them. What are they? What exists today?

'''S:''' Nuclear subs.

'''B:''' Nuclear subs, right? But also?

'''S:''' Aircraft carriers.

'''B:''' Aircraft carriers, right? They are just... Think about that. They are amazing.

'''E:''' Nuclear vessels.

'''B:''' I'm glad somebody said that. These guys can operate for a quarter of a century without refueling. And on top of that, they have amazing safety records. And then there's another one. What's another example? There's one other one that I think that should be on this list. And that's the Russians' famous nuclear-powered icebreakers. And that's kind of it. There's other examples, you know, maybe a commercial ship here in Russia or maybe even some other Russian projects. But they're kind of more footnotes than anything else in my mind. It's really just the subs, nuclear subs, aircraft carriers, and the icebreakers. But that's it. I mean, it's a little frustrating for me as a sci-fi geek because that's the only really three types that we have. Of course, I have to throw in nuclear rockets there because that is absolutely changing. They are working on nuclear-powered rockets now. It seems inevitable that this is going to happen. But they don't exist yet. They don't exist yet. So one recent advance, though, I think is going to make a big change in that. This is something we've mentioned a few times on the show, small modulate reactors, SMRs. So this is a class of small fission reactors that could be many different types. It could be Gen 4 reactors. It could be pressurized water reactors. It could be molten salt. It doesn't matter, really. The specific tech doesn't matter, but they're all basically small fission reactors. And they're also built, the idea is that they will be built at a factory and then shipped to a location to power things. Many different things. It could be microgrids, communities, remote communities, buildings, data centers. I'm sure we're going to be seeing these in data centers. Their power output is typically 10 to 300 megawatts compared to the real big boy reactors. They can range from 700 megawatts to 1,600 megawatts, 1.6 gigawatts. And right now, where do you think the actual small modular reactors are right now that are actually working and doing stuff right now?

'''J:''' Well, for the military, right?

'''B:''' No, it's like China and Russia. And they have like four. So we're kind of at the precipice of this really taking off. There's really not many right now. And it's not hard to predict, right? Maybe I should have predicted it at the beginning of the year. The number of these types of reactors are going to explode worldwide, so to speak.

'''E:''' Yeah. Thank you.

'''B:''' Yeah. There's at least 80 SMR designs being developed now across 19 countries. And they're being seriously considered for tons and tons of applications. So I mean, it's kind of obvious that some of these designs will almost surely proliferate in the near future. And some, I hope, will be used to move ships.

'''S:''' Well, Bob, we have to say, though.

'''B:''' Yeah, there's a lot of stuff we have to say. But go ahead.

'''S:''' I appreciate your optimism. But you know what the big deal killer is for SMRs?

'''B:''' Yeah, the expense.

'''S:''' The expense. They are more expensive per unit energy than the big reactors.

'''B:''' Yeah. That's a problem.

'''E:''' A lot more to ship their products.

'''S:''' It's more than a problem. It could be a deal killer. Because why would you spend? Already nuclear power is at the high end of the cost per unit energy. And if now you go even higher cost, why would you do that? If you're just having something stationary attached to the grid, why not build a big boy and it's more cost effective?

'''B:''' Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's definitely a good point. I was going to segue to that at some point after I got over a little bit of my techno-optimism here. But yeah, that's a potential problem. But I think, Steve, I think if that proves to be almost a deal killer, essentially a deal killer, I think that cheaper micro-reactors, which are out of scope of this news item, micro-reactors, I think, will probably proliferate.

'''S:''' But this dovetails with your news item, with your point. So if you're just attaching it to the grid and making electricity, you have to compare it to all the other ways to make electricity in terms of cost effectiveness. But if you design an SMR with a specific purpose that is worth the trade-off, then it can become cost effective. The military uses it because the strategic advantage is worth the higher expense.

'''B:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' And what you're going to talk about is for cargo ships, and that's, they are designing it to purpose so that it's not just, again, connected to the grid. And that also can be cost effective. You also mentioned data centers, so there's a company that's designing them specifically for data centers that, again, because it's designed for purpose, it can be cost effective. So I think that's the direction that the SMRs are going to go, not just hooking them up to the grid, but for specific purposes where the advantages make it cost effective.

'''B:''' Right. And that's why I mentioned 80, there's 80 of these designs being developed by 19 countries. All of them are similar, but also kind of distinct. And in my opening statement, I made a specific point to say that this idea, this new idea is to use a small modular reactor coupled with this innovative propulsion system, which is critical, which is critical to their plan because it brings in efficiencies that make it a better cargo ship in terms of space, in terms of safety, in terms of a lot of stuff. So let me go through some of the ideas.

'''S:''' There's one other thing that can make an SMR cost effective, is if you build it in a location where the waste heat can be utilized for a specific purpose, then you double their efficiency. And so that's like with the data center thing, that you have to build it with the data center, and then you could use the waste heat to cool the data center, and suddenly it's twice as cost effective as it was.

'''B:''' Yeah. So all that said, I think, I still think that SMRs are going to have a future. And from what I could tell doing the research for this specific application for cargo vessels, it sounds very promising. Of course, it's got to be vetted, and a lot of the information that I've seen is coming from this company. And the company is South Korea's HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. And they're a big player in the movement, and they are what this news item is about. They recently announced plans for a nuclear-powered cargo vessel capable of carrying 15,000 20-foot containers, which is a massive commercial transport ship. It's at definitely the bigger end of the spectrum. Their release, the information that I've come across so far, it seems to focus on three things, and it makes a lot of sense. They're focusing on regulations, safety, and efficiency. Those things, I can't, I mean, those are the top three. It seems, I can't think of anything else that would really be more important than those. So that's a little bit encouraging. So to illustrate what they're doing with the regulations, I'll quote Park Sangman. He's the head of the company's Green Energy Research Lab. He said, HD COSO is strengthening cooperation not only with major classification societies, but also with international regulatory bodies to establish international regulations necessary for the commercialization of nuclear-powered vessels. Okay, so what are classification societies? These are organizations that set and enforce technical and safety standards for ships, including nuclear-powered vessels. So safety, okay, safety is the second critical focus here. Their ships are really, their plan is really taking this seriously. They're planning a double shielding system where you've got stainless steel and light water working together to shield and protect against the things you need to shield against, ionizing radiation, gamma rays, neutrons, and it also dissipates heat very, very well. So the steel absorbs gamma radiation and gives structural integrity to the system, and the light water moderates the neutrons and absorbs radiation as well and dissipates the heat. Then they also plan to create a facility in South Korea specifically for testing and validating their design. So that's, you know, that sounds good. Those words sound good. So in terms of the company's final focus, efficiency, I think this is where their design could have some impact, I found really fascinating as hell. So critical to this efficiency that they talk about is the partnership of the fission reactor with the propulsion system. Having a small modular reactor on the ship, it's not only an efficient source of heat, right, because nuclear energy is much more dense than chemical energy, but it also means that you think about what you can get rid of. Now you can get rid of the exhaust system, the engine exhaust system. You can get rid of the fuel tanks. Because you have this reactor, you don't need those things. So you can just pull them right out of the ship, and now you have a lot of extra space where more of those 20-foot cargo containers can now go where this other stuff was. So the more cargo you can carry, the better, the more efficient the whole enterprise is, and the better the bottom line. So that's one. That's one boost in efficiency. The next boost comes from what the ship actually does with the reactor's heat, right? Because the heat, the nuclear reactor, that's just a source of heat, whether if you're burning fossil fuels or if you have any other type of reactor, you're really just like, we need to create a source of heat that's efficient. So that's it. You've got your heat source. Traditionally, ships use their heat source to heat water to make steam, right? You make the steam, that drives the turbines, and that generates the electricity for the propulsion. That's kind of how the flow goes for a lot of ships. So this propulsion design, though, is different. It does away with the steam, and it replaces it with supercritical carbon dioxide. And this is kind of like a secret sauce. It's such a really cool idea. So the bottom line is that why CO2? Why are we using CO2? Why not just use water? One of the main reasons is that CO2 expands more efficiently than steam. Bam, right there. It's just like, it's just flat out more efficient, and it's because of the supercritical state. So how efficient is it? A traditional steam cycle is 30% to 40% efficient. The supercritical CO2 cycle is up to 50% efficient. And if you look at the numbers they're talking about, they typically say that their design is going to be about 5% more efficient, and 5%, it might not sound like a lot, but that could be huge for lots of ships traveling the seas, 5% increased efficiency could be pretty awesome. And so not only is it more efficient, but it's smaller and it's lighter than steam turbines. There's no water or steam, and so that means that there's less corrosion and no emissions as well, which of course is a wonderful addition there. So this is kind of, I see it as like a nice one-two punch. You got the small modular reactor, and you've got the CO2 replacing water, and it makes such a potent combination. Bottom line, there's less fuel waste, there's more cargo space, there's lower maintenance, there's zero emissions. And that's nothing to sneeze at. The shipping industry consumes about 350 million tons of fossil fuel annually. So decarbonizing shipping could really, really help in our damn climate crisis. It's not something that's going to make a hugely dramatic difference because I think shipping accounts for only 3% of worldwide emissions like that. But any little bit helps, and this is, I think, a pretty cool idea. So yeah, so a lot of industries are looking into SMRs, and hopefully they're going to pan out here and become cost-effective. It seems like we're on the edge of this stuff taking off. It's not just SMRs and micro-reactors. I hope. I hope. Maybe I'm being too positive, but I hope that it takes off and it's more than just little niches here and there. So do all of these developments and all these advances and improvements in our technology, does that mean that the Ford Nucleon may be closer to reality? It can be if you're okay with five feet of steel or concrete shielding in your car. Otherwise, that's not going to happen. It's just like, you know, can you imagine the car, it would be far, far worse than the car that Homer Simpson made up in that famous episode of The Simpsons where it was just a car that uses a nuclear reactor like this would just be ridiculous. So we're not going to see anything like that. I think battery technology is more than enough for small applications like cars. But bigger stuff, bigger stuff, I think reactors will be in the mix.

'''S:''' Well, the hope is too, Bob, that with these niche applications like data centers and cargo ships and things like that, that will cause an economy of scale. Like I said, if you have factories cranking out SMRs, then they might become cost-effective for more general applications like just plugging into the grid.

'''B:''' Creating these, the hope in the beginning, Steve, was that if you create enough of these, it could really help decarbonize a worldwide economy. But even powerful big SMRs, you know, five to 300 megawatts, they calculated you would need tens of thousands of them to really start making a difference. And I'm not sure how long it's going to... I think we'll be probably well past 2050 by the time, if ever, we could start making them and get some economies of scale like for that. I mean, shit. It's scary to think, but it's still the idea. It's just fascinating.

'''S:''' It doesn't have to be the solo solution, but if we want to decarbonize shipping and, yeah, take a chunk out of the grid, that would be nice.

'''E:''' Yeah. There'll be hundreds of pieces to this puzzle.

'''S:''' Yeah.

{{anchor|wtn}}
{{anchor|futureWTN}}
== Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:19:31) ==

'''S:''' Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' All right, guys. Lat week I played this Noisy. [plays Noisy]

'''E:''' I know what that is.

'''J:''' Yeah, so there's a lot going on there.

'''S:''' There's a lot going on there.

'''E:''' I know what that is. That is the world's first popcorn machine built in 1884, which you had to start up with diesel fuel or whale oil or something. And it popped like eight kernels. Like at the end there, it sounded like kernels of corn.

'''S:''' I thought that was the sound of... That's what happens after I put my quarters into the candy machine and waiting for the candy to dry.

'''J:''' Well, we had some guesses. Visto Tutti wrote in. This guy's very busy and I feel very lucky when he emails me. So he said, this one sounds like an ice maker, the mechanical part of the refrigerator that cracks ice cubes into a receptacle for drinks and such. Man, if you had that in your kitchen, I'd be pissed, right? That's a noisy fricking ice maker. That is not an ice maker, but they do make noise. So I hear what you're saying. Cooper Parrish wrote in and said, howdy. Here's my guess. Coint operated mechanism, two bit selection interface pushing a ball down a long metal track on dispaly inside a box. So he's saying it's a vending machnie. I thought that was a good guess because-

'''E:''' That's basically what Steve said.

'''J:''' Yeah. There's lots of noises. You're putting the coin in and the thing turns and then the thing falls and then maybe an arm grabs. Whatever, right? There's all these different things. It's not a vending machine, but that was a good guess. A listener named Derek Dunsmore wrote in and he said, hi, I may finally know this one. As a hobbyist 3D designer, I recall watching a video of a man producing a small but functionally manned bumper car sized tank out of 3D printed materials. I believe this is the sound that vehicle made when the tank treads were moving over terrain during a trial run. I thought that was cool. I didn't know that someone 3D printed a tank that could move. I'm sure they had to put some type of motor in there. But anyway, this is not correct, but I would like to see the tank. We have a couple of closer guesses. So Gerard Steenbeck wrote, first time guessing that sounds like a plotter printer, a massive printer that uses pens or something to draw blueprints on big sheets of paper. So I think I've been around one of these and they definitely make lots of different kinds of noises and everything. This is not a plotter printer though, but that was an interesting guess. Dan Tenhove said, I'm guessing that this is a recording of the inside of a VCR. And I know you have to be kind of older to know what a VCR is. Cara, do you know what a VCR is?

'''C:''' I'm not that... Come on. Of course I know what a VCR is.

'''E:''' I was going to ask if you knew what a vending machine is.

'''C:''' I was born in 1983, you guys. My entire upbringing was with the VCR.

'''E:''' You're a millennial.

'''C:''' I'm an elder millennial. I'm two years away from the millennial cutoff.

'''E:''' Oh.

'''C:''' Yeah, I'm an elder millennial.

'''E:''' Elder millennial.

'''J:''' So I remember when we were kids that Bob actually could repair VCRs. The tape got caught in there or whatever. Bob was always tinkering around or whatever because he was really obsessed with taping Star Trek and Bruce Lee and Spider-Man, which I was 100% behind. So yeah, they make different noises. There's things happening in a VCR. There's moving parts. There's things that grab the tape and there's things that are happening. So I could see that. I think that was a good guess, but that wasn't correct. I do have a winner. And there were actually two people that guessed pretty quickly. There were a lot of other guessers, but I'm going to tell you who the first two are. The person who won and who submitted it first is Travis Warburton, and he said, this is 100% a canister being sent down a pneumatic tube system.

'''B:''' Oh.

'''C:''' Oh, like at the bank?

'''J:''' He says, the beeps are probably the destination station being typed in. I'm a nurse at a hospital and use these every day. And Madeline Love also guessed correctly on that. These are two new names to Who's That Noisy. So yeah, that's basically what it is. I will remind you that a young listener named Gertie sent this noisy in, so I wanted to thank her personally for doing that. Thank you so much. And yeah, essentially that's what it is. I mean, the people who recorded this, there was different use of this whole thing. But that's basically what's going on. Pneumatic systems are pretty cool. I remember that one of the banks that I used to use had one of the canisters get stuck. I guess the tube went underground for this one, and it got stuck in there because somebody put in like $20 worth of coins.

'''E:''' Oh.

'''C:''' And it's too heavy.

'''J:''' Yeah, they had to dig it out, and that was that for that pneumatic system. But Costco uses-

'''E:''' They took a backhoe and dug it out?

'''J:''' Yeah, they had to dig it out.

'''E:''' Holy moly.

'''J:''' Costco uses a pneumatic system, and there's pretty extensive ones out there, especially today. With the modern technology, they can make them pretty interesting.

'''S:''' We still use them in the hospital for sending blood samples to the lab.

'''J:''' Yeah, that's it. There you go.

'''B:''' Oh, I thought that tech was dead.

'''S:''' No, when you still have to physically move stuff around, it's pretty useful.

'''C:''' Yeah, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

'''J:''' Yeah, like when you need blood immediately, you put it in the pneumatic system.

'''E:''' In a tube in the pneumatic system.

'''J:''' Oh, I thought it was opening your vein. You know, suck the blood. No, it doesn't work that way.

'''E:''' No?

'''J:''' I have a new noisy guys. This one was sent in by a listener named Ed Barrett. [plays Noisy]

'''E:''' Oh, those all sound like wrong numbers.

'''J:''' Yeah, there is a pranking kind of vibe to that. Guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

'''J:''' NOTACON 2025, guys, is coming. We have a couple of months. We're very excited. And in fact, the person that we're interviewing this week is a special guest that we're going to have at NOTACON, so listen to the interview. And please do consider coming, because you're going to miss out on one hell of a good time with lots of music, lots of fun things that we're going to do. There are surprises. There are jigs and jags. Steve is going to teach someone how to do kung fu. It's going to be awesome. Don't miss it. NOTACON CON, Evan. [https://notaconcon.com/ notaconcon.com]

'''E:''' That's the website.

'''J:''' That's the website.

'''E:''' [https://notaconcon.com/ notaconcon.com]

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Jay. All right. Well, let's go to that interview now.

{{anchor|interview}}
== Interview with Adam Russell (1:21:32) ==

'''S:''' We are joined now by Adam Russell. Adam, welcome to the Skeptics' Guide.

'''AR:''' Hello there. Good to be here.

'''S:''' Adam, you are a musician, the bassist for the group Story of the Year. I also understand you have a Star Wars podcast called Thank the Maker, but we wanted to chat with you because you're going to be joining us at NOTACON, but tell us a little bit about yourself first. Tell us about your career.

'''AR:''' Yeah. I've been, we were just talking about this offline, I've been with this band and this group of guys the majority of my life, going back to the late 90s when I first started playing music. St. Louis is a small scene, so we all kind of played in bands together, ended up as this lineup plus one other who's no longer with us and released our first album in 2003. It's a big debut. It was the just like perfect alignment of stars. We were so lucky to have the success we had then and over these years, these 25 years almost since then, we're riding the wave of the 20-year cycle, the resurgence, and our music kind of came back into the public consciousness and we're on to another generation of fans and things are in a really fun, exciting place where we're lucky enough to have another chance. We've kind of threaded the needle down into this small group of bands who are still around and can still pull it off. I'm a lucky guy. I'm happy to be here.

'''S:''' Yeah, there's so many sub-sub-genres of music these days. You don't need to have, it's not like there's just this one bucket of musicians. You could survive in a really small niche.

'''AR:''' I mean, there's so, you look at that with anything, there's so many subcultures. You go onto social media and see people who have literally millions of followers that I've never heard of. I have no idea what they do. I bet they have these communities, whether it's just on social media or somebody on the reality TV or any kind of artist, and it's wild to think that there are that many people on earth that each of us can succeed well enough with our little niche.

'''S:''' Yeah, well, it's more than 8 billion people on the planet.

'''AR:''' Yeah, that'll do. That'll work.

'''J:''' Adam, what is the style of the band?

'''AR:''' I think we would describe ourselves most accurately as post-hardcore, a lot of punk influence, emo, I think is the most mainstream, most known title for this subgenre, but we have influence of just 90s rock, metal, punk, everything, good music, I'll call it good music.

'''E:''' It does touch on emo, although I would not necessarily peg it as such. However, in the early 2000s, that was kind of the wave that carried a lot of groups forward into the mainstream.

'''AR:''' For sure. If you know the Vans Warped Tour, that sort of moving window of that Venn diagram of genres, that's what we fit into.

'''E:''' Yeah, perfect.

'''J:''' How does skepticism and your music connect to each other?

'''AR:''' Science was my first passion. I grew up on science like any kid, pretty much. It was dinosaurs and then the space shuttle and everything in the 90s, especially. All of that was front and center. I went to space camp. I was always at the science center and stuff like that in St. Louis. Friendships were always kind of adjacent to those things. Music just happened to overlap, but our guitar player and I are big Star Wars nerds. We're all kind of into similar things and into science. I've always tried to make it part of anything that I do, whether it be like the Star Wars podcast or the band. On our third album, actually, we got pretty political and kind of got into social and other kind of topics in our second and third album, lyrically. We had a few songs that were inspired by Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot specifically. We ended up using an excerpt from the Pale Blue Dot as sort of an interlude, cut it together. It got the old audio tape and ran it into Pro Tools and chopped it up. We actually had to get permission from the estate, so Andrean had to approve it and sent us an email back, which I still have buried somewhere in an inbox. It was like the peak of my life. She wished us luck. She said, you know, I hope the album climbs the charts like a rocket into space or something like that. It was amazing. We've touched on that stuff here or there, but it's always been more like personal stuff that you try to inject wherever you can.

'''J:''' We've worked with her in the past and she is just amazingly generous that way, so I'm not surprised that you say that.

'''AR:''' Yeah. She's an angel.

'''E:''' How did you stumble across the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe?

'''AR:''' Like I said, I've always been into science, but when I really got into music in high school and went from being this fairly intelligent kid who kind of coasted through elementary school, got into high school, discovered music, and then my grades just tanked. I got so off track. Music was the only thing that mattered to me, but once that mission was sort of accomplished, we got signed and it was happening, I found myself with all this free time and the spark kind of reignited my passion for science. I just went headfirst into reading and finding podcasts and everything. It was also about the time that at the end of high school, around teenage years, I realized my beliefs didn't align with what I was raised on. I was raised Catholic and realized I didn't believe in God or any kind of metaphysical stuff like that. I leaned into science and then found, through the New Atheist Movement and those folks, many of which are questionable people at this point, but listening to Dawkins' interviews and things like that on Point of Inquiry and things like that, in discovering podcasts, found you guys. I want to say it was maybe less than a year after Perry died, I was working on a DVD that we were editing. I had this long process of censoring, had to go through frame by frame and do all this stuff. I spent a month solid at my desk with just visual stuff and I needed something to listen to. I ended up listening through your entire back catalog and got fully caught up. I don't think I've missed an episode since then, since 2007 probably.

'''E:''' Yeah, 2007, yeah, that's when Perry left us.

'''AR:''' Yeah. That was the beginning.

'''J:''' That's amazing. You must experience this. When you find out that people are into the work that you create and then they sustain it, like what you just said, it really surprises me that people can do that with podcasts because they can go on for a very long time, which at this point, there's a lot of them out there. It means a lot to me to think that people are just into the show to the point where they're going to keep going with us.

'''AR:''' Like we were saying before we started, what you guys feel about what you've accomplished with your podcast, I feel so similarly about our music and our band. I feel very lucky to have people still with us after all these years.

'''S:''' Adam, have you ever been to a live skeptical conference before?

'''AR:''' Not a conference, but pardon the pun. I was at one of the live recordings in, what was it, Phoenix?

'''E:''' Phoenix.

'''B:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''AR:''' That's about as close as I've come.

'''J:''' Well, you're not going to get laid-

'''AR:''' Well, my wife's going to be there, so, I mean-

'''C:''' Jay, that's none of your business whether or not you get laid.

'''S:''' Adam, tell us about L.A. Strikes Back.

'''AR:''' Yes, L.A. Strikes Back is a fundraising initiative to support victims of the L.A. fires. Started with a handful of other folks who I know through the Star Wars community, Mike Forrester, one of the co-hosts of Thank the Maker, and some other prop makers and folks who are members of the 501st Legion, the costuming group. A few of the folks live in L.A. and have been directly affected by the fires. Actually, our producer and editor, Jason, he and his wife are living in a rental house right now. They were in Altadena. They didn't lose their house, but the whole place is uninhabitable. We have a direct connection to people in L.A. who have been affected, and we, of course, as we like to do in the community, in the Star Wars community, has banded together to try to help folks out. We're combining Star Wars and music. I'm kind of bringing in the music side of it, trying to get donations from friends. It's a lot of custom-designed helmets and different props and things and collectibles, anything we can put on auction to raise money. I'm donating a bass, some old Star Wars figures that I have from years ago, some kind of rare collectibles.

'''E:''' The original Kenner Boba Fett, maybe?

'''AR:''' I don't have that, unfortunately.

'''B:''' What's that worth?

'''E:''' Oh, it's too bad.

'''B:''' What's that worth these days?

'''E:''' Is that a million bucks?

'''J:''' Well, there's different kinds. The one that's super expensive...

'''E:''' The prototype?

'''J:''' Yeah, it was just a prototype that shot a little red missile out of the back. If you get one of those, you have a lot of money on your hands.

'''E:''' I'm sorry. I digressed.

'''AR:''' Harmful if swallowed, the rocket.

'''E:''' That's right. Always.

'''AR:''' It's mostly props and things because, again, 501st Legion and other makers are contributing some really, really cool stuff. We're doing the auction at the end of March. We pushed it back a little bit because we just want to give it some more time, but it's already going very well. The stuff we have lined up, I think it's going to pull some considerable funds. Obviously, we're not going to solve the problem, but we're going to do our part.

'''E:''' You mentioned Thank the Maker podcasts. How did that come about, and what is that about?

'''AR:''' It was a pandemic project. We were all... Actually, Ryan Key, the singer of Yellow Card, and I... Yellow Card and Story of the Year have toured together off and on for years. We connected over Star Wars, and at some point, I realized I wanted to do a podcast. I've been listening to you guys forever. I've listened to so many podcasts. I wanted to do something, and I was thinking a movie podcast, kind of a pop culture thing, do all the classics that we grew up on. Then literally the night before we were about to record our first episode, Ryan and I, he said and called me up and said, look, man, you're going to kill me, but I have an idea. I kind of want to change up this idea. What if it's just about Star Wars? I was skeptical at first, but we ended up going with it. It ended up being perfect because there's a built-in listening base, and it ended up being something that we could find the slice of the Venn diagram where people who grew up on our music and people who grew up on Star Wars, especially the prequels, that actually lines up perfectly. We just crossed 250 episodes recently, our fifth anniversary. It's not our full-time job, but it's a paid hobby that works, and it's worth our time. The main thing is that we've created this community around what we love about Star Wars.

'''J:''' What do you think about Kathleen Kennedy supposedly not being a part of the brand anymore?

'''AR:''' I'm excited to see what the next chapter is going to be, but I'm already just worn out by all the bullshit negative celebration of her retirement. She's a legend. She's been producing some of the best films of all time literally our entire lives. We're all in our mid-40s, starting with Poltergeist and E.T. She's been at the helm of all these incredible films. Maybe she wasn't the best studio head, per se. Who can say? None of us have that skill set. Who are we to say that? She's a legend. She should be praised for her long, illustrious career. I have nothing but respect for her.

'''J:''' Yeah. I don't know if I agree with that. I can respect your perspective on it. I get the whole, let's not focus on the negativity, and I have done what I think you have, which is completely not be a part of any of it, because I don't want to focus on that. Without getting into the whole thing, because there's a lot to talk about, the bottom line is I'm an episode four, five, and six guy, and I probably won't be happy with much that comes after that. It is what it is. I liked a couple of the movies. I liked Andor, and that's good enough. I recommend to people, just watch the things that you like and let the other stuff, just ignore it.

'''AR:''' Exactly. Let people enjoy stuff. Just leave the negativity out of it. Yeah.

'''E:''' I agree as well. There shoulb be something someone can find somewhere in the Star Wars universe that they can enjoy and just concentrate on that for what it is.

'''AR:''' Absolutely.

'''C:''' Really? Really?

'''J:''' Except Cara.

'''AR:''' Everybody except Cara.

'''C:''' Except me. Yeah. I don't know.

'''J:''' Cara knows a little bit more about Star Wars now because of us.

'''C:''' I know a little bit more about Star Wars than I ever wanted to.

'''E:''' That's called osmosis.

'''C:''' See, but the difference is, I'm not one of these Star Wars fans that's obsessed with Star Wars and then just shits all over it. I just don't care about Star Wars. I feel like that's different.

'''AR:''' I much prefer that too.

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah. It's a different take. We don't have to all be all about everything all the time.

'''J:''' Of course not. Of course not.

'''E:''' No. But again, Venn diagram, it's a good example. You know how science, skepticism, Star Wars, those three circles definitely are here in this family.

'''AR:''' Well, Jay, I'll re-ask you officially right now. I'll put you on the spot, on the air, so to speak. Would you like to join us on Thank the Maker, perhaps, for an episode?

'''J:''' Oh my God. How many times can I be on the show?

'''AR:''' All of them?

'''J:''' Yeah. A hundred percent. Just email me. I mean, I will make myself available. I would love to do that.

'''AR:''' Awesome. I have some ideas.

'''J:''' So you're going to come to NOTACON. You know, we've been very selective about who we let on that stage because we have a core group of people that we work with, that we love to work with. But I mean, it was a pretty easy decision to have you do it because, first of all, Evan came out swinging about how awesome you are. But I mean, after I found out about the Star Wars thing, I'm like, this guy's awesome. I got, you know, like, he's in, a hundred percent.

'''E:''' I cinched it.

'''J:''' Yeah. So we're going to have you join us for a few of the bits that we're doing. I will give you a couple of reveals right now. We haven't really gone into much detail. We're doing something, George changed the name, didn't he? We used to call it Woo Tank.

'''S:''' It's Pitching Woo.

'''J:''' Pitching Woo.

'''E:''' Pitching Woo.

'''J:''' Okay. So the idea is that we are going to have the audience pitch to us things that revolve around pseudoscience as if they're like, they could be products, it could be a, you know, a cult.

'''S:''' A pseudoscientific business. Yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah. And we're going to judge it on whether or not we think it would work and everything. Like, we're going to be very critical about it. And we think that this is going to be funny because, you know, the audience is going to come up with some really, really crazy stuff, I'm sure. So you know, there's going to be a lot of the judges talking to each other and we're going to be, you know, doing the whole thing that like the show does. I think that's going to be a lot of fun. And then we're going to do a bit called Never Seen It, which is a improv comedy bit where you find out movies that people haven't seen, that most people know about, and then you make them do a live read of a scene with somebody else.

'''AR:''' Yes.

'''J:''' And you have to, you know, you have to be-

'''S:''' But no context.

'''J:''' No context, but you have to be 100% committed. Like you're doing this as if you're in the movie. You have to be dramatic and you have to have total buy-in.

'''AR:''' Oh, I love this. I love this so much.

'''J:''' I think that one is going to be, people are going to really love it because it's going to go off the rails immediately.

'''E:''' Oh gosh. Hilarity will ensue.

'''AR:''' Yes. This is great.

'''J:''' Yeah. So Adam, I think you're going to love this stuff. We're going to have a great time. You know, I'm really happy to welcome you to White Plains, New York. I mean, God, this is one of the cultural hubs of the United States.

'''E:''' Adam's familiar with many, many White Plains-ish types of towns throughout America.

'''AR:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Basically, it's an airport, a train station, and some hotels.

'''J:''' And a huge mall. One of the biggest malls.

'''E:''' That is a big mall.

'''AR:''' Hey, I'm a child of the 80s and 90s. I love malls.

'''J:''' Yeah. We did the food court last time and it was great. So we did the 2023 NOTACON there. It was awesome. The hotel was awesome. We basically took over the entire hotel. So I think this year is going to be even better than last time. So we're really excited that you're coming. And I just want you to be prepared because you're going to have to do improv comedy with us.

'''AR:''' I'm ready. I'm prepared.

'''S:''' All right.

'''E:''' Adam tell us where we can find you and all your endeavors that you do so our audience can easily find you?

'''AR:''' Yeah. Find the band at Story of the Year on all the socials. I think we're still on Twitter, X, whatever that was called, unfortunately. Thank the Maker Pod at Thank the Maker Pod on Instagram, TikTok for now, Blue Sky, I think we're on there maybe. At Adam the Skull on all the things, Thank the MakerPod.com, StoryoftheYear.net and so on and so forth.

'''S:''' All right. We look forward to seeing you in May, Adam.

'''AR:''' Same to you guys. Thanks again for having me.

'''S:''' Yep.

'''J:''' You got it, man.

'''C:''' Good night.

{{anchor|theme}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:39:31) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = None
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = Researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment.
|link1web = https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-025-01360-5
|link1title = Radioprotection of healthy tissue via nanoparticle-delivered mRNA encoding for a damage-suppressor protein found in tardigrades | Nature Biomedical Engineering
|link1pub = www.nature.com

|item2 = Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).
|link2web = https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado3843
|link2title = https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado3843
|link2pub = www.science.org

|item3 = A new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars.
|link3web = https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu6058
|link3title = https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu6058
|link3pub = www.science.org

|}}
{{SOFResults

|science1 = Researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment.

|science2 = Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).

|fiction = A new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars.

|rogue1 = Jay
|answer1 = Researchers successfully used mRNA which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment.

|rogue2 = Evan
|answer2 = Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).

|rogue3 = Bob
|answer3 = Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).

|rogue4 = Cara
|answer4 = Studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct diel classification (what time of day they are active).

|host = Steve
|sweep = y
|clever =
|win =
|swept =
}}

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panelk of skeptics, that's you guys, to tell me which one is the fake. I've got three exciting news items this week. You ready?

'''J:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Mm-hmm.

'''S:''' Okay. Here we go. Item number one, researchers successfully used mRNA, which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. Item number two, studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct Diel classification, what time of day they are active. And item number three, a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars. Jay made a noise. Jay did. Jay gets to go first.

'''J:''' All right. The first one here, these researchers, they successfully used mRNA, which produces a tardigrade protein to protect surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. I have a lot to say about that one, Steve, because I remember I did specifically, I did a news item where they tracked tardigrades that were attached to rockets that went into outer space.

'''E:''' I remember that news item.

'''J:''' Yeah, me too. And I remember talking about this protein that they have that's covering their DNA and protects it from radiation coming in and messing it up. And this is exactly the kind of thing that I think you would make up. And man, if we could do that, though, they successfully used mRNA to produce, but who did they successfully use it on, Steve?

'''S:''' Well, since you're going first, I'll tell you. This is a mouse study, not that it matters.

'''J:''' Wait. So there are anti-radiation mice running around this planet now?

'''E:''' Well, not running around a laboratory.

'''S:''' And of course, the cancer treatment is radiation therapy, right? I hope that was obvious.

'''J:''' All right. So this is how supervillains are made, by the way. Okay. So I'm going to put that one on the back burner for a second. The second one here, you're saying studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct deal classification, what time of day they are active. So only 39% were correct in saying when they're active during the day.

'''S:''' Yeah. So in other words, like if an animal is categorized as nocturnal, this study found that 61% of the time they were not nocturnal.

'''J:''' That's crazy. If that's real, if that's legitimate, then it really, you know, what are these scientists and researchers doing? Like they're falling asleep at the wheel here while they're doing... They made 8.9 million observations of 445 species and 39, they were that wrong? That's a big mistake there, right? That's bad. I don't like that and I hope that one is not science. The last one, a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars. Okay. I mean, I just...

'''B:''' Could you expand on that one, Steve?

'''S:''' A little. So you know what a rogue planet...

'''J:''' Rogue? Yeah, of course.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' It's roaming between the stars. It's not in orbit around a star. Right. So rogue planetary mass objects, right? So these are not stars. They're big, but they're planetary mass, they're not stars. And so the question is, do these planetary mass objects that are rogue, do they form as failed stars or do they form as planets that then get ejected from their solar system? This analysis says that most of them are ejected planets, not failed stars.

'''B:''' But you said they're planetary mass, so by definition, they would have to be planetary and not stellar.

'''S:''' No, because they're ...

'''B:''' Why?

'''S:''' Planetary mass objects...

'''C:''' I think that's a mass of planets.

'''S:''' They're big, but they're not stars, right? So are they too small to be a star or are they just big planets?

'''B:''' Okay. So you're talking like Neptune type, Jupiter gas giants?

'''E:''' Yeah, Jupiter.

'''S:''' Even bigger than Jupiter, but just not bigger than Jupiter.

'''E:''' Jupiter's a failed star.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But not in orbit.

'''S:''' They're rogue. Yeah, they're floating around.

'''J:''' So the question is, how does a planet get out of its own solar system, right? That's because it needs to be... I think the planets need to be around a star to form or at least that's... Oh boy, this is not an easy one, Steve. Nothing is sticking out. I am going to say, the first one about the mRNA that produces the tardigrade protein, this is exactly what we were saying we hoped would happen, right? And I could see them doing this. It makes sense. So I'm going to say that one is science. I'm going to say that the 39% here, the 8.9 million observations that were made of these 445 mammalian species, if they were that wrong, then something is really wrong. I don't think the number is 39%. I think it's a lot lower than that.

'''S:''' Or you mean higher.

'''J:''' You know what I'm talking about.

'''S:''' Yeah. I know what you're talking about.

'''J:''' That's the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. Evan.

'''E:''' Oh boy, I don't want this tardigrade protein one to be science. Oh gosh. Right, Jay?

'''J:''' Of course.

'''E:''' I mean, this is too good. Tardigrades are amazing little buggers, aren't they? Can't kill them.

'''C:''' Animalcules. Steve's favorite word.

'''E:''' Again, that's the one that can trap you, right? You want it to be true. You don't kind of care, but at the same time, you'll lose the game. And then the 445 mammalian species, 39% correct deal classification, I suppose that could be right. It's more refined. Make observations and over time, you make more and more and more observations and you start concentrating on you can realize you were pretty far off the mark to begin with. I don't think there's a problem with that one per se. The last one about the rogue planetary mass objects, the rogue ones, ejected planets rather than failed stars. Okay. I believe that. Oh, what the heck. I'll go with the tardigrade one as the fiction because when it's not, if it turns out to be science, then my sadness from losing the game will be overridden by my happiness in that it was a fact.

'''S:''' All right, Bob.

'''C:''' Yeah, Bob's going before me.

'''B:''' I was hoping you'd go before me. Jesus. Tardigrade protein, huh? I guess. Why wouldn't they use the code from, what's the name of that bacteria, radiodurans? This is a bacteria that could have its genome obliterated by radiation and then it just like puts itself back together. I think it's even heartier than even a tardigrade. But tardigrades have some amazing, famously amazing resilience. So sure, I want that to be true too so badly. Let's see. So 8.9 million observations of only 445 species. That's 20,000 observations per species. That's a lot. And they still were that wrong? That's pretty dramatic. Wow.

'''S:''' That's the database they used to figure out that the older classifications were wrong, right?

'''B:''' Right.

'''S:''' You understand what that says?

'''B:''' I think so.

'''S:''' Yeah, you made it sound like, and they're still wrong after 8, no, 8.9 million observations is what led them to, you know, based upon those observations, the existing deal classifications were only correct 39% of the time.

'''B:''' All right. That's not encouraging. Let me look at this third one here. All right. So this one's interesting. So you've got, I mean we've, Steve, we've believed for years that there's more rogue planets ejected from solar systems than there are planets in orbit around a star, right? Isn't that kind of like many billions of these rogue planets. For years, that's kind of been the consensus. He's not even, you're not agreeing with me, but I know you would agree with me.

'''C:''' He's not done it.

'''B:''' So you're saying here that potentially these, some of these could be failed stars. I don't like, I don't like that. I like the idea of these, these rogue planets just like, you know, I don't need a star, you know, screw.

'''S:''' It says they're ejected planets, not rogue stars, not failed stars.

'''B:''' Just the idea of potentially thinking that these were failed stars is like, I like the idea of the rogue planets. It makes sense. It's like, you know, screw those billionaire stars. I don't need them. I'm out on my own. I don't need those guys. And imagine the life forms that could have evolved on an exoplanet with no star, with no stellar-

'''C:''' In what universe could anything live off of a, okay, sorry.

'''B:''' Plenty. Plenty. First off, you've got, you know, microbes living under the ground because of the heat of nuclear decay. That's, that's like, yeah, that absolutely can happen. But yeah, surface life, yeah, that's going to be, that's going to be difficult for sure. But there still could definitely be life on those. I mean, you know, there's still plenty of heat inside the earth. So this one, that one makes sense to me. All right. I'm going to say that the 39% correct one, something, yeah, I'll just, whatever, throw my coin down on that and say that's fiction. I don't know. Any of these could potentially be, except the third one.

'''C:''' Wait. So the brothers are saying it's the mammalian classification.

'''S:''' Evan, the tardigrade.

'''E:''' Yeah. I went with tardigrades for my own selfish purpose.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Who do I go with?

'''S:''' All right, Cara.

'''B:''' Don't. Just try to suss it out.

'''E:''' Or the rogue planets. You could do the rogue planets.

'''C:''' I could?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Fun.

'''C:''' Let's see. The tardigrade one I think could be true. At least somebody probably researched that. They were like, oh, these are radiation resistant. Maybe we can take something from them and put it in tissue. And it doesn't say in people. It says in tissue. So this could have been in vitro.

'''S:''' I said it was in mice.

'''C:''' Oh, in mice. Yeah. Totally happened in mice. I don't know why everybody is as bothered by this database one, though. Like, I'm not bothered by any of them. Okay. So what you're saying is that a new database where they had tons of observations. What I'm reading this as, the first time they did a big data analysis of this, they realized that all of their boots-on-the-ground non-comparison data was kind of wrong. And naturalistic data is just, oh, I'm standing out in the forest and I'm writing down how many of these creatures I see. But if they were using camera traps or CCTV or some way or satellite footage or something.

'''E:''' Thermal imaging.

'''C:''' Yeah. Thermal imaging to get big data, I could see them being way off. Animals are famously very good at evading human observation. So this one doesn't bother me at all. Now, the rogue planet one, I have no idea.

'''E:''' That must be the fiction by process of elimination.

'''C:''' I want, I mean, the other two don't bother me. This one, but Bob says this one doesn't bother him. And I have to think Bob is a proxy for my own brain, which I don't know anything about. So okay. In an attempt not to sweep Steve, I'm going to be, I'm going to use strategery here and I'm going to say it was, it's that they're not rogue planetary or they're not ejected planets. They are failed stars or something different.

'''S:''' Just to screw me out of it. That's your strategy. Okay. All right. Well, you're spread out, which means I did my job this week and well, it means I take them in order. Take them in order.

'''B:''' But you didn't do the job as good as you could have.

'''S:''' Please. You guys were confused and befuddled. Here we go. Item number one, researchers successfully used mRNA, which produces a tardigrade protein to protect the surrounding tissue from radiation damage during cancer treatment. You all want this one to be correct, but Evan thinks it's the fiction.

'''E:''' And I still want it to be correct.

'''S:''' And this one is...

'''B:''' Say it.

'''S:''' Science.

'''E:''' Oh, yes.

'''S:''' This is super cool.

'''E:''' I lose.

'''S:''' Yeah. So...

'''B:''' Tell me about it.

'''S:''' Well, I'll tell you. So yeah. So it's pretty much what it says. They identify the protein that binds to DNA and protects the DNA from breaking apart due to radiation. They made the mRNA that produces that protein. They inject it into the tissue of mice. They then gave them radiation therapy for their cancer because they actually had cancer, the mice that they were studying. And the mRNA produced tardigrade protein protected the surrounding tissue from radiation damage. They did not get as much DNA damage from the radiation. The idea here is that the mRNA is only going to last for a short amount of time. So it'll produce a bunch of the tardigrade protein. You give the radiation therapy and then within a couple of weeks, it's gone, you know, so it doesn't have any long lasting effects. And that's basically what they found. So the research was successful. Obviously, this is a long way away from human treatments, you know, doing.

'''B:''' Yeah, but extrapolate that. That's pretty, could be potentially pretty awesome.

'''S:''' But it could be.

'''C:''' Hell yeah.

'''S:''' Absolutely. So this is a good proof of concept, you know, in an animal model and very, very encouraging. Radio protection of healthy tissue via nanoparticle delivered mRNA encoding for a damaged suppressor protein found in tardigrades. Cool study. All right, let's go on to number two, studying a new database of 8.9 million observations of 445 mammalian species found that only 39% had correct deal classification. What time of day they are active. Bob and Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Cara and Evan thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, guys. Cara's strategy, unfortunately, worked.

'''E:''' Oh, it worked. Yeah.

'''B:''' Failed stars. That sucks.

'''S:''' Hang on, Bob. Hang on. Hold your horses.

'''E:''' Hold your fire.

'''S:''' So...

'''B:''' Hurry up.

'''E:''' Yeah, yeah. Mammals next.

'''S:''' Cara, you pretty much are correct. You know, a lot of the classifications were based on field observations, and a lot of them were just too few field observations.

'''C:''' Nocturnal, diurnal, crepuscular, and the one I don't know, either crepuscular?

'''S:''' Cathemeral.

'''C:''' Is that the opposite? One's done, one's does?

'''B:''' I never heard of that one.

'''S:''' Cathemeral means that they're active during multiple phases throughout the day.

'''C:''' Oh, okay. Okay. So it's a catch-all.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's kind of a catch-all. And what they found was a couple of things. One was that a lot of the classifications that we had were not correct, but also that there's a lot more variability than we previously assumed. So in other words, like a quote-unquote nocturnal animal is active during the day quite a bit. So a lot more of the animals were cathemeral than strictly nocturnal or strictly diurnal.

'''B:''' Oh, that makes more sense.

'''C:''' That doesn't surprise me.

'''S:''' Yeah, but it's interesting, and it was a massive database, which of course, as Cara was saying, of course they would revise the less accurate information. This was a global network representing 38 countries, leveraged 8.9 million observations. So they updated our deal classifications. Quite a deal.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''S:''' Okay. That means that a new analysis finds that the vast majority of rogue planetary mass objects form as ejected planets rather than failed stars is the fiction.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''S:''' But they're not failed stars either. This is kind of a trick. It's neither.

'''C:''' Oh.

'''B:''' What?

'''J:''' What are we talking about?

'''C:''' So what are they?

'''B:''' Okay. Specify, please.

'''C:''' What else is there? Are they comets? I'm confused.

'''S:''' Right. So basically, there's two main ways that stuff gets made, right? You either get made as a star, meaning a collapsing disk of material, or you form as a planet, which is an accretion of material around a star, right? Those are the two basic ways that worlds get made. And the question was always for these rogue planetary mass objects, which PMOs are generally like bigger than Jupiter, but not big enough to become a star, right? And there's a lot of them out there. And Bob, you're right, there's probably more rogue planets than there are planets around stars.

'''B:''' Oh, they still believe that?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah. This does not impact that. Because these are not just anything that's a planet. This is the planetary mass objects are a specific range. Again, they tend to be large, but not suns. What they found was that they form by a third newly discovered mechanism that's neither like stars or planets. And it's complicated. But what they found was they found a bunch of them forming in the same location. What seems to be happening is that it's an interaction between two planetary disks that are forming these like a tidal bridge, as they say, there's like a tidal bridge between these two encountering circumstellar disks that then produce these highly productive clusters of material that spits out these PMOs, these free-floating-

'''E:''' Oh, like a baseball going through a pitching machine kind of thing. You got these two wheels that send the thing going.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's a good analogy, I guess.

'''B:''' Two circumstellar disks around one star.

'''S:''' No, I think, no, in a cluster, like in a cloud, a star forming region.

'''E:''' Neat.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' But if it's a circumstellar disk, then there is a star there already, right?

'''S:''' But it's not around a star. It's not in orbit around a star. It's a young star cluster, right?

'''B:''' So is it like a binary system? I'm confused.

'''E:''' Proto star?

'''S:''' No, no, it's, so you have a star, a cluster of stars, right? So a star forming cluster. So there's a lot of young stars forming in this one region because there's a giant cloud of gas there, and lots of stars are forming. But in that cloud, there can also be these circumstellar disks that are forming stars. But if they get close together, they form these tidal bridges that then spit out a bunch of these PMOs. Does that make sense?

'''B:''' Fascinating, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's-

'''B:''' Yeah, but I think circumstellar is kind of just not a good word for this.

'''S:''' That's the name of the disks. But that's the- So this would be a-

'''B:''' I don't like them.

'''S:''' This is a new mechanism by which these kinds of objects can be formed. It's not formed as a sun or as a planet. It's its own thing, which is weird. But cool.

'''E:''' Bob, we learned something here.

'''S:''' You did.

'''B:''' Yeah, that's really a third way. It sounds, that's really cool. I want to read up on that one. That's fascinating.

'''E:''' And Cara figured it all out.

'''C:''' Sure thing.

'''E:''' Without AI.

'''C:''' I'm totally not still confused.

'''E:''' No, no, no, no. She took the reins and commanded her way to victory.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:54:43) ==
{{qow
|text = "One of the few universal characteristics is a healthy skepticism toward unverified speculations. These are regarded as topics for conversation until tests can be devised. Only then do they attain the dignity of subjects for investigation."
|author = Edwin Hubbel, The Realm of the Nebulae (Yale University Press: 1936)
|lived =
|desc =
}}
'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' "One of the few universal characteristics is a healthy skepticism towards unverified speculations. These are regarded as topics for conversation until tests can be devised. Only then do they attain the dignity of subjects for investigation." That was written by Edwin Hubble in an article called The Realm of the Nebula. 1936. Edwin Hubble, right? He's one of the-

'''S:''' I've heard of him.

'''B:''' He was awesome, man.

'''C:''' I saw his locker.

'''E:''' No.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's here at Mount Wilson. Yeah, if you go and observe at the telescope at Mount Wilson, Hubble's locker is still down in the bottom.

'''E:''' Holy moly. Steve, you were actually there.

'''S:''' I was there. Yeah, I saw it. There was also his telescope, his microscope or something that was there. I don't know.

'''E:''' And his lunch. It's kind of old now.

'''C:''' Yeah, there's some stuff inside of his locker. Yeah, it's like an old apple.

'''S:''' All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

'''J:''' Got it.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''E:''' Thanks doctor.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 1027

2025-05-03T17:27:17Z

Hearmepurr: epi

{{Editing required
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|episodeNum = 1027
|episodeDate = {{1000s|1027|boxdate}}
|episodeIcon = File:1027.jpg
|caption = "Cross-section highlighting the substantia nigra, crucial for movement and coordination."
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|qowText = "The burden of proof as far as authentication is concerned is on the claimant—not on anyone else to prove a negative. Asserting that a particular image must be paranormal because it is unexplained only constitutes an example of the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge."
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{{anchor|intro}}
== Intro ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, March 15th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening everyone.

'''S:''' How's everyone faring? We've got some beautiful spring weather starting up.

'''J:''' Oh, I know. It's percolating.

'''C:''' Oh, really? It's raining here in LA. It's been quite dreary today, which I'm not going to complain about because the wheels are moving.

'''S:''' No, you're not.

'''J:''' Cara, is it true? I've heard this from several people. Is it true that when it rains in LA that things look really clean for a couple of days?

'''C:''' Yeah. Well, hopefully you get a couple of days, at least one day. Like the day after it rains, you can see, like the visibility is amazing. You can see out to the ocean. The mountains look crystal clear.

'''J:''' Oh, the sky is clear, too.

'''C:''' That's what they're talking about.

'''J:''' Okay. I thought they meant things.

'''C:''' That's what looks clean. Uh-uh. The air. The air is clean after it rains. Yeah. But I have news. Good news, everybody.

'''J:''' What?

'''C:''' I took my exam today, and I passed.

'''S:''' Congratulations.

'''B:''' Fantastic.

'''J:''' Oh, my God. I was sweating. I couldn't have been farther away from that test, and I was worried about it.

'''C:''' So I took the EPPP, which is the licensing exam for professional psychology in the United States. Everybody has to take it. I still have to take my exam for California licensure, but that's a lot shorter. It's just like the law and ethics. It's not nearly as intense. So yeah. I'm one step closer, but pretty much like I've jumped over all the big hurdles.

'''E:''' That's a big hurdle.

'''C:''' Yeah. Uh-huh.

'''S:''' Congratulations.

'''C:''' Ooh, you remember, Steve. You remember taking that good old boards, or I don't know how many. You have multiple exams.

'''S:''' Yeah. I'm actually, I have three board certifications.

'''C:''' Oh, well, yeah. So that was your-

'''E:''' That will expire.

'''S:''' Eventually, yeah.

'''E:''' In due course.

'''C:''' But you also, do you have a licensing exam just for the medical license as well?

'''S:''' I mean, initially, there is, but you don't have to retake that. You have to pass your examinations initially. There's like three parts to it, and you need to pass them in order to get licensed, but then that's it.

'''C:''' Yeah. That's like, I think, equivalent to what I just did.

'''S:''' But then there's also board certification in your specialty, so I'm on top of that.

'''C:''' Yeah, which we also have. Yeah.

'''S:''' On top of that, I have three board certifications.

'''C:''' There aren't that many board certifications in psychology. Medicine has so many different boards. There's a handful in psychology. It's not 100% necessary, but obviously, it can open doors. I think the only one that I would really be interested in or would even be, I don't know, would make sense for me would be health psychology, but it doesn't seem to, I don't know, it doesn't seem to be required.

'''E:''' Cara, I have a question about the test, the examination.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''E:''' The material you studied in order to prepare for it, was it overall spot on? Was it a bunch of things that you wound up not being tested on?

'''C:''' Oh, a million. Yeah. So many things I ended up not being tested on, a bunch of things on the test I had never seen before.

'''E:''' Was it 100 questions or-?

'''C:''' 225 questions.

'''E:''' Multiple choice?

'''C:''' Mhm.

'''E:''' All of them?

'''S:''' What they did for the board exams and the medical exams, they typically will, they have obviously broad questions, but they'll pick one area and do deep questioning on one area. But you better hope that they pick an area that you understand well, or you just got to understand every area well so that whatever they pick, you're good at.

'''E:''' Right.

'''C:''' Yeah. That's basically it for psychology. the questions are so obscure, they're so narrow focused in these bigger areas. And a lot of times, and there's whole sections of things that you have to learn fresh just for the exam. There's a whole bunch of questions on industrial organizational psychology, and clinical psychologists don't learn that during their PhD programs. So it's like-

'''E:''' You only learn it in preparation for this exam?

'''C:''' Mm-hmm.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''C:''' And I'll never use it again because I'm not an IO psychologist. And then there's just stuff that's like, I don't remember. Stuff that sounds easy, like when we talk, we've talked on the show a lot about classical and operant conditioning, right? Like these classic Pavlovian, and then later these pairing an unconditioned stimulus with a conditioned stimulus to get a conditioned response. And so it seems really straightforward, but then it's the most random, obscure, higher order conditioning question with all these distractors and confusing things. And you're just like, sometimes you read it and you're just going, I don't know what I just read. I don't know how to answer this question. Your eyes are just crossing. And of course, Steve, when you did it, did they have testing centers back then?

'''S:''' Not when I did my original exams or my original board certifications. They came online before I had to do any of my subspecialty boards or my later recertifications.

'''C:''' Yeah. Testing centers are so weird. It's like there's a bunch of people there, they're all taking their own licensing exams or whatever specialty there. There's some nurses there.

'''E:''' Right. Legal, whatever.

'''C:''' Yeah. Legal people. Like, yeah, teachers.

'''E:''' I'm sure accounting is a part of it.

'''C:''' And they're like, check your glasses, and you can't have jewelry. And if you want to drink water, you have to like raise your hand and leave the room and drink water. And you're like being observed the whole time, cameras all over you. It's very intense.

'''S:''' Now my board recerts are online.

'''C:''' Oh, nice.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' That's so nice.

'''S:''' Yeah. So they're very hard to get originally certified and then fairly forgiving on getting recertified.

'''C:''' Yeah. Passed that first hurdle. I can finally breathe. And tomorrow's my last day of fellowship, you guys.

'''E:''' Right.

'''C:''' So I go into the hospital tomorrow, say goodbye to everybody.

'''J:''' How's that feel?

'''C:''' Weird. I mean, I already, last week, I already said goodbye to all my patients. So that was like, you know, bittersweet. Now it just feels like, I don't know, I think I'm just very tired, you know? I got up very early this morning and I was very stressed all, well, not all day until I got that answer right after. Also very lucky in psychology that they tell you right when you finish what your score is.

'''J:''' Oh, really? How come?

'''C:''' Because it's on a computer so it can be scored, whereas, you know, I have friends who are lawyers who told me they had to wait like, I don't remember what it is, like six months for their bar results.

'''B:''' What?

'''C:''' Yeah. Something, maybe five months, something obscene. And then they're like publicly posted. So I feel very lucky.

'''J:''' Well, I mean, then what happens? This time of your life is ending and what's the next thing?

'''C:''' So the next step now is paperwork, right? I have to submit everything to the board and then the board will issue me my license once it's ready. And then the hospital will start the process of credentialing, which can take months and months and months and months. And I don't really know what credentialing involves, except for making sure that I'm like legally and ethically and, I don't know, competently okay to work at the hospital. But I know they do a lot of backgroundy stuff and they do a lot of paperworky stuff and it takes months and months. And then once I'm credentialed at the, oh, and put me on all the insurance panels, I think is a big part of it. And once I'm credentialed at the hospital, then I can come back on as an attending, but I'll be part time.

'''J:''' Oh, it's going to be a part, I was just going to ask that.

'''C:''' Yeah, I want to be part time there and then I'll probably have a part time clinic as well, just private patients.

'''E:''' You're making it happen. That is so great, Cara.

'''C:''' Whew. Going back to school when you're an old is weird, you guys.

'''S:''' Yeah, my wife did it. My wife got her PhD in her 40s, 50s.

'''C:'' Did she? How old was she when she first started? Do you remember?

'''S:''' I think late 40s.

'''C:''' Wow. Go, Joss. Yeah. I don't know if I could do that. Like, I'm 41 right now and thinking about doing all this again, oh, I would die. I just couldn't. I started at 36. Is that right? No, I started at 34. It was a six-year degree and I just finished postdoc. I can't imagine doing it in my late 40s.

'''S:''' Yeah, and she was working full time at the same time.

'''C:''' Yeah, I was working full time. It was really hard.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But you have to do that when you're an old, right? You're not like on mom and dad's health insurance anymore.

'''E:''' No.

'''S:''' Right. Exactly.

'''C:''' You got bills to pay. So anybody else out there who went back to school or changed careers, I feel you. You can do it.

'''S:''' I can't. I couldn't imagine going through medical school now.

'''C:''' I can't imagine sitting down and getting a PhD right now, even though I just did it. It's too much now. I don't think I could.

'''E:''' It's surreal.

'''C:''' I'm remembering back to like, guys, I was still working in television. So I would be on set or in my dressing room with textbooks, like reading or like on location somewhere in another country and like sitting, huddling in Video Village or something studying between takes. It was nuts. What was I thinking?

'''J:''' Well, I mean, that's what you got to do when you're young to get to that base level where you want to start your career, you know?

'''C:''' Yeah. But I was starting a whole career over.

'''S:''' But I think my experience has been both personally and professionally, you know, that people who go through medical school, go through training or whatever when they're older, like after they've been in the private sector for a while or whatever, are excellent because they have a lot more perspective. They're more versatile. They appreciate and understand what they're going through a lot more, you know, the value of the information that they're learning. They haven't just been in school their whole life, you know?

'''C:''' Right. And there's also kind of like a confidence. That's not a fake confidence, but you know, just a comfort sitting with patients that I definitely, the younger folks that I would be working with, I did see, you know, a lot of them were like, I couldn't work in the older adult clinic like you do. What would I have to say to these people? But they loved working with kids, I think, because they didn't feel confident.

'''S:''' Something to be said for life experience, you know?

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''S:''' All right. Well, congratulations, Cara.

'''C:''' Thanks, guys.

'''S:''' I had no doubts. I had no doubts.

'''C:''' I lied to them before we started recording.

'''E:''' Well, no, it was a lie of omission, though.

'''C:''' It was a lie of omission.

'''E:''' It's not like you missed your bus.

'''C:''' But it's true. I hadn't, I didn't tell anybody when I was going to take it because I couldn't, I didn't think I could handle the either a good luck text or the how'd you do text in case I failed, you know? So I was like, ugh. But yeah. Anyway, thank you, Steve. Thank you.

'''B:''' It's a little white lie. We forgive you.

{{anchor|wtw}}
== What's the Word? (10:22) ==
* Psionic

'''S:''' Evan.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' You're going to do your own What's the Word?

'''E:''' Yes, I am. My first attempt at a What's the Word? And this What's the Word segment was inspired by Mick West. Mick West, yeah, one of the best UFO debunkers out there today. We highly recommend him go to his channels and subscribe to everything he does. He sent out a tweet back on February 24th, and I'm going to read to you the tweet right now. Word for word. Here's what he said. I find the history of word usage fascinating. The word psionic has briefly become popular in a corner of UFOlogy, but it's primarily been a Dungeons and Dragons specific word. Looking at trends, the only spike was in August 2010 with a D&D book. This begs the question. Are the people who use it now D&D fans? Is there perhaps a little fantasy involved here? Now, that may seem like an innocuous tweet to a lot of people, but to those of us familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, oh my gosh, the responses poured in, wanting to correct Mick about, you know, the fact that he's kind of saying, well, yeah, August 2010, you know, there was this spike. So maybe that's kind of where they pulled it from. But oh my gosh, the word psionic has a history before that. And I think all, well, Cara, not you, but the four of us are familiar with the term from Dungeons and Dragons, and it is well before 2010. I'll read to you a couple of other follow-up tweets that help paint the picture a little bit. One reply was, the word means nothing, Mick. My mental association of it comes from playing Mass Effect in 2007 on my Xbox 360. You're looking for popularity and a cultural significance for a word that has plenty of synonyms. Okay, so they used it in 2007. That's where that particular person who sent a tweet or an X out had it from. And then there was another one. It was used in a late two-part episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation, which I don't really remember, even though I watched Next Generation. An ancient psionic weapon was assembled by Vulcan separatists. Robin Curtis guest starred. I actually think she's better in the role than as Savick in the films.

'''C:''' Are you saying psionic like S-C-I-O-N?

'''E:''' P-S-I-O-N-I-C.

'''C:''' Oh, P-S.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Oh.

'''E:''' Sorry. Thank you, Cara. I should have spelled it for you.

'''C:''' No, it's good, because I was like, there's a car called a psion, but it's a different psion.

'''E:''' And I'm going to get to the nitty-gritty in a second. I just wanted a couple more tweets for some flavor here. Another one. Psionics and D&D have been around heavily way before August 2010, Mick, having first seen myself in the Dungeon Master's Handbook in the early 80s. The Dark Sun world, which was created in the early 90s, is based upon a world where everyone had psionics. Okay. So this person's getting closer sort of to the origin of this. And then a few other funny ones. It sounds better than magic or telepathy. It sounds more scientific. The word psionic, I agree.

'''S:''' By design.

'''E:''' My recollection of this word dates back to the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule system, which came out in the late 1970s. I began playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1980, so it wasn't soon after that I discovered it. And if you go to page 110 of that old player's handbook, which I'm sure many of us still have a copy of on our shelves, you'll find it, psionics, here's their definition, psionics are various powers derived from the brain, and they enable characters so endowed to perform in ways which resemble magical abilities. Okay. But I hadn't really thought about that really. What about prior? Like, what was, was there any use of the word psionic prior to the original Dungeons and Dragons books? Well, actually, yes. Let me tell you a little bit about the word psionic itself, though. It's a combination of psi, which is a reference to psychic phenomenon, derived from the Greek letter psi, P-S-I, which has been associated with psychology, the mind, and parapsychology. And the last part are the suffix onyx, a suffix that suggests a scientific or technical aspect, similar to words like electronic or bionic. So psionic. Linguistically, the term's origin is well before Dungeons and Dragons. So says the Rhine Research Center's director, John Kruth, K-R-U-T-H, who was asked about this and replied eventually in one of Mick's threads here, and he said, Psionics is a term that gained popularity about 55 years ago in the 1970s. I first understood it to mean mechanisms that enable psi to be expressed, and it includes different techniques developed through research, like meditation or sensory deprivation techniques. It is most often used to discuss devices, human-made machines, and other manufactured technologies that are considered to be either amplifiers of psi ability or have the ability to store psi intentions so that they can be released by the owner at a specific time or in a specific location. Okay, so, and he goes on a little bit more about that, but actually, that's not really the origin of it. It goes back even further than that. You really have to go to the mid-20th century, the year 1951. This is really where it came from. The term psionic was popularized in science fiction and speculative fiction, particularly in the mid-20th century, 1951's the first use of the word. One of the earliest uses was John W. Campbell Jr.'s science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction in the 1950s. Campbell, a key figure in shaping modern sci-fi, used the term to describe psychic abilities that function like a science-based power, often linked to telekinesis, telepathy, and other mental abilities. And while psi has been used in earlier discussions of parapsychology, the structured term psionics emerged to frame psychic phenomenon as a kind of technology or scientifically measurable force rather than purely supernatural. That is the origin of the term psionic, or the word psionic, and it derives from science fiction from the 50s. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense that it would be incorporated in the 1970s when Gary Gygax and his other partner, whose I forget, or the people he worked with in order to develop the game system Dungeons & Dragons, they were of the age, what would they have been reading when they were kids in the 1950s? This is exactly what they would have been reading. And they obviously borrowed it from this era of science fiction and brought it in as a game mechanic to Dungeons & Dragons. So that is where the word psionics comes from, all the way back to 1951. So this has been a very special What's the Word, inspired by Cara Santa Maria as a segment of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Tune in next time when we explore the origins of the word THACO.

'''B:''' Ah, to hit aces?

'''S:''' Or not.

'''B:''' Nice. I found mention of the word psionic in Babylon 5 from the early 90s.

'''S:''' Hello!

'''B:''' The Psionic Monitoring Commission replaced the Psicorp. So I knew they must have said it in there because Psicops was all over Babylon 5. So yeah, Psionic Monitoring Commission.

'''E:''' Makes sense. Yeah. Is that a portmanteau when you take two words, slam them together and make a new word out of it?

'''C:''' It is, except that's not really a portmanteau because it's just using a suffix.

'''E:''' Oh, I see. Okay.

'''C:''' Yeah, portmanteau is if you take two words, like psychology and bionic, and you make it into psionic.

'''E:''' I see.

'''C:''' But that's not how they... They just used a word-forming part, onic.

'''E:''' So it's not...

'''C:''' So it's not technically... No. It's just a... Not a malapropism. It's a neo... Neologism? It's just a new word.

'''B:''' Yeah, a new word.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's like a half portmanteau. They used some words like electronics, and then they just replaced the prefix with psi.

'''C:''' Yeah. But I mean...

'''S:''' But it's not technically a portmanteau.

'''C:''' You could say, like, I'm a computerologist.

'''S:''' Right, right.

'''C:''' But that's not really a portmanteau.

'''S:''' Right, right. I agree.

'''E:''' I love how a discussion starting with UFOs and this brought up by Mick, all of a sudden... And they all ignored the UFO aspect of it. It all turned into a discussion of Dungeons and Dragons. So anyway, it's funny in its own right.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan.

'''E:''' Yep.

{{anchor|news_item}}
== News Items ==

{{anchor|news_item1}}
=== Screen Time and Mental Health (18:53) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/03/250310131816.htm
|article_title = Limiting screen time protects children's mental health | ScienceDaily
|publication = www.sciencedaily.com
}}

'''S:''' Jay, start off the news items with a discussion of screen time and mental health.

'''J:''' Yeah. I was reading a study that came from the University of California, San Francisco, published by... Or it was published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. And the study shows that preteens, age 10 to 11, who essentially watch too many screens, right? Too much phone and iPad and computer screen use, are at a heightened risk of developing manic symptoms. And that's kind of scary because if you read about mania, it could be very severe and it could be very difficult to deal with. So the symptoms included an inflated self-esteem, decreased need for sleep, distractibility, rapid speech, racing thoughts, and impulsivity. And these are all characteristics of bipolar spectrum disorders. And a second study, this was a Finnish study at the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Eastern Finland. They followed 187 adolescents over eight years and their findings show that a higher screen time, particularly on mobile devices, this correlates with increased stress and depressive symptoms. So adolescents who engage in regular physical activity and organized sports, they of course had lower stress levels and fewer depressive symptoms. Notably, those with both high screen time and low physical activity faced the highest levels of stress and depression. Now, at this point, I think nobody is shocked at all, right? Anybody who is reading the news and who's been paying attention, even through your own experience, would be able to hear what I'm saying and be like, yeah, of course. This is not a surprising piece of information. What is really sad about it, and this is essentially just making people aware, we have a huge number of people that are setting themselves up for mental health issues and it doesn't have to be that way. There are things that can be done to help these people. So if you have kids or you have nieces and nephews, whatever your job is, if you have anybody that you could help pass this information to, I think it would be very helpful. So let me give you some more information in case you get into a discussion about it, you want to talk about more details. So the screen times vary significantly across age groups, which I think tracks very nicely with my experience. This was coming from data from 2019. American children aged 8 to 12 spend an average of, guess how many hours, guys, per day, ages 8 to 12?

'''E:''' Oh my gosh, it's disturbingly-

'''C:''' 8?

'''E:''' I was 6.

'''J:''' Yeah, you're right in the zone. It's seven hours per day on screens.

'''E:''' Yeah, you're right.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''J:''' Teenagers aged 13 to 18 averaged how many hours daily?

'''C:''' 12.

'''E:''' Oh no.

'''J:''' It's eight.

'''C:''' Oh really? I thought it would be higher because they're on their phones all the time.

'''J:''' Yeah, I was in the same exact place. So younger children have lower screen times with those under two years old averaging 42 minutes per week. Wow, like even two years and younger, like 42 minutes a week, that's a lot of screen time. Two to four-year-olds averaging two hours per week, five to eight-year-olds averaging two hours per week. These statistics definitely highlight this increasing engagement with screens as children grow older, right? This is a significant problem. It's a mental health problem. Could also be connected to a child's physical health because screens are definitely keeping them from going outside and exercising and all that stuff. Like I mean, this goes hand in hand. So it's definitely very concerning and it's really obvious. This isn't like muddy results. This is crystal clear what's going on here. So over the past 20 years, there's been a significant increase in mental health issues among various populations. This is globally. In the UK, for instance, surveys showed that mental health problems have been on the rise since the year 2000. 65% of Britons experience a mental health problem. This was in 2017 and in the United States. The National Comorbidity Survey replication, this is called NCS-R, it indicated that nearly half of Americans, 46.4%, reported meeting criteria for a mental health disorder at some point in their life. I don't think it's that uncommon for people to have problems throughout their life that could give them spells of mental health issues or whatever. It could be depression, anxiety, but we're not talking about a year or two of someone struggling with something. We're talking about something that is definitely persistent. Imagine this generation growing up who are heavily into their screens. I struggle with my children as well. When the weekends come around, that's all they want to do and I can't get them outside. They could be setting themselves up for a very uncomfortable future with these mental health issues that will seemingly come out of nowhere. My wife and I do the best that we can, but other parents out there, I'm sure you know, it's very hard. The other thing is screens are pretty much a cure-all for adult problems. If I need my kids to be involved in something so I can focus on something, giving them screens hands that to me very neatly, but we got to stop using it that way. We've got to really monitor not only the kid's screen time, but what are they doing on the screens as well, which that's a completely different topic. They're saying here that regular engagement, of course, in physical activity and organized sports, these things promote a physical well-being and it also acts as a buffer against stress and depression, meaning that if a child is doing this, it's harder for the child to develop mental health issues because they have this, you know, built in essentially like a mental buffer that, you know, doesn't make it come on as quickly. So it's a very, very healthy thing for them to do, for all people to do. And also the experts are recommending, of course, limiting children's leisure screen time to two hours per day. And there are people inside of these studies that are, you know, making recommendations that are saying two hours is probably too much. Even though they're saying like, you know, if this is like the thing we're going to agree on is the max number, there are people that don't agree with that and think it's got to be even less. You know, but you think about it. My kids use screens in school, every class. You know, I have a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old and like they have Chromebooks that the school gives them and they're on those screens nonstop and they're on them when they get home. And that's all just school related. It's still screen time. So I'm worried. I think, you know, this is one of those things that we have a lot of these types of issues that we have to deal with in modern times. Like, you know, just the plastic issue as an example is another thing. Like I'm worried about it. I don't know what to do. It's a very hard thing to not fall victim to and it's a very hard thing to train your kids to not be screen addicts.

'''C:''' Well, one of the first things we can do is model good behavior because I can assure you that the vast majority of these kids' parents are also screen addicts. And I think it's really, we talk about it a lot in terms of it being like a kid problem. But how are kids supposed to have better impulse control than their own parents?

'''J:''' Yeah, exactly. I totally agree. I mean, you know, kids definitely model their behavior after their parents. I mean, there are things that I say in my house, like, you know, I'm not even aware that I'm saying it. And all of a sudden I hear my kids repeating them and using them, you know, they are picking up on our behaviors, on the, you know, tones of voice, the words that we use, you know, how angry are you? How, you know, how calm are you? All of those things get passed down to them for sure.

'''C:''' How addicted to your phone are you?

'''J:''' Yeah, it's terrible. I mean, I work on my phone. In one way or another, I got a phone in my face most of the day, you know, or my computer screen. Just, you know, I can't do any of my work without a screen.

'''S:''' I think it's important, though, also, and I know we've said this before, that the better strategy is probably maximizing non-screen time rather than limiting screen time. Because if you just take the approach of, like, you get two hours of screen time per day, but you're not making an effort to say, well, what are you going to do the rest of the time?

'''C:''' Yeah, you're just like, you're on your own, kid.

'''S:''' Yeah, then it's kind of a losing strategy, where if it's like, we're going to spend two hours outside today, or we're going to do this thing together, or, you know, whatever. You have to give them other things to do that does not involve screen time. And then you can also have some protected time, like dinner is a great example. Like, no screens at dinner. This is family time. You incorporate some of that as well. But I agree, Cara, the hardest thing is for parents to limit their screen time.

'''C:''' And I would see it all the time when I was working in the kid clinic. The parents being like, oh, my kid's on their phone all the time, and I'm like, your phone is in your hand while you're talking to me.

'''S:''' Yeah, while you're saying that.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly. Like, why do you think? I mean, and I'm not saying it's the parents' fault. It's, you know, it's culturally normative now to be on your phone all the time. But yeah, I mean, how on earth is a kid expected to have, like, kids don't have a developed frontal lobe. You know what I mean? Like, it's really hard for them to control those impulses.

{{anchor|news_item2}}
=== US Mass Shootings (28:03) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/society/us-mass-shootings-impact/
|article_title = 1 in 15 US adults have been on the scene of a mass shooting
|publication = cosmosmagazine.com
}}
'''S:''' Well, Jay, I'm going to give you one more thing to worry about.

'''J:''' Okay.

'''S:''' And that is the effect of mass shootings on the public.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know. There's a new article that was published in Cosmos Magazine, which is an Australian publication that you can access by, what a name, Ima Perfetto, who's a science journalist at Cosmos. And she wrote about a publication that just came out in JAMA Network Open, titled Direct Exposure to Mass Shootings Among US Adults. So the researchers here were interested in getting a little bit more information, because we've talked about this on the show, so I'm not going to get too deep into the weeds on this. But we've talked about how, historically, there were barriers to accessing information about gun violence in the United States. And so there just isn't a lot of data. And what these researchers wanted to do is understand, from a self-report perspective, how many people in the US have had direct exposure to mass shootings? And also, is that risk equal across different demographic groups?

'''B:''' What does direct exposure mean?

'''C:''' Well, yeah, we'll define that. So they used a survey company called YouGov. I think we've talked about YouGov in the past, which is a polling organization, a market research firm. And they were able to put together a representative survey of adults in the US. So 10,000 adults. And then if you look at the sample demographics, they're pretty representative of the US population. So 4% silent generation, 30% boomer, 25% Gen X, 28% millennial, 15% Gen Z, almost half-half female-male, 51% female, 49% male. And then also across race and ethnicity, 3% Asian, 12.5% black, 16% Hispanic, 62% white, 5% other, blah, blah, blah. They also have demographics on income and on educational attainment. And so they gave this survey to 10,000 respondents, and they asked them some questions. And so the question that you were asking, Bob, well, first of all, they were asking specifically about gun-related crimes, where four or more people are shot in a public space, such as a school, shopping mall, workplace, or a place of worship. That's how they are defining a, quote, mass shooting. That's based on the Gun Violence Archive's definition. That direct exposure question, they said, quote, have you personally ever been physically present on the scene of a mass shooting in your lifetime? And then it further clarified physically present as, quote, in the immediate vicinity of where the shooting occurred at the time it occurred, such that bullets were fired in your direction, you could see the shooter, or you could hear the gunfire. So that's how they defined, yeah, it's pretty specific. Then they asked, for those who said that, yes, they were, they asked, were you physically injured in the incident? And that could include being shot, trampled, or something else that caused physical injury. They coded that. They asked about mental health consequences of exposure. But they really focus in this publication on physical injuries other than psychological impacts. I'm sure there will be another study coming out with that information. They also asked about where the shooting occurred. Was it in a, quote, geographic area in which you reside, or to which you feel especially close, such as a neighborhood, small city, or area in a larger city, or place where you spend a large amount of your time, such as a workplace, place of worship, or recreational area? And then they also asked about media coverage. Do you believe that this incident was, quote, covered widely by news media, which they defined as national news media, or by a media beyond your city? So they got demographics on everybody, and then they asked all of these questions. And what they found was that 7% of adults were present on the scene at a mass shooting, and 2% were actually injured in that same shooting. And so then the researchers extrapolated those numbers, right? Because this was a sample of 10,000 people that they believe was representative. And they think that approximately one in 15 US residents have been present at the scene of a mass shooting. One in 15.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''C:''' Yeah. So they also found a few other highlights. Younger people, especially millennials and Gen Zers, were more likely to have been present at or injured. Males were more likely than females to report direct exposure. So those both, they kind of make sense, but there's no way to fully know. So basically, men being more likely than women to report direct exposure is in keeping with other statistics about gun violence and gun violence risk. The generational difference, the researchers think, could be attributable to the fact that mass shootings are becoming more and more frequent. So it's simply a function of time. So younger people are being exposed to them more than older people. But they talk about some of the limitations of their study, that there could be like forgetting effects and things like that as well. And then there's an interesting section here, which I think is important to note on. So one of the authors said, some have hypothesized, this is a direct quote, some have hypothesized that the US pays disproportionate attention to mass shootings because they affect mostly white people. But this report shows this perception to be incorrect. As with other types of gun violence, black adults were more likely to report exposure to mass shootings. What the report does suggest, however, continuing the quote, is that we are simply less likely to talk about mass shootings that affect black individuals or other marginalized groups. A lower proportion of black respondents say that the mass shooting at which they were present received media attention. So according to this survey, approximately or extrapolating out from the survey, the authors believe, you know, if they can repeat this study, because they do say this is a huge limitation, right? It's only a 10,000 person sample. What if it turns out to be biased? We don't have a lot of other measures. So we don't know if this has external validity, because we can't compare it to anything else, or not external convergent validity, because we can't compare it to anything else. Like one of the authors said that this survey is the best we can do to estimate the number of people directly affected by mass shootings is frankly frustrating. We need better, more reliable data. But if this estimate turns out to be representative, that's epidemic, right? Like that's a really troublesome statistic. And we're not even looking at the psychological impacts of being present on the scene when there's a mass shooting, witnessing death. You know, one of the main diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress syndrome is that you have real or imagined exposure to death. Like you either witnessed somebody else, or you thought you were going to die. And so I'm not saying that everybody who's exposed to a mass shooting will develop PTSD, but if they do, the criteria are there. And that's really worrisome.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's an incredible number of people.

'''C:''' So we'll see, obviously, if we can continue to collect data and look at this. And if you are interested, you can go to the [https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ GunViolenceArchive.org], where these researchers have tirelessly been compiling gun data over the last several years.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Cara.

{{anchor|news_item3}}
=== Stem Cells for Parkinson’s (35:42) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://theness.com/neurologicablog/stem-cells-for-parkinsons-disease-2/
|article_title = Stem Cells for Parkinson’s Disease - NeuroLogica Blog
|publication = theness.com
}}
'''S:''' So guys, have you ever heard of using stem cells to treat Parkinson's disease?

'''E:''' No, not specifically.

'''S:''' When would you guess that started? What was the first actual treatment using stem cells?

'''E:''' 2000. 2000.

'''C:''' Like on a person?

'''S:''' Yeah, on a human being.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's probably been a bit.

'''B:''' Last week?

'''C:''' I don't know.

'''J:''' About 10 years ago.

'''C:''' 2015?

'''S:''' 1987.

'''C:''' Shut up.

'''S:''' 1987 in Sweden.

'''C:''' What were they doing?

'''S:''' Well, what were they doing?

'''E:''' That was before the whole stem cell kind of became a well-known term among the stem cells.

'''S:''' I know. The 2000s is when it sort of hit the public consciousness. It was fetal-derived dopamine-producing neurons. Fetal-derived. So that's how you got stem cells back in 1987, right? You got them from voluntary abortions, basically.

'''C:''' But how did they get them into the brain?

'''S:''' Yeah. Surgery.

'''C:''' Oh, okay. Okay.

'''S:''' Yeah. You implant them.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''S:''' The Parkinson's is interesting. It's an obvious target for stem cell therapy because you have a very specific population of neurons in the brain that are dying, right? And so you would think that we need to just replace those neurons right there and that could cure the disease. So it's always been on the short list in terms of neurological uses of stem cells. Let me just very quickly remind people what Parkinson's disease is. It is caused by degeneration of the substantia nigra pars compacta neurons, which are dopamine-producing or dopamine-secreting neurons in the basal ganglia part of the brain, which is responsible for smooth voluntary muscle movement, right? It facilitates movement. It modulates moment to moment the connection between the desire to move and the resulting movement, right? So...

'''C:''' And to be clear, you mean smooth as in fluid, not smooth as in smooth muscle?

'''S:''' Yes. Right.

'''C:''' Skeletal muscle.

'''S:''' Skeletal muscle. Volutnary movement. Yes. And not coordinated because that's the cerebellum, right? That's the cerebellar system. If this feedback loop is off in such a way that that connection, the gain of that connection, if you will, is increased, you get chorea. You get too many movements. If it's turned down, you get hypokinesis. You get Parkinsonism, right? You freeze up. You can't move as much. So that's basically what's happening in Parkinson's disease. So Parkinsonism is kind of the suite of neurological symptoms that you get when this part of the brain isn't working. Parkinson's disease is a specific cause of that and it's a spontaneous neurodegenerative disorder and it responds to treatment with dopamine. So early on in the disease, you can give L-DOPA, which is a precursor to dopamine, and that increases the amount that gets made by the surviving dopamine-producing cells in the basal ganglia and it effectively treats the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. But in the end stage, you basically lose most or all of those neurons. Then that doesn't really work very well anymore because there's no buffering. There's no neurons. The circuit is not complete. You're just sort of bathing that part of the brain in dopamine. The blood level basically determines your clinical effect. So people are constantly going through being hyperkinetic and then having a brief moment, you know, like 5, 10, 15 minutes of being well-managed and then they get hypokinetic again and then they have to dose and they go through that cycle many, many times a day, right?

'''C:''' And to remind folks who may have seen the film Awakenings, which was based on an Oliver Sacks book, he, you know, talks a lot about youth. They had post-encephalitic Parkinsonism.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But yeah, if you remember that movie, that's what's happening in that movie.

'''S:''' Yeah. They had a post-infection destruction of the substantia nigra cells, right?

'''C:''' Which is why they awoke and then...

'''S:''' So they basically had end-stage Parkinsonism right away, like the virus wiped out those cells rather than dying over 20 years.

'''C:''' And so the L-DOPA worked for a minute.

'''S:''' It basically worked for a brief window, then it quickly burned out whatever remaining neurons they had. Yeah.

'''C:''' But that's how... didn't he discover that L-DOPA could be used in that way?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah. It was amazing.

'''S:''' And you can also use dopamine agonists, you know, so drugs that mimic the effects of dopamine. They bind to those receptors. You can use anticholinergic drugs, which sort of have... Choline has the opposing effect, so it kind of pushes the system in the other direction. This is all a massive oversimplification, but you get the idea. So if you could, however, increase the number of neurons in that part of the brain, it would dramatically improve control of patients with Parkinson's disease. But if you go back to like the 1987 kind of approach, they weren't putting really like neurons... Those neurons that they were transplanting, those fetal neurons, weren't making connections in the brain. They were just sitting there secreting dopamine. So in essence...

'''C:''' They must have died pretty quickly, right?

'''S:''' We were eventually able to get them to survive for a while, years, you know, wouldn't be really worth it otherwise. But it basically was just a drug delivery system, right? It wasn't repairing the damage to the brain. It was just another way of getting dopamine to the place where it needed to be. And it only worked in people who responded to L-DOPA as a treatment, right? So it's like not a treatment for people who were not responding to medication. It was just a way of improving the drug delivery and therefore the level of control. Never really became like a mainstay of treatment. Because it's...

'''C:''' Right. Because that's like, you could just swallow L-DOPA.

'''S:''' You could just take it.

'''C:''' Yeah. So why would you get brain surgery?

'''S:''' Well, again, some people, they got better control because they're having a continuous release of dopamine rather than, again, being dependent on their...

'''C:''' Right. But that's a big risk benefit.

'''S:''' It's a very expensive, massive brain surgery for moderate improvement. Yeah. So it was... It's why it never really became a mainstay of treatment for Parkinson's disease. But then you fast forward to the 2000s, Evan, right? When the whole controversy over doing stem cell research and, of course, Parkinson's was one of the diseases that we were supposed to cure with stem cell research. This is now we're going to like embryonic stem cells, not fetal tissue. And this was the infamous decision by George Bush to ban research, creating new cell lines.

'''E:''' You could only use existing ones.

'''S:''' You could only use existing cell lines, which is very, very problematic, and it was very draconian the way it was applied. And universities could lose all their federal funding if one clinic was using stem cells in the wrong way.

'''E:''' Right. Not approved.

'''B:''' You know, I didn't think I could get mad at a president at that time.

'''C:''' I know. I was going to say, oh, they could lose all their funding, huh? Wow. That was the worst thing for those days.

'''S:''' At the time, that was like the worst thing a president did in terms of health research. It really had a very massive dampening effect on stem cell research in the United States. But in South Korea, they basically took the lead in stem cell research at that time, and Japan and elsewhere. Eventually, you know, what happened to the law was that it just became irrelevant because we figured out how to make induced stem cells. So we didn't...

'''E:''' We didn't need the embryos.

'''S:''' We didn't need... Well, yeah. There are still advantages to embryonic stem cells. They're totipotent instead of pluripotent.

'''E:''' Like pre-programmed?

'''S:''' No. No. No.

'''C:''' They can become, like, literally anything.

'''S:''' They can become anything, including the placenta, right? Whereas the pluripotent can become any fetal tissue.

'''E:''' I see.

'''S:''' So in any case, because we could make induced pluripotent stem cells from, like, fibroblasts, that opened up a whole new area of clinical research that wasn't dependent on these banned, you know, or very limited cell lines.

'''C:''' I love that about science. It's like, oh, I can't do that? I'll figure out another way.

'''S:''' Luckily, it was easier than we thought it was going to be. Like, four genes, and boom, you're done. So it didn't have to necessarily be that way, but it was. So we got very good at making stem cells. And we can even make those stem cells, then we can induce them to become the type of cell we want them to be, like neurons.

'''E:''' That's the key.

'''S:''' We can make it a skin cell, turn it into a stem cell, turn it into a neuron. We're good at that. The applications, not so much. And here's the problem. And I know we've discussed this before on the show, but just as a reminder, it's hard to get the stem cells to do what we want them to do and not do what we don't want them to do. So they're basically tumors waiting to happen. And it's the reason why we're not flush with stem cells to begin with, right? Evolution kind of minimizes the number of stem cells to just what we absolutely need because it's a double-edged sword. Stem cells can turn into cancer and tumor. And that's a problem that we're having. If you don't know what you're doing and clinics are getting a little bit ahead of the evidence or whatever, they don't have the expertise, they're just injecting stem cells into your spinal cord, there's a high rate of that becoming tumors.

'''C:''' This is why you don't go get some unapproved stem cell treatment in another country.

'''S:''' Don't go to some stem cell clinic tourism somewhere in the world because, yeah, you don't know what they're injecting into you and there's lots of potential for harm there. But it's also hard to get neurons to make meaningful connections in the brain. And this is whether you're looking at stroke rehab or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, whatever, right? So we were hoping, it's like, oh, we just have to introduce these stem cells into the brain and they'll automatically hook up with each other and start making meaningful circuitry and everything. Not so much. Research for a lot of neurological applications has shifted to, all right, but they can still help because they could be support cells. These stem cells that we inject into the spinal cord into the brain will, you know, again, produce neurotrophic factors and positively affect the local environment and maybe process toxins or whatever. They will improve the environment so that the neurons that are already there will survive longer and function better. And so that's a lot of the research now is focusing on that application of stem cells, which is great, but it's not the cure we were hoping for. But we haven't given up on doing that. So given that we've been doing this now since the 1980s, it may seem a little surprising to read that there's a phase one clinical trial just getting going, looking at using autologous induced pluripotent stem cells to treat as Parkinson's disease therapy. And again, in the hope of like really taking this treatment to the next level. Don't know how it's going to work out. Again, it's just more, they're getting the neurons to survive longer and the hope is that they will not only take up shop, but actually start to replace some of the lost functionality.

'''C:''' Right. So I guess then if we iteratively have improved the ability to, like you mentioned, kind of release trophic or tropic factors so that, okay, now I know where to go and now I kind of want to stick and now that eventually they'll just work their way into the networks.

'''S:''' That's the hope. But even if they just improve the function of the cells that are there, it could still be advantageous. And just the fact that we're able to use the patient's own cells to make stem cells, so they don't require any immunosuppressive therapy. They don't have to be harvested from any exotic source. They're not animal cells, they're not fetal cells, they're the patient's own cells. So anything that we can do to reduce the complexity, the cost, the risks of doing this procedure, then if you're doing a risk versus benefit analysis, right, even if it's the same benefit as we've already been getting, like from the fetal cells from 30 years ago, but if we could do it safer, cheaper, faster, better, then it changes the calculus to where it may become more of a mainstream treatment for Parkinson's disease.

'''C:''' In Parkinson's, Steven, I'm curious, like I might be getting into the weeds, is it literally just the dopaminergic cells? Do some of the glial cells get damaged? Is there structural support that could be... I'm just wondering if like a cocktail would be better for integrating.

'''S:''' Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, my understanding is it's definitely predominantly the dopamine-producing neurons. It is the... And you can see it. If you look at either an MRI scan, like we do what we call the DAT scan, it's like a dopamine scan, or you could look at the pathology slides of brains of patients. You could see dramatically the loss of the substantia nigra. It's those neurons that are dying. Now why that's happening is not clear, and it may be different reasons in different people. Again, the disease is defined largely by the populations of neurons dying, not why they are dying. Just like ALS is defined by the population of motor neurons that are dying, not why they're dying. And so there's different types based upon the cause. But in any case, the stem cell therapy thing, this is one of the things that we lived through starting with... I mean, I obviously knew about them in my medical training in the 90s, but it really became part of the popular discussion in the 2000s. And there's a lot of hype around all the amazing things that stem cells were going to do, and it has been largely unrealized.

'''C:''' Yeah. Don't we really only use them for like a handful of applications?

'''S:''' Yeah. They're still pretty limited. I mean, bone marrow transplants are technically stem cells.

'''C:''' Bone marrow transplants, I think skin graft kind of work. But there's not that many things that are like approved as skin cell therapies. I'm sorry, as stem cell therapies.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's 25 years later. This is one of the things that I... 25 years ago, I would have predicted we would have been much farther along than we are today. But that's because it's just turned out to be... The technological hurdles are massive. And it's really... It's turned out to be a much more difficult nut to crack. And we may have to settle for some really good applications that are just not what we were hoping for in terms of like cures. It may not be a cure for these neurodegenerative diseases, but it may be another therapy that is effective, safe and effective.

'''B:''' As usual, the good shit will come out after we're dead.

'''S:''' Yeah, probably.

'''C:''' But hey, also, there is good shit. That's the thing. Yeah, we're like, eh, bone marrow transplants.

'''B:''' That's true.

'''C:''' Do you understand?

'''B:''' There's some good shit.

'''C:''' People are cured of their cancer through this. Cured. I mean, that's amazing.

'''S:''' I don't know about Bob, we always have an eye on what's coming. We're always 20 years behind, you know, the cutting edge. But there are things out today that we were just dreaming about 20 years ago, you know? And there are some fields where it's like exceeded my expectations, like genetic engineering.

'''B:''' Some of the stuff I really, really want.

'''E:''' You want the reverse aging, Bob. Come on, say it. Admit it.

'''B:''' There's lots of things. I want Wolverine claws and lots of cool stuff.

'''E:''' You want the telomeres.

'''S:''' Did we have this conversation last week? All right.

'''C:''' We have to have this conversation every week.

{{anchor|news_item4}}
=== Brown Fat and Exercise (51:55) ===
{{shownotes
|weblink = https://www.rutgers.edu/news/special-type-fat-tissue-could-promote-healthful-longevity-and-help-maintain-exercise-capacity
|article_title = Special Type of Fat Tissue Could Promote Healthful Longevity and Help Maintain Exercise Capacity in Aging | Rutgers University
|publication = www.rutgers.edu
}}
'''S:''' Well, all right, Bob, what you're going to talk about is another, you know, body hack. Tell us about brown fat and exercise.

'''B:''' This was a lot of fun. Researchers claim that mice without a specific protein developed an enhanced type of fat, of brown fat, that not only increases exercise capacity, but also extends healthy lifespan. Wow. So this fascinating study was published in the journal Aging by a team from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. The name of the study was Brown Adipose Tissue Enhances Exercise Performance and Healthful Longevity. All right, let's dig in. So let's start this one with the skinny on fat. What basically everyone means when they refer to fat is white adipose tissue. That's the fat that's right under our skin. We all know it. We all have it. And most of us want to get rid of it, at least some of it. The fat is primarily energy storage, but it's also for insulation and hormone production. And it's also not just under our skin. This white fat is also around our organs. And it's actually not good to have too much fat there because that's because then the fat gets into the blood and then all sorts of crazy bad stuff happen. Okay. There's another type of fat called brown adipose tissue or just brown fat. Not too many people I think have ever even heard of this. This fat is in many ways like anti-fat with little goatees like evil Spock in the mirror universe. But this fat is not evil. It's kind of awesome actually. I've known about it for a couple of decades and I've always wished I had more brown fat. So in a nutshell, brown fat can't make us fat. It makes us warm. That's what it does. This is thermoregulation. When you get cold, what happens? What typically happens when you get cold?

'''C:''' You shiver.

'''B:''' You shiver. Why do we shiver? Have you ever thought about that?

'''J:''' To produce heat.

'''C:''' To produce heat. Yeah.

'''B:''' Shivering generates heat. And brown fat also kicks in when we get cold and it generates heat for us by itself. And it's actually funnily, is funnily a word? It's actually humorously referred to as non-shivering thermogenesis, non-shivering thermogenesis.

'''E:''' It is now.

'''B:''' So this is now, this is incredibly important for newborns who have a lot of brown fat relatively. I think two to 3% of their body weight is brown fat. So when they get cold, they don't have all the mechanisms fully in place to make them warm that we do. For example, they literally cannot even shiver. They cannot shiver.

'''C:''' Oh yeah, you never see a little baby shivering. Weird.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah. I never thought about that until right this moment.

'''B:''' Right.

'''C:''' I've never seen a tiny baby shiver.

'''B:''' It's just not developed. The musculature, nervous system is not developed enough to even make shivering happen. But they have brown fat. They've got a good amount of brown fat and that literally can save their lives. You know, maybe not so much in modern days, but of course in the centuries past, I'm sure it saved a lot of babies' lives. Now these cells diminish as we age and we used to think that they disappeared, but they found them in adults not too long ago. I think maybe 30 or 40 years ago. We still have them mainly in our upper chest and neck area. But now brown fat cells, they're small. They're smaller than white fat cells and they're different. They're actually different, but I don't need to go into too much detail about that. And they're spread out. So I remember microbiologist Covert Bailey in some audio books years ago, he was saying things like that. If you collected all the brown fat cells together, it would be the size of a small organ, a little heat generating organ. And they're brown because these cells are packed with mitochondria and that's the reason why it's one of the most metabolically active tissues in our bodies. It's just so ironic that a type of fat is so metabolically active. Where do you guys think the mitochondria in these brown fat cells get their energy from? Where do they get all this energy to generate this heat? Where are they pulling it from? From regular fat cells, from white adipose tissue, which is great actually if you think about it. That means that when you activate, when you get cold and you activate these brown fat cells, it's burning calories from your regular fat. And that of course then can promote weight loss and it'll enhance insulin sensitivity. And that has intrigued researchers for years and years.

'''E:''' Oh gosh. Don't tell me ice baths are good now for weight loss. Is that what it is?

'''B:''' Oh man, dude, I'm telling you. It would actually help activate and perhaps even generate extra brown fat cells. So yeah. So yeah, that's actually a thing. So this is why enhancing insulin sensitivity and weight loss, this is why brown fat has intrigued researchers for years because brown fat could have or should have some obvious therapeutic potential for obesity and diabetes and a host of other conditions. But that isn't exactly why these Rutgers researchers were studying the brown fat of mice. They were studying brown fat because other researchers had noticed that mice that lacked a signaling protein called RGS-14, they seem to have better longevity and even exercise performance than typical mice. So they wanted to dig deeper and see what the hell was going on there. So what did they do? They created specific knockout mice, knockout mice that do not have RGS-14 protein. But otherwise they were the same as the control mice. So when they looked at the brown fat cells from these knockout mice, what they found almost seemed like a super brown fat to me. It was like, what? This is really happening? The mitochondria, now we know mitochondria, right? These are the powerhouses of the cells. They were essentially souped up. They were more efficient than normal. They were better at producing energy and heat, and the mitochondria had greater overall heat generating capacity as well. And even enzymes, the enzymes levels like SIRT3, S-I-R-T-3, they were enhanced as well. These enzymes further enhanced mitochondria function, and they also protected the mitochondria from things like oxidative damage, which they're very prone to. And let's see, one other big benefit here, the brown fat cells themselves benefited from the creation of new blood vessels to give them better blood flow and nutrients and also boost the cell's metabolic performance. So all that stuff are the things that they found. And so when they looked at the knockout mice themselves, of course they showed some interesting changes. I mean, if you're changing your metabolism to a certain extent to that level, you're going to be seeing some things just like right out of the gate here. So I'm not even sure how much I believe some of this stuff. It's just like, are you kidding? So they noticed that the maximum lifespan was significantly greater in these knockout mice than in the control mice for both males and females. And they also get this one, 24-month-old knockout mice. Now that's an old mice, and this is a quote from the study. These knockout mice did not show the aging phenotype normally present in the control mice of similar age, including body atrophy, loss of hair, graying of fur color. So these mice-

'''C:''' Oh. Mice get old and gray at two years?

'''B:''' Oh, yeah.

'''C:''' That's so sweet.

'''B:''' Well, it's sad. It's sad. But it makes them great lab animals, right? I mean, a couple of years, you go through the whole life cycle. And so they're looking at old mice, and they're seeing that no atrophy, they're seeing no balding mice, and they're not seeing much graying of the fur either. It's like, I mean, what the hell? And if that wasn't good enough, the researchers also showed improved exercise performance and endurance of the knockout mice as well to a significant degree. One site was saying 30% exercise performance improvement, but I didn't see too much those specific numbers in the study itself. All right. So to make this even cooler, when the researchers transplanted the knockout brown fat into the control mice, right? Because they wanted to say, all right, these knockout mice don't have this protein. So let's just transplant that brown adipose tissue, the brown fat, let's just transplant that in and see what happens. So if something happens, then we know it's the brown fat that's doing it and not some other reason. So what happened was when they transplanted the brown adipose tissue into the mice, within three days, they were showing similar exercise capabilities and enhanced durability capabilities. So when they did it from knockout mouse, when they did it from control mouse to control mouse, they saw some enhanced enhancements, but it took eight days and it wasn't nearly as significant as what they were seeing. So I guess if you put extra brown fat in your body, you're going to see something that's noticeable, some enhancement in performance, but it was nothing like when it was transferred from the enhanced brown fat, right? You follow that?

'''C:''' So the knockout mice had a gene knocked out that coded for a protein that suppressed adipose tissue? Like what did the protein do?

'''B:''' One of the things that it does, it's a signaling pathway for metabolism, as you might imagine. So that's why we're seeing this difference here. This protein essentially puts on the brakes for your metabolism. It's very similar to myostatin. You've heard of the myostatin protein. It's similar. It puts the brakes on muscle growth. So when you see like a whippet, a dog or some cattle that do not have the myostatin protein, they are jacked to the sky. It's incredible because there's no brake. So this is similar in that without this protein, that these certain metabolic pathways just don't have the brakes. It makes the changes that I've discussed in terms of mitochondrial efficiency and all that extra stuff.

'''C:''' So here's a question.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' What is the evolutionary purpose of having a brake on our metabolism?

'''B:''' Yeah. I don't know.

'''C:''' And if we knock that out, is that bad downstream? Because it's one thing to look at a two-year-old mouse. It's another thing to talk about a human that has like a 90-year lifespan.

'''B:''' Yeah. I don't know. But there's also other problems because this protein, it impacts metabolism, but it also impacts other things like your nervous system and plasticity. So that's one of the things that I think they need to be concerned about. If this does take off, they're going to have to seriously study what are some of these other potential impacts. You just can't like, oh, let's do this on people now because who knows what else it could impact. Let me mention this other piece here that they took a control mouse and they put the enhanced brown fat into the control mouse at three months old. And when that mouse was old, it also wasn't gray, wasn't losing hair, wasn't atrophied. So just by having that enhanced brown fat in their bodies, it gave them all these benefits.

'''C:''' And to be clear, Bob, you're using shorthand when you say a mouse, right? They didn't only do this once.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. They had a lot of... Yeah, they did this on a lot of mice.

'''C:''' Okay. Just making sure.

'''B:''' I don't know the exact number, but yeah, this wasn't just one mice. This was a bunch of mice. Yeah. I'm seeing here from my notes that the other effects of this protein is it impacts learning, memory and synaptic plasticity. So yeah. So that's just like, oh, yeah, you just can't mess around with that stuff.

'''C:''' Does the protein suppress those things or does the protein enable those things?

'''B:''' I wonder if it puts the brakes on it as well as metabolism. I'm not sure. So obviously, all that would have to be studied. Okay. So but for people to benefit from this, right, because this is where we're going, right? We want to benefit people with this discovery. So that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to make ourselves knockout people that don't have this RGS-14 protein. So as they say in the study, it becomes increasingly important to develop a pharmacological analog to the RGS-14 knockout brown fat that can be translated to the clinics to promote enhanced exercise capacity and healthful aging in patients. That's the wet dream scenario, right, for this? Not knocking out our own proteins or genes, but targeting therapies, creating these targeted therapies to give our own brown fat similar properties without necessarily getting any of the potential downsides, but some sort of targeted therapy that could do it. So that would be amazing. But I mean, to me, what are the odds of this transferring to people? First off, yeah, you can never assume that what you see in these studies in mice is going to transfer cleanly to people. It's almost guaranteed that that's not going to happen. But it does happen. And we may learn enough about this enhanced brown fat that we could mimic these properties and transfer that somehow through some therapies to people. That would be amazing. The impacts to enhancing longevity and health and dealing with obesity and diabetes and all these other problems that it could potentially ameliorate, I think, it could be dramatic if this transfers well. But we'll see. Right? We'll see.

'''C:''' But I guess, Bob, an important question is, I don't know if you've done the research on this because you're so interested in it, but I feel like every day we're seeing more and more that these GLP-1s or these semaglutides have these positive benefits beyond what they were originally developed for. How do they affect brown fat?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Because we might already have, I mean, I'm not saying that they're a panacea by any stretch, but we already have these targeted therapies that really, really seem to be helping people metabolically. And so I'd be curious to see if, I don't know, it might not be that crazy an idea.

'''B:''' Yeah. I hope. By knocking out this protein, it turned the mice brown fat into like super brown fat. Super. I mean, it really was... This is dramatic where you're looking at an old mouse and it's not gray and atrophied. I mean, that's just like, what the hell? That's incredible. I mean, even if it doesn't... And it doesn't have to extend our lifespan. What it would be great if it could extend our healthy lifespan, if it compressed the morbidity so that we're in really great shape until we're into our 80s and then... That's the goal, right? You experience this compressed morbidity where over the course of a year, you really decline really fast. And it's not like 15 years of just a horror show of like medical expenses and decrepitude and all that nasty stuff.

'''C:''' I'm seeing like just a quick, quick internet search, an article in Cell Biochemistry and Function that says, from 2022, semaglutide, GLP-1 receptor agonist, stimulates browning on subcutaneous fat adipocytes and mitigates inflammation in visceral fat adipocytes of obese mice.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' So, it's like, we already have drugs that are doing this. I mean, it's cool, but I don't think it's... It feels iterative to me.

'''B:''' Scientists have noticed that these mice before, and that's what these researchers did. They're like, wait. These people are seeing mice that seem to have increased longevity and enhanced exercise capabilities. What's going on? That's why they took a deep dive onto the brown fat and like, holy crap, look what's happened to this brown fat.

'''C:''' Right. Because there's already individual differences in mice and people. There's already people who have never had a problem with their weight their whole lives, and there are people who really, really struggle. Like what's going on there from a genetic perspective, from a protein perspective? I don't know. There's a lot to learn.

'''B:''' Yeah. I wonder if there are people that don't have the myostatin protein and are really muscular. Maybe there probably are people out there that already don't have this, and they can check them out. That would sound like an awesome study right there.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Bob.

'''B:''' Sure.

{{anchor|wtn}}
{{anchor|futureWTN}}
== Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:07:41) ==

'''S:''' Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' All right, guys. Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy]

'''C:''' I think it's an animal.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' That sounds like some flying mythological creatures from a Ray Harryhausen stop motion movie scene.

'''C:''' But I think it's a real animal.

'''J:''' Steve, what do you got?

'''S:''' Yeah. It definitely sounds like an animal.

'''C:''' Is it a bird?

'''J:''' Is it a plane? No. It is not a bird.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''J:''' Frederick Neant wrote in and said, I believe this is someone pulling the string on a broken 80s to 90s voice box found in dolls. It's a cromulent guess. That is not correct, but thank you for trying.

'''C:''' No, it's not.

'''J:''' Hunter Richards wrote in and said, hi, Jay, I know a lot of people are going to say it's an animal of some kind, but if you listen closely, it sounds too mechanical. My guess is this is a record being scratched. Most likely, someone has a hold of the belt that turns the platter and is pulling it back and forth while the stylus is in contact with the record. Not sure what kind of record, but something that when sped up and played backwards and then forwards sounds like a growling baby bobcat. Now, what that person just described is actually this. Okay, that is-

'''E:''' Am I too old to recognize that?

'''J:''' No, I meant to say, it's funny, when I read it, I'm like, I don't know, does he not know? Does he not know that this has been around for a very long time? That is not correct, but thanks for the guess. Let's move on to J.D. Bergen. J.D. said it sounds like it could be some little angry rodent, like a sugar glider.

'''E:''' A sugar glider? I don't know what that is.

'''C:''' They're not angry.

'''J:''' How do you know, though? They might be.

'''C:''' They're so sweet. Have you ever met a sugar glider?

'''J:''' No, I wish I did, though. I think they look really cool.

'''C:''' They're cute.

'''J:''' All right, there's no winner this week, guys. I'm shocked. I'm utterly shocked that there was no winner. I'll play it for you one more time. [plays Noisy] Okay. That's a skunk.

'''B:''' What?

'''S:''' Okay.

'''J:''' Yeah, and I grew up with a standard poodle. That was the dog that my family had growing up. And our dog would get sprayed by skunks at least twice a year. It was not uncommon. And I remember hearing the mother and baby skunks making that noise as they were running away. So I recognized this right away, but I'm really surprised. Like, nobody, nobody really did. Maybe it was an off week, but, you know, it is what it is. You know, sometimes I stump you on something that I would consider to be pretty easy. All right. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. Cara, you were correct all the time. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Dale Robinson. [plays Noisy] If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, email me directly at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Steve, very quickly, the SGU is changing significantly this year because Steve is going to retire. So Steve will be going full-time at the end of June, early July.

'''E:''' He'll be taking his certification in July.

'''J:''' He will. We are giving him a Skeptics Guide-

'''E:''' 225 questions he'll have to answer.

'''J:''' Yeah. He'll have 20 minutes to answer the questions and I'll give him the answers immediately. The bottom line is, if you'd like to help support us during this time when Steve's going to be going full-time because we could really definitely use the support, and if you also want to support us because, I don't know, the world is in a very non-skeptical place and I think we need skeptical outreach now more than ever, please consider becoming a patron. You can go to [https://www.patreon.com/SkepticsGuide patreon.com/SkepticsGuide] You can also join our mailing list. We send out an email every week giving you details on everything that we did the previous week. You can also go to theskepticsguide.org to check out our email list. You can give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. I think iTunes is still like the number one place to rate podcasts. And that's it. Oh no, it isn't. The conference. Guys, I know you're excited. I can hear you guys chomping at the bit wanting to talk about how excited you are about this.

'''E:''' NOTACON.

'''C:''' Woohoo.

'''J:''' No, we are very excited just because we know how much fun it is and we've been working on this conference for the last six months. Very, very excited and happy that we're running it again. If you'd like to join us, it's called NOTACON, NOTACON 2025. We have a Beatles theme this year and it'll be on the dates May 15, 16, and 17. You can go to [https://notaconcon.com/ notaconcon.com] for information about the conference. Everything you want to know is on there and also you can buy tickets there. Please join us. It's going to be great.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay.

{{anchor|email}}
== Emails (1:13:04) ==


'''S:''' I'm going to do one email. This email comes from Tim Graham from Canada. And Tim writes, Dear Skeptics, your show is a highlight of the week for me. I am sure I am not the first to point out inaccuracies in episode 1026 regarding the Texas measles outbreak. I certainly got the sense from the skeptics that fun was being poked at the recommendation to use vitamins in the treatment of measles. According to the WHO guidelines, vitamin A has been and continues to be a core treatment for measles and cod liver oil contains not only vitamin D as reported, but also vitamin A. In the situation with the Mennonites, it's plausible that this traditional remedy would be more palatable given their cultural norms than pills from the big bad government. For example, Cochrane states that vitamin A reduces death by 87% in children younger than two. Any cursory search for measles treatment would have outlined the importance of vitamin A. While I think the reporting content was uncharacteristically shoddy, it was actually the tone that I found more problematic. I agree with the general premise that RFK Jr. has been a dangerous vaccine skeptic, but in this case, he basically seems to be recommending the correct treatment. While I understand the bias of judging RFK Jr. based on previous quackery, each time the skeptical community stoops to judging the current behavior in this way, it feeds the narrative that the sky is falling. If RFK Jr. starts to promote general health via exercise, will that be taken at face value or also laughed off? Lest we forget vaccine hesitancy and denialism exists on all sides of the political spectrum, I would hope the skeptics can try to stick to a more neutral and fact-based approach. Keep up the great work.

'''C:''' Oh, no. There's a lot here.

'''S:''' I responded to Tim with the information that I'm about to give you guys. And he responded simply, thanks for the correction. Because Tim is completely wrong here, but in a very interesting way that is worth exploring. So the idea is that, well, vitamin A is actually a WHO and actually CDC recommended treatment for measles and therefore we were unfair to criticize RFK Jr. in recommending vitamin A for measles. But that's not true. I wrote about this today on Science-Based Medicine as well, if you want to have all the references. Here's the skinny. If you look deeper into the data, what the data clearly shows is that what vitamin A is treating is not measles, it's vitamin A deficiency. The problem is that measles exacerbates vitamin A deficiency. It depletes vitamin A. The infection itself depletes vitamin A. So if you already have vitamin A deficiency, measles can make it worse. What the WHO is essentially recommending is targeted vitamin A supplementation in at-risk populations who are either likely to get measles or who do get measles. It's also true that measles and vitamin A deficiency both weaken the immune system, right? So there's also a synergistic effect there.

'''C:''' And in like a developed country where somebody is not likely to have vitamin A deficiency, they may still be given vitamin A as an adjuvant treatment, but it's not going to... Because measles does make you deficient in vitamin A. So while they have the measles, they might have temporary vitamin A deficiency. But it's not like, oh, if you get the measles, don't worry. You can just take vitamin A and then you won't have the measles.

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' That's...

'''S:''' It's actually more... I would go farther than that, Cara. So because it's been studied. So first of all, the 87% figure is highly misleading. That was in one small study. The most recent systematic review I found actually put the number at 12%, so a 12% reduction in mortality. RFK Jr. actually referenced a study, an earlier review, an older review that cited 65%. Why are these numbers so wildly variable? Because it depends on the level of vitamin A deficiency in the population that you're studying. All of these studies, all of these studies are in developing nations with rampant vitamin A deficiency, all of them. It also found, by the way, even in the maximally positive patient population for the effects of vitamin A, no preventive benefit. It does not prevent measles. It doesn't prevent the spread of measles. It doesn't prevent a lot of complications of measles. It does reduce overall mortality. So vitamin A deficiency, right? It also prevents blindness from vitamin A deficiency. So yes, vitamin A is an effective treatment for vitamin A deficiency. It doesn't have any anti-measles viral activity, right? It has no antiviral activity. It's not treating the measles. It's treating the vitamin A deficiency we see in measles. I found one study that specifically looked at the effects of vitamin A in the treatment of measles in a developed nation. And you know what it showed?

'''C:''' Nothing?

'''S:''' Zero benefit.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' No benefit. So citing data from parts of the world with vitamin A deficiency for the efficacy of vitamin A supplementation and then applying it to Texas is classic, classic RFK Jr. It's completely getting the science wrong. It's interpreting it on the most superficial level possible with no medical understanding. Not like as a physician, you hear that there's a massive reduction in mortality from measles from vitamin A. The first thing you think of is like, I wonder what the mechanism is that? Are they just treating vitamin A deficiency? But if you're not a physician and you just think, oh, it's treatment, right? It's just treating the measles, you know, and you just take something that supports your ideology that like everything is nutritional, right? And also while he has to make positive statements about the vaccine, he's still throwing out all the anti-vaccine tropes. And then he gets interviewed later on Fox News and he's bringing up vaccine side effects and it's a choice and all that stuff. He's still a hardcore anti-vaccinationist.

'''C:''' You know, what's so infuriating to me is that obviously there's so much misinformation there that's going to lead people to make bad decisions because this is now a public health official. I should say disinformation, but like to be clear, and this is the part that's so infuriating, there is no cure for measles, which is why we have to rely on vaccination. When we think about the vaccines that have really dramatically changed the landscape of these diseases, it's usually diseases for which there is no cure. If you get this virus, all we can do is give you comfort measures and hope that your immune system can fight it off. That's all we can do. That's so scary. We can't say, oh, after the fact, you're going to be fine.

'''S:''' You'll be fine. Take vitamin A, you're good. Even though it has no benefit in like America, right?

'''C:''' Right. It's like COVID too. That's what's so infuriating. It's like people are going to die from this. People die from the flu. People die from all of these diseases. And even though we have, quote, treatments, those treatments don't actually fight the disease.

'''S:''' That's right.

'''C:''' They do things like reduce your mortality.

'''S:''' The only messaging the government should be having on this or the primary messaging should be full-throated support for vaccination. Confusing people by misinterpreting the vitamin A literature is counterproductive, right? And so, like people say, the CDC recommends it. This is what the CDC has to say, supportive care, supportive care, again, physicians know what that means. It's not a treatment. It's not a disease modifying treatment. It's just making the patient better able to weather the storm of this illness. Supportive care, including vitamin A administration under the direction of a physician may be appropriate. Whoa, is that lukewarm, right? That's just like it may be, you know, adjunctive supportive care. It's not a treatment for it. Completely gets it wrong, but in a way that's very typical for RFK Jr. and for cranks in general who don't-

'''C:''' Yeah, I almost wish that the language would be even stronger, though. Like I'm looking at the Mayo Clinic and they literally say, there is no specific treatment for a measles infection once it occurs. Treatment includes providing comfort measures. That's it.

'''S:''' And also, to be emphasized, it is not a substitute for the vaccine.

'''C:''' No.

'''S:''' But people are doing it. People are taking vitamin A to prevent measles, and even in the studies that show that it's effective in reducing mortality, it doesn't prevent the contraction of the illness. And vitamin A is like the most toxic vitamin that there is, right? You're aware of that? Like it's very easy to overdose on vitamin A with horrible consequences.

'''C:''' You can overdose on vitamin A just from eating too much liver.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's correct.

'''C:''' Not just from taking too many of the supplements. This is why it's so dangerous when there are these supplements that are like 2,000% of your daily value.

'''S:''' That happened by the way. There was one polar mission that they had to kill and eat polar bears. They ate the polar bear livers. So safety tip, don't eat predator livers because predators eat livers, and their livers concentrate all of that vitamin A, and they got hypervitaminosis A and died from vitamin A poisoning becausethey ate a polar bear liver. So I don't think that we were unfair to RFK. But the point is well taken that we shouldn't reflexively say that anything that he says is wrong, because he will throw in correct things at times as well.

'''C:''' That's what good pseudoscientists do.

'''S:''' They do. Yeah, and this is rampant in the healthcare, like the alternative healthcare. And so they got to eat right, have a lot of vegetables, exercise regularly, and take these bullshit supplements. That is par for the course.

'''C:''' As part of a well balanced diet.

'''S:''' Yeah, we even have, this is the Trojan horse phenomena. We even have terms for this. We write about this all the time, how they do this. You couch your nonsense in reasonable and reasonable sounding common sense or generally accepted good health advice, and it gives it the air of, again, of reasonableness in that you're reasonable and you're just throwing in this thing. But there's the poison pill always. There's always the nonsense. And he is inappropriately touting vitamin A because he's an anti-vaxxer, period. He's trying to present it as an alternative, and it's not.

'''C:''' Oh, and it's so scary. Steve, I'm looking at the symptoms of vitamin A toxicity.

'''S:''' It's horrible. Your skin like melts off your body.

'''C:''' Yeah, your bones get thin and chronic.

'''E:''' Bob, don't get excited.

'''C:''' But in acute exposure, listen to this, increased intracranial pressure.

'''S:''' Yeah. Now you're at organ failure. It's terrible.

'''C:''' Oh my God. You don't want that.

'''S:''' No, no, no.

'''C:''' Yikes. So if you've been taking vitamin A, it says when you have a headache and a rash, you need to seek medical attention.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' It's so scary.

'''S:''' Stop taking the vitamin A, but go to the doctor. That's why the CDC says under the direction of a physician. They do not want people self-medicating with vitamin A because it's dangerous.

'''C:''' Oof. But it's just a vitamin, Steve.

'''S:''' I know.

'''E:''' It's all natural.

'''C:''' Ugh.

'''S:''' All right. We have a fun interview with Dave Farina, Professor Dave, coming up, so let's go to that interview now.

{{anchor|interview}}
== Interview with Dave Farina (1:24:41) ==
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfessorDaveExplains

'''S:''' We are joined now by Dave Farina. Dave, welcome to The Skeptic Guide.

'''DF:''' Hi. Thanks for having me.

'''S:''' Dave, you are also known as Professor Dave from your Professor Dave Explains YouTube series, which is very popular. Obviously, we've been enjoying watching. I just watched your most recent one. I think it's your most recent one, Reacting to Pathetic Answers in Genesis Propaganda Video.

'''DF:''' Yeah. That's a good one.

'''S:''' You seem to have a good time doing that one.

'''DF:''' I do. The reaction videos are fun. It's just I can kind of just let loose a little bit.

'''S:''' So tell us a little bit about this project, how and when you started it, and how it's been going.

'''DF:''' Sure. I started my YouTube channel in 2015, January of 2015, so I actually just celebrated my 10th anniversary, if you can believe it. But yeah, I started out just I had been teaching organic chemistry, and I had noticed that some people were uploading educational content, tutorial-based content to YouTube. Not that much. This was quite a while ago, but there definitely was some up there, most notably Khan Academy and some other things like that. And I thought, well, why can't I do that? So I basically just filmed myself delivering my organic chemistry lectures as though I were teaching class, and did a little branding, made a little theme song, you know, some fun little tidbits to make it a little more fun, and put them online and just thought, well, let's see what happens. And I was actually pretty shocked at how well it was received immediately, which prompted me to start making general chemistry tutorials, this time with green screen and some animations and kind of up the production value a little bit. And those were also received well, so I started doing biochemistry and physics and astronomy and math and just really, you know, kind of was off to the races with as many topics as I could cover. And then around 2019, 2020, a new component of the channel emerged. I started to do some debunking content, where I just take charlatans and frauds who lie about science and expose them, debunk them increasingly maliciously, I guess, over the years, which has become something of a reputation for me. And so those are the two things I do to this day.

'''S:''' Yeah, so we kind of started with debunking. That's kind of, I think it's a critical part of science communication.

'''DF:''' I think so.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's funny that you kind of found it after the fact, because, you know, most people have misconceptions about science, you're not just filling a void, you're correcting misinformation, right?

'''DF:''' That's right.

'''J:''' I saw your videos, I think all of them at this point, of your ongoing battle with the flat earthers. And yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I really like your angle on it. I guess, you know, you're at the level of aggression that I wish that I could be at.

'''DF:''' Yeah, I hear that a lot.

'''J:''' I mean, it's perfect. It's perfect, because, you know, it's really interesting as a science advocate and science communicator myself, like, you know, you're saying the things that I wish I was educated enough in that particular area, you know, it just isn't one of my areas that I've done a deep dive on. You know, and it seems so obvious to most of us that this is so ridiculously, you know, it's an ill thought out position, right? It's just like, you can't, you can't, it doesn't hold water on so many levels. How did you get into that? Like, tell me about the story behind how that kind of became your focus.

'''DF:''' So I mean, it was, I definitely wouldn't say it's my focus now, but I would say that it's the first thing that I debunked, because I kind of got dragged into it. So I was making an astronomy series. You know, basically, Astronomy 101, right, tutorials to accompany a freshman year undergrad that's taking Astro 101, right, this is what you learn in class, here you go. I just thought at the end, it'd be kind of fun to do a couple of pieces, one debunking astrology and one debunking Flat Earth. I didn't look into anything that Flat Earthers say, I just had heard that there were Flat Earthers, and I thought, ha ha, that's so silly, isn't it? So I did those two pieces, and I thought I'd get more heat on the astrology one, but nobody seemed to care on that. But with the Flat Earth one, all I really did was kind of recapitulate points from earlier in the series. How did we, how did the, you know, in antiquity, how did we observe the celestial sphere, things that we noticed that helped us understand that the Earth is a sphere 2,500 years ago, right? Here are some things to talk about. And that video went to the top of the Flat Earth keyword search that day when it went out. So these guys, the globe busters, decided they were going to do a live stream just tearing it apart. Oh man, this guy's so dumb, this Professor Dave is so indoctrinated, he's a NASA shill. And they did this long, long, long, long live stream, just, and they were really, I mean, they were really nasty towards me. And that, it's just, at the time I was not used to people talking about me on the internet. Now it's every minute of every day and it's just, it's a constant barrage of vitriol being thrown my way. But at the time I just, I wasn't used to it and I got, you know, I took it personally. So I did a response video, I did a 45 minute video tearing apart their little live stream. It's the first debunk I've ever done, it's the first long form content I'd ever done. And I loved it. I found out that I'm really good at it. People loved it. It's still to this day, the most viewed video on my channel by a lot. And so it was just this incredible thing where I discovered this other type of content that I felt compelled to do, that I really enjoyed doing, that looked like it could be lucrative as well, which would help me, you know, not have to do other kinds of work and I could really focus on science communication. So I really went for it. I mean, I stuck with Flat Earth for a few more videos, but then I pretty quickly branched off into creationism and electric universe and anti-vaxxers and just quantum mysticism or whatever I felt like debunking. I mean, it's a never ending well that we can dip into for things to debunk, but just kind of went for it.

'''J:''' You know, I used those videos to introduce my son to Flat Earth and, you know, he really got into, well, he and I both liked your point of approach. You know, I just think it was like, first and foremost, you really knew all the answers. They weren't really get one over on you, which is their typical way of doing it is they'll throw a bunch of lingo at you and like make you second guess your position just because you're not following everything that they're saying. Yeah. I could see that they were being aggressive towards you and that you decided that you're going to take the gloves off a little bit, which it worked really well, obviously, like people really responded to it. Other than that, what are some of your topics that you felt, you know, landed really well?

'''DF:''' I mean, creationism and intelligent design is one of the biggest focuses, if not the biggest debunking focus, just because like Flat Earth, it is a denial of entire fields of science, depending on the flavor of creationism. Flat Earth is a denial of the entire field of physics, the entire field of geology, the entire field of astronomy is, you know, in the same way, Young Earth creationism denies almost as much science as Flat Earth. The difference is that it's tremendously more prevalent and is also, you know, part of a political movement, right? There's definitely a push towards Christian theocracy, the erosion of church and state. These are things that really the separation of church and state, trying to get religion taught in public schools, things like that. These are things that I'm really concerned about from a societal standpoint, right? Flat Earth is adorable in comparison, right? It's a very silly, tiny little cult, and it's fun to make fun of, and it's important to expose how stupid it is and use it as a case study in conspiratorial thought to teach lessons about it. But creationism and intelligent design and all that move, that's something that actually directly threatens our freedoms as a country, as a citizenry. So I have devoted quite a lot of attention to that. And now I'm starting to look at, you know, what the current administration is putting out. I actually just finished editing a piece on, that'll come out probably this Saturday about all the Trump, the trans mice comment that he made. And it's just like insane. And I mean, this is where our government is at. So I'm trying to be topical and do things that are, you know, I got to talk about RFK Jr. I got to talk about people in his cabinet. I got to talk about this stuff and hope that that makes an impact. So that's definitely at least part of my, the main part of my focus at the moment with the debunking.

'''S:''' What I found with the Flat Earthers actually is that I think a lot of them are creationists because even though it might've started as kind of this more of a cult thing on its own, it's kind of merged with the, well, it's the firmament, you know, that notion of a firmament comes from the Bible. And so to them, to a lot of the ongoing Flat Earthers, it's a support of creationism, of, you know, the literal interpretation of the Bible, right? There is no space because there's a firmament up there. They quote the Bible when they talk about it.

'''DF:''' Well, I mean, I wouldn't say merged. I think that there is a sub-community of Flat Earthers that are that way because they are biblical literalists. Some are just conspiratorial thought on steroids. Like it's just insane conspiratorial thought.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely. The conspiracy, the hardcore conspiracy theorists are into everything conspiratorial regardless. But then there's the ideological conspiracists who I think are Christian.

'''DF:''' Yeah, if you're a Flat Earther, you believe in every single conspiracy. But the difference is that the overwhelming majority of creationists are not Flat Earthers.

'''S:''' Yes, that's correct.

'''DF:''' There's only about 10,000 Flat Earthers at the most in the world, whereas there are millions upon millions of creationists, even young Earth creationists. They're a much larger demographic and they believe these things in earnest. And ironically, they mock Flat Earthers, right? Even Kent Hovind will mock Flat Earthers as like a silly belief system.

'''J:''' Isn't that funny?

'''DF:''' That's the one thing that you don't advocate for, you know, but yeah, it's pretty incredible.

'''J:''' Dave, what are you working on right now?

'''DF:''' Literally, this moment today, I was working on the piece I was just telling you about the Trump trans mice. Other than that, I'm working on like, I'm also constantly working on academic tutorials. So I'm working on some math tutorials on differential equations. I'm working on zoology tutorials. I'm working on forensic science tutorials. I'm working on world history tutorials. And then a whole bunch of other debunks are constantly kind of in the queue, as it were.

'''J:''' When you're going to, in the future, talk about the Trump administration and what the government is doing, we're struggling with it right now, right? Because first of all, we started out the show being apolitical. We really don't want to talk about politics.

'''S:''' Not apolitical, nonpartisan.

'''J:''' Nonpartisan.

'''S:''' Yeah, so we don't talk about things that are strictly political, but of course, whenever politics has a scientific angle to it, we talk about the science. If they're getting the science wrong, we will absolutely talk about it. Just like we don't talk about religion, but we talk about religion like creationism when they make scientific claims.

'''DF:''' Correct.

'''S:''' Yeah. But I wouldn't say we are not political, because that's just not accurate. We just have to be clarified, so we're nonpartisan.

'''DF:''' Yeah. When demagogues politicize science, I'm going to debunk their politicization of science. And so it's annoyed. It's turned some people off. I'll talk about trans issues, but it's because I'm tired of this aspect of the culture war. And people, 10 years later, we've been talking about this, people still refusing to learn about what trans people are. So I try to teach them aspects about human anatomy and physiology, and what gender identity is in these things. And I do get comments, you know, why are you being political? I'm not. I'm talking about science. This is about hormones and human anatomy. That's biology, my friend. That's called the science. But it has to be done. I'm really tired of the discourse. I'm really tired of the abuse in our government of science. And now, I'm finally seeing scientists turning around and starting to become more available for commentary because of the gigantic funding cuts, the NIH funding cuts. Scientists are panicking, right? They are finally starting to realize what I've been saying for years, and that is that public perception of science informs voting behavior, which informs your ability to do your jobs, right? That Trump got in there is why you guys are all freaking out about your work. So work with me, right? Let's all together, the scientific community and us science communicators, help the public figure out what the hell is going on and how they're being lied to, left, right, and center, by this administration and others.

'''J:''' And that's part of the problem and issue as science communicators. We have audience members, we have people who listen to the show for a long time and who can't really tease apart the idea that we're talking about the science and how politics has affected it and distorted it. But we're not specifically talking about politics. That's not our focus. That's not the thing that we get out of bed in the morning, but again, we have to talk about it because things have become so unbelievably unclear. The trans issue in particular is something that the skeptical community is really wringing their hands over because there isn't an agreement inside the skeptical community. There is an agreement about what the science says.

'''DF:''' Yes. Yeah. It's unfortunate.

'''J:''' It sucks. Yeah. It's very frustrating because-

'''S:''' It's unfortunate and completely unnecessary because, and I've spoken about it quite a bit recently as well. Of course, I get attacked as a woke ideologue, liberal, because I say like, yeah, well, biological sense sex is not strictly binary. That's just a fact. And-

'''DF:''' Correct.

'''S:''' But they say, but it is because of gametes, right? Have you encountered the gamete theory, right? That's the new ideology. That's the dogma. It's like, well, it is strictly binary because the gametes are binary. Yeah, but people-

'''DF:''' But that's flawed, right?

'''S:''' Because they're not single-celled creatures and that's not what we mean by biological sex. Well, are you trying to redefine biological sex.

'''DF:''' But the reason it doesn't work is that, so, okay, so how do you, so when a boy is born, are they not male until they begin producing sperm?

'''S:''' Right. Exactly. So it's nonsensical. I agree.

'''DF:''' It doesn't work, right? You cannot use a strictly gonadal definition nor strictly genital-based definition, right? Sex refers to a suite of characteristics that don't always agree.

'''S:''' But they say it doesn't. That's the weird dogma they've gotten themselves into. Like because of evolution, it's really only about gametes. So yeah, but we're talking about people, you know, which, and at the very, at the most, you're making some kind of weird, it's a semantic argument. It's a completely semantic argument. All right, so call it something else. But the fact is you can't divide all of humanity cleanly into two categories.

'''DF:''' No.

'''S:''' That's what we're talking about.

'''DF:''' You can't impose a rigid mathematical certainty onto the biological world in a way that just does not fit. Period.

'''S:''' Right. It also just like, it doesn't make sense. This is the conversation we're having. Well, you know, men shouldn't compete in women's sports. Like, well, yeah, okay, but the definition of male and female from a sporting perspective is not so clean. It's like, yeah, but gametes. It's like, yeah, but we don't have gamete leagues. Like we don't have a sperm league and an egg league. So you're using other features that you are telling me now are not part of biological sex because of evolution or something to divide. So it doesn't even make internal sense within the own argument that they're having.

'''DF:''' But more importantly, you know, informed nuanced discussions about social issues are never going to happen until everybody agrees on the science.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''DF:''' We're not there yet. We're still having people called, well, men can't be women. Men can't have babies, blah, blah, blah. While people are still talking like that, how the hell are we going to talk about these nuanced social issues? Everybody has to understand the basics. Then we can talk about what to do. I'm not going to have this sport conversation or the locker room conversation while people are still talking this way. It's ridiculous.

'''S:''' I agree. This is why it's unfortunate. I think that, you know, the science communication community needs to get their shit together.

'''DF:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Because if we're arguing with each other about how to define biological sex, we have no hope of having a coherent message to the public. It was kind of a little bit of the same way 25 years ago with climate change. I think that was one of the, not the first issue, but one of the early issues where the ivory tower scientists had no idea what was coming for them. And then, come on, like a wonky field of climate science, like we probably never had any interaction with the media before, suddenly becomes in the crosshairs of a political movement. They didn't know how to deal with it. It took them 10 years to get their shit together in terms of dealing with the public. Now I think they kind of know what they're doing. But I think we're still kind of in the same place with the trans issue and the biological sex issue.

'''DF:''' Yes.

'''S:''' We went through it 50 years ago and then it kind of got swept under the rug and now we're going through it again. Unfortunately, I'm afraid of what's going to happen.

'''DF:''' Yeah. I'm actually doing a piece, I'll probably put it out not this Saturday, but the following about, I was actually asked to be on a Piers Morgan panel with Jerry Coyne. So there was the whole FFRF resigning from the board of Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, these guys. I think what you're alluding to is, you know, these figures, largely extensions of the, you know, atheist community that are doubling down on the conservative talking points on this issue.

'''S:''' Totally.

'''DF:''' So I'm doing a piece on what Dawkins said on that panel and I'm tearing him a new one in that. And yeah, it's really disgraceful. You know, I mean, the irony about it is that he is accusing people that actually educate themselves about gender identity and all of these concepts that he's pretending to have expertise in. He's accusing them of being ideologues when in fact he is bending over for ideologues that are using his rhetoric to try to impose Christian nationalism, right? These guys, Dawkins and Coyne, they're famous for fighting against, you know, anti-evolution propaganda in that space. And now they're tools. They are instruments of the very same people. It's just, you can't write this stuff.

'''S:''' I know. I hate to say it, but it's just always Michael Shermer. They're complete tools of Christian nationalists and they don't, you know, they don't see it.

'''DF:''' It's all because they refuse to learn something new. It's just ridiculous, you know?

'''S:''' Yeah. I think they've decided that anyone who disagrees with their perspective are liberal, you know, woke liberal ideologues and then it shuts down any discussion. And so it's very dismissive, you know? So you can't have a conversation. And the vitriol and the rhetoric is so intense. It's like, can we lower the heat a little bit and just – and try to focus in on what our common ground is? Like there's none of that happening. And they're just stuck in this ridiculous semantic argument that is just fueling, you know, this right-wing Christian propaganda. It's so ironic. I agree. It's completely ironic.

'''J:''' Yeah. But Steve, if you ignore all the edge cases, it is binary.

'''S:''' Yeah. If you ignore – yeah, it's like – They always come out at night except during the day.

'''DF:''' It's binary except for when it's not.

'''S:''' Except for all the exceptions. I mean, Jerry Coyne recently – I'm going to call him out a little bit because we invited him on the podcast to talk about this issue and he refused to come on, right? But then he still trash talks me on his blog and on a recent one where he was touting a survey that said, look, most scientists agree that biological sex is binary. The question was, is biological sex binary? And then with an asterisk, and this is the asterisk, it said, if you don't include all of the intersex people. So like 52% of people of science have ever agreed with this statement. So you're saying that's supposed to mean something? Is biological sex, if you don't include all the people who are not binary? It's ridiculous.

'''DF:''' But it's also – but it's not just intersex people. The far more interesting cases are the – I forget off the top of my head the names of the syndromes. But you can have XY chromosomes and express female genitals and you can have XX chromosomes and express male genitals.

'''S:''' Yeah. I mean, they are technically –

'''DF:''' We're not even talking about different chromosomal situations.

'''S:''' They are technically intersex but now the term –

'''DF:''' Oh, those count as intersex?

'''S:''' Yeah. The term would be difference of sexual development, DSD.

'''DF:''' Or gonadal dysgenesis, right? But the thing – typically when we're talking about intersex, we're talking about X monosomy or XXY trisomy, right? We're talking about irregular chromosomal situations. We're talking about – instead, there are situations where you have XX and XY just like everybody else but you express the opposing set of genitals and reproductive organs.

'''S:''' Yeah. I use it as an example.

'''DF:''' How is that in the binary?

'''S:''' They're CAIS, right? There's a complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. They're XY. They have testicles. They make sperm. The sperm is not functional because the testes don't descend. But they have no response to testosterone. And therefore, they develop completely morphologically female. They don't have uterus. But other than that, they are completely morphologically female. And according to Coyne, that's a male. That's a guy because they have sperm inside of them. Even though they're female.

'''DF:''' But he'll also say it's based on genitals. This was the funniest thing about the Pierce segment is that Coyne started talking about, oh, it's based on the genitals. And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he goes, no, it's based on the gonads. And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Pierce starts fixating on that boxer, that Egyptian boxer who was born with female genitals and reproductive organs and everything but has XY chromosomes. And he starts saying that that's a man because of the—it's like, you guys, you don't even realize you're contradicting each other because you don't care about any kind of accuracy. You're just grandstanding to get the points from the conservative audience that you're courting, right? It's just ridiculous.

'''S:''' Yeah. I mean, I don't know that that's—I mean, I think Coyne is sincere and just misguided in his conception of this. I think he's just applying—he's making a category mistake. He's making the wrong argument and he doesn't realize the full context.

'''DF:''' It's unfortunate.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''DF:''' He's chosen his camp and he'll—these men are of a certain age, Coyne and Dawkins, and it's just—

'''S:''' Yeah. I think it's generational. I agree. The idea that there's something different than just men and women is so anathema. They can't wrap their head around it.

'''DF:''' It's impossible for them to wrap their head around, yeah. I wish that everybody could just learn the lesson. I'm not quite old enough. It was the 70s and 80s, I think, primarily when people started to become aware of the homosexual community and that sexuality is not as rigid as the Puritans would have us believe. And now, right, even conservatives, even mainstream conservatives are tolerant towards different sexualities. You know what I mean? Because it just would be so incredibly unpopular, right? It would not be trendy to be bashing on gays in 2025. And so they're tolerant of gay people. It's like, you guys, can't you just learn the lesson here, right? It's not Adam and Eve. It's Adam and Steve, right? Can't you see that that's what you're doing about trans people right now? Can't you fast forward 20 years and just like get the tolerance that we're all going to have societally, hopefully?

'''S:''' I do think it's generational. Talk to the younger generation. They don't give a shit.

'''DF:''' No, no.

'''S:''' They're not going to have the same ick reaction that I think the older generation has about it.

'''B:''' Just got to wait till they die out.

'''S:''' Unfortunately, that's the way revolutions happen sometimes in science. Got to wait for the old guard to die off.

'''DF:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right. Well, Dave, thank you so much for being on the show. Why don't you tell our audience how they can get to your content?

'''DF:''' Absolutely. Yeah. I am Professor Dave Explains on YouTube and that's pretty much all I do. I have some other socials, but I don't really use them. So yeah. Just go there.

'''S:''' Sounds good. All right. Thanks for joining us.

'''J:''' Thanks, Dave.

'''DF:''' Thanks a lot. Have a good one.

'''B:''' Thanks Dave.

{{anchor|theme}}
{{anchor|theme}}
== Science or Fiction (1:49:31) ==
{{SOFinfo
|theme = Ancient Roots
|hiddentheme =

|item1 = Persian scholar, Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past.
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|item2 = Aristarchus of Samos was the first to propose a heliocentric system, in which the Earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day.
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|item3 = In his 1025 work, Muslim physician Ibn Sina proposed human-to-human transmission of disease through invisible entities, and was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion.
|link3web = https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-ibn-sina-s-work-became-a-guiding-light-for-scientists-facing-contagions-35440
|link3title = How Ibn Sina's work became a guiding light for scientists facing contagions
|link3pub = www.trtworld.com

|}}
{{SOFResults

|science1 = Persian scholar, Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past.

|science2 = Aristarchus of Samos was the first to propose a heliocentric system, in which the Earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day.

|science3 = In his 1025 work, Muslim physician Ibn Sina proposed human-to-human transmission of disease through invisible entities, and was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion.

|rogue1 = Evan
|answer1 = Aristarchus of Samos was the first to propose a heliocentric system, in which the Earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day.

|rogue2 = Cara
|answer2 = Persian scholar, Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past.

|rogue3 = Jay
|answer3 = Persian scholar, Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past.

|rogue4 = Bob
|answer4 = Persian scholar, Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past.

|host = Steve
|sweep = y
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'''Voice-over:''' It's time. For. Science. Or fiction.

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. You guys are coming off a sweep from last week. See how you do this week. There's a theme.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''S:''' This week there's a theme, Ancient Roots. These are modern scientific ideas that have roots that go back maybe a bit farther than you thought. I've done this before. I like this theme. Are you ready?

'''J:''' Mm-hmm.

'''S:''' Okay. Here you go. Item number one. Persian scholar Abu Rahman Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past. Item number two. Aristarchus of Samos was the first to propose a heliocentric system in which the earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day. Item number three. In his 1025 work, Muslim physician Ibn Sina proposed human-to-human transmission of disease through invisible entities and was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion. Evan, go first.

'''E:''' These are all very plausible. I won't try to pronounce the names though because I will fail. But the first one about the 11th, the one proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past. I think of the three, this might be the one that I have some inkling, some sort of memory and filed away in my head where there was early suggestions that India was not originally part of Asia. I just don't know if it's tied to this Persian scholar specifically, but something is saying that this is right. Science. Number two, the second one about the heliocentric system in which the earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day. You didn't give the year.

'''S:''' Oh, I should. I meant to. This is like B.C. something from 310 to 230 B.C., so somewhere in there.

'''E:''' I don't know. I mean, they were able to figure out pretty early that the size of the earth. I remember there was a measurement done around that time in which they were able to pretty much accurately figure out how that the earth was a sphere and roughly how big it was. They were pretty close. So could they have also figured this out back then? Maybe. Maybe. Let me look at the last one again. 1025 was this one Muslim physician proposed human to human transmission of disease through invisible entities and was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion. I mean, just plausible. But you don't think of that until what? Like the 19th century is kind of I think when that came back or maybe late 18th century. So that's a long time. That is a long span in which it's proposed. But they did talk about. Hmm. All right. I have to say something. So I will go with the earth and revolving around the sun and rotating on its axis in one day. I think of the three. That one will be the fiction.

'''S:''' OK, Cara.

'''C:''' Pass.

'''S:''' Automatic failure for Cara.

'''C:''' Damn. Never mind. Never mind. OK. So Evan went with Aristarchus.

'''S:''' Mm hmm.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' I like the name of Samos. Who? So first of all, I don't know. Somebody must have thought of it before, even if they couldn't prove it like they could draw a picture of it. No, I feel like that's the case with all of these things. Like, OK, I don't know. Let's get creative. Human to human transmission of disease. Like, if you just watch people you notice that people that are close to each other get sick. So what if we take them apart and then they don't get sick. We don't even really need a model of, you know, viruses or anything. So that one feels reasonable too. India may have been connected to other continents in the past? Plate tectonics in the 11th century? I don't buy that one. The maps weren't even that good, were they? No. Didn't people still think that they could sail off the edge of the earth? Persian though, Persian scholar. Maybe they did have good maps. They were very mathy. That name too. Abu Rehan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. Wow, that's a good name. I'm gonna say that it wasn't him. I thought it was somebody with an easier name. I don't know. I'll say that's the fiction. Let's spread out so we can sweep Steve, you guys.

'''E:''' All right.

'''S:''' All right, Jay.

'''J:''' I'm pretty sure that, see what's his name, Aristarchus?

'''S:''' Aristarchus.

'''J:''' Yeah, Aristarchus Samos. He's of Samos.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''J:''' Okay, well that changes everything.

'''E:''' Well, yeah, I mean if you're from Samos.

'''J:''' Something about this rings a bell for me, about him being the first one to say that the heliocentric system of earth. So I think that one is science. The Muslim physician proposed a human transmission of disease. Wow, that's 1025. Hmm. And then the first one here, so this guy, his name is Rehan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. I'm gonna say that one is the fiction because I don't have a good reason, Steve. My gut is telling me that he wasn't the first person to say that.

'''S:''' Okay, and Bob.

'''B:''' Yeah, these are good. These are really good. I'm looking forward to see what's what here. What's rubbing me the wrong way is the Aristarchus and heliocentrism. I mean, I don't know, Cara, I don't know. This is just a schwing. I mean, everyone knows Copernicus is the heliocentric guy, right? I mean, it wouldn't surprise me, but I think I just would have heard of this or known this. So I'll just say whatever and say that's fiction.

'''S:''' All right, so you guys are all spread out. So no sweep for me. So I'll take this in order, as I do when they're all spread out. I'll start with number one, Persian scholar Abu Rehan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad al-Biruni. Or just al-Biruni. Proposed in the 11th century that India may have been connected to other continents in the past. Cara, you think this one is the fiction. Jay, you think this one's the fiction also, Bob and Evan think this one is science. And this one is the fiction.

'''C:''' Yeah, Jay!

'''E:''' Oh, hey, way to find it.

'''S:''' Although none of what you said is true. But so, yeah, this is not true. Although, all right, so I used ChatGPT to research this theme for science or fiction. And this is one of the things that ChatGPT spit out. Now, of course, I don't take ChatGPT's word for anything.

'''B:''' Of course not.

'''S:''' So then I typed in, can you give me a reference to support this? And ChatGPT said, oh, I'm sorry, I made a mistake. This did not happen.

'''E:''' Wait, what? It does that?

'''S:''' I mean, I had looked it up anyway, and I couldn't find it. I'm like, why can't I find it? So give me a reference. What I did find, which was true, so al-Biruni, so this guy was an amazing polymath, astronomer, mathematician, mapmaker. He calculated the size of the earth within 2% of the modern value just using some trigonometry and measuring mountain heights or something. So just really pretty amazing. What he did do, so after he calculated the size of the earth, he reasoned that there should be another continent between Europe and Asia, like on the other side of the planet, basically the Americas. That's what he really did. He anticipated the discovery of the Americas. So that's true.

'''C:''' He's like, that's too much water.

'''S:''' Yeah. Why would there be all this land on one side of the earth and then nothing but ocean for all the world? There's got to be a continent over there. And he was correct.

'''C:''' That's cool.

'''S:''' Yeah. He also thought that it would probably be in the temperate zone, at least part of it, and therefore that's probably inhabited, which was also correct. So no, but he did not anticipate plate tectonics. Nobody did. People did notice the map thing though, Cara. So even before plate tectonics was discovered, there were observations of, even going later than this though, not quite, more like 1500, 1600.

'''C:''' Right, when they could see the Americas, right? And they were like, whoa, that fits really well next to Africa.

'''S:''' Once you mapped out North and South America and Africa, people started to say, wait a minute. And then also fossils were lining up too. Leonardo da Vinci actually was one of the early proponents to say, oh, maybe the land moves around. Why are there fossils on mountains? Why are there shells on mountaintops? Maybe land moves. So there's the inklings of these ideas that land can move and these things sort of piece together on the map even before plate tectonics was discovered. All right, let's go to number two. Aristarchus of Samos was the first to propose a heliocentric system in which the earth revolves around the sun in one year and rotates on its axis in one day. Bob, you said that one was the science fiction. This one is science. He got it pretty much exactly correct. He also, by the way, agreed with those ancient Greeks who said that the sun is just another star. So his cosmology was pretty spot on.

'''C:''' Wait, I just realized that I said Ptolemy, but he's geocentric. When was Ptolemy?

'''S:''' No, Ptolemy's geocentric.

'''C:''' Yeah, he was geocentric. When was he compared to Aristarchus?

'''S:''' Ptolemy is basically Ptolemy won out over this guy, right? So Ptolemy's views predominated over Aristarchus until Copernicus. And in fact, Copernicus cited Aristarchus in his writing, although he later tried to suppress the citation so that he can keep the credit for himself.

'''C:''' No such thing as a new idea.

'''S:''' But yeah, so Ptolemy beat out Aristarchus, but Aristarchus was completely correct. So it is amazing to think that there were ancient Greeks like, yep, the earth revolves around the sun, it spins in a day, it rotates around the sun in a year, and the sun is just another star.

'''C:''' So they didn't have screens or anything. All they did was just stare at the sky.

'''S:''' Yeah. They had no telescopes. It was all naked eye astronomy. All right, all of this means that in his 1025 work, Muslim physician Ibn Sina proposed human-to-human transmission of disease through invisible entities and was the first to propose a quarantine to limit the spread of contagion is also science. This guy, also amazing.

'''B:''' Yeah, what the hell, man?

'''S:''' Yeah, so and again, he didn't quite nail the idea of germs, but he knew it was particles, as opposed to Cara. So yes, you are-

'''C:''' Miasma.

'''S:''' Miasma, exactly. So the idea that there's contagion was definitely around, because you're right. It's just easy to observe that there's contagion. But the predominant belief was that it was miasma coming from the soil and the air, right? Bad air, but not necessarily people-to-people. So that was the human-to-human transmission was definitely something that he was an early proponent of. The idea that it was particles and not miasma, also him. The idea that it was microscopic organisms, he didn't quite get there, but he got pretty far to the modern germ theory. And also the idea of quarantine, he thought 40 days. There's human-to-human transmission, we need to quarantine people for 40 days in the middle of an outbreak or epidemic in order to limit spread. So his work, these guys, you read about these ancient polymath scholars, they write hundreds of books. He wrote The Canon of Medicine in 1025. That was the work in which he proposed this. This was among a total of 450 works, right? The Canon of Medicine was used as a global medical textbook for 600 years after he wrote it, basically until the modern times, until we started to do scientific medicine. And I do think that in our Western-centric history of the world, we don't spend enough time studying the Persian and Muslim scholars that basically was science and scholarship in our Middle Ages, in the West's Middle Ages.

'''B:''' Amazing accomplishments.

'''S:''' Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely amazing. The astronomy, the math, the medicine, all of that.

'''B:''' Oh my God, you name it. Yeah, optics.

'''S:''' Yes, optics was...

'''E:''' Algebra.

'''S:''' For a thousand years, they were it. They were the scientific and cultural center of the world.

'''B:''' Oh man, they leveraged that. I think, what, religion came in and they messed it all up, is that what happened?

'''S:''' That's an oversimplification. Because a lot of them, the religion was there the whole time, Bob. And a lot of them did it, like a lot of the astronomy was done specifically to create the religious calendar.

'''C:''' Yeah, you literally wrote in his 1025 work, Muslim physician.

'''S:''' Yeah, no, no, religion was there to begin with. And it was not an impediment. It wasn't. It was actually part of it. It's really just more modern evangelical type...

'''C:''' Yeah, fundamentalist.

'''S:''' Or fundamentalist, I should say, modern fundamental type interpretations that would hold anti-scientific views. But at this time, they completely accepted science and scholarship, and it was just part of their culture.

'''C:''' Yeah, there was actually...

'''S:''' Alongside their religion.

'''C:''' There was a phenomenal Sudanese journalist and researcher at this conference that I was just at earlier this week. And she was talking about communicating climate science to Muslim communities in Sudan. And she was like, I couldn't remember the number that she cited, but she was like, I dug into the Quran and I was able to find like dozens, plural, of passages to promote taking care of the earth, to promote planting trees, to promote like, she's like, there's so many ways that you can meet people through the religion and promote that kind of science. And there's, you know, a lot of religious passages that enforce that. It's what we choose. It's what we choose to read, right? And how we choose to interpret it.

'''S:''' All right. Well, good job, Jay and Cara.

'''C:''' Yeah, Jay.

'''S:''' This was a fun one. ChatGPT, still hallucinating. You can't trust anything it says. It is helpful to just like throw out a bunch of ideas, you know what I mean? Then I could do the research on them. But just to like, give me a starting point.

'''E:''' So don't ever do that again.

'''S:''' It's a bit of a time saver. Like I just said, give me, you know, three examples of modern scientific theories that have deep, ancient roots. And then I actually had to give me like 20 of them before I settled on the ones I wanted to use. But and so that was good. It's a good way to just, again, a starting point. It's like Wikipedia, you know, it's a good starting point. You can't use it as your ultimate reference. You know, you got to go to, you know, first sources, primary sources. But it's a good, you know, shortcut.

{{anchor|qow}}
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (2:05:45) ==
{{qow
|text = "The burden of proof as far as authentication is concerned is on the claimant—not on anyone else to prove a negative. Asserting that a particular image must be paranormal because it is unexplained only constitutes an example of the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge."
|author = - Joe Nickell
|lived =
|desc =
}}

'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' "The burden of proof as far as authentication is concerned is on the claimant, not on anyone else to prove a negative. Asserting that a particular image must be paranormal because it is unexplained only constitutes an example of the logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge." That was written by Joe Nickell. Joe Nickell died last week. And kind of a shock to the entire skeptic community. Do I need to explain who Joe Nickell was to our audience?

'''S:''' Yeah, I know. We heard about that after we recorded last week's show. But yeah, Joe Nickell was, you know, a friend of ours. He was one of the first people that we really got close to in the skeptical movement. A really consummate skeptic. He really, when he said, I mean, so many pearls, I remember him saying over the years that were totally true. Like he really, really got the process, the logic, you know, the essence of, you know, skepticism as an endeavor. Investigation is the consummate investigator. Again, the only person really at the time, definitely, who was a full-time, paranormal, scientific, skeptical investigator. You know what I mean? And he did it, man. He was boots on the ground. You know what I mean? Also a great lecturer. I enjoyed every lecture.

'''B:''' Oh, so interesting to listen to.

'''S:''' He knew how to tell a story.

'''E:''' Great lecturer.

'''S:''' He knew how to tell a story.

'''E:''' Wonderful in an interview. His books were fantastic. So much information. So much that we all learned from him.

'''S:''' In Quest on the Shroud. The definitive debunking of the Shroud of Turin.

'''J:''' Yeah, that's right.

'''S:''' Absolutely definitive was Joe Nickell.

'''E:''' Without question. And also one of the first to really kind of take down the Warrens during their rise throughout the 70s and the 80s. He was there toe-to-toe with them the whole way. So many great stories. And just, my gosh, he will be missed. He was tremendous.

'''S:''' Yeah, he was. All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

'''E:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''J:''' You got it.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.
{{Outro664}}{{top}}

SGU Episode 104

2025-04-19T18:23:29Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

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|episodeDate = July 18th 2007 
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== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, July 18th, 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. This evening, we're going to have a shorter than usual episode. We have an interview scheduled with Brian Trent coming up in just a moment and that interview will be the entire show for this week. Unfortunately, this was unavoidable. There were a combination of personal events this week. Skeptical rogue Jay Novella is getting married in a few days. This we were planning on. We were planning on Jay's wedding and we were going to try to work around it. However, unfortunately, there was also a death in the family. So the combination of those things did not leave us time to do a full episode. But we're still going to bring you the interview that we had scheduled with Brian Trent. So let's go to that interview now.

== Interview with Brian Trent () ==
* Author of Never Grow Old: The Novel of Gilgamesh
* http://briantrent.com/

'''S:''' Joining us now is Brian Trent. Brian, welcome back to the Skeptics' Guide.

'''BT:''' Thank you very much. It's great to be back.

'''S:''' Brian is a professional essayist, screenwriter, and novelist and we interviewed you actually a little over a year ago about your book, Remembering Hypatia, and now we invited you back to discuss some essays that you've written on immortality.

'''BT:''' Right. Well, it's been kind of a subject that's interested me lately. My newest book just came out, Never Grow Old, and it deals with the mythological analysis of immortality, but I have also done scientific readings on it as well. So it's been a subject that's interested me for a long time.

'''S:''' Well, you're also a columnist for the American Chronicle, and you do have an article in there on this topic, and you do discuss the history of man's obsession with immortality. So why don't you tell us about that?

'''BT:''' Well, it's interesting. I mean, the oldest story that we know of, and actually the story that I used to base my new book on, is the Gilgamesh legend. This is back when they were pressing stories into wet clay. It was before scrolls, way, way, way before ancient Greece. And the first story that we know of is about man's obsession with immortality. It's been, as far as we know, from the dawning of sentience with our species and the dawn of our civilization. This is a subject that our recognition of our own mortality and the desire to increase our longevity and our life and to remain existent is something that's obsessed us for a long time. In ancient China, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was obsessed with immortality. He sent people all around the world to find the elixir of life. He had his body encased in a full suit of jade from head to toe, because they would believe that jade was the bone marrow of Pengu, the creator god. It would have regenerative properties. The Egyptians are an obvious example. They're just a lot of stock in the idea of immortality, even though it didn't work out very well for them, since even though they would remove all the organs of the body and put them very carefully into penultimate jars, they would discard the brain.

'''S:''' Right. That was an unimportant organ. Scrape it out through the nose, throw it away, yes.

'''BT:''' But it's going into everything. One of the lesser-known adventures of Gulliver on Gulliver's travels was he went to an island of immortals where people would live forever, but they would keep aging. You had these people who would become these babbling, helpless idiots, but they would be around forever. They were just sucking up all the island's economy to try to take care of them and keep them fed. Because they wouldn't die off, you just had that population of immortals ever increasing and ever destroying what society they had, which I think is pretty farsighted of Jonathan Swift to write something like that, because that's obviously one of the concerns if some of the new scientific explorations of this subject turn out to bear fruit. It's a relevant philosophical and cultural and political subject in time.

'''B:''' Was that a prevalent topic in his day? I know a lot of the islands that Gulliver visited was basically a commentary on society. So how did that really apply to his contemporary society when he wrote that?

'''BT:''' Yeah, and that's what I was able to cover. Swift is, I think, what I consider one of the true literary geniuses. He also was a hopeless misanthrope. His views on humanity were extremely dismal. It's almost hard to read some of his works sometimes because he has such a dark view of human nature, but he also was, like I said, very farsighted and he's just analyzing different islands. Each one of those islands, like you said, provided him an opportunity to analyze religion, government, war, different aspects of cultures. I think it just came in time. He might have been thinking that far ahead. Certainly people were was obsessed with the idea of immortality since Gilgamesh, so it may have crossed his mind, but that certainly allowed him—it's a very relevant metaphor that he left us. I believe it was—I think they were called the Stroldbrugs or Stroldbugs or something like that was the name of the island. It's been some time since I've read the book, but I do recall that very vividly.

'''S:''' But it does bring up a point that you also write about, which is—we could talk about the scientific question of immortality in a moment, but you also write about just the impact that this would have on society, on civilization, and the reactions that different segments of civilizations are likely to have to the prospect of immortality.

'''BT:''' Right. It's a subject—I mean, I'm a fan of scientific progress. I'm a fan of a lot of humanistic philosophies, and certainly I consider death, aging and death to be a mechanical problem. That can be solved through mechanical means, but that doesn't make me blind to the very real conundrums and the very real ramifications of that research. As I mentioned, I think that was the article, too, that I mentioned where, what do you do when you have an immortal board of directors on a company, or you have senators who have languished in the Senate of a particular country for 500 years? What happens to the arts when you don't have the—mortality has been a muse for music, for writing, for so much. One thing I suggested was that, much as Anne Rice implied and explored with her vampire novels, the idea of something that an immortal sentient being might find things plenty to be upset about, because even though you're not necessarily dying, it's not your own mortality you're exploring, the world around you still changes. You are a constant in a universe that is defined by change. Certainly when you consider the laws of entropy and the fact that the stars are going to burn out, our star itself is like an arrow shot. Its timeline, the hourglass has been turned. It's not going to be there forever, so I believe that as a species we'll still find plenty of things to motivate us artistically. Of course, if I'm wrong, you're looking at more or less the calcification of progress and the calcification of inspiration.

'''B:''' Well, death, even if we were immortal, death would still happen. There would be catastrophic accidents and maybe even suicide, so I think that would make death even more tragic and something that artisans could treat as a muse. Imagine how tragic a death would be if somebody dies when they're 50, when you know they could have lived for millennia. It's still a tragic thing.

'''BT:''' Right, that is a very valid point. I know when I spoke to Michael Rose at the University of California at Irvine about his research on breeding quote-unquote immortal fruit flies, he talked about the idea there was still a mortality distribution curve. Unless you're going to get into more transhumanist ideas, I'm not a big fan of some of the ideas of that community, but it's difficult to predict the science. It's very difficult to predict where things might go. I find some of the arguments very counterproductive, quite frankly, whether or not they're right, but the construction of the minds is a physical thing, even though pop culture and certainly religion have the idea that there's this spiritual dimension to it. If it is a physical entity with neurosynapses and the construction through our lives of bridges that have been built as we, as our reflexes develop and as we encode memories, could that be transferred digitally? Would you always have backup copies of a certain mind? Would the future Albert Einstein or future Joe Citizen be preserved digitally so that there really would be no final death?

'''B:''' Yeah, the medium isn't all important. It's really the pattern that's really important. It doesn't have to be this electrochemical substrate. It could be silicon or something much more exotic.

'''S:''' It could be, but it's not just a pattern. I don't think that our existence is simply a pattern. It's a combination of the pattern and the hardware. The question is, could we migrate our consciousness over to another medium without losing the actual continuity of the self?

'''B:''' Right. That's a key concern in my mind, is the continuity. I don't care if they were able to duplicate my mind in any other medium and then destroy the biological residue. That residue is me. You'd have to maintain continuity. That's why some of the ideas I've heard about where it's a slow metamorphosis of your biological brain into something more hearty and the new substrate, that's appealing to me because there wouldn't be any break where you exist in two places or you don't exist and they recreate you type of thing.

'''S:''' Yeah, there would be a period as a hybrid where you were both biological and digital and then eventually the digital you would predominate over the biological, but at every point it's still you. Otherwise, as you say, you just got a clone who may have all of your memories and everything, but it isn't a continuation of yourself. But for civilization, that wouldn't really matter. It would still be entities with memories hundreds or thousands of years old that are inhabiting our civilization.

'''R:''' But it's funny because when we talk about immortality like that, we don't usually think in terms, or at least I don't think in terms of what would be best for society, like keeping a hold of the memories of these individuals. Instead, I think about what would be best for me living on and on.

'''B:''' Absolutely. Me, me, me.

'''BT:''' Yeah. There's no denying that there is a selfish driving force behind that. Even going back to the Gilgamesh legend, it was when Gilgamesh loses his friend in Quito, he goes off in search of immortality because he is totally devastated, completely ripped apart. This is one of his best friends in life, but he's not looking for immortality for himself because he doesn't want to suffer that same fate. So yeah, I mean, sir, I certainly agree with Rebecca. I mean, it definitely does have that idea that it is a selfish thing. But on the other hand, I mean, we're blessed and cursed to be, as far as we know, the most remarkable species to ever evolve in this world, 500 million years of life.

'''S:''' And just to clarify, so we don't get any emails, you're referring to multicellular life.

'''BT:''' And you've had very successful species like the dinosaurs and other organisms which have lived and died and changed, but in such a short period of time of our species, of upright walking hominids, and then of course the very, very short history of our civilization, which you can trace back to 5,000 B.C., maybe a little more, as far as it depends on who you consult and the different records and different cities A on Earth. But we've done so much in such a short period of time, it is a curse in a way that we're so keenly aware of how fragile we are. We forced our way to the top of the food chain. We didn't have natural armor. We didn't have poison sacks. We weren't these bulky titans. We were, frankly, a fallen ape in a way that had to stand upright to look over the tall grasses to survive in the savanna region of Africa, and just happened to have freed up our hands. We could start using tools, and throughout this whole process, we've constantly remade our environment. We're the ultimate shapers. We can cut down trees and build a house. We defy nature. We defy the elements at every chance we get, and I frankly celebrate that. There's nothing... Winter is a deep freeze that happens in this world, and species or cows are killed off. Well, we defy that. We become little Prometheus's. We light our fires. We persist through the glacial ages. We persist through whatever is thrown our way. The idea that us expanding our lifespan to points like that, to quote-unquote indefinite... I mean, it's a flashy, sensationalist term, immortal, but the idea is longevity research, way beyond the seven, eight, maybe nine decades that we are granted by nature's design, I think is inevitable. I think it's something that is a very important scientific problem, probably, as far as we're concerned, maybe the most important one right now.

'''S:''' Right. We're hitting a lot of points that I want to come back to. One was, as Rebecca mentioned, the difference between what's good for the self and what's good for civilization, and that, I think, is at the crux of a lot of this. I mean, you could argue that our mortality, as you were saying, has a lot of strengths for society, for civilization. There's constantly new people coming up with new ideas and fresh eyes on the world, and the old and stodgy and calcified are moved out of the way to make room for what's new. And what would be the long-term impact of having scientists controlling the upper echelons of science but locked into their ways of thinking that are maybe centuries old? There's a quip, which I think is a bit outdated, but it goes that science progresses on the deaths of those who came before, so new ideas only take hold when the people who are clinging to the old ideas die off. To the extent that that's true, extremely long lifespans would impede progress, because it would lock in these old ideas.

'''BT:''' Of course, that does bring up an interesting question as well. You look at Isaac Neumann, you look at a lot of luminaries throughout history, Archimedes and so forth, who accomplished things very early in their lives. Historically, especially in the history of science, a lot of discoveries seem to be made by people who are in their 20s or in their 30s. But is it because people gradually get older? Is it so that it's set in their ways so much as just whatever driving OCD or whatever it was that was really pushing them onward to be fanatical about something? Do they kind of, as their bodies age, as they settle into older eras of their lives, do they just kind of calm down and that spark, that burning kind of tends to evaporate a little bit? Or is it just people do get set in their ways no matter what, and they're not open to new ideas because they harden like those old Mesopotamian clay tablets?

'''S:''' That's a really good point because there actually is a neurological basis for people getting set in their ways. Yeah, there's a pruning effect that goes on in the brain where you lose neurons, you lose the ability to make entirely new pathways, etc. So, from a purely neurological basis, the brain becomes set in its ways. And what if, again, through bioengineering, we can fix that? Would people keep a more youthful outlook and a more nimble mental picture of the world if they had a brain that was perpetually 20 years old? That's something that I don't think we're going to know until we get there.

'''B:''' Yeah, that pruning seems like a form of pathology to me, Steve. That's something that we would address. If we were to make ourselves live indefinite lifespans, I mean, I wouldn't want to make myself equivalent to a 50-year-old. I'd make myself biologically equivalent to a 25-year-old.

'''S:''' Right. And when that happens, then we'll have a much better notion of how much of the stodginess of old age is neurological and how much is just psychological. It's just that you've been there, you've done that, you've done everything, and you're set in your ways, and you're too tired to change.

'''B:''' Right. But it's still no reason not to pursue this, some of these problems that people have with like the ossification of your psychology or the overpopulation, these things that I think we will address, and they're not deal killers for me in any way.

'''BT:''' Right. I agree completely with that. I think that the problems, we have a habit of surviving. When we're confronted with a challenge, we make it work somehow. And overpopulation and other issues that come up, I think we'll deal with them in due time. Historically, you expand to alleviate overpopulation pressures, but there's also things kind of balance out. There's the equilibrium that's established, and people probably wouldn't be having kids as frequently. I don't think they're aggressive. They're not deal killers.

'''S:''' Yeah, I agree. And we also, there's some potential upsides to this in that imagine having people around who are 500 years old or 1,000 years old. That's a living history and a living memory that could be invaluable. And just imagine the potential wisdom and insight that such longevity could produce. I mean, that could actually become an incredible resource for civilization and for humanity.

'''R:''' Although, what about the ability to forget things? I mean, when you're 500 years old, what do you fiddle around with in the brain to make sure that it holds on to certain memories? But in the end, sometimes it's kind of nice to forget things.

'''B:''' Forgetting is absolutely crucial.

'''R:''' It is.

'''B:''' If we didn't forget, we couldn't.

'''R:''' We'd go nuts.

'''B:''' We would go absolutely nuts.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''R:''' Right. So, I mean, that would be a huge hurdle where you've got, yeah, somebody who's lived for 500 years, but they're only going to be crystal clear on the memory of the last 10 or so.

'''BT:''' That's a great point. That's great. Do you guys recall the movie Strange Days with Rob Lines?

'''B:''' Yeah. Yeah.

'''BT:''' It was where they could record memories and then play them back. And Angela Bassett makes a great point with just what Rebecca said was one of the characters in the movie is so obsessed with reliving old memories. And she says to him something to the effect of, memories were designed to fade. They're built like that for a reason.

'''R:''' Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is another good movie about that.

'''S:''' That's true.

'''B:''' I have to see that, yeah.

'''S:''' So we may be living in like a 50-year window that's moving through time and memory for 100 years.

'''B:''' But even that will change. Even that is totally ephemeral because if you say these things are going to happen,then we'll also be in some ways, even if in minor ways initially, augmenting mind and memory such that there won't be any fading. I mean, that's another form of –

'''R:''' Yeah. That's what we're saying.

'''S:''' Maybe we won't want to do that. Right.

'''R:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Or people could choose. People may decide they want a little freshening up of the mind and clearing out of the mental closets and fading away some of the old memories.

'''R:''' I'm a pack rat. I could never do that.

'''B:''' Offload the memories to some external hard drive. It's like, yeah, I'm going to forget about these for a little while. I want to watch that movie for the first time again. And you watch the movie. That's fine. I mean, hey, it's going to get boring after a while. You might as well get some freshness back into the mix.

'''R:''' Yeah, if somebody spoils Harry Potter for you, you can just rewind, erase, re-read.

'''B:''' Just stay off the net.

'''P:''' Brian, on another point, the gods are adorned with many qualities, vulnerability, infallibility, but immortality is one of their prime powers. So, what happens to faith if humans start becoming effectively immortal?

'''BT:''' A lot of organized religion strength is obviously derived by the dual roots of fear of death and the promise of something beyond that. So, when you take that away, when you're saying, well, this is the world we know for certain and we can keep this, that need, I think, is negated to a point. I suspect that people have a need for some kind of spirituality. I think we enjoy our monsters. We enjoy our mythology. We enjoy creating myths. The techno-myth, even. The old gods are gone, but there are creatures in the wilderness. There are aliens in a hangar somewhere. We still create that. We still have a love for that. I think we still like the hero worship in a certain way, but I definitely think it would be a death now to the religions that we know today. Certainly, if history teaches us nothing else, governments come and go, civilizations come and go, religions come and go. I don't think that the ancient Greeks ever really thought that Zeus would not be worshipped, that goats and lambs and cows would not be sacrificed to him at some point in the future. So, I suspect the same thing will happen. I see spirituality becoming maybe more Earth-based, maybe more reality-based.

'''P:''' Well, even dispelling the very great motivator and fear of death with regards to religion, you still are stuck with the mystery of creation, the other end of things. You still need answers for that, and I think people will still stretch, as you say.

'''B:''' That's true. That's true. We might never get a good handle on that, but regarding religion and faith, I don't think they have to be diametrically opposed. I think that you could still have faith in a god and an afterlife because – we throw around the word immortality, but it's a bit of a misnomer. You could talk about philosophical immortality, but practically, you're not going to live forever with any of the technologies that seem to have some potential. Some people have even put estimates that if you look at statistics, you will live between 1,200 and 5,000 years, because eventually something catastrophic is going to happen to you. A meteor is going to land on you. Something is going to happen eventually. The longer you live, chances are it's going to happen. But even if you discuss things like, say, backing up your mind and making 1,000 copies and going to the four winds, you could extend that greatly, I think. But eventually, say there's a few of you left, and at the heat death at the end of the universe, you're going to die one way or the other eventually. So you could always say, well, I'm going to live a billion years, but eventually I'll die and then I'll go to heaven. So I don't think it's an either-or thing.

'''S:''' But the fear of death won't be there if you know you can live a ridiculous amount of time from a human perspective or as long as you want. And so I do think that the emotional desire and need for this belief in an afterlife will diminish with this. But I also, Brian, that religions will evolve and adapt to this changing psychology and the changing situation of human existence, just as they have.

'''R:''' It could have a very positive impact on religion in one way. One mode of thinking about it might be, well, God has decided to give us immortality and now this is heaven. Basically, we're living in heaven on earth, so let's make the best of it.

'''BT:''' Make it good, exactly. And you know something? They won't be sacrificing themselves to get a few score of virgins in some afterlife.

'''S:''' That's a good point. We'll take on a different meaning if you're giving up hundreds or thousands of years of life and not just expecting. He's giving up a few decades.

'''B:''' But still, there'd be people that wouldn't accept it, wouldn't join the club, and of course they would have died and there'd only be immortals left. But it's amazing to think that.

'''BT:''' In a way, it would almost be like, not that it was imposed, but what you're talking about, yes, there would always be people. Those would be your Amish, the equivalent of that in the future, whatever they're called themselves, the naturals or the pure births. But in a way, it would almost be a social Darwinism of a sort. Not that I'm advocating such a thing at all, but I'm just saying I think it would sort of happen that those people would die off and their children or their grandchildren would kind of join the fold of this extraordinarily long-lived human community.

'''S:''' It certainly would be a huge lure. When you start to get 70, 80 and your body is falling apart, it's right there, the elixir of life, the ability to rejuvenate and be young again. You'd have to have a pretty strong ideology to pass that up, I think.

'''B:''' But we know how strong ideology can be.

'''S:''' I know, it's true. I'm not saying that it wouldn't exist, but it'd be interesting to see how that plays out. It'd be a very interesting experiment. I do think that society in general will evolve and will adapt to this, just like, as we said, religions are. Getting back a little bit to some points you brought up before about becoming calcified in your profession. Brian, you wrote about what would the marriage vow of till death do us part mean in this type of situation. But I think those institutions will just adapt. I think people will start to think of a career, a marriage, whatever, in terms of, this is what I'm doing for the next 50 years, and then after that all bets are off. We might even really strongly encourage or force people to switch professions. You've been a geologist for 100 years, you have to stop now and make way for other people. You're done.

'''B:''' That's interesting, yeah.

'''BT:''' Negotiating a term of service. You'd fall in love, oh sure. But you would negotiate a term of service for the marriage. Maybe it would be like, what would the other 50 years, and if we want to renew, well the option is there.

'''S:''' Well, you'd have to think in those terms.

'''R:''' I'd like to re-up, but you need to work out.

'''B:''' Take this exercise pill.

'''R:''' Lose 10 pounds.

'''S:''' What do you see as being the major source of opposition to this?

'''BT:''' Well, I mean two things. Obviously, the mechanical problems themselves, and we've identified the Hayflick climate, we know about oxidation, we know there are certain things. But these are, unfortunately, the way we deal with these, they have negative effects right now. I mean, they have the unraveling of chromosomes, the telomeres. They have telomerase, I think it's called, which is supposed to repair that, but it has carcinogenic side effects. So, I mean, obviously there's a certain mechanical problem. But honestly, the major problem is absolutely ideological. When I talk to people about it, and again, I'm not a transhumanist. I find it to be very interesting, and I think it's certainly a very worthwhile pursuit of the scientific community. But this is where we're leading anyway. But a lot of people just can't wrap their minds around the very idea of that. A lot of people balk at it. They don't want to even think of it in terms of that, because I think they've been brought up ingrained, like it's hardwired at this point through so much conditioning and through the idea that death is inevitable. I mean, the article that you've been referring to, Steve, a lot of the inspiration behind writing that came from reading Marcus Aurelius' book, Meditations. And he's probably one of the most enlightened rulers we've ever had in history, certainly one of the best Roman emperors. And time and time again, on almost every third page, he's drilling home the idea that death is inevitable. Yesterday, we're a blob of semen. Tomorrow, we're going to be embalming flu and ash. And it's so technological, this repetition of this idea. I just got the impression that he was really trying to convince himself and trying to come to terms with, I think he lived 57 years, to terms with the death of himself in time. And I thought about, you know what? Is it that inevitable, really? I mean, if it is a mechanical problem, certainly. People used to live, we were hunter-gatherers. I've read that the life expectancy was, at the most, like 25 years. And I mean, now we can expect 70, 80, 90 years. It's something that's possible. We know people who do it. We know people who have reached 122. It was that French woman I can't recall her name offhand. And even the definitions of death have changed. It used to be where your heart stopped, you were dead.

'''B:''' Right, you stopped breathing, you were dead.

'''BT:''' You stopped breathing. I think it was the man who shot Liberty Valance who, you know, the guy gets shot, the doctor comes over to make sure he's dead, takes a swig of liquor, kicks him in the ribs, up, dead, you know? And now you have defibrillators. You have all kinds of ways of looking at expanding life, and it doesn't necessarily stop immediately, and there are ways to bring people back. And these are things that earlier cultures certainly think to be sorcery. So I just was thinking about that, and I thought, really, the ideological opposition, not even organized, it's just something you talk to people about, and they haven't even considered it, quite frankly.

'''B:''' And that definition of death, I think this is an important point, how the definition of death has been changing over the decades. And I think you have to look, what's the ultimate definition of death? And for me, it's brain death. When you cannot even infer the structure of your brain, the working structure of your brain, once you pass that boundary, then you are truly dead. Because if you cannot infer what the functioning state was, and in such a way, in such a fidelity that your memories would still be intact, once you pass that, then bam, you are irreversibly dead. Nothing short of a time machine can get you back. So I think that's the ultimate goal of the definition of death. When we reach that point, then that's it.

'''S:''' That's the ultimate theoretical limit of the definition of death. In the meantime, it's a technological definition. It's beyond the point where we could bring somebody back meaningfully. Well, Brian, your new book is Never Grow Old. Is that in stores?

'''BT:''' It is, and it's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. A lot of it is about the mythological aspect of the search for immortality, but it's also a cry, a humanist cry. I mean, Gilgamesh did a couple of speeches that I put into the book, which is about he's advised not to do this, and what are you trying to do? The world couldn't tolerate an immortal race of people. He's like, well, we'll reshape the world. And that's the crux of it. It's like, well, if the world's not going to make room, we will force it to make room. The clustered forest didn't really permit us to have permanent settlements. Well, we cut them down. And it's not necessarily about being so callous to the natural world so much as there's nothing wrong with the most brilliant and sentient species on the planet redefining things to further its own end. And a lot of this, I think, in the end, the final iteration, comes back to would better things come of this or worse things? Does humanity, you know, you're talking about an immortal Adolf Hitler, would not be necessarily a good thing. But then again, when you look at the products of humanity, I mean, the Da Vinci's and the Archimedes and the Galen's and the Lord Byron's and the people who have inspired us, the Diabasius, you know, going back to my first book, I tend to have more of an optimistic view of the human race, you know, at least until I get tailgated in traffic. But generally speaking, I think that we are a good species and we try to do the right thing. When we don't, I think it's through ignorance. I think it's... but that's a whole other subject.

'''S:''' Well, Brian, thanks again for joining us. It's always an interesting conversation.

'''B:''' Thanks, Brian.

'''S:''' Good luck with your new book.

'''BT:''' Thank you so much and great talking to you.

'''S:''' All right, take care.

'''P:''' Good night.

'''S:''' Well, that is all we have for this week's show. But we will be back next week with a full regular episode. We also have a very special interview for next week. You are definitely not going to want to miss this. One just brief announcement before we close. I would again like to remind everybody that The Skeptic's Guide and Skepchick is having a get-together on August 11th. This is in Brooklyn, New York, at the Voorhees Auditorium at 186 J Street. Beginning at noon, we will be recording a live episode of The Skeptic's Guide where our listeners can ask us questions and we will answer them live. We will have a get-together at the Voorhees Auditorium. After we record the show, we will be available to meet and greet with our listeners. And then there will also be casual events after the event itself as well. So we look forward to seeing you all there. And of course, we all want to extend a warm congratulations to Jay Novella on his wedding. He again is getting married on July 21st. And he is marrying a very lovely girl, Cheryl Wells, who in fact is the girl who does the audio introduction to the show. So congratulations Jay and Cheryl.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.

{{Outro61}}== References ==
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{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 101

2025-04-18T18:20:59Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

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|episodeDate = June 20th 2007 
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== Introduction ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, June 20th, 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Perry DeAngelis...

'''P:''' Hello.

'''S:''' Evan Bernstein...

'''E:''' Hi everyone.

'''S:''' ...and Jay Novella.

'''J:''' Good evening.

'''S:''' Rebecca Watson has the evening off, so she's not with us today.

'''J:''' Guys night out.

'''S:''' She will be back next week. We have an interview coming up with ORAC, the Skeptical Blogger, and it's a long interview, so we're going to keep the news and emails a little bit short this week.

== News Items () ==

=== Blackholes possibly don't exist () ===
* Blackholes possibly don't exist

'''S:''' The first news item has to do with black holes possibly not existing. Bob, why don't you tell us about this item?

'''B:''' Yeah, this one was quite a shocker, if it's true.

'''S:''' I'm shocked.

'''B:''' According to an article accepted for publication by Physical Review D, black holes as we know them do not exist. This is the startling conclusion reached by Case Western Reserve University physicist Tenmay Vakaspati, Dejan Stokovic, and Lawrence Krauss, who also happens to be the author of The Physics of Star Trek. Specifically, they claim that collapsing stars never form an event horizon, the theorized area around a black hole that nothing, not even light, can escape from. Therefore, once anything crosses that boundary, there's no coming out. The problem this conclusion resolves is called the Information Loss Paradox. The rules of quantum mechanics forbid the destruction of information, but if nothing can escape the event horizon of a black hole, then say a terabyte hard drive with tons of information on it thrown in is irretrievably gone. So who's right? That's been a long-standing paradox that people have been trying to resolve. Some scientists have argued that Hawking radiation somehow encodes the information as it slowly leaks out of the black hole. Remember, I covered Hawking radiation last week, where particle and antiparticle pairs form just outside the event horizon. One is sucked into the black hole, and the other one escapes. So you appear to see radiation leaking out of the black hole. Some physicists say that this information loss is somehow encoded in this Hawking radiation. But according to these scientists, the event horizon itself never forms. They spent a year working on calculations on trying to determine what exactly happens during a stellar collapse. Their calculations seemed to show that as big stars collapse, the gravity of the collapse somehow disrupts the quantum vacuum, creating what they call pre-Hawking radiation, which causes the hole to lose mass and never form an event horizon in the first place. If no horizon is formed, then information is never totally lost. The pre-Hawking radiation is non-thermal, and can therefore encode information, which can then be reconstructed far from the black hole, the black star, as they call it. Stars only begin the process of forming a black hole, but never get there, is kind of what they're saying. Now, some physicists disagree, notably Nobel laureate Gerard de Hooft of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He says, I strongly disagree. The process he describes, or that the scientists describe, can in no way produce enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as they are suggesting. The horizon forms long before the hole can evaporate. So we'll see. If they are indeed true, that would be quite a-

'''S:''' Quite a change.

'''E:''' How do you test it? How do you test that?

'''S:''' Does it say? I mean, it sounds like the basis is theoretical. It's just a different way of explaining, just modeling what should happen. And I guess that would be the key, is to figure out a way to distinguish between a black hole and a black star, so you can make some observation. So there's got to be some observational prediction, but I don't know if the article covered that, or if it made a prediction.

'''B:''' No, the articles I read didn't cover that. I suppose it's possible. They are claiming that this pre-Hawking radiation...

'''S:''' So is the key difference that what's left behind does not have enough mass to form a black hole, because enough mass was radiated away with this pre-Hawking radiation?

'''B:''' Exactly. That's it. The pre-Hawking radiation is radiating away so much energy, which is equivalent to mass, that it never quite reaches the mass required to form an event horizon.

'''S:''' But don't we know that black... What about supermassive black holes? I mean, don't they have way more times the mass than would be necessary to form an event horizon?

'''B:''' Yeah, that's... They kind of treated them as a different beast, because that's not one star. One star did not collapse and form a supermassive black hole, whereas other black holes, from just a collapsing star, they claim could not form a conventional black hole with an event horizon. But that, yeah, that was kind of hard to understand how they reconciled supermassive black holes with this, because clearly there's plenty of mass there, and it's detectable mass, and there's no pre-Hawking radiation that's preventing it from reaching the mass required to form and density required to form an event horizon. So that's kind of a different... Somehow they treat that as a different class that somehow makes them distinct enough where... So why isn't there this information loss problem with these supermassive black holes? That I didn't get, and I couldn't find anybody to specifically address that in any of the articles I read.

'''S:''' I wonder what Stephen Hawking has to say about all this. Yeah, I'm sure he'll make his opinion known.

'''B:''' I haven't found anything.

'''S:''' This is really his specialty, is this whole information black hole thing.

'''B:''' Right, and of course Hawking radiation he came up with, and that just opened up a whole can of worms, because the Hawking radiation is thermal radiation, so there's no information encoded in that. That kind of exacerbated the whole information loss idea, but we'll see what happens as this develops.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's interesting. It's basically an alternate hypothesis that is consistent with the data we have and solves a problem. We'll see how it pans out. It'll be interesting.

'''B:''' Yeah, maybe we'll report on this in the future if we get some more developments and something to elucidate these ideas further.

=== News Item #2 () ===
*

'''S:''' Another news item is just a quick follow up on the stem cell debate that has been going on for several years now. The Senate in the United States is trying to pass yet another measure to help fund and regulate embryonic stem cell research, but President Bush promises to veto their bill, so it looks like we're not going to get any embryonic stem cell funding during this-

'''P:''' I thought we put this to bed a few weeks ago, Steve, with the discovery of the stem cells from skin cells and so forth.

'''B:''' Well, the jury's still out on the effectiveness of those stem cells. If it works out, great, but a lot of those experiments turned into tumors and cancer, so the jury's still out on that. You can't just bet everything on this potential new idea that may or may not pan out.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's true. If that pans out, and I do think eventually we'll have stem cells that do everything we need stem cells to do that we can get from sources other than embryos, but there's two things to know. One is we don't have them yet, and we don't know how long it's going to take for that technology to pan out, and two is that the research that we're doing to develop these alternatives, a lot of them are dependent upon having embryonic stem cells as part of the research. In order to get there, ironically, we need embryonic stem cells in order to make us free of them, or at least it will slow down that research if we don't have the embryonic stem cell lines to utilize in the research.

'''P:''' This whole stem cell debacle is such a low point for the president.

'''S:''' Yeah, definitely.

'''P:''' I mean, it's just terrible.

'''J:''' Well, I heard him in an interview today.

'''P:''' It's indefensible.

'''J:''' He said, I heard him, I guess when he publicly announced his decision, he said, it'll be good for us to, along the lines of no one is going to be harmed with the collection of stem cells as if embryonic stem cells actually harmed anybody, which means he still doesn't get it.

'''S:''' He's saying federal money will not be spent to destroy an embryo, basically.

'''B:''' So he'll leave them. He'll let them be thrown in the garbage, though.

'''S:''' Yeah, but fertility clinics, what he says shouldn't happen is what is happening in fertility clinics.

'''B:''' Why isn't he making laws against that, then?

'''S:''' He's not making a stink about that because you're not going to take fertility clinics away from people. That would be politically untenable. He's just sort of pretending that that whole hypocrisy is not there, basically.

'''P:''' This is just almost politically untenable.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''E:''' I have a feeling this problem will resolve itself in 2009. We just got to hang tight.

'''P:''' Around January 20th.

'''E:''' Yeah, we just got to hang tight for another 18 months, and I think we'll be all set with this one.

'''J:''' But what is it, I'd like to know, honestly, how the religion affects this decision. How does his faith affect this? Where's the connection there?

'''E:''' The belief that life begins at conception.

'''P:''' Right, and he thinks that any destruction of an embryo is murder, and utilizing products from that murder, no matter what the benefit, is immoral.

'''J:''' But what about the fact that they get the embryonic tissue from afterbirth of normal babies?

'''S:''' Well, that's fetal, not embryonic, Jay.

'''B:''' Right, they're not as pluripotent.

'''J:''' But he doesn't even want that. He doesn't even want that, though, if I'm correct.

'''S:''' No, it's just embryonic stem cells, not other sources of stem cells. That's the problem. But of course, embryonic stem cells are the best. They're the ones that have the most potential. I think what it is, is the pro-life movement wants to draw a sharp line at conception, and they want that to be their line in the sand. They make basically a slippery slope argument that if they yield on that line, then that leads to murdering babies, basically. So an embryo is post-conception. It's a human being. It's over the line. They want to hold a line there. That's what it comes down to.

'''E:''' Steve, is there a scientific consensus as to when life begins?

'''S:''' When life begins? Or when does an embryo become a person?

'''E:''' The argument of life at conception.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's not the question. It's just the way you're stating it. I don't think it's when does life begin. It's when does that become a person.

'''B:''' Human life.

'''S:''' Yeah, when does it become a human person, as opposed to just an extension of the mother.

'''E:''' Okay, fair enough.

'''S:''' Or whatever.

'''E:''' So is there a consensus on that?

'''S:''' No. Because it's not a scientific question. It's not answerable. It's a continuum, and there's no objective place to draw a line.

'''P:''' But the Supreme Court has drawn a line after the second trimester, haven't they?

'''S:''' Yes. That's an ethical or political line. It's not based on science.

'''P:''' Well, it's a legal line.

'''S:''' Legal, yeah.

'''P:''' But it's a legal line that they drew, and you're right. It was arbitrary.

'''S:''' It was. It was.

'''B:''' But you could say things like, when is there a nervous system? When does a brain reach sufficient development? When can pain be sensed? You could draw other lines that clearly makes a human from a non-human.

'''S:''' But putting meaning on those lines is what's arbitrary. What do those biological milestones mean in terms of the ethical question of is it a person or not?

'''E:''' Science does not dictate at all when a person begins and where one ends.

'''P:''' These are deep, complicated questions. Look at, I'm serious, look at an anencephalic baby. That's a tragic occurrence, right? Is that a human being? This is a body with effectively no brain. Has a stem, but no brain.

'''S:''' It's a lizard, basically.

'''P:''' Is that a person?

'''B:''' No.

'''S:''' I don't think so.

'''P:''' You say no, and yet there are parents out there of anencephalic children who helped them to survive as long as possible. I believe their survival rate doesn't go beyond a few years. Is that correct, Steve?

'''S:''' I think it's even less than that, yeah.

'''P:''' Okay. Who will claim that every moment the child who's with them was a joy and just as fulfilling as their other normal children. You know? I mean, it's very, very difficult questions.

'''S:''' Yeah, so there are emotions, ethics, morals involved, and those are not amenable to objective scientific answers. And that's probably why this has been such an enduring controversy. There is no ultimate solution to it. There are moral choices involved. So we're certainly not going to solve this problem.

=== News Item #3 () ===
*

'''S:''' The next news item, Perry, you sent this one to me. This has to do with towns using local legends in order to boost their tourism.

'''P:''' Yeah, this was a pretty simple piece there. Recently here in the U.S., down in Florida, there's been these cases of a couple of leaping sturgeons, which are very sizable fish. They can grow to a couple hundred pounds, I guess six to eight feet. And an incident in April, and again an incident in June, these sturgeons leapt up and out of the water to such an extent that they knocked people unconscious. Back in April, the woman actually lost some fingers and they had to be reattached.

'''J:''' That's one hell of a leap. What do they have, freaking ginsu knives attached to their backs? What's happening?

'''P:''' Actually, their scales are like armor. They're sort of prehistoric looking. They're pretty neat looking. Anyway, the point of the piece is simply that the town should handle this carefully because they could have a Bigfoot in the making. They could have a Nessie in the making. When marketed correctly, they can start to reap some of the rewards that towns like Roswell and so forth reap. That's really what the piece is about.

'''S:''' And just from the skeptical point of view, it does bring up the fact that once these sort of stories are created, there is a huge incentive locally to promote them and to keep them going because it does actually drive tourism and then it has a certain dollar value attached to it. So certainly, like Loch Ness, for example, there's a huge tourism there. So they are hugely motivated to promote belief in the Loch Ness monster.

'''P:''' Right. And this article points out that the place where these sturgeons have struck, if you will, is very scenic and it's on some beautiful river areas, you know, and so it's very easy to market and draw people in.

'''E:''' The sturgeon actually exists, though.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a fish.

'''E:''' Nessie doesn't exist. Bigfoot doesn't exist.

'''P:''' And these two incidents actually happened, Evan.

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's a little different.

'''P:''' You're right.

'''S:''' I think probably the town that most exploits its local legend is Roswell.

'''J:''' Roswell.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' The museum and everything.

'''J:''' Well, that's Salem, Steve.

'''S:''' You're right. Well, Salem does, but that's more of a historical thing, I think.

'''P:''' It's slightly different, but Jay, you're right. Salem is certainly a tourist trap if any of our listeners have ever visited there. It is a tourist trap.

'''S:''' Yeah, I was just there recently.

'''E:''' Roswell is newer. It's sexier. It's a little more...

'''P:''' Right. And there's no one town that can claim Bigfoot.

'''S:''' Yeah. That's true.

'''P:''' You know, Bigfoot's in the northwest, you know, sort of. I mean, actually, there's been sighting in all 50 states, but...

'''E:''' And Pennsylvania.

'''S:''' So he's up for marketing. He's up for grabs. You know, some northwestern cities got to grab Bigfoot as their local legend. He's currently unaffiliated.

'''P:''' That's right. You're saying, also in the piece, he goes on to say, you know, Hollywood could step in and make a few Sturgeon movies, you know.

'''S:''' Attack of the Sturgeons?

'''E:''' Attack of the 50-foot Sturgeon?

'''P:''' You could put it up there with Jaws, and certainly that greatly helps the process.

'''S:''' Right.

'''J:''' That'll be almost as bad as that Bigfoot movie on YouTube that Rebecca showed us yesterday.

'''P:''' And Night of the Demon?

'''E:''' We have a local legend around here called the Melon Heads. Maybe we could do something with that.

'''J:''' The Melon Heads?

'''P:''' That's true. Yeah. They dance in the woods.

'''J:''' You're a Melon Head. What? What is this?

'''E:''' They're a bunch of recluse, bald-headed, like inbred family that lives in the woods of Fairfield County, Connecticut. Look it up. Look it up online. Do a search for Melon Heads. You'll come across a couple little articles and references.

'''P:''' So maybe we're missing a potential pot of gold here.

'''E:''' I think so.

'''P:''' You know, it's possible.

'''J:''' What, are we going to parade these people around and put funny suits on them? What are you talking about?

'''E:''' Well, you've got to find them first. You can only see them at night in the woods when it's dark and they have no hair and these big eyes.

'''P:''' Jay, you have a lot of research to do before you start making money, okay?

'''J:''' Oh, I found a site.

'''P:''' You did?

'''J:''' Yes.

'''P:''' Somebody beat us to it?

'''J:''' The Melon Heads. These big-headed children have been rumored to roam the woods surrounding Windsor and King Memorial Roads in Chardon. They only come out at night, Evan you were right, and seem to be incredibly shy, often running away from others who spot them. Some believe these children were victims of freak medical experiments conducted by a Dr. Crow who injected their heads with water or chemicals.

'''S:''' Damn you, Dr. Crow.

'''P:''' This really is the stuff of P.T. Barnum, you know, when he used to put anybody with a medical malady up on the stage and charge people a dime to go look at them, you know?

'''S:''' The sideshow freaks?

'''P:''' The freaks. Absolutely.

'''S:''' Well, let's move on to your questions and emails.

== Questions and E-mails () ==

=== E-mail #1 () ===

'''S:''' The first one comes from Joseph Van Geel in Belgium and he writes, dear all, he gives the name of an organization which is basically the Belgium Organization Against Quackery and he says, this is one of the oldest skeptical organizations in the world. It was founded 125 years ago, I wasn't aware that there were skeptical organizations around for that long. He says, it's located in the Netherlands. Last week they have been brought to court by Mrs., the name is...

'''E:''' Sikkens.

'''S:''' Well, actually, I think it's Sikkens without the N. I think he misspelled it in that one. On the other side, I could not find Sikkens, but I can only find Sikkes, S-I-C-K-E-S-Z, which is kind of a funny name for her to have.

'''P:''' Either way, she sikkens me.

'''S:''' Yeah, right. Because they had nominated her as one of the top 20 biggest quacks in the world. So basically this anti-quackery organization had their top 20 biggest quacks in the world list and Mrs. Sikkes was on that list and then she sued them. So the judge decided that the organization was not allowed to name her as a quack and condemned them to publish an advertisement in all big Dutch journals to declare that she isn't a quack. This also will cost them a lot of money and they basically can't afford it. So I also read that they have to pay the court costs. So the combination of these mandatory advertisements and the court costs would essentially bankrupt this Belgium skeptical organization.

'''P:''' I think it was about 30,000 euros, I believe, was the price I remember.

'''S:''' Yeah, he said 30,000 euros. Then he goes on to say, as all skeptic organizations, they only live from gifts, which means that this group is not able to bear these costs. The result will be the end of the organization. So please mention this topic in your great podcast that might motivate many skeptics to support them and help to survive the situation. He has a link. This was also written up by James Randi in his online Swift journal, which I'll link to that as well. I tried to get more information about this, but unfortunately most of them are in Belgium so I couldn't understand them. There wasn't much in English about this. But apparently her schtick is some kind of manual therapy, which relies heavily upon sort of chiropractic notions. She's been doing this for quite some time. It's a gross miscarriage of justice, of course. I think originally, according to the Swift article, she lost her lawsuit against the skeptic organization, but then it was appealed and now the judge just decided against them.

'''P:''' There's no higher court?

'''S:''' I don't know. I don't know. I think there may be appeals left to be made if they can afford to do it, if there are some lawyers out there willing to give them some free advice.

'''P:''' My suggestion would be to dissolve the organization and start it up under a different name.

'''S:''' Yeah, although it'd be a shame. A 125-year history is hard to give up.

'''P:''' I understand. I understand, but I would never, never publish those articles or ads saying this woman's not a quack. That can also destroy your organization.

'''J:''' Steve, don't you think if they took the money instead and spent it on lawyers, it might benefit them instead of them actually doing the advertising?

'''S:''' Well, I mean, they were court-ordered to do it. I don't know. I mean, I guess if they initiated an appeal process, then they wouldn't have to do it until that was carried through. I'm not an expert on law and the business.

'''P:''' And Jay, we don't know if there's anywhere else to go. This could be the end of it.

'''J:''' They could have hit the ceiling.

'''S:''' Apparently, the judgment turned on the definition of the word quack. And she was saying that that implied that they were calling her a fraud. And they were saying that, no, quackery just means that your treatments are not valid. In fact, the dictionary definition gives two definitions. The first one is just it's someone who makes claims that are not supported by the evidence and who uses invalid treatments. And then the second one was a fraud. So the judge was basing it entirely on the second definition, not the first definition, which seems kind of silly to base the judgment on that. But even if you were, the judge got it wrong, apparently, in this case.

'''P:''' So the judge sounds like a flaming ass.

'''S:''' But it's terrible. I mean, it's a terrible decision. Can you imagine? You know, so that means charlatans can promote any nonsense they want in the Netherlands. I mean, any scientist or skeptic who stands up to point out that their claims are bogus can get sued out of existence. I mean, it's a terrible, terrible precedent. But I think we just talked about it, I don't know if it was just last week or recently, about the fact that this is a big threat to skeptics because, you know, we're out there taking on oftentimes con artists and charlatans. And they are often fairly savvy about harassing us or trying to silence us with these kind of lawsuits. And it's particularly shameful when it works.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's sad when you see a court of law pander to a psychic.

'''S:''' It's terrible.

'''P:''' Ugly, ugly.

'''S:''' It is.

'''P:''' Ugly decision.

'''J:''' Well, Steve, so what could we do, honestly? What could we do to help?

'''S:''' Obviously, they're looking for donations so that they could financially survive this. Again, we'll have the link to that organization. I think they probably, most of all, need some free legal help, although, again, that would need to come locally from somebody who has practiced law in the Netherlands.

'''P:''' If there is an appeal available.

'''S:''' Yeah, if it's available, right.

'''P:''' But I wouldn't do it. If I asked for donations, got the 30K, I wouldn't do it. I would dissolve the organization first.

'''S:''' That's a good point.

'''P:''' I would never, ever, under the name of my skeptical organization, publish ads saying that this freaking quack is an actual therapist or doctor or whatever the hell she's claiming.

'''S:''' Yes, I agree. I could not do that. I'd cut off my right hand first.

'''P:''' Couldn't do it, yeah. I'd dissolve the organization.

=== E-mail #2 () ===

'''S:''' The next email comes from Trevor Daly in Canada, and he writes, In 1632, Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy for questioning the Aristotelian consensus model of the universe, which held that the sun and all other heavenly bodies revolve around the earth. He was threatened by the Inquisition with torture for holding these views, despite the fact that he, and anyone who troubled to do so, could see through a telescope that moons orbit the planet Jupiter. An old man, Galileo was forced to recant and confess his error. He thereby escaped being burnt at the stake and was instead sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. Science and history have, of course, proven him right. Ever since, the notion of enforced consensus has been anathema to scientists. Until now. The dawn of the 21st century sees relentless, strident attempts to enforce consensus about global warming theory. These modern inquisitors, replete with Supreme Court rulings, brand deniers of impending apocalyptic global warming as heretics who lack blind faith in the theology of infallible computer models. Today's Galileos are being threatened with loss of their positions, credentials, and titles. Foisting theories upon scientists and the public by means of verbal persuasion, elections, court orders, or intimidation is the opposite of the scientific method of determining the truth. Well, I wanted to include that because it actually represents the view of a lot of emails we get. And it is actually, from my readings, one of the primary points of the global warming skeptic camp that they basically are being oppressed. And that the scientific consensus that there is global warming is being used to silence the debate prematurely, to end it, to harass or oppress anyone who dares to say that there isn't global warming. I basically don't buy the whole thing, to be honest with you. It sounds an awful lot like the kind of stuff the intelligent designers were saying about evolutionists. Oh, you know, if anyone dares speak out about the faith in evolution, then you lose your tenure, you can't get published, or whatever. It's really the exact same rhetoric as is coming from the ID camp, just global warming instead of evolution. The other thing, the comparison to Galileo, I know we've mentioned on this podcast more than once before that that is like a guaranteed invitation to be compared to all kinds of nonsense. The analogy to Galileo has many flaws in it. The first of which is that Galileo existed in essentially a pre-scientific era. And you can't compare the consensus of opinion that was based on dogma. The consensus that existed at the time of Galileo was not a scientific consensus, it was an authoritarian dogma. And to compare the two is to really completely miss the point. It also, you know, comparing one's position or one's self to either Galileo or Einstein or whatever, again, just invites ridicule. So I wouldn't go there. I think that Trevor and the people that are making this point are doing themselves a great disservice in forcing that comparison. And again, it doesn't work. The bottom line is that there is a scientific consensus that there is man-made global warming. Now there's always room for debate, and even sometimes the minority opinion in the long run turns out to be the correct one. I think we need to continue to allow for there to be a debate. At the same time, we have to make decisions based upon the best evidence and the best conclusions that we have around right now. And right now, there is a consensus about man-made global warming. Other emailers have said that basically playing the consensus card is making an argument from authority, and I don't think that's a legitimate point either, because we're not saying that global warming is happening because some guy says it is. That's an argument from authority. We're just saying that the world community of climatologists have looked at all the data. They've debated it for decades. They've done lots of research to answer all the questions that have been brought up on both sides. They've really hammered out a consensus, and when you have a broad consensus that's mature, that's been hammered out over a long time, and where all of the data has been looked at in a very transparent way, the probability of that consensus accurately reflecting the actual evidence out there is pretty good. And what I haven't heard from the dissenters is, you know, really why we should be skeptical of that consensus. And when they are asked that question, they basically come out with all this conspiracy kind of stuff that Trevor is saying, which I don't find compelling. I just don't buy it, and it's just too much like what the intelligent design people say about evolution.

'''J:''' The next question is, where do you draw the line? Like, at what point is the evidence enough?

'''S:''' Yeah, I know. Yeah, and we definitely, there's that demarcation problem that I think we're having with the global warming issue. I think that, yeah, there is a consensus, but what does that mean? Does that mean that you can't hold a dissenting opinion? I don't think it should ever mean that.

'''J:''' I agree.

'''S:''' I think we always have to have room for other ideas, you know? Science does change over time, absolutely. I don't think you could ever close off debate. Science does not work that way, and I don't think the scientific community is trying to do that. Maybe some politicians are, you know, again, when science starts to blend into politics, that's when, you know, I think people may be inappropriate, but I don't think the scientific community is doing that. So as I said, we have a long interview coming up with Orac, so let's go to the interview now.

== Interview with Orac () ==

Joining us now is the science blogger Orac, who also goes by the first name of Dave. Dave, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

'''DG:''' Hi, everyone.

'''J:''' Hey, Dave.

'''S:''' And as I said, Dave writes a science blog called Respectful Insolence, which of course we'll have the link to, which covers a lot of topics and not just straight science, but a lot of skeptical topics, too, so I guess technically you're a skeptical blogger.

'''DG:''' I would like to think that.

'''S:''' How long have you been doing that? When did you start off the blog?

'''DG:''' It was two and a half years ago now. I believe it is December of 2004, been pretty constant since then.

'''S:''' Is that the first time you got involved with any kind of, you know, promoting the public understanding of science or any kind of media like that outside of your profession?

'''DG:''' Sort of. I've had a long interest, or I've been an online presence for quite a while, but not as a blogger. As far back as the late 90s, I used to be a regular on a fair number of Usenet groups, if you remember.

'''B:''' Remember Usenet?

'''DG:''' You remember Usenet?

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that.

'''S:''' It's ancient history now.

'''DG:''' In actuality, I guess the first serious skepticism that I got into was combating, actually, of all things, Holocaust denial. In fact, I don't know if you know the news group Alt-Revisionism. I was a regular on there for quite a few years, and then starting around 2000, 2001, I started getting more interested in the whole problem of alternative medicine and non-evidence-based therapy, shall we say.

'''S:''' Right. And for background, I don't think I said it. You are a surgeon, and you have a specialty in oncology, is that correct?

'''DG:''' Surgical oncology. I do mostly breast cancer surgery. I run a lab. I have NIH funding.

'''S:''' Yes, you have an academic appointment.

'''DG:''' Correct. I'm an associate professor of surgery.

'''J:''' So Dave, do you consider yourself a breast man? You must hear that joke like every week.

'''DG:''' I was going to say, you know.

'''J:''' But you did laugh, so.

'''DG:''' Yeah, I know. I was being polite.

'''S:''' So you do cover a lot of very important topics on your blog. The Holocaust denial is interesting because that's kind of outside of your professional background. How did you get interested in that?

'''DG:''' Basically, ever since I was actually a little kid, you know, like a little kid or at least a teenager, I was interested in World War II history, and I think it was sort of just an outgrowth of that. I posted about this, like, pretty early on in my blogging career when I first discovered Holocaust denial. I basically, you know, could not believe that people were out there who denied that the Holocaust happened, you know, or minimized it or what have you. It totally blew my mind, actually.

'''J:''' Yeah, it's pretty absurd.

'''S:''' It's kind of like me and creationism, just the notion that, you know, a group of people can deny such a well-established science. Again, it is mind-blowing. So I guess it's the same thing with Holocaust denial.

'''DG:''' Well, that was a later reaction when I, you know, I didn't take that much of an interest in creationism until a few years ago, and it was a similar sort of reaction.

'''S:''' Yeah, and they're both denials, denialism, and they're very similar. They're both kind of the same thing, and also like HIV denial.

'''DG:''' Yes, yes. I mean, they all use very, very similar logical fallacies, techniques of distorting data, cherry-picking evidence, all of that.

'''S:''' Do you find that once you sort of figure out what the logical fallacies are and how these people's reasonings go astray, you can pretty much apply it to anything as long as you have a reasonable fund of knowledge in an area. You could then, you know, apply those logical fallacies and deal with a wider range of topics.

'''DG:''' Oh, yes. I mean, there's one area that I don't write about much or if at all, and that's essentially global warming. And the reason is because I don't think I know enough about it to be, you know, intelligent about it. So...

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Don't get into it. It's a big pain in the ass. Let me tell you.

'''S:''' Let's shift a little bit to your area of expertise as an oncologist. You write a lot about cancer cures and either alternative or fake cancer cures or dubious cures. And that's a huge industry, obviously. You know, cancer is a very desperate illness and it definitely attracts a lot of quackery. One treatment, however, that you've been writing about recently is dichloroacetate, which in and of itself is not necessarily an illegitimate treatment. It's just the way it's been marketed. Can you give us a summary of that?

'''DG:''' Oh, no. I mean, I think dichloroacetate is a really interesting way of targeting cancer. I mean, basically to make it simple, the idea is this. There's a characteristic of cancer cells that's known as the Warburg effect. In essence, cancer cells, or at least a large percentage of them, utilize glucose for their metabolism preferentially. And even in the presence of oxygen, they still do anaerobic metabolism. They do glycolysis primarily and they don't do oxidative phosphorylation. Dichloroacetate is a treatment that essentially alters that and pushes them back to a more normal metabolism. Now, there's been a lot of discussion about the metabolic changes that occur in cancer and whether this is a case of the chicken or the egg. It's actually kind of blurred now in that, you know, it's not entirely clear whether it's the cause or a consequence of cancer, but it is fairly clear that by normalizing cellular metabolism by either blocking enzymes that shunt the metabolism back to a more quote unquote normal state that some cancer's growth can be stopped. In fact, this is a hot area of research. Dichloroacetate, it was originally used for metabolic diseases in children. I think what happened is in January, a scientist at the University of Alberta named Evangelos Michalakis, and I hope I'm not butchering his name, basically tested this drug against a variety of cancers in rats and got promising results. The way it was spun in the media or the way it was reported, okay, this is a small molecule. It can't be patented. I mean, its use for cancer can be patented, but use patents are kind of weak, and big pharma is not interested in it, you know, the dum-dum-dum, you know, but what's different about it as compared to like a lot of other drugs that might have been in this situation is that it's a small molecule that's fairly easy to synthesize. So a guy named Jim Tassano in Sonora, California decided to start synthesizing this stuff. He has a business, of all things, a pesticide business as far as I understand.

'''S:''' But it means he can make chemicals.

'''DG:''' He could hire someone who could make chemicals. They set up a website, two websites. One was called ByDCA.com, and the other was called the DCASite.com. They had all these discussion boards, and they talked about DCA and how great it was and that it was going to be the cure to cancer, and that's how it was being spun as the cure to cancer. A lot of bloggers that I normally kind of respect sort of fell into this line of thinking, for instance, Digby, Digby's blog, if you're familiar with that one, is going around, this is the drug, this is the cure to cancer that big pharma doesn't want you to know about. It's sounding a lot like Kevin Trudeau. Basically, the guy set up these websites, and he started making this stuff, and he started selling it, and people started discussing on the websites what was happening. Meanwhile, Dr. Michalakis was obviously appalled by this because contrary to what they say, this drug is not without side effects. For one thing, it can produce a pretty bad peripheral neuropathy, which as a neurologist, I'm sure you know how nasty that can be, and a number of other side effects that were reported. The other thing is these people were basically taking stuff that they didn't know whether it was truly pharmaceutical grade. The DCA site claims it was pharmaceutical grade, but you have no way of knowing. Here's the really disingenuous thing. They started out selling it as quote-unquote pet DCA. We're selling it so you can give your dog or your cat with cancer DCA, but they slipped up, and I kind of caught them on this. They talked about, well, we recommend that you see your doctor first. I'm like, well, what do you got to see your doctor for if you're giving this to your pet? The funny thing is after I wrote a blog piece pointing that out, they started switching things and taking that stuff out.

'''S:''' So, basically making an end run around the FDA and regulations.

'''DG:''' As far as I could tell. To this day, he's still in operation, and I still don't understand why the FDA hasn't shut him down. This drug has only been shown to have activity against tumors in rats. Many of the drugs that have activity against tumors in mice and rats that don't make it in human clinical trials, maybe only 5% or 10% of such drugs actually make it to some sort of marketable product. It could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it could be this miraculous, powerful chemotherapeutic agent that we would all hope that it is, but you don't know until you do the clinical trials. It's kind of frightening what you see on that site. There are these people who are just dying of cancer, and I understand that they're desperate, and I don't know that I wouldn't be tempted to do the same thing if I were in their shoes. But they're taking a risk for what is probably no benefit. The other thing is what these people don't seem to understand is how we evaluate the effectiveness of cancer drugs. There's one person there who's actually fairly savvy. He was a physician. He's an unfortunate guy. He had metastatic sarcoma, and he was on this, and he was reporting that his tumor was this size then, this size then, and this size then, and on the last one, he said there were more tumors in his lungs, and it was this size. And then some of these people were going there, okay, well, we're measuring the volume, and it looks like the growth rate is slowing down. Well, there's such a thing as called Gompertzian growth. Basically all tumors do that with no treatment. As they get bigger and bigger, they outgrow their blood supply. The growth fraction decreases, and they don't increase in volume as fast, and they kind of slow down with no treatment at all.

'''S:''' Right. It's the natural course of history.

'''DG:''' And the natural, you know, and of course when it levels off completely is when you're dead. You know, they're stoking the hope of these people saying, oh, look, it's working. These tumors are slowing down. They're not shrinking. They're slowing down. Does it mean that they're actually, that it's actually doing something? Well, maybe, but you have no idea without a control group.

'''J:''' It's also a good example of people giving other people advice when they don't know what they're talking about.

'''DG:''' Well, here's where this pulls into skepticism. One of the big boosters of DCA is an old friend from a certain intelligent design website.

'''J:''' Hey, come on. What are you getting at?

'''DG:''' What am I getting at? Well, no. I mean, well, have you heard of Dave Scott?

'''J:''' No.

'''DG:''' Okay. He's over at Bill Demski's blog, which is Uncommon Descent, I believe. He was a big booster of this very early on, and he would periodically show up in some of my blog posts, saying, yeah, yeah, look, it's working, and then I'd go look at it, and I'm like, no, it's not, or I can't tell if it is. I'd go to the boards and see no evidence that it's working. There's only one way on earth that you would be able to tell from this sort of uncontrolled experiment that this stuff is good against cancer. That would be if it was so good against cancer that it basically cured everybody or it cured somebody.

'''S:''' You had some home runs.

'''DG:''' Yeah, a total home run. It totally shrank the tumor to nothing, and of course, we don't see any of that.

'''S:''' We could say at this point that we're not seeing that. It's not a dramatic cure.

'''DG:''' My perspective is it might very well be a very useful chemotherapeutic agent, but it probably won't be useful by itself, and it probably won't be all that much more useful than a lot of other stuff that we have. There's a certain mindset in alternative medicine that chemotherapy is bad. It's evil. It's poison, and radiation therapy is burning, and surgery is slicing and cutting. I mean it is, but I like to think it's a little more precise than that. Yes, thank you.

'''S:''' That's the common phrase from cancer quacks is that the standard treatment is slash burn and poison.

'''DG:''' In any case, what is DCA? It's chemotherapy.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a drug.

'''DG:''' It is chemotherapy. It is a chemotherapeutic agent. That's what it is, but they're flocking to it in spite of that, and they're denying that that's what it is. They go on about how it naturally turns the tumor cell back to a normal metabolism. It's magical thinking.

'''S:''' Yeah, just throw the word natural in there, and it just gets a mystique that makes it somehow seem different.

'''DG:''' There was one particularly egregious article that came from a student newspaper somewhere, but it keeps getting passed through the web, and I keep seeing it again and again. The headline was something along the lines of, they cured cancer yesterday, but no one cares or something like that, or but you can't have it, and this still keeps popping up. I have a Google search set to dichloroacetate to see what new stuff comes up, and I keep seeing the same old stuff coming up again and again and again.

'''S:''' The core of the conspiracy claims is that this is a drug that cannot be patented. It's already out there, so the pharmaceutical industry can't make as much money off of it. They make about, from what I've read, about 20% off of an unpatented drug as they would off of a patented drug.

'''DG:''' You can make money, just not incredible amounts of money, not like Viagra type money.

'''S:''' That leads to the notion that not only would a pharmaceutical company not invest in it, which I think is a reasonable conclusion that they may not think it's worth their investment, but then they go the extra step and say, therefore, they're going to suppress it. They're going to keep anyone else from studying it, and that's where it just gets absurd.

'''DG:''' The whole thing out there is, oh, because big pharma isn't interested, no one's going to study it, even though a promising drug like this can attract grant money. It's just, obviously, it'll take time. It'll take a few years to figure out if this stuff actually has activity that's in a favorable side effect profile. To determine if a drug actually has an effect on survival, it'll take a few years.

'''S:''' Yeah. If you want to know what the five-year survival is, it takes five years, at least.

'''DG:''' Well, at least. Yeah, exactly. Maybe more. Well, I mean, you can estimate it through Kaplan-Meier survival curves, but it takes a few years at least.

'''J:''' Dave, do you notice that your cancer patients tend to go to other alternatives first, or is there any correlation between a patient's sex and their willingness to use an alternative medicine? Do you know any stats on that?

'''DG:''' Do I know stats? Not really. I mean, from my own practice, there seem to be a lot of women who take supplements and stuff like that, but that they don't really rely on it to treat their cancer. It's not like they're telling me they don't want surgery. I have no problem with that. As long as you're getting effective treatment, I just need to know what you're taking in case it makes you bleed more when I operate or something like that. One set of statistics that they throw out there, it implies that huge numbers of people use this stuff, and I'm not sure how accurate those are. And you're right.

'''S:''' Numbers are inflated because you have to look at the details. Often the percentage of people who are using hardcore alternative modalities, like they're trying to cure their cancer with homeopathy, those are single digits, very small numbers. But then there's a few types of treatment that inflate the overall numbers, like prayer. So if anyone's ever been prayed for, they consider that using alternative medicine.

'''DG:'' Practically everyone... I grew up Catholic, practically everyone I know has been prayed for.

'''S:''' Right. But that makes it turn into 50% or 60% or something, and they say, 60% of people are using alternative modalities. Yeah, but it's almost all just people who have ever been prayed for, and then very, very tiny numbers of the hardcore stuff that we actually think of as alternative medicine. So those numbers get artificially elevated. I know you've blogged about, as I have, about certain cases where parents have tried to refuse standard cancer treatment for their children in exchange for alternative medicine. And of course that brings up a lot of very thorny ethical and legal and moral issues. But what's the bottom line? What do you think about that? I mean, obviously it's not a great decision, but it's come up when the states have tried to intervene, and then you get the conflict between the state trying to protect a child and the parents who are trying to exert their parental rights. What do you think about those kind of situations?

'''DG:''' Yeah, you're right. These are very tough. There are two people that I've primarily written about over the last year or so. They both have lymphoma, different age. One of them was named Katie Wernicke, like late 2005 or so. She was 12 then, developed a fairly aggressive lymphoma, apparently got one round of chemotherapy. She went through one course of chemotherapy, and doctors thought that she needed radiation, and the parents balked, and they wanted to go to some clinic in Kansas to get high-dose vitamin C, and they actually went on a lam. They ultimately won the right to take her to that clinic. From what I can tell, now for her, because she was 12, and I think she's 14 now, I think it's fairly clear. She's nowhere near the age where she can make the decision for herself. As much as I understand and am actually wary of the state telling parents how to raise their children, I think that not providing proper medical care to a child, and this goes to Christian scientists, for instance, or Jehovah's Witnesses. If a Jehovah's Witness says that you can't transfuse their child when their child's bleeding, you transfuse the child. You go to court and do it. However, when it comes to these various alternative modalities for which there is no evidence, and for some of which there's evidence that they plain don't work, for some reason, the court seem to look at those as being okay or almost equivalent to evidence-based medicine, and they're more likely to say, okay. In fact, that's what they did with Katie Wernicke, and in fact, it's very sad. They have this family blog, Pray for Katie, and actually several months ago, they posted something about follow your markers. You got to get scanned every couple of months. You got to be very vigilant about your cancer, and I saw that and I was like, oh, she's recurred. I just knew it, and a couple months later, they posted that, yes, she had recurred, and she had some sizable tumors in her chest, but I haven't really heard anything much since then other than that the Wernicke's are suing the state of Texas, and it wouldn't surprise me if they'll say something along the lines of, well, the state interfered with us going to get the treatment, the vitamin C, and therefore, that's why Katie is dying now.

'''J:''' Yeah, always blame every single thing else you possibly can other than yourself and your own logic.

'''S:''' We talked about a similar case, Isabel Pritchard is a 13-year-old girl who has a brain tumor. This is even worse. The parents are not opting for an alternative treatment, but there's this Russian psychic healer who's telling them that it's not a tumor.

'''DG:''' I remember that.

'''S:''' It's normal brain tissue that's not a result of his healing intervention, so they're not going to get it treated at all.

'''DG:''' The second case is a young man who I believe was 15 when he was diagnosed. He's 17 now by the name of Starchild Abraham Cherix. Now this is a little more difficult because he's closer to the age of consent. He's closer to being 18. What happened is his story is kind of eerily similar in a way. He's diagnosed with what seemed like a fairly aggressive Hodgkin's lymphoma, underwent one course of chemotherapy and had a lot of problems with it, a lot of side effects, and decided he didn't want to do any more. His parents supported him in this, and quite frankly, this is the kind of thing where the parents kind of have to step to the plate and get the kid to take the chemotherapy. But they also were of kind of an alternative bent, and he decided he wanted to take the Hoxie therapy, which is this concoction, and I forget exactly what it's made of, but the legend is that a guy by the name of Hoxie noticed that when his cows were out in the field or when his horses were out in the field, if they came in contact with these certain plants, if they had skin tumors, they would regress. I mean, it's typical, no evidence, and this is a therapy that is given at this clinic in, of course, Tijuana. So I mean, he wanted to go there. Now, he's tougher because, like I said, he's 15, 16, he's more of an age where you can think that he could decide for himself, and my personal philosophy is kind of on the lines of, well, if you're an adult, you can choose any sort of quackery you want, you can turn down regular therapy, that's all your choice as an adult. But if you're a kid, I think there is some obligation for parents or the state to make sure that you get the proper treatment. In fact, one thing about the Cherex case that's very disturbing is it ended up causing a law called Abraham's Law in Virginia, which basically says that anyone over the age of 14 who has a quote-unquote life-threatening condition can refuse treatment or can choose whatever their treatment is or whatever they want. In essence, if you're over the age of 14 in Virginia and have a life-threatening condition, it's open season for quackery there.

'''S:''' Everyone looks at it completely from the point of view of the right of the patient to choose their treatment, but that doesn't mean that any provider should have the right to provide any treatment that they want.

'''DG:''' That's an excellent point.

'''S:''' So somebody should not have the right to sell a fraudulent therapy, a therapy which has been shown to be unsafe or ineffective and to make claims about it, no matter how implied or inferential they are. Getting back to the anti-vaccination thing, I want to use that to segue into just the recent autism omnibus, the mercury causing autism. Briefly, what's the update with the court trial that's going on now?

'''DG:''' It's finished its first week and now we're well into the second week. The way the autism omnibus works is there are 4,800 sets of parents who have sued or filed for compensation under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. They're going through a group of test cases. By these test cases, they're picking, I guess, their best cases or where they think they have the best evidence that vaccines injured the child and caused their autism. This first case so far hasn't gone well. One of the first witnesses, I believe his name is pronounced Dr. Aposhian, basically on the stand last week, in essence, admitted that he made up his hypothesis like three weeks before. There was nothing published. If you look at the transcripts for the first week, which is all the plaintiff's witnesses, there are some howlers in there.

'''S:''' They're just making stuff up.

'''DG:''' They're making the stuff up as they go along. Going back real quick, the concept that mercury injury causes autism, which is not supported by science. Yes, mercury, as I think you pointed out the other day, mercury is a neurotoxin but the question is, at the doses that it's given in vaccines, can it cause autism or other neurologic injury and there's basically no evidence that it does. Again, this is a magnet for quackery. This week, Dr. Fonbone, he's done a number of studies. He basically ripped apart the plaintiff's side so far. The only thing they could touch him on is that he's taken pharmaceutical money in the past so they start trying to rip him for a conflict of interest but the way I look at it is, if the conflict of interest is stated clearly and not hidden, that's one condition. The other condition, I look at it and I'm like, okay, there may be a conflict of interest there. I'll be a little more skeptical about the data but in the end, the data has to stand on its own. It's the data, not the person.

'''S:''' But they're quick to dismiss scientist for any tenuous link and they will make a leap from that, so if you've ever gotten pharmaceutical money ever that you're actually in their pocket and you're adulterating your research and you're basically working for the pharmaceutical industry. That's a huge leap to make. Did you have a chance, by the way, to read RFK Jr. recent article in Huffington Post? I blogged about it today, I don't know if you had a chance to read it.

'''DG:''' Oh, stay tuned. I've already written a response, it's going up tomorrow. ut I saw your response and I liked it. You're nicer than I was.

'''J:''' You guys are blog-buddies, aren't you?

'''S:''' We are, we're blog-buddies.

'''DG:''' But actually you should read, if you want a really snarky reponse you should go read Kevin Leach's blog. He also wrote about it. He happens to have a daughter with autism and he's very much into this skeptical, he's very much against this stuff, all this conspiracy-mongering nonsense. His post is precious.

'''S:''' I have to read it.

'''J:''' Hey Dave, I noticed that you blogged about scientology today.

'''DG:''' Yeah. And I know you guys have talked about it on the podcast.

'''S:''' Jay's favourite topic.

'''DG:''' It's just so stupid.

'''J:''' I know, it's a freak show on the dance floor. Scientology is just a train-wreck.

'''DG:''' Yeah, I mean, I wrote about John Travolta because he basically blamed the Virginia Rampage on psychiatric drugs.

'''B:''' Oh man. Wow.

'''DG:''' I always sort of thought, scientologists, John Travolta is kind of low-key, he doesn't talk about religion much, he's kind of amiable, he doesn't bother me. But then I saw this, I'm like, oh great, he's way up there with Tom Cruise.

'''J:''' They're making him step up now.

'''DG:''' What I said about it is like, ok, you've got to remember this - even if a peson is a truly commited scientologist, no matter how amiable and reasonable they seem on the surface, you look underneath the surface, they're as crazy as Tom Cruise.

'''B:''' Oh yeah, if you're buying into that stuff, the Xenu.

'''S:''' The whole Xenu stuff, they drank the cool-aid.

'''DG:''' Yeah, they drank the cool-aid, definitely. In huge quantities, gallons of it.

'''B:''' Dave, quick question for you about the potential future of cancer therapies. Maybe the next five to fifteen years.

'''DG:''' One of the good things about cancer therapy over the last few decades is it's been moving away from more radical to less radical. For instance, back in the seventies every woman with breast cancer got mastectomy. Couple decades before that they all got radical mastectomy which is really deforming and involves taking the underlying muscle as well. Now they all get, and they all got their lymph nodes removed under the arm. I've never even seen a radical mastectomy. Most women these days get a lymphectomy and only a sampling of the lymph nodes instead of taking all of them. And then they get radiation. The other big theme in cancer these days is moving towards more targeted therapy based on molecular alteration in the cancer that you're treating. How much these will pan out is hard to say. You may have heard of receptin, that's a targeted therapy against a certain receptor that some breast cancer express. There's anti-antygenic therapy which is my area of interest. Attacking the blood vessels that feed tumors. There are other targeted therapies based on other specific molecular alterations. The idea being hopefully less toxicity but still equal tumor control. I think that tends to be where things are going now, there's no other way of putting this - cancer is a bitch, like really really tough. And it's not just one disease, that's another thing that alternative medicine really bugs me. They all refer to it as cancer, a cure for cancer. There is no cure for cancer. There may be a cure for a cancer, but there's no cure for cancer.

'''J:''' Out of all the cancers out there, overall, what's our cure for cancer rate if you were to average it out.

'''DG:''' Overall, it's probably, I'm not a 100% sure this is right, but it's around the order of 50% range, but that's like everything. You're mixing pancreatic cancer, nastiness of nasties. Or you're mixing breast cancer which is very curable, especially in the early stages with esophageal cancer, which is not so, very difficult to treat and cure.

'''S:''' there's probably not going to be one cure for cancer. It's going to be a lot of baby steps, baby steps. Slowly, slowly, slowly we'll gain ground.

'''J:''' Slowly weed it out, right?

'''DG:''' Yeah, I wish I could say that I though it will happen in my lifetime but probably not.

'''B:''' Really? Not even in 30 years? We won't knock down some big cancers out there?

'''DG:''' Well, I think we'll make progress, I don't think there will be any magical or even... I don't think there will be a cure for most cancer in my lifetime. I wish I could say it wasn't true. But it's just tough, it's not just one disease, it's many diseases and it's a very tough oponent.

'''S:''' Well, Dave, thank you so much for joing us on the Skeptic's Guide.

'''DG:''' Thanks.

'''S:''' It was a lot of fun.

'''J:''' thank you very much Dave.

'''B:''' Thanks Dave.

'''DG:''' All right, thanks a lot.

== Science or Fiction () ==
Question #1:

'''S:''' Ech week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two are geniune and one is fictitious. Then I challenge my skeptics and you at home to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys ready?

'''J:''' Yes. Ready.

'''B:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Okay. Item number one, in the recent publication researches describe process for making a liquid telescope on the moon. Item number two, geophysicists have used magnetic eruptions on the sun to image deep layer of the earth. And item number three, biologists have discovered that certain species of electric eel use their electrical discharges to cummunicate complex information, such as the precise location of prey. Even you go first.

'''E:''' The first one was researches describe process for making a liquid telescope on the moon. Liquid telescope. Okay. I could believe that. Number two, geophysicists have used magnetic eruptions on the sun to image deep layer of the earth. Why I don't really understand how's that possible. And the third one was biologists have discovered that certain species of electric eel use their electrical discharges to cummunicate complex information, such as the precise location of prey.

'''B:''' Is that communication amongst other electric eels?

'''S:''' Yes. Yesh. I thought that was implied.

'''B:''' Yeah, I figured.

'''E:''' That sounds right. I'll say that the eel one actually is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''E:''' I think you're throwing the curve in there somewhere.

'''S:''' You think there's something fishy about it? Perry?

'''P:''' The eel one sound perfectly fine to me. I mean if bees can dance, eels can shock. The first one? Sure. Liquid telescope on the moon. Why would you need a liquid telescope on the moon? And the last one, the middle one. That's the one that's I am ignorant as to how that process could work therefore I will choose it. That one is fiction. Number two, geophysicists have used magnetic eruptions on the sun to image deep layer of the earth.

'''S:''' Okay, Jay?

'''J:''' You're doing it again Steve, you're very good. The eel, in particualr the eel one, being able to locate their prey using electrical discharge-

'''S:''' Not that to locate the pray, to communicate information about the prey.

'''J:''' Oh, communication like the location of the prey.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''J:''' So it's just the communication, okay, that one sound very reasonable to me. The liquid telescope, my first question is, why does it have to be liquid and liquid seems to be difficult to handle on the moon because lack of pressure and atmosphere and all that. It doesn't sound as bad as the second one. Something's funny about the second one to me, the geophysicists have used magnetic eruptions on the sun. I'm going to go with number two.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob?

'''B:''' All right. The liquid telescope on the moon. I don't know if you have ice telescope up north, [inaudible] ice telescope on the moon. I don't have a problem with that.

'''S:''' Down south actually.

'''B:''' South, north, it's a pole.

'''E:''' That's true.

'''P:''' He's right.

'''B:''' Let's see. Geophysicists have used magnetic eruptions on the sun to image deep layer of the earth. I can kind of see that. Perhaps charged particles from the sun, some small percentage of them can actually travel through the earth, which can be detected, which can might reveal some detail about the deep layers of the Earth, that's conceivable. Now the electric eel, using electrical discharges to communicate complex information. That would be interesting. I just don't see electric eels as being kind of team players. I don't think they give a crap about communicating anything to other electric eels. If other electric eels can somehow interpret it, that's another thing, I don't think it's an intentional communication. Did you mean to imply it was intentional?

'''S:''' Yes.

'''B:''' So I'm not buying that.

'''P:''' Never saw the old cartoons Bob, where the eel would change it's shape and went to eat at Joe's?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' That's exactly it. All right, so you guys buy the liquid telescope on the moon?

'''J:''' I'm not buying that. It's gotta be millions of dollars.

'''B:''' Absolutely.

'''S:''' And that one is in fact science.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Jay I told you about that one.

'''J:''' You did. Thank you Bobby.

'''S:''' The concept is really cool now. You can use a liquid to make, instead of a glass lense, right? Or collector. And the advantages, if you use a liquid and you spin it, the force of the spinning will form it into pefectly smooth parabolic shape.

'''B:''' Not necessarily heavy.

'''S:''' It's true.

'''B:''' It's not heavy and it could be huge.

'''S:''' Right. That's right. It's actually a really neat concept.

'''B:''' They're talking ten to hundred meters which would make it one thousand times more sensitive than anything we have-

'''J:''' That's awesome.

'''B:''' A thousand times more sensitive.

'''J:''' Bob, how much they have to spend on that?

'''B:''' Billions, I don't know.

'''S:''' Billions and billions?

'''B:''' I don't know.

'''S:''' But the teoretical problems has been finding a liquid that we get to hold up in the harsh evironment of the moon.

'''B:''' I guess they did.

'''S:''' And that's the breakthrough is that they figured out the way. This is the international team including researcher Hermano Bora from University Naval Centre for Optics, Fotonics and Laser. And they basically figured out how to make liquid that could fit the bill. That could theoretically be used to make this kind of telescope on the moon. Of course having it on the moon is an advantage, because there's no atmosphere.

'''P:''' So it's a synthetic liquid?

'''S:''' The called it an ionic liquid with silver by vaporizing it in a vacuum. That was the breakthrough.

'''J:''' That explains everything.

'''E:''' I should have thought to do that.

'''B:''' So Jay, however much that thing weighs, multipley ten thousand dollars per pound and that's a minimum it's going to cost.

'''E:''' Yeah, but one sixth the weight because it's on the moon.

'''B:''' It doesn't matter.

'''S:''' But it's got to get of the Earth.

'''B:''' Still in our gravity well.

'''S:''' So now Jay and Perry think that the magnetic eruptions are fake and Bob and Evan think tht the electric eel is fake. So is it electricity or magnetism? Which one is the fake?

'''P:''' Well, we all know magnets are BS.

'''S:''' Let's go to the third one, the elctric eel. Biologists have discovered that certain species of electric eel use their electrical discharges to cummunicate complex information, such as the precise location of prey. And that one is fiction.

'''E:''' Ooh.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' That one is fiction.

'''J:''' Good work boys.

'''B:''' Hi five Bob. Mi streak is intact.

'''S:''' The real study showed that electric eels do use their electric discharge in courtship. So the males and females do kind of like a song back and forth to each other with their electrical discharges. But they're not communicating complex information, that part was made up.

'''J:''' See, because I rememebr reading that one.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' You did it again, Steve.

'''B:''' Very good.

'''S:''' And that means that geophysicists have used magnetic eruptions on the sun to image deep layer of the earth is science. And this is also cool. Bob, you got this pretty much right on the nose, that they're using these earthquakes on the sun. They're not earthquakes, magnetic quakes on the sun, which gave pulses of discharges. And they can measure that over time and it does penetrate the deeper layers of the Earth. ANd they can use that as a method of imaging deep down into the Earth. What they found using this technique was that there is a large layer of molten mobile rock beneth Arizona, basically. This is done by Arizona geophysicist Daniel Tofermayer and James [inaudible]. They detected a molten layer with comperatively new and overlooked technique for explaining deep earth that uses magnetic eruptions on the sun. Very cool.

'''B:''' Cool.

'''S:''' So good work Bob and Evan.

'''E:''' Oh, thanks doctor.

== Skeptical Puzzle () ==
<blockquote>This Week's Puzzle Identify the 6th number in this sequence: .426, .424, .420, .420, .409 Last Week's Puzzle I notably lurk on the fringes of physics I rely on people's ignorance of water's specific capacity I was the world's only teacher of my practice from 1977-1984 I don't spend much time doing what I do I keep my momentum, yet try to stay uneven And if those dollars are burning a hole in your pocket, I can teach you to attain virtually any goal Who am I? Answer: Polly Burkin</blockquote>

'''S:''' Evan, tell us the answer to last week's puzzle.

'''E:''' Do you want me to repeat the puzzle itself?

'''S:''' Yes. It's assumed.

'''E:''' Okay. I notably lurk on the fringes of physics. I rely on people's ignorance of water's specific capacity. I was the world's only teacher of my practice from 1977-1984. I don't spend much time doing what I do. I keep my momentum, yet try to stay uneven. And if those dollars are burning a hole in your pocket, I can teach you to attain virtually any goal. Who am I?

'''S:''' Is it Wink Martindale?

'''E:''' No. That's a good guess. Ever heard of a gentleman named Polly Burkin?

'''B:''' That rings a bell.

'''E:''' You got to know who Polly Burkin is. He is the self-proclaimed creator of the fire-walking movement.

'''S:''' Fire-walking?

'''E:''' Fire-walker.

'''J:''' So he's got sweaty feet?

'''E:''' He is a professional fire-walker.

'''B:''' Well, that's been done for millenia though.

'''E:''' According to him, he's been researching fire-walking since 1977 and is considered to be the formost authority on the subject. Listen to what he says here, this is from his website. Knowing the secrets behind fire-waling can improve your life. Knowing how it works can bring better health and increase personal power. Why? Because fire-walking demostrates how your thoughts impact everyhing else in your life. Fire-walkers are instructed to pay close attention to their thoughts since those very thoughts are the way in which we create our own realities.

'''B:''' Oh man.

'''P:''' Wait a minute, those are from The Secret.

'''S:''' Yeah, this is The Secret.

'''E:''' Posite thinkers literally live in a different chemical environment than negative thinkers.

'''B:''' Oh man.

'''S:''' Different chemical environment.

'''E:''' A different chemical environment.

'''S:''' Can I legally call that gobbledygook?

'''E:''' You can call this guy a quack I think and quite-

'''P:''' It's no secret that he's an ass.

'''S:''' Nonsense. So he reseached this? Did he ever had somebody walk over hot coals thinking I'm walking on hot-burning coals. And does that matter? Do they burn their feet if they think that?

'''E:''' Our good friend doctor Andrew Wile says, today we see people of all sorts learning to walk over beds of glowing coals after a few hours participation in seminars thought-

'''S:''' Andrew Wile. I love it when one quack endorses [inaudible] form of quackery. It warms my heart.

'''E:''' James Mapes, famous hypnotist, probably heard of him. Totally changed my definition of impossible forever.

'''S:''' And just for the record, fire-walking is possible because of physics, not because mental woo-woo.

'''B:''' Tell him to look up heat capacity and therml conductivity and I will believe all that clap trap when I see somebody fire-walking on molten metal. Then I will believe it.

'''S:''' Red, hot steel.

'''B:''' Yeah, it doesn't have to be molten, red hot, just red hot.

'''P:''' That's the first time steel has ever burn feet.

'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a new puzzle.

'''E:''' All right, so new puzzle is as follows. This one is a logic puzzle, another sequence puzzle, so here we go. Identify the sixth number in the sequence. I'm going to give you the first five, you have to identify the sixth. 0.426, 0.424, 0.420, 0.420, 0.409. What's the sixth number in the sequence. So wrap your mind around that and good luck everyone.

'''S:''' We call this formula 409.

== Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>“The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.” - George Jean Nathan</blockquote>

'''S:''' Perry, do you have a quote to end the show for us?

'''P:''' Yes I do. The quote is as follows. "The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism." That was George Gene Nathan, 1882 to 1958, an American journalist, essayist, and editor of some note.

'''J:''' Thank you, Perry.

'''S:''' Excellent.

'''J:''' Fans love you, man.

'''P:''' Don't thank me.

'''E:''' Nice quote. Thank George Gene Nathan.

'''S:''' Thank you, George. Thank you all for joining me once again.

'''J:''' It was a pleasure. The pleasure is totally ours, Steve. Steve, have a great vacation.

'''B:''' Good episode.

'''E:''' Good episodes Steve.

'''S:''' You may have noticed, those who are paying attention, that we actually recorded two shows Cumberland, Maryland, where we don't have fancy things like internet access.

'''P:''' Hunting Bigfoot.

'''S:''' So I won't be able to record a show next week, which is this week when this episode is coming up.

'''P:''' So next week is this week.

'''B:''' You know what's going to happen? Something amazing is going to happen. Some black hole is going to pass near the earth, and we're not going to talk about it next week.

'''S:''' Right.

'''E:''' If a black hole passes near the earth, I don't think anybody is going to be talking about it.

'''B:''' Well, if it's far enough away.

'''S:''' It depends on how big it is.

'''B:''' Yeah, and how close.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, the universe can collapse into a quantum vacuum, and we won't be here to talk about it.

'''P:''' It's true.

'''B:''' Oh, man.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.

{{Outro61}}== References ==
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SGU Episode 741

2025-04-12T15:00:34Z

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== Introduction ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, September 18th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' I love science.

'''S:''' Thank you. I'm happy for you. Evan, what if I told you that mathematicians used a planetary computer in order to find the question, the correct answer to which is the number 42?

'''E:''' Oh, yeah, boy. Let's see. That's a darn good book you're reading.

'''S:''' And this really happened. No, this is real life. This really happened.

'''E:''' Okay, we've gone from fiction to reality. All right.

'''S:''' It's real, it's true. I know Cara's heard about this because she tweeted about it. But you guys heard this?

'''B:''' Yeah, awesome. Sum of the three cubes, baby.

'''S:''' Yeah, sum of the three cubes.

'''J:''' I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I mean, I recognize the 42 and everything, but this is a real news item?

'''S:''' eah, this is real. So in 1954, at the University of Cambridge.

'''E:''' Uh-huh, I've heard of that.

'''S:''' Yeah, so the mathematicians proposed this, what's called the Diophantine equation. It's X cubed plus Y cubed plus Z cubed. So sum of three cubes equals K. And they wanted to solve that for all numbers from one to 100. And they did, except for two, the number 33 and the number 42. However, recently, they solved it for 33, which left 42 as the only number, the only integer between one and 100 for which-

'''E:''' There was no answer.

'''S:''' There was no answer, right. There was no sum of three cubes that added up to the number 42.

'''B:''' Right, so you needed a distinct number multiplied by itself three times, and add that to yet another distinct number, different from the first one, multiplied by itself three times, plus a third one.

'''S:''' It has to be an integer, right?

'''J:''' Why is this important?

'''C:''' It's fun.

'''S:''' It's one of those math problems. Yeah. So it was recently solved by mathematician, Professor Andrew Booker at MIT. It's kind of a funky solution because the three numbers are all huge, but one of them is negative. So I guess it almost balances out, except for a residue of 42.

'''E:''' Well, that seems like it took them an awfully long time to nail this particular one down. You're saying 1954 is when this was started?

'''S:''' Yeah. And they did use a quote-unquote planetary or worldwide computer. They used one of those engines where, it's called the Charity Engine, where it basically uses 500,000 PCs around the world.

'''B:''' Hence the planetary computer.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Neat. Okay, kind of what's similar to what SETI does with their project?

'''S:''' Yeah, it's like a computing at home app, yeah.

'''B:''' Wait a second, wait a second. Wait, those are huge numbers.

'''S:''' Yeah, I know, but I just said that, Bob. One of them is negative.

'''B:''' But wait a second, if K equals one to 100, and the one that they're solving for is 42, how are you gonna cube those big numbers?

'''S:''' Bob.

'''B:''' Oh, because of the negative.

'''C:''' He's a mathematician from MIT, you gotta trust him on this.

'''S:''' They're just adding them together, so you add a big negative number to two slightly smaller positive numbers, and yeah, it adds up to 42.

'''B:''' Gotcha, gotcha, cool.

'''S:''' I had the same reaction, like, wait a minute, these numbers are huge, oh, the first one's negative.

'''B:''' The negative. Yeah, the negative.

'''E:''' Negative will do that. So that's fascinating.

'''S:''' Yes, it is. Now, that provokes the question, is this a coincidence, or did Douglas Adams know this? Did he pick the number 42 because he knew about this?

'''E:''' Because he knew 33 and 42 were the two outstanding numbers at the time that he wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

'''B''' I doubt it, Evan, I doubt it. Because they've been, I think, I mean, that was many, many years ago, it was like in the 70s that he did that, and I think some of these have been solved since then, and some of them were actually, some of them decided they were unsolvable. They do mention that in the article, where some of them were just like, like, 71, sorry, that's been shown to be unsolvable, so they know they didn't have to work on that one anymore. But they didn't go into any detail, how many were unsolvable? So I looked up what the origin of 42 was in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the answer is-

'''B:''' 42.

'''S:''' Nobody knows, except Stephen Fry. So there is an answer, but Douglas Adams only told Stephen Fry, and he, of course, died.

'''E:''' I'm dubious.

'''S:''' Douglas Adams passed away at the age of 49.

'''B:''' Sad day.

'''S:''' And Stephen Fry has promised to take that secret to his grave.

'''J:''' No, why would he do that?

'''E:''' I'm sorry.

'''C:''' Who said that he only told Stephen Fry? Did Douglas Adams say that, or did Stephen Fry say that?

'''E:''' Right, is this part of a skit?

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''B:''' Yeah, that's good, he could be totally making that shit up.

'''C:''' Because Stephen Fry could just say that.

'''S:''' Say, I know, but I'm not telling anybody?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I don't know if that was confirmed, but, so apparently, that will be a mystery. He did not want to reveal to the world where he got 42 from.

'''B:''' That's fine, I'm fine with that.

'''C:''' Probably because he just made it up.

'''E:''' Right, I mean, that could be the answer.

'''C:''' It's probably just a non-story.

'''E:''' It's like, oh, it's just 42.

'''B:''' I like it, because you think of something yourself. It doesn't, it would kind of detract from it if it was some mundane source that he got 42 from.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Well, sure, but at the same time, it's not this international mystery that must be solved, I don't think.

'''S:''' Well, and I suspect that Adams wanted it to be its kind of meta, it is a mystery, right? The number, the origin of the number itself in The Hitchhiker's Guide itself is a mystery.

'''C:''' Yeah, Evan, I feel like you may be underestimating the nerdiness of nerds a little bit.

'''E:''' Oh, jeez, okay, all right.

'''B:''' And aren't they, are they wrong about this whole idea of the planetary computer? Because Deep Thought designed the planetary computer, otherwise known as Earth.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Right?

'''S:''' Yeah, this is just, it's just a metaphor. They're just trying to make as much of a connection as possible. I know, in The Hitchhiker's Guide, the computer was Earth. The whole Earth was the computer.

'''B:''' Yeah, Deep Thought designed it.

'''S:''' Worldwide distributed computer network.

'''B:''' Yeah, but they, my point is that they bring up Deep Thought and it wasn't Deep Thought.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah, they're making an error in the reference. Well, Deep Thought came up with the answer, 42.

'''B:''' Right, and the planet Earth was created to come up with what the question was. You know, when you're coming up with a really epic question, you better think it out a little bit.

'''S:''' And what was the question? What is six times eight?

'''B:''' How many paths must a person take? I don't know, I forget. It's been so long. It's due for another listen of Douglas Adams reading his Hitchhiker series.

'''E:''' According to Bob, that is the only way-

'''B:''' The only way, the best way, I'll put it this way, the best way to enjoy that series. You could read it, read the words, fine. You could listen to Stephen Fry. I think Stephen Fry and some really awesome people narrate those books, and they're good too. But nobody is like Adams reading his own work. And he was just a wonder, as you can imagine, he was a fantastic narrator.

'''E:''' All right, Jay, you and I have to go and hang out with Stephen Fry and knock a few back and get him to loosen up so that he spills the secret. What do you think?

'''J:''' I would think more about threatening to kill him if he doesn't tell the world. I mean, this is a big deal.

'''C:''' Very aggressive, Jay.

'''J:''' I mean, it's the answer. You know what I mean? It's too big, it's too important for just one man to carry the weight.

'''C:''' I can't fathom the fact that we've been talking about this for 10 minutes straight at this point.

'''S:''' What do you want to talk about, polio?

'''C:''' Geez, yeah, sorry. Onto more pressing matter.

== News Items ==

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'''S:''' All right, Cara, tell us about polio. Go ahead.

'''C:''' Oh, gosh. Well, I'd like to say that the polio virus saga has been, I think in many ways, a real testament to biomedical science. And we've talked about this before on the show. I feel like we might hit it like once a year, something like that, because I'm always really interested when there are new developments. And so the newest development in the conversation about polio virus is that there is a new vaccine being designed right now that could help with the remaining cases that exist. So let's do like a little quick and dirty background. So poliomyelitis is caused by the polio virus. And there are three different types of wild type polio virus. There's wild type one, two, and three. But there's also a type of polio virus that's a vaccine-derived polio virus. And it typically comes from wild type two within the vaccine. So currently, globally, there are two types of polio vaccines. You guys have heard of the Salk vaccine. That was the first one that was developed, I think in 1955, if I'm not mistaken. And that is an injection. And then there's an oral polio virus vaccine, which was developed like five or six years later. And the difference between the two is that the injection has killed virus in it, and the oral virus is attenuated. So that's like a weakened virus. The oral virus seems to be more effective in single dose. Like you usually need more than one dose of the injectable virus. And it's also easier to administer than having to have the needles for the injectable virus. So the oral virus tends to be used more worldwide. The problem is, every so often, people who take the oral virus will actually, they'll be populated with polio virus, but it's weakened polio virus. It won't make them sick, but it'll undergo mutations in the GI tract. And by the time they kind of poop the virus out into the community, into the water, or into the soil, it may, on very, very, very rare occasions, have actually mutated and be able to be virulent again. And so there are actually a number of cases of polio worldwide, which are caused by this vaccine-derived polio because of this attenuated virus. And I think I have a list here of the numbers we're looking at right now. So this year today, as of this week, this is as of September 11th, so that's the most recently published numbers. Globally, there are 78 cases of wild-type polio virus. That's amazing, isn't it? Can we just take a minute to think about how incredible that is?

'''J:''' Yeah, I never realized that there was that many independent versions of it. I mean, are they all as deadly as the next?

'''C:''' So they are, I actually don't know if one, two, and three vary in terms of their effects. Because the thing about polio is that talking about whether or not it's deadly is very individual. Like most people who actually contract polio don't even show symptoms. A percentage of people who contract it show flu-like symptoms, and only, I think, one in 200 people that contract it will have neurological symptoms. And so when we think of like the most devastating aspects of polio, like we think of like images of the iron lung and people on crutches, that's a very, very small percentage of people who even contracted the virus. But I'm not really sure if type one, type two, type three actually have any sort of difference in effect. I do know that type two is fully eradicated in the wild. So what a lot of people thought about doing is actually figuring out how to remove type two from the vaccine altogether because of the risk of the wild type, or of the vaccine derived. And we'll get to this new development in just a second. But so 78 people globally with wild type virus, all 78 are only in three countries. These are the endemic polio virus countries, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And then 72 so far this year, cases of circulating vaccine derived polio virus. And that's in, 15 of them are in those endemic countries, but a full 57 of them are in non-endemic countries. And so that's where the real fear comes out is that this spreads more. Also, there are a lot of countries where polio has been eradicated for so long that people aren't getting vaccinated.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's scary.

'''C:''' Yeah, so that's a real risk, right? So these researchers were like, okay, what do we do? How do we keep this type two that's in the oral vaccine from becoming virulent again? And they did a bunch of research and they realized that there's four different things that seem to happen in order for the vaccine to kind of mutate and revert to becoming virulent. There were 104 polio cases last year just due to the type two polio virus circulating and actually periodically, some of those cases did lead to paralysis. As I was saying, the things that they had to do, the steps that they had to take are kind of complicated, but there were four important changes that were made. One of them prevents it from folding up into the appropriate protein shape that it can do on its own in order to become revirulent. Another one involved changing the enzymes within the vaccine that actually copy the RNA so that when it makes a copy of itself, it's more accurate and it's less likely to mutate. The third change is that they, I'm not really sure how they did this, but they were able to reduce, oh, it's through the same enzyme that they use to change the way that it copies its RNA. It actually prevents, or not prevents, but reduces its recombinatory capability. So it's less likely to recombine with other viruses that are already populating the person who took the vaccine. And then lastly, the actual attenuated virus in the vaccine had its genetic material kind of rearranged a bit so that regions of RNA, if it were to combine with a different wild virus, would actually kill it instead of allowing it to be a new mutant. So for example, a lot of people in these countries are also carrying other gut viruses. It's not uncommon. One of the ones that they mention, and I don't really know anything about this, Steve, is Coxsackie, Coxsackie virus. So apparently a lot of kids carry Coxsackie virus, especially in these regions where this is a concern. And what sometimes happens is that the attenuated poliovirus will actually combine with portions of the Coxsackie virus, and that's how it'll mutate to become virulent again. But this change actually makes it so that when it tries to combine, it actually kills the virus, which is great. So they've tested this so far in cells. They've tested it in a mouse model, and they've also done a phase one clinical trial, which we talked about a lot last week. So that showed that they did not make people sick. They were pretty well-tolerated. The immune response is there, so the vaccine is working. Unfortunately, it didn't completely eradicate the reversion to virulence, but it did reduce it compared to the original oral vaccine. So that's a really good sign. So long story short, this is what happens at the end of an eradication effort. I mean, I think it's fair to say, or when you're doing really well in an eradication effort, when this started in 1988, we saw a 99% reduction in rates. It might've even been like 99.9 or 0.8%. We went from thousands of cases, maybe even tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases, down to 100 cases a year. It's incredible. But now that we're playing whack-a-mole trying to get rid of these last few cases, because once it's fully eradicated, it's gone. Only humans carry this virus. There's no reservoir. It's amazing.

'''S:''' So it can't be eradicated. Unlike, not every virus can be eradicated.

'''C:''' Yeah, unlike Ebola or something, which is living in bats or rats or whatever.

'''E:''' It would still exist in laboratories and contained areas.

'''C:''' Like, is smallpox eradicated?

'''S:''' Yes, but smallpox exists in labs.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly. So it's like eradicated from the human population, but it might still be in vials. And that's necessary, right? In case if something did happen. Or in case if we detected a virus that was somewhat similar.

'''S:''' It's a debate. There's a debate about whether or not we should get rid of any stored virus once it's eradicated, because then it's gone from the world. There's no possibility of an accident or a theft or whatever. So that's an open question, actually.

'''E:''' Interesting.

'''C:''' Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question, too.

'''B:''' Trivial.

'''S:''' I don't think so. I mean, there's something to be said for it. Imagine it's like there is no smallpox virus in the world. They can't possibly come back.

'''B:''' Big deal. They're gonna be creating, they'll be creating viruses and infections that never existed in nature, that are 1,000 times more vicious.

'''C:''' Who is they?

'''B:''' The bad people.

'''C:''' Oh, the bad people.

'''S:''' The bad people.

'''C:''' But I mean, what happens, Steve, and I'm sure, obviously, this is part of the conversation, if a cowpox virus or some other type of pox does crop up that is genetically somewhat similar to smallpox, and if we still had those smallpox stores, we would be able to fast-track vaccine research. I think that's probably the argument for keeping things is that a lot of viruses are somewhat similar.

'''S:''' And it's so frustrating, because we were so close like 10 years ago, but it was the anti-vaccine fears that kept it going. We missed our chance, and now we're trying to recreate it.

'''C:''' And I mean, we're still, but let's be clear, we're still so close. Like, we're very close. We're talking only 150 cases so far this year.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, but that's so many more than there was when we were close last time. And close doesn't really count. We gotta get over that finish line until it's eradicated, because then we still have to keep up vaccinating everybody, et cetera.

'''C:''' Yeah, once it's eradicated, we don't have to get the vaccine anymore at all. That's amazing. So yeah.

'''S:''' All right, we'll keep pushing. And who knows, maybe eventually we'll be able to reverse aging, right, Jay?

'''C:''' Oh, God.

'''E:''' Really?

'''C:''' That's a whole other conversation we will not be having right now.

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'''J:''' Yes, actually, we are having it right now.

'''C:''' Damn it! Jay, I'm gonna have to keep my mouth shut this whole time.

'''J:''' If you wanna die, Cara, it's gonna happen, so don't worry about it. You'll die.

'''C:''' Thank you. That's a very enlightened perspective.

'''J:''' But for those of us who don't think that a scant 60 to 80 years is quite enough, because it isn't.

'''E:''' 60?

'''J:''' So look, I'll start off by saying that this is a very early, early, early small study. There are a couple of things about this news item worth really digging into, but everything else, we just need a ton more research done before we could actually say anything definitive. But according to a recent study, it seems that a certain combination of drugs was able to reverse the test subject's biological age, and that is a key term in the sentence, which they determined examining changes to their DNA, right? So they're looking at these test subjects' DNA. So let's get into the details. The study was published on September 5th, 2019 in the journal Aging Cell, and it consisted of nine healthy white males between the ages of 51 and 65. Now, three times a week, the test subjects had to administer a combination of growth hormone, a diabetes medication, and what I believe to be a second hormone supplement. These articles that are coming out aren't giving 100% of the details. So at the end of the year of research that they did on these nine test subjects, they found that the subjects' DNA were on average 2.5 years younger than their previous biological ages. Are you already confused? Because it is a little confusing. So let me get into what I'm actually saying here. So this means that over the course of the test year that the subjects were taking the medication and they aged chronologically another year, but their biological age, as I will explain how that is determined in a second, their biological age seemed to decrease by 1.5 years, which if you add it to the year of testing, it's 2.5 years. So anyway, let me get into what's actually going on here. So before the medication was administered, the test subjects had their DNA examined for common signs of aging that biologists call epigenetic clocks. So they're using these markers that are found on human DNA. And over a human's lifespan, DNA acquires these certain chemical tags that are found riding on top of the double helix as we age. And as an example, one of these tags is made up of a carbon and a hydrogen atom stuck together, and they stick to the outside of the DNA strand. And these tags, scientists believe, can alter how a particular part of a genetic piece of information is read. And that's what they think one of the reasons why we have an actual physical effect of aging, one of the reasons why we actually age could be that these epigenetic molecules are sticking to the outside of our DNA and causing it to be, I guess, misread. You can think of these epigenetic changes or chemical tags as flags that demonstrate a person's biological age. So they will look for these chemical tags, they will see a certain arrangement of them, a certain frequency of them, and the scientists have a way to determine a person's quote-unquote biological age by doing this type of examination. And they say that it's as accurate as a two- to three-year range, which is really accurate and a little bit scary.

'''C:''' Yeah, but that also means that the outcome of the study is within the error bars.

'''J:''' Yeah, I know.

'''C:''' Which means that it could have done nothing. Nobody is saying here that they're 100% sure. They're only sure about one thing, which I'll get to in a second. So this early test does not prove that the test subjects actually became biologically younger, meaning that they actually grew to become younger. The scientists are trying to figure out if the epigenetic clocks are the cause of the aging themselves or if they just operate more like an after effect of the aging process. Does that make sense, guys?

'''S:''' Yes, because most of the things that we measure like that, that's what they are. They're markers that are just an effect of the thing that we're looking at, not the cause of the thing, right? So I'm sure there's a lot of things that happen in aging that doesn't mean that it's causing the aging, and that's actually one of the questions they're asking. Are we looking at something that's actually responsible for aging to some extent?

'''J:''' Or the result of aging, right?

'''S:''' Or just one of the probably many markers of aging.

'''J:''' It's kind of like, you can kind of think of it as an accumulation of scars that you get on your skin as you walk through life. Now, the scars aren't making you older. They're the result of just living a longer life. You get more scars. Okay.

'''S:''' That's a good analogy.

'''J:''' What they really did was they first identified the biological epigenetic markers that attach themselves to DNA. They were like, okay, we know that these exist. We know how to read them, and we know that they're pretty accurate in determining somebody's biological age. They administered the drugs for a completely different reason, but then when they went back and tested blood samples and took DNA tests of those blood samples, after the one-year drug regimen was over, they saw that some of those epigenetic markers were gone or changed in what they would read as a younger person's biological age. So that's it. And that's all they're claiming in all the headlines that you're reading. Nobody knows exactly. Like, nobody appeared younger. Nobody like, you know. The only thing that they noticed, and this was the one thing that I was gonna tell you, Cara, was they were testing part of the immune system, and they did find that these medications specifically rejuvenated a part of the immune system. And actually, more tissue was actually present after the study than before the study.

'''C:''' Oh, that scares me. That sounds like a precursor to cancer to me.

'''J:''' No, no.

'''S:''' You're talking about the thymus.

'''J:''' The thymus, yeah. The thymus functionality.

'''S:''' There was some thymic regrowth.

'''J:''' The studies, though, the study was limited, and I'll give you some things that you could talk to people about if they're saying that this is, you know, we're all gonna live forever. So they were saying that work has to be done to disprove the actual effects of the drugs, to prove or disprove. So as an example, there was no control group. There was only nine test subjects, which is amazingly small. And if the participants made any other positive lifestyle changes, they did not take that into account. So they don't know.

'''C:''' Which I'm sure they did in a study like this. Well, I'm not sure, but that's not uncommon.

'''S:''' It's common. They went off that heroin, you know.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly.

'''J:''' But the other thing that they did say was six months after the test was over, they re-sampled blood samples of six of the people that did the test, and the positive, the quote-unquote positive effects of their epigenetic markers was still there. So whatever it did, it did make a change that was lasting at least six months after the test.

'''C:''' My biggest concern with this is, yes, the sample size is small. Yes, there's no control group. Those are massive issues. But also, how much did they baseline test? Did they do a single sample?

'''J:''' I think that their baseline testing is the only thing that they could possibly use to-

'''S:''' How long did they do it for?

'''J:''' Express their-

'''C:''' But that's what I'm saying. Did they also do six months prior to starting?

'''J:''' Well, what this test is gonna do though, because again, and like I said, the initial test, the whole project here, wasn't based on this. This was just another thing that came out of it. So now, of course, they will move on to specifically design a much more robust test and be able to dig in to more detail. And actually, they'll do it much more correctly. I don't know. I wouldn't say they did anything incorrectly. They just didn't have that-

'''S:''' No, they just gotta do more. They gotta do more subjects. They gotta do a better baseline. They have to do a longer follow-up. They need more subjects in a double-blind, placebo-controlled arm. And they also need to test more things. So what they need to do is also is validate this marker as meaning something. In other words, does it predict the risk of dying over that period of time? That would be a good thing to correlate it with.

'''C:''' And also compare the other epigenetic markers that are established. Like, did it do anything for histone length? Did it do anything-

'''J:''' Sure.

'''C:''' I'm sorry, for loss of histones. Yeah, not, sorry, I didn't mean histone.

'''S:''' Not histones.

'''C:''' I didn't mean telomeres. I actually meant hist-

'''S:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Yeah, but that's not what I meant.

'''J:''' Not Cara, another-

'''C:''' One of the biggest epigenetic marks of aging is actually losing histones. And so, like, how is their histone count? Like, how, you know? And maybe, yeah, look at telomeres, look at other types of markers.

'''S:''' Telomere length, histone count, yeah.

'''C:''' Things like that.

'''J:''' Now, there was another cool thing that I didn't say, Cara, but there was one other side effect that one of the test subjects had.

'''S:''' Some monsterism?

'''J:''' The guy was able to shoot lightning from his fingertips.

'''C:''' Oh, see, that's why you're excited.

'''J:''' Yeah, so this, you know, it's a little scary, and he did seem to get more wrinkly in the face every time he shot the lightning out of his fingertips.

'''E:''' So his voice got a little hoarse.

'''J:''' It's a little, it's a little scary. Yeah, so, no, but again, you know, I know, look, as soon as I read the headline, I'm like, ooh, ah, ah, you know? Like, I got a little excited.

'''C:''' And as soon as you read the headline, I was like, uh, womp, womp, womp.

'''S:''' Well, it's just, this is such an early study. The probability of this turning into anything is, like, less than 1%, right? That's basically, at this stage, you have some marker, it's gonna turn out to actually have therapeutic application, very, very low. And it's gonna take us 20 years to know, or more, right?

'''C:''' Not 5 to 10, we've moved on.

'''S:''' No, we're in the, this is definitely in the 20 years. Five to 10's like when you're at the phase three level, like you're starting the phase three trial. This is sort of the 20 year mark. There's a lot to work out, a lot to work out with this.

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'''S:''' All right, Bob, let me ask you a question.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Have you ever heard of Red Mercury?

'''E:''' The movie?

'''B:''' What, in science fiction? I have, I have, I have heard of that.

'''C:''' What is Red Mercury?

'''S:''' Red Mercury, that's a good question, Cara. So it is, it's essentially an urban legend that has come around again because of social media, but it's a very interesting story. It goes back, actually, to the Middle East. Not really sure exactly how long. It's kind of like, it's a cultural legend in some cultures in the Middle East. It's like the djinn, right? But the idea is that it is a healing elixir that was used by the ancient Egyptians, and the only way to get it today is from the mouth of an Egyptian mummy.

'''C:''' Wait, what? I just Googled Red Mercury, and it talks all about nuclear waste.

'''E:''' So I was right, science fiction.

'''S:''' That's the second, that's the second life I'm getting to that.

'''C:''' Oh, sorry.

'''S:''' This is partly why it's interesting, because it has its origin in a particular culture and is tied in with a lot of their cultural beliefs, and it's this notion that the ancient Egyptians have this sort of mystique, and whatever is associated with the mummies, you might think there was some kind of mojo going on there. And so, and anything that has even the whiff of healing about it, then people are gonna immediately get very, very interested. So yeah, so Red Mercury had this sort of initial urban legend life as this healing elixir from ancient Egypt, and Westerners heard about it mostly from archaeologists who have had to fend off people who were prospecting for this Red Mercury in mummy's tombs. So people were trying to get it from Egyptian mummies, and they had to fend them off. That's how we came to learn about it.

'''B:''' And therefore?

'''S:''' But in the 1970s, a separate Red Mercury urban legend or myth developed, and it's unclear what the relationship is with the original Red Mercury healing elixir legend. The story, the properties are completely different. Whether it was just a coincidence that they used the same term, or that people used that term because it already was out there as kind of this legendary mythical material. All right, so this Red Mercury was supposed to be a very, very, very high-energy chemical compound, literal mercury that was combined with antimony, and then irradiated in the core of a nuclear reactor. And when you do that, according to the legend, you get this very, very high-energy chemical compound that could be used in order to make, to use as a very, very small trigger device for a nuclear bomb, either a fission or a fusion bomb. So by making a very, very small trigger, this could basically create the possibility for a briefcase fusion bomb.

'''E:''' Suitcase nuke.

'''S:''' Yeah, so that was the fear. But also, it could just be used as a dirty bomb if you had combined it with some radioactive material, or it could just be a high explosive unto itself. There was a lot of interest in obtaining Red Mercury by terrorists. And that caused the intelligence agencies in the West to take it seriously, because we had to figure out, okay, is this real or not? I found an article in the New Scientist from 1995, basically debating whether or not Red Mercury is a real terrorist threat, or is it complete nonsense, and quoting different experts with opposite opinions. Some saying it's nonsense, others saying this could be a real threat to civilization if this thing, if this gets out. It's possible that this was a hoax that was committed when the Soviet Union fell, right? Although the idea already existed, but imagine the Soviet Union is collapsing, and there was definitely a lot of profiteering going on at that time. So if you were on the inside in the Soviet Union, you could tell people around the world, yeah, this Red Mercury stuff's real, and it was made by the Soviet Union, and now we could get access to it, because the Soviet Union's not keeping an eye on things anymore. There was actually a real fear when the Soviet Union collapsed that what would happen to the nuclear weapons and nuclear material, yeah, would find their way, and this whole Red Mercury hoax rode the coattails of that fear, and then people started selling fake Red Mercury for incredible amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of pounds, British pounds, for a vial of it, very, very expensive. There's another angle to this that's very interesting, and it's possible that Western intelligence agencies used the offer of Red Mercury as their own sting operation to flush out terrorists, right?

'''E:''' That I could believe.

'''S:''' Yeah, so pretending to be somebody who's selling Red Mercury, and then a terrorist comes to you to buy it, and you got him, right, so that was the idea. But of course, that perpetuated the urban legend, it perpetuated the myth, it lent it credibility. And now Red Mercury is getting a third life, which is sort of the newsy item, recently on social media. You could actually find YouTube videos online where people show you how to make it, but it's just, apparently all you need is mercury, lemon juice, and cheesecloth, and you could make quote-unquote Red Mercury. But what they're showing is, so you can fake Red Mercury in a few ways on video, you could just, because real mercury is silvery, it's highly reflective, and so if you have anything red above it, it will just reflect that red color, or the red light, and look red. Or you could just put dye, you could put red dye into the mercury itself.

'''C:''' Isn't it kind of dangerous to be messing around with mercury?

'''S:''' Yeah, and if you look at the videos, they're wearing gloves, which does, I don't know if that's just for the drama, or if it's because they're actually using a little bit of mercury. But yeah, mercury's toxic, you shouldn't be playing with it. Or you could use video effects. And there are some videos out there, this is sort of another angle. So it's really interesting how this legend is morphing over time, from a healing elixir to a nuclear material, and now to like this magical substance. So there are videos online purporting to show that Red Mercury has no reflection in a mirror. Why? Which of course is just a very simple video thing. Yes, so there's a vampire connection, because there are, some people claim, so this is how the legend morphs, that Red Mercury can be sourced from bat nests. Of course, bats don't have nests, so that's a problem. But that aside.

'''J:''' That aside though.

'''S:''' And so once somebody made the connection to bat, then vampire bat, then vampires, yeah, bat. And so if there's a connection to vampires, and you can prove that connection by showing it doesn't have a reflection in a mirror. So that's the latest incarnation of the morphing of this legend of Red Mercury, which probably does not exist.

'''C:''' It's so sad too, isn't it, Steve, where people have these like heuristics in their head, where like, depending on how steeped you are in lore and stuff, if somebody were like to just say a few words about it and throw in some of those buzzwords in their head, so it'd be like, yeah, that checks out.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''C:''' Bats, blood, vampires, they all kind of exist. Oh yeah, totally.

'''S:''' It's all connect. That's, yeah. Now, of course, there is a Red Mercury-based mineral. Does anybody know what that is? Cinnabar, yeah, Cinnabar. But it's solid.

'''E:''' I've heard of Cinnabar.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a solid, it's not liquid. But it has nothing to do with this. It's just, yeah, sure, there's some mineral that contains mercury that's red, but it's not this stuff. So anyway.

'''C:''' Non-existent stuff.

'''S:''' A fascinating tale of something that doesn't exist. And of course, this all reminded me of red matter. You guys remember red matter?

'''E:''' That was from Star Trek, yes.

'''S:''' That was terrible.

'''E:''' The movie relaunch, oh gosh, they mined it.

'''C:''' What was it?

'''J:''' Very dangerous stuff, man. Don't mess with it.

'''C:''' Tell me.

'''S:''' It's crazy. So yeah, so Spock had this glob of red matter, which was a liquid mercury-like red substance, which is sort of a similar kind of vibe to it, that had properties so that you could sort of create a singularity with a drop of the stuff. Get this, Cara, he used it in order to stop a supernova from destroying the galaxy.

'''C:''' Well, that's good.

'''B:''' Makes a lot of sense.

'''E:''' Yeah, it's a practical application.

'''C:''' And also vampires.

'''S:''' And also vampires. Of course, Spock had no reflection. I don't know if you knew that.

'''C:''' The conspiracy deepened.

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'''S:''' All right, let's go on to some real science news. Evan, tell us about crystal healing.

'''E:''' Best segue of the night.

'''S:''' The other day, I read an article in The Guardian, Guardian Online, titled Dark Crystal, The Brutal Reality Behind a Booming Wellness Craze.

'''S:''' By the way, does the Dark Crystal reboot?

'''C:''' They rebooted The Dark Crystal?

'''S:''' Yeah, Dark Crystal as a series, as a TV series.

'''C:''' Is it Jim Henson still? Is it puppets?

'''S:''' Well, Jim Henson is dead.

'''J:''' It's his production company, his estate.

'''C:''' Well, I know, but his company?

'''S:''' Yes, it's all with puppets. And although there's a little bit of a CG overlay, just to make it a little bit less puppety. And it's really good. It's gorgeous, actually. And it's a prequel. It's actually a prequel to the movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

'''J:''' It's super faithful to the look and feel of the original movie and the sound. I mean, it's almost identical.

'''E:''' And that was one of the reasons I was drawn to this headline, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Dark Crystal, obviously, the movie from 1982 and Henson and Franca. So it's a very clever title to use for the article. And then subtitle describing the brutality of the wellness craze of crystals, or as we're fond of saying here in America, crystal healing. So what is crystal healing? Well, here's what The Guardian article says about it. Believers say crystals conduct ambient energy, like miniature phone towers picking up signals and channeling them onto the user, thus rebalancing malign energies, healing the body and mind. So that's about as deep as they get, but there's more to it than that. Here's the rest of the pseudoscience of it all. The belief that crystals have healing properties is a form of energy medicine, which we have talked about quite a bit on the show. Crystals can contain, they can amplify, attract, or repel different kinds of energy. And energy medicine in general, we're not talking about any kind of real energy that can be identified or measured by physicists. So the energy referred to in energy medicine is purely metaphorical and mythical. And it's also sometimes referred to as spiritual energy. You may hear it referred to in that context. Can't be measured by science, but apparently it does have effects in the rest of the measurable world. Therein lies the contradiction. This is why it's an extraordinary claim. This is why it's pseudoscience, and why it's nothing more than a belief system.

'''S:''' It's faith. It's faith healing with crystals, basically.

'''C:''' Is this what people push around when they do Reiki?

'''E:''' I believe, yes, that is right.

'''S:''' Reiki is also an energy medicine-based thing. So is acupuncture, so is straight chiropractic.

'''C:''' Oh, okay.

'''E:''' All part of the same.

'''S:''' It's all spiritual energy you can't detect.

'''E:''' Can't detect it. And if you look online, some cursory searching for crystal energy or crystal healing, you can see what they're describing. Now, it's not only scientifically unfounded, but how they describe these things are, I think, rather childish and overly simplistic when trying to tie in the physical characteristics of the crystals to the powers that they claim to have. For example, rose quartz, commonly used for attracting and keeping love as well as protecting relationships. Well, that's because it's pink, and pink is a color of love.

'''J:''' It is. Oh, wait, wait, wait. This is really starting to make sense now.

'''E:''' That's right. But beware the obsidian crystals. Ooh, well, don't beware them. You need them to protect you from shadows, ooh, addictions, fears, anxiety, anger, all this black, ugly stuff.

'''S:''' White walkers. Don't forget white walkers.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh, I almost forgot that. Must have your obsidian crystals around. So it's kind of childish the way it goes. Something so ridiculous must be considered fringe, right? An outlier of society. Belief that only people from a less scientifically advanced time would fall prey to. No, because according to Pew Research Center data in 2018, more than 60% of U.S. adults hold at least one new age belief, such as astrology or psychics. 42% think spiritual energy can be located in physical objects such as crystals.

'''S:''' 42.

'''�E:''' That is disturbing. And more about this article makes it even more disturbing. You know, we've seen a rise in this, especially lately, kind of the last eight to 10 years, we've covered several stories on the show describing examples of how, especially in the United States and a lot of Western cultures, they're abandoning more traditional forms of religion and religious identification, but at the same time, they're embracing more new age beliefs and practices, astrology, psychic abilities, and crystals and crystal therapy. They're seeing a resurgence and ascension. And this is where the Guardian article kind of takes a closer look at it. Check this out.

'''S:''' You could find websites that will tell you which crystal you should use according to your astrological sign. It doesn't get more scientific than that.

'''E:''' In a way, it makes perfect sense. Isn't that right? Pseudoscience begets more pseudoscience. Why not? There's plenty of room on the pile for it all.

'''J:''' I would have been rich by now, guys.

'''E:''' Jay, you totally would have been rich. Hashtags for crystals and hashtag healing crystals, tens of millions.

'''J:''' Yeah, I came up with this idea when it was like a year before we started the SGU. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna make a website that recharges crystals. And I built it. It was done.

'''C:''' It recharges them.

'''J:''' The website was completed. It was done. And Steve had a very severe, I don't wanna say severe, he had a very heart-to-heart with me. Like, Jay, don't do this. And I'm like, yeah, but Steve, they're gonna spend their money anyway. Like, why shouldn't, you know, why can't I have that money, you know?

'''C:''' Or why not like divert all of that money to like embryonic stem cell research?

'''J:''' Cara?

'''C:''' Or like something that'll really help the world.

'''J:''' So many good things would have benefited from me becoming rich 10 years ago.

'''C:''' There's a crystal shop like in my old neighborhood. I just recently moved. So I don't walk by it anymore.

'''J:''' What goes on in there?

'''C:''' Well, it's like they sell crystals and like dream catchers and shit. And there, I walked by it with my very good friend who happens to be really into this stuff. And there was a gift card in the window. And it said like, I love you even though, or like, I love you because you don't mind that I'm into all this woo-woo bullshit. And I was like, that's so us because I really love my friend and I'm constantly trying to like get her out of it. But at the end of the day, I have to just love her regardless of the fact that she believes in all this woo-woo bullshit.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh. There are a couple of people in my life as well, Cara, who absolutely, absolutely believe in crystals and crystal power.

'''C:''' Hook, line, and sinker.

'''E:''' Pyramids as well.

'''C:''' Pyramids, oh no.

'''E:''' It's remarkable. Yep. The thing about this particular Guardian article, getting back to the article, is that although they don't really go into this deep dive about the bunk of crystals and crystal healing, they take a look into the actual trade, the actual market for these things and how the heck do these things get from remote parts of the earth onto the shelves and into the stores of where we can buy them here in America and elsewhere. So it's scary and it reads like something out of the movie Blood Diamond, to be perfectly honest. And they go to Madagascar. Madagascar, large island country off the east coast of Southern Africa. Also one of the poorest countries in the world, but it has lots and lots of minerals and crystals. Rose quartz, amethyst, citrine, labradorite, among others. Some very popular ones that we see and buy here in the West. Gems and precious metals were Madagascar's fastest growing export in 2017, up 170% from 2016. So in just one year, whoa. They are among the other nations such as India, Brazil, China, these really large industrialized nations. Madagascar is right alongside them as far as one of the key producers of crystals for the entire world. But it's human bodies rather than machinery that pull the crystals from the earth. The people are the beasts of burden. More than 80% of crystals mined in Madagascar are mined by small groups of people, families, with no regulation and they're practically paid nothing for their labor. It is so poorly regulated, the mining locations are out there in remote areas of what are already remote areas of the world. Far from the eyes of authority, from health officials and from humanitarian groups. These countrysides are run by gangs. They rule the area using ruthless tactics such as theft and intimidation and rape and murder. So this is the environment in which these mines exist and they are terribly unsafe. They're prone to collapsing. Workers become buried alive to die. They can't always get them out. People are seriously injured in landslides and dirt avalanches. They have little to no protective clothing, these workers. They don't wear masks, they're barefoot. They're constantly breathing in dust and rock particles. They become sick. They're exposed to higher risks of cancer and silicosis. And the longer they try to make a living in these mines, the more subject they are to it. Child labor, child labor is widespread. U.S. Department of Labor and the International Labor Organization estimate that about 85,000 children work in the mines of Madagascar. Ew. And it's a particularly nightmarish scenario for children because in some cases, think of this, they are lowered by ropes into holes in the ground which are barely one meter in diameter and they go down as far as 25 meters below the surface to scrape and dig by hand.

'''J:''' Oh, man.

'''E:''' Which in a space which I would generously define as claustrophobic. I mean, to me, that's the stuff of nightmares. It's hard to even imagine it. No shaft support whatsoever, literally just a hole in the ground. And in some cases, 19 tons of soil and rock above you, suspended only by its own natural cohesion and at any point, these things can collapse. So when we talk about what's the harm, talk about belief in nonsense, we remind people every day that there's a huge cost to the belief in the ridiculous and the non-scientific. Crystals may seem like harmless or at least it's my body, who else am I hurting by believing that crystals have healing properties? Well, you only need to peer down, I think one of these black holes in the grounds of Madagascar to get your answer. Pseudoscience can kill and cause tremendous suffering, not just to the person trying to make use of the nonsense, but all the people and steps it takes to deliver these dangerous goods to our shelves and our markets.

'''S:''' Yeah, but I would say though, that is a distinct problem because nothing wrong with collecting minerals, I love to collect gems and gemstones, et cetera. But yeah, we definitely have to address the issue. It's like the conflict-free diamond thing, trying to be conscious about where your gems are being sourced. Unfortunately, most of these semi-precious stones are being sourced all around the world in these kind of lawless places, but what do we do about it? Even if there wasn't a crystal healing culture, there would still be a market for these. We just wouldn't be as big as this.

'''C:''' And the thing is, you want to support industry, you just want to also support regulation and obviously civil rights. And so that's where the conflict really comes in. We know it's relatively clear how to stay away from blood diamonds now. It's relatively clear not to buy rubies now. We know certain things, but it's hard, I guess, as a consumer to really understand that.

'''S:''' Yeah, but you're not gonna think about rose quartz.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly, or just quartz. It's everywhere, yeah. It's like, where did I get this stone?

'''S:''' I do think though, if your industry is based on pseudoscience, then I do think that's a setup for problems. We talked about the traditional Chinese medicine market, trafficking in parts of endangered animals like pangolin scales, or the supplement industry trafficking in contaminated and adulterated products. If your whole business is a scam, you're probably not worrying about where you're sourcing your raw material. I think that's really the problem. Yeah.

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'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about this massive neutron star.

'''B:''' Yes, the biggest neutron star ever has apparently been discovered. It's so big that some think we may never find one bigger. So are they correct? If so, why or why not? This was recently published in Nature Astronomy. We've talked about neutron stars over and over and over. They're not really stars, right? They're kind of corpses of stars. Beautiful and fascinating, but still pretty much burned out cinders in many ways. But they are still amazing, city-sized with the mass of a sun or two squeezed into that tiny, tiny volume with gravitational effects and behaviors that are just mind-boggling and still very, very mysterious. So the name of this neutron star is kind of long and boring. I won't even say it. I'm gonna call it Fred. Fred is-

'''E:''' Fred.

'''B:''' Fred is 4,600 light years from Earth, and it emits radio waves and spins 289 times per second around its axis, and that makes it a pulsar, of course. The really fascinating part of the story, though, is not just its huge mass, but the method that they used to determine its mass was especially interesting. I hadn't heard of it before. So kind of put your imagination goggles on. We've got, it's a binary system. It's not just a neutron star. It's a binary. There's another player here, and it's a white dwarf. The white dwarf and the neutron star were orbiting each other, and it also was nearly edge-on. The orbital plane was pretty much edge-on to the astronomer's eyes. So then, so you have this white dwarf orbiting around a black hole, essentially, and every four days, it would kind of finish an orbit, or so every four days, it would kind of come between us and the neutron star. So that's kind of critical. What happens when that, in this very specific scenario, is you have what's called a Shapiro delay. When the white dwarf was between us and the neutron star, the effects on space-time around the white dwarf impacted the radio waves coming from the neutron star behind it, okay? And that would actually delay, just by a little bit, the pulsar's radio waves from hitting the Earth. And the delay only amounted to about 1 ten-millionth of a second. So very minor, very tiny, tiny delay. Unless the white dwarf was between us, there would be no delay, but only when it was between us, you'd have this delay. So what that delay would give us is the mass of the white dwarf, because the amount of delay is directly related to the mass of the white dwarf. And so now, we have the mass of the white dwarf, and that would then give us the mass of the other partner in the binary system, because that's a relatively simple calculation. If you have one mass, and you know about the binary system and its orbit, you can then calculate the mass of the other object, which is the neutron star, which is what they did. So that was the technique, very fascinating technique, apparently very, very accurate. So when it was all said and done, the mass was calculated to be 2.14 solar masses. So the neutron star had the equivalent mass of 2.14 of our sun, in terms of its mass. So, oh, big deal, what is 2.14? Actually, that's a very interesting number, because as far as we could tell, as far as what our theories are telling us, that the maximum mass that a neutron star could have is 2.16, or probably maybe closer to 2.17. So this bad boy was really, really close to having the amount of mass it needs, the maximum mass it could have, without turning into a black hole, okay? So, and that's because of degeneracy pressure. We've talked about this a few times on the show. Real quick, once you get past, once you get past, say, 2.17 solar masses, then the neutron degeneracy, the neutrons together, are saying, you can't go any farther than this, it's pushing back, pushing back, but when you have more than 2.17 solar masses, the neutron degeneracy pressure gives out, and that's the last thing that was holding back that mass from becoming a black hole. So once you go a little bit beyond that, bam, you go into a black hole, you have a singularity, and all the beautiful, wonderful, mysterious things that happen with a black hole. And you, essentially, you're leaving the universe, right? I mean, the neutron star is great because it's so exotic, but it's a real thing in our universe that we could learn about. A black hole is, you know, is hidden, and it's mysterious, and some things that we will never, ever, you know, penetrate the veil of the event horizon. So it's a major, you talk about a major milestone there, and this neutron star is really, really, really close to it. So close that if Jay threw a meatball at Fred the neutron star, it could collapse into a black hole. And, of course, that's completely wrong because it's not just a meatball. Jay's meatballs are big, but they're not that big. What you would need is a meatball around 1,300th the mass of the sun to tip over Fred the neutron star into Fred the black hole.

'''S:''' That's a big meatball.

'''B:''' That's a big meatball.

'''E:''' That's a spicy meatball.

'''J:''' Now, Bob, does it matter, like, if I put any pork in this meatball, or does it just have to be beef? Like, give me some straight.

'''E:''' Mass is mass.

'''B:''' None of that matters. You could throw marbles in there, too.

'''J:''' Wait, wait, are you saying that pork in a meatball doesn't matter? What?

'''B:''' A black hole doesn't give a crap about it.

'''J:''' Oh, the black hole, I got you.

'''B:''' So that amount of mass, 300th the mass of the sun, it's a lot, and it's a little, depending on how you look at it. I think it's enough. I think there's enough wiggle room here that we will eventually find another neutron star, that we'll eventually find one that is even closer, you know, 2.15, 2.159, or six, whatever. I think, I hope we'll find one that's even closer and closer, because I would love to find the point where it's so close that maybe we could even potentially catch it in the act of swallowing just a little bit more extra mass and seeing it reach the tipping point and transition from a neutron star into a black hole. That would be amazing. But all of this is amazing, and that's why astrophysicists, astrophysicists?

'''C:''' Fizzle cysts. Fizzle cysts.

'''B:''' Yeah, reminds me of Jay's boy, Dylan. Fizzle cysts, what a great word. So that's what makes astrophysics so fascinating and valuable. It's really a laboratory in space that we will never really be able to truly recreate in a lab on the Earth. It's the only way we can find out some of this type of information until we evolve our technology for another couple millennia, and then we'll be able to just recreate it in our heads. But until then, we have to rely on laboratories in space. It's an amazing universe out there, and we're learning new things like this neutron star every day, and I just can't wait for the next news item.

{{anchor|wtn}}{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? () ==
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'''S:''' All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' Last week, I played this noisy. [lays Noisy] It's kind of repetitive, huh?

'''E:''' A bit, a bit.

'''J:''' It is more on the noisy side of a noisy, isn't it?

'''B:''' Nice.

'''J:''' So Visto Tutti wrote in and said, okay, it's an alarm siren, but I suppose you want more than that.

'''B:''' What's that name?

'''J:''' Visto Tutti.

'''B:''' Visto Tutti, wow, awesome name.

'''J:''' So I will say that it is the alarm at the Large Hadron Collider. That's funny. So let's say here, he said, you gotta warn people that the tunnel is about to get, as the British would say, quite thoroughly irradiated. So that would be a horrifying alarm noise. Listen to that and think of it as an alarm. [plays Noisy]Wow.

'''C:''' Yeah, because it's like screaming at you.

'''J:''' Yeah. What are you doing? Get out of here now. So Mark Constantine wrote in, hi, goddammit, I knew that Sydney subway won, but I thought it was too simple because I hear the damn thing every day. So anyway, this week, it sounded like a lyrebird imitating a car alarm. That is not correct, my friend. Although I would not doubt that a lyrebird, if it heard that noise enough, could actually make a noise that sounds exactly like the one you just heard. But that's not a cromulent guess, my friend.

'''S:''' Yeah, but about any noise, you could say it's a lyrebird imitating that noise.

'''J:''' Yeah, I will say, well, the only thing is, is if the lyrebird does something so good that I have to play it on the show, I probably, you know, I'm just saying, I'm probably not gonna play a lyrebird imitation again because I've already heard it do amazing things like chainsaws and camera clicks, but you never know, another lyrebird mimicking noise might be worthy to get on the show. But unlikely. Richard Hosker wrote, Jay, this week's noisy is the sound of a screaming hamster running in a hamster wheel. Damn, that's a good guess. You are not correct, but it certainly does sound like that.

'''C:''' Can hamsters scream?

'''J:''' They certainly do, if they're stuck on a wheel, you know.

'''C:''' Ooh.

'''J:''' So, we've got so many weird guesses this week because it's such a weird noise. So we do kind of have a winner. This is a close, so I'm gonna give this person the win. This person's name is Brian and his nickname is iPuppy. I don't know why. I think it's cute. He said, hey, long time, several time. I'm going to try to guess the noisy each week and here it goes, nothing. The sound is like the noise a weather fax machine on the bridge of a ship makes. The screeching is the data coming over the radio. The repetitive mechanical sound is the thermal printer head printing the image on the fax paper or it's something similar, old telephone, fax machine, mimeograph, or large format printer. So this is pretty close. So here's the actual answer and this is coming from the person who sent it in last week. They said, hey, Jay, here's my suggested noisy. It's a recording of a balinograph operating or also known as a wire photo invented by Edouard Bellin at the first way to send photos by wire. He said, he looked into this at his place of work, a university in Toulouse, France. It's on Avenue Edouard Bellin and on the street name sign, it says inventor of the balinograph or balinography. He's recently been getting into the podcast and thank you for listening. So what is this? It is the device that first was able to digitally send or electronically by some means send a photo from one place to another. So it is kind of, I believe, like a fax machine and kind of like a printer at the same time, but I could not find any video of this machine operating and that is the unbelievably horrible noise that it made. And thank God, like we moved away from it, right? Imagine if that's what all of our office machines sounded like.

'''C:''' Well, you remember what it used to sound like when we dialed up?

'''J:''' Well, that was, I did. Cara, I might be romanticizing it, but I certainly did like those tones especially when it worked well. You know, like there was something fun about it.

'''C:''' Nope, not good.

'''J:''' Nope, okay. Man, it's like, if you think back then, like we lived through those years. We were there, we had the computers that were around at the time and to dial up and you had to use your phone line. Like, you know, it's like it was so inconvenient but amazing at the same time. I remember when like the first internet fun stuff started to happen and me and all, you know, all you guys and my friends, we were all like sharing these funny files with each other. We would go to each other's houses with disks and they'd be like, here, man, like look at this stuff I found, you know, and you'd like share like the booty from the past couple of weeks. Those days are long gone.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy () ===

'''J:''' Okay, so this week's noisy guys was sent in by a listener named Patrick Johnstone. And Patrick gave me a single clue that I am not going to give the audience because he did the surprise one where he sent me the noisy and then a file attached that is the reveal, which you don't ever, you know, for future reference, you guys don't have to do that. But if you want to go ahead, but you don't have to. I did not guess what it was. I actually guessed completely wrong. And this is one of those noisies, man. It's a toughie, but check this out.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

Oh, I don't know what happened at the end there. Anyway, very, very fun and interesting noisy this week. So thank you, Patrick, for sending that in. If you think you know what this is, and if you heard anything cool this week, now, Cara, you went to Africa. Like where are my 25 noisies per day that you heard over there that you could have just given me like the download of amazing sounds? What happened?

'''C:''' Yeah, but people would know what they are.

'''J:''' Yeah, but at least one animal making a weird noise that you wouldn't think came out of the mouth of that animal, anything.

'''C:''' Okay, I'll get you something.

'''J:''' Thank you.

'''C:''' You're welcome.

'''J:''' And you know what, when we do it, Cara, we'll do a special, like Cara, who's that noisy as the person who suggested it, and I'll wear a costume or something. I'll do something fun for you.

'''C:''' And nobody will be able to see it.

'''J:''' Right, but at least you would know.

'''C:''' Good.

'''J:''' So email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

'''S:''' All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

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== Science or Fiction (h:mm:ss) ==

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''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Cara, you're coming off a solo win last week. You beat the boys.

'''C:''' I'm gonna not have false confidence.

'''S:''' Good. There's another theme this week. The theme is dragonflies.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''S:''' What do you know about dragonflies?

'''J:''' I don't think anything.

'''S:''' Well, good. All right, here we go. Three items.

'''J:''' Oh, good, good.

'''E:''' Excellent.

'''S:''' That's good. We'll see, we'll see what you know about dragonflies. All right, here we go. Item number one. Dragonflies may swarm in groups so large, numbering in the billions, that they show up on weather radar. Item number two. Of the over 7,000 species of dragonfly, a few dozen have venomous bites or stings, but none threatening to humans. And item number three. Dragonflies are voracious predators, and the large ones have been reported eating hummingbirds and other small vertebrates.

'''C:''' What?

'''S:''' Oh, Cara, that sounds like you wanna go first.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' No.

'''B:''' That's why I don't say shit.

'''C:''' I know. I think that the, I think that dragonflies have swarmed to the extent that they've shown up on weather radars. I feel like this happened recently in LA, but it wasn't dragonflies. It was like ladybugs. But I feel like I've read that dragonflies do that too, but I could be wrong. I could just be mixing them up with ladybugs. But if ladybugs can do it, why can't dragonflies? 7,000 species. Well, but that's not that weird, right? But I always think of numbers that high as being beetles.

'''J:''' Right.

'''C:''' 7,000, that's dragonfly. That's very specific. That seems like a high number. And venomous bites, I've literally never heard of a dragonfly. You always think of dragonflies as being the quote-unquote sweet insects?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' That they don't bite. So I don't know. That one, just my spidey sense says maybe that one's the fiction. They're voracious predators, and the large ones have been reported eating hummingbirds and other small vertebrates. Hummingbirds can be really small, and dragonflies can be really big. So I don't know. This one doesn't, it sounds crazy, but the more I think about it, the more I think that one could be science. So I'm gonna say the 7,000 with some being venomous is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' All right, swarming in the billions. I don't think I've ever seen two dragonflies together unless they were having sex.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Right? I've never seen a swarm of them, but I haven't seen a swarm of locusts either, and I know they swarm. So what is, yeah. So let's see. Let's jump down to three, voracious predators. Yeah, Cara makes a good point. I mean, hummingbirds can get small, and they can get fairly big. So, and they can, I know they can maneuver like a mother. I mean, with those four wings, two sets of two, they are amazingly maneuverable. So I could see them catching a hummingbird, I guess. But yeah, I'm gonna, I'll have to do a GWC here. 7,000 species seems high, and I've never, being venomous and stinging? Wow. I mean, I thought they were just kind of cool and never anything that could do that to you. So I'll go, I'll say that number two, 7,000 species and venomous is fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' Yeah, I think I'm inclined to agree with Cara and Bob here. Few dozen have venomous bites or stings, but none threatening to humans. None of those few dozen is what you're referring to in that item, Steve, right?

'''S:''' None of the 7,000.

'''E:''' None of the 7,000. Okay, so that's, that takes to that. Well, I kind of still feel like this one's the fiction. Maybe the dragonfly can't really get through your skin, kind of like a, what, a daddy long legs, right? They have poison, but they can't get through your skin. So technically it does have venom that could affect you, but can it even get there? I think maybe it's something along those lines. You know, one flies in your open mouth, you're probably in big time trouble there. And then as far as the other ones, the group's so large and they show up on weather radar. Yeah, I've heard lots of reports of different kinds of insects having that impact on the radar. So I'm not surprised there. And then the large ones, these things do get pretty large in some places. And to eat a hummingbird? Sure, I don't see why not, especially because they do have venomous bites and stings, and a hummingbird, you can get through their skin pretty easy. So I agree, Cara and Bob, the venomous bites and stings is threatening to humans is fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, although you just used that, you used two to justify three, but you're saying it's a fiction.

'''E:''' Used two to justify three? Yeah.

'''C:''' You said that they are venomous.

'''E:''' Well, yes, but-

'''S:''' So I'm sure I followed that. I don't think that quite scanned, but that's okay. You're saying number two.

'''E:''' All right, I am saying number two's the fiction, same as Cara and Jay's.

'''S:''' Okay, all right, and Jay.

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' Well, I'd like to begin by saying that I read the three of these and I don't believe any of them because they're all unbelievable, right? So dragonflies swarming in the billions, what? I see one once a year.

'''C:''' You only see one? Oh, you need to hang out at more ponds.

'''J:''' Okay, well, yeah, I'm not really, pool's good for me, you know?

'''S:''' The pond or the pool.

'''B:''' I'll hang out with you next time at a pond.

'''J:''' So here's my logic. Okay, I'm saying to myself, Jay, remember, these are insects. So then, okay, the billions, okay. Yeah, especially after they all mate, then they all give birth and they're all hanging around the same place because they like to mate and give birth in the same place, or whatever, laying their eggs. All right, but billions, wow, okay, but they're insects. So I'll say that one is a definite possibility. The second one here about having venomous bites or stings, but none of them threaten humans. I listened to what everybody said. I didn't know, like, first off, you could have got me just on 7,000 species. There's biting and stinging. I don't know, I don't think they sting at all. Like my instincts are telling me that these are not stinging type of insects. So that is a check towards me saying this one is fiction. The last one, the voracious predator one, I just, for some reason, I just don't picture dragonflies flying around going, ha-da, ha-da, you know, like they're not slathering like my puppy running around biting sheetrock. They're not those kinds of creatures. Okay, dragonflies and eating the birds, wow. I mean, I'm scared of these bastards, if this is true. I don't know, but everyone's said it. I think I'm gonna go with the group, Steve, because I don't think that they sting, and I don't think that they, yes, this one, that one seems to be the most fictiony of all of them, so I will say that.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Okay, so let's take this in order. Dragonflies may swarm in groups so large, numbering in the billions, that they show up on weather radar. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''S:''' And yeah, I agree with you guys. You usually don't see like a swarm of dragonflies, even like in the summer next to water in their environment where there's a lot of, you see individual dragonflies, or you see dragonflies mating. You know, they kind of make that, you know, that C kind of configuration, the head-to-toe-to-tail thing. That's the male using the long, you know, tail as a sperm depositor.

'''B:''' Let's not get explicit here, we got kids.

'''S:''' And they don't usually travel in swarms, but if the weather conditions are just right, they will tend to bunch up, and these bunches of these swarms can get really, really large. And they have shown up on weather radar. They may be also mixed in with other insects, and not necessarily just 100% dragonflies, but they're primarily swarms of dragonflies. Very cool.

'''E:''' It's intimidating.

'''S:''' Let's go on to number two.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Of the over 7,000 species of dragonfly, a few dozen have venomous bites or stings, but none threatening to humans. So there's a lot of elements there that could be incorrect. You guys seem to think that 7,000's a lot of species of dragonfly, and that you're not sure that any of them are venomous or sting, although Evan is not sure.

'''E:''' Yeah, I'm not 100% sure.

'''S:''' But you guys all think this one is the fiction, and this one is the fiction.

'''C:''' Yes!

'''J:''' All right.

'''E:''' Thanks, Cara.

'''C:''' Woo, you're welcome.

'''S:''' Well, let's break it down. So the 7,000 species is correct.

'''C:''' Oh, jeez, really?

'''S:''' That's not a lot. That is not a lot, guys.

'''C:''' I know, but it's a lot. It's not a lot for an insect.

'''S:''' It's not a lot for an insect. There's over 100,000 species of beetle.

'''E:''' Oh, beetle's the number one. Beetle's the king.

'''B:''' Oh, God is inordinately fond of them.

'''S:''' But tens of thousands is typical for many groups of insects. So 7,000's actually not that much for a group of insects, to be honest with you. You know what the closest relative to the dragonfly is in the same group with it? The damselfly.

'''C:''' Oh, damselfly, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, do you know what the difference between a dragonfly is and a damselfly?

'''J:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Number of wings?

'''S:''' Nope, they all have four wings.

'''J:''' The females fly backwards.

'''S:''' No. So dragonflies have rigid wings.

'''J:''' Rigid wings, there you go.

'''S:''' Always.

'''C:''' Love that.

'''S:''' Always extended. Damselflies can fold their wings back.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''S:''' Have any of you guys seen Carnival Row?

'''B:''' No, I keep hearing about it.

'''C:''' Is that a TV show?

'''S:''' It's great, I love it. Yeah, it's a great show. Carnival Row, I highly recommend it. It's an alternate universe where there are fairies, right? And the fairies have four insect wings. They fly with their rapidly beating wings. But when they're not flying, they fold back down along their back. So basically they have damselfly wings, the fairies. But anyway, but there are no dragonflies that are venomous or sting. So that's the part that's made up.

'''J:''' Okay. Yeah, they don't have stingers.

'''S:''' They don't have stingers. They 100% don't have stingers. And I could not find a statement anywhere that there are no venomous dragonflies. But I read as much as I could, I could not find any mention of any venomous dragonflies. And I read entries that if there were, it would have said it. But still, I was looking for that magic phrase, there are no venomous dragonflies. I couldn't find it. But as far as I could tell, and I'm pretty confident from the extent that I read, that's why I threw in the stings to make it 100% fiction. But they are not threatening to humans, but they do bite. So they do have very deadly mandibles if you're a bug.

'''J:''' And if you're very small.

'''S:''' And if you're very small. Even a hummingbird, yeah, the big ones have these enormous mandibles, these big teeth. And they will bite you though. If you capture a dragonfly and hold it in your hand, they will probably bite you as a defense mechanism. And if it's a big dragonfly, it may actually even hurt. But it probably won't break the skin or draw blood.

'''J:''' Okay, note to self, don't be fearless around dragonflies anymore.

'''S:''' Dragonflies will not attack a human being and they will not bite you unprovoked. But if you threaten them, if you capture one and hold it in your hand, it will probably bite you to try to get away. But you-

'''C:''' But it probably won't even hurt.

'''S:''' You probably won't feel it, right? But if it's a big one, if it's a big one, it may hurt. You may feel a pinch, you may feel a pinch. Yeah.

'''J:''' What do you recommend, Steve?

'''S:''' Harm you, it's not gonna harm you.

'''E:''' Wear gloves if you're gonna capture these things.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I'm just saying that if they get too close, you shoot them with a shotgun.

'''C:''' Oh, what about that horrible tennis racket thing you got me?

'''J:''' Horrible? That thing is amazing, Cara.

'''C:''' But I would never zap a dragonfly. I'm only gonna zap-

'''J:''' No, I would not.

'''C:''' Mosquitoes, houseflies, and cockroaches.

'''B:''' Hummingbirds.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Because dragonflies are voracious predators and the large ones have been reported eating hummingbirds and other small vertebrates is science.

'''C:''' Yay.

'''S:''' And Cara is right, dragonflies eat mostly insects. This is rarely. A large one will occasionally take out a little lizard or a hummingbird or something, but you can see pictures of it online. And it's amazing, you see a picture of a dragonfly that's as big as a hummingbird, holy crap.

'''C:''' That's awesome.

'''S:''' But they eat, they just go through, they are voracious. They eat so many insects.

'''B:''' Like bats.

'''S:''' Yeah, they are amongst the most successful hunters if you keep track of how often they capture their prey when they go after them. What do you think their success ratio is?

'''J:''' For whenever they attack?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I'd say one in five.

'''C:''' No, it's gotta be higher than that because they eat so much, so they must be pretty successful.

'''E:''' One in-

'''C:''' 60%?

'''S:''' 95%, they are among the most successful hunters. And they have a very sophisticated nervous system. So first of all, they have like among the best, if not the best eyes in the insect world. They have like 30, 40,000 facets to their eyes. They have, the wings give them excellent control, as Bob said, but also their brains. Recently, neuroscientists studying dragonfly brains have discovered that they have incredible ability to focus in on their prey. And they can also like keep track of one fly or one insect in the middle of a swarm. So their brains can filter out everyone else. Like once they focus on their prey, their brain filters out everything else.

'''J:''' Hey, Bob.

'''S:''' Even in a swarm, they can keep track of that fly.

'''J:''' Bob, remember in the movie Alien, the first one?

'''B:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Oh yeah.

'''J:''' And the android actually looks up to the creature, you know, he admires it.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' This is Steve. Steve is, this is Steve acting just like that android right now.

'''S:''' Oh, it's true. But here, one more thing. The dragonflies are really cool insects.

'''B:''' Oh yeah.

'''S:''' The other thing is they don't chase their prey.

'''J:''' They stroll. They're very casual about it.

'''S:''' No, they intercept them. So their brains can calculate distance, speed, trajectory, and then they take an intercept path and they go where their prey's going to be, right? They intercept its path. They don't just chase it down. And that's partly why they're so successful.

'''B:''' Yeah, you intercept Mars. You don't chase it.

'''S:''' Yeah. And then once they capture their prey, the first thing they do is bite their wings off. So they're immobilized. And then they generally eat the insects that they kill. They generally eat them from the head down. And they just will constantly, constantly eat. There was, I read one report of a dragonfly that got caught in a spider's web and then ate the spider.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''C:''' That's awesome.

'''E:''' That'll learn you.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''S:''' Turn the tails on it. They are, they are.

'''B:''' Spiders, and what the hell?

'''S:''' Incredible predators. They are incredible predators.

'''J:''' I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me.

'''B:''' You're trapped in here with me.

'''E:''' The Watchman, that's a great saying.

'''S:''' But it's funny that if you ask people like what the three nicest or prettiest or friendliest insects are, they're butterflies, ladybugs, and dragonflies.

'''J:''' And dragonflies. Yeah, I know. They're pretty, they're beautiful.

'''S:''' I love them, I know.

'''E:''' You can't judge an insect by it's-

'''J:''' I'm gonna stay away from it. And Cara, I am never gonna eat a dragonfly meal or flower, okay?

'''C:''' I don't think they make that, so you don't have to worry about it. Well, there are probably some cultures where they do eat dragonflies.

'''E:''' Oh, I imagine, sure.

'''C:''' But I don't think you can like buy dragonfly flower on the shelf right now. It's mostly crickets.

'''J:''' Okay.

'''S:''' And you can find online, you can find websites for how to attract dragonflies to your property.

'''C:''' Yay.

'''S:''' Yeah, but it's basically you make a little pond and you put little fish in there because they actually will eat little fish. Here's the other thing. The dragonfly larvae, also voracious killers. They will eat fish.

'''J:''' Oh my God.

'''S:''' The larvae themselves, yeah. Yeah, these things are hungry. Now imagine back in the Jurassic era.

'''J:''' Prehistoric.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''J:''' When they were the size of bats, you know?

'''E:''' The size of a bus. Of a bus, not quite a bus, but no.

'''J:''' I'd like to think that back then they had Cockney accents, you know? At least one of you laughed. Thank you, Cara. I missed you. When you were gone, this was a humorless show.

'''C:''' There's a void.

'''J:''' There was nothing going on.

'''S:''' The largest dragonfly discovered had a wingspan of 710 millimeters.

'''J:''' Why don't they just say an inch, you know?

'''S:''' You want to do like that?

'''J:''' No, I'm just joking.

'''S:''' That's about 20 inches.

'''B:''' 30 inches. 30 inches, oh my God.

'''C:''' That's enormous.

'''E:''' Get that thing away from me.

'''C:''' No, that's beautiful.

'''J:''' That is totally out of the movie Caveman, like for real.

'''B:''' Yeah, totally thinking about that, Jay.

'''E:''' And Jay, you would need a shotgun at that point, probably.

'''J:''' Right, at that point. At that point-

'''S:''' You would need a shotgun.

'''J:''' Cara, what if there were billions of them?

'''E:''' Oh yeah, showing up on prehistoric radar. I mean, gosh.

'''C:''' That's true, they would eat you. They would just eat you and carry you away.

'''J:''' You walk outside one morning and one of them's driving your car, you know?

'''S:''' Then you'd wish you'd had that tennis racket.

'''J:''' That's right.

'''E:''' Who's laughing now?

'''S:''' That would be cool, though. Could you imagine seeing a meter long dragonfly?

'''C:''' That would be awesome.

'''E:''' Only if I'm behind six inches of transparent aluminum, yes.

'''C:''' Oh, come on.

'''J:''' It'd be cool on TV. I'm kind of happy we live in a small insect world, okay?

'''C:''' I think big bugs are really cool. I'm always so excited when I see them in other countries. We don't have, you're right.

'''J:''' In other countries, notice Cara didn't say, whenever I see them in my bathroom. She said, in other countries.

'''C:''' Living in L.A., I don't see that many really big bugs and it kind of bumps me out. We do have some periodically, but I follow a friend from South Africa on Instagram and he just posted today that there was a whip scorpion in his garage.

'''E:''' It's called an insect gram.

'''J:''' No thanks.

'''C:''' I'm like, that's so cool. That's that bug that I put on my face when I was in the Amazon video.

'''E:''' Oh, the face.

'''C:''' The face bug.

'''S:''' Cara, you want to go to Madagascar, they have the Madagascar hissing cockroach.

'''C:''' I know, those are awesome.

'''S:''' Those are like five to seven centimeters.

'''C:''' There's so many cool big, big bugs, especially in Southeast Asia. So I'm hoping that I'm going to go to Indonesia at the end of this year and I want to see some really big bugs in Indonesia.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Fingers crossed.

'''S:''' I like big bugs and I cannot lie.

'''C:''' I knew you were going to go there.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

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'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' Hey, Steve, I'm flipping the script tonight.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''E:''' I proposed a quote. I'm changing to a different quote.

'''S:''' Oh, an unapproved quote.

'''J:''' And it's a quote from Evan's wife. It's, get the hell out of the bathroom, you bastard. Jennifer Bernstein.

'''S:''' What are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don't you get out there and give someone else a chance?

'''J:''' Lossy.

'''B:''' Bam, bam, bam, bam. Just trying to remember that quote.

'''E:''' I'm combing my hair. All right, so this is a quote suggested by a listener, Adam Mullis from Iowa. And I'll read the email and then I'll read the quote, okay? Hi, Evan, I'm a graduate student in chemical engineering at Iowa State University, studying nanoparticles that improve the potency of existing antibiotics.

'''B:''' Cool.

'''E:''' I came across this quote on the Chemistry World podcast and I thought it fit in with the medical misinformation theme that comes across frequently in the show. It's attributed to the FDA commissioner's decision during the banning of Laetrile. Here it is. "The Laetrile proponents maintained that even if the drug did not work, people should still have the right to take it because they deserve freedom of choice. But the sellers of Laetrile did not offer a free choice. They persuaded cancer victims, desperate and dying, to buy a drug that did not work on the basis of false hope. Only informed choices are free."

'''S:''' Yep, awesome.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''S:''' That's a good quote.

'''E:''' Yeah. Oh boy, the whole Laetrile story. Have we ever, have we talked about that on the show?

'''S:''' We have, we have, but maybe we could come around again. If it ever pops up in the news anywhere, we'll readdress it, but yeah.

'''E:''' So I thought that was a fantastic.

'''S:''' That's old school, old school.

'''E:''' Thank you, Adam.

'''S:''' All right, well thank you, Evan.

'''E:''' Thank you.

'''S:''' Thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

'''E:''' Pleasure.

'''J:''' Right.

'''E:''' Pleasure.

== Signoff ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


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SGU Episode 741

2025-04-12T15:00:00Z

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== Introduction ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, September 18th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' I love science.

'''S:''' Thank you. I'm happy for you. Evan, what if I told you that mathematicians used a planetary computer in order to find the question, the correct answer to which is the number 42?

'''E:''' Oh, yeah, boy. Let's see. That's a darn good book you're reading.

'''S:''' And this really happened. No, this is real life. This really happened.

'''E:''' Okay, we've gone from fiction to reality. All right.

'''S:''' It's real, it's true. I know Cara's heard about this because she tweeted about it. But you guys heard this?

'''B:''' Yeah, awesome. Sum of the three cubes, baby.

'''S:''' Yeah, sum of the three cubes.

'''J:''' I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I mean, I recognize the 42 and everything, but this is a real news item?

'''S:''' eah, this is real. So in 1954, at the University of Cambridge.

'''E:''' Uh-huh, I've heard of that.

'''S:''' Yeah, so the mathematicians proposed this, what's called the Diophantine equation. It's X cubed plus Y cubed plus Z cubed. So sum of three cubes equals K. And they wanted to solve that for all numbers from one to 100. And they did, except for two, the number 33 and the number 42. However, recently, they solved it for 33, which left 42 as the only number, the only integer between one and 100 for which-

'''E:''' There was no answer.

'''S:''' There was no answer, right. There was no sum of three cubes that added up to the number 42.

'''B:''' Right, so you needed a distinct number multiplied by itself three times, and add that to yet another distinct number, different from the first one, multiplied by itself three times, plus a third one.

'''S:''' It has to be an integer, right?

'''J:''' Why is this important?

'''C:''' It's fun.

'''S:''' It's one of those math problems. Yeah. So it was recently solved by mathematician, Professor Andrew Booker at MIT. It's kind of a funky solution because the three numbers are all huge, but one of them is negative. So I guess it almost balances out, except for a residue of 42.

'''E:''' Well, that seems like it took them an awfully long time to nail this particular one down. You're saying 1954 is when this was started?

'''S:''' Yeah. And they did use a quote-unquote planetary or worldwide computer. They used one of those engines where, it's called the Charity Engine, where it basically uses 500,000 PCs around the world.

'''B:''' Hence the planetary computer.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Neat. Okay, kind of what's similar to what SETI does with their project?

'''S:''' Yeah, it's like a computing at home app, yeah.

'''B:''' Wait a second, wait a second. Wait, those are huge numbers.

'''S:''' Yeah, I know, but I just said that, Bob. One of them is negative.

'''B:''' But wait a second, if K equals one to 100, and the one that they're solving for is 42, how are you gonna cube those big numbers?

'''S:''' Bob.

'''B:''' Oh, because of the negative.

'''C:''' He's a mathematician from MIT, you gotta trust him on this.

'''S:''' They're just adding them together, so you add a big negative number to two slightly smaller positive numbers, and yeah, it adds up to 42.

'''B:''' Gotcha, gotcha, cool.

'''S:''' I had the same reaction, like, wait a minute, these numbers are huge, oh, the first one's negative.

'''B:''' The negative. Yeah, the negative.

'''E:''' Negative will do that. So that's fascinating.

'''S:''' Yes, it is. Now, that provokes the question, is this a coincidence, or did Douglas Adams know this? Did he pick the number 42 because he knew about this?

'''E:''' Because he knew 33 and 42 were the two outstanding numbers at the time that he wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

'''B''' I doubt it, Evan, I doubt it. Because they've been, I think, I mean, that was many, many years ago, it was like in the 70s that he did that, and I think some of these have been solved since then, and some of them were actually, some of them decided they were unsolvable. They do mention that in the article, where some of them were just like, like, 71, sorry, that's been shown to be unsolvable, so they know they didn't have to work on that one anymore. But they didn't go into any detail, how many were unsolvable? So I looked up what the origin of 42 was in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the answer is-

'''B:''' 42.

'''S:''' Nobody knows, except Stephen Fry. So there is an answer, but Douglas Adams only told Stephen Fry, and he, of course, died.

'''E:''' I'm dubious.

'''S:''' Douglas Adams passed away at the age of 49.

'''B:''' Sad day.

'''S:''' And Stephen Fry has promised to take that secret to his grave.

'''J:''' No, why would he do that?

'''E:''' I'm sorry.

'''C:''' Who said that he only told Stephen Fry? Did Douglas Adams say that, or did Stephen Fry say that?

'''E:''' Right, is this part of a skit?

'''S:''' I don't know.

'''B:''' Yeah, that's good, he could be totally making that shit up.

'''C:''' Because Stephen Fry could just say that.

'''S:''' Say, I know, but I'm not telling anybody?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' I don't know if that was confirmed, but, so apparently, that will be a mystery. He did not want to reveal to the world where he got 42 from.

'''B:''' That's fine, I'm fine with that.

'''C:''' Probably because he just made it up.

'''E:''' Right, I mean, that could be the answer.

'''C:''' It's probably just a non-story.

'''E:''' It's like, oh, it's just 42.

'''B:''' I like it, because you think of something yourself. It doesn't, it would kind of detract from it if it was some mundane source that he got 42 from.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Well, sure, but at the same time, it's not this international mystery that must be solved, I don't think.

'''S:''' Well, and I suspect that Adams wanted it to be its kind of meta, it is a mystery, right? The number, the origin of the number itself in The Hitchhiker's Guide itself is a mystery.

'''C:''' Yeah, Evan, I feel like you may be underestimating the nerdiness of nerds a little bit.

'''E:''' Oh, jeez, okay, all right.

'''B:''' And aren't they, are they wrong about this whole idea of the planetary computer? Because Deep Thought designed the planetary computer, otherwise known as Earth.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Right?

'''S:''' Yeah, this is just, it's just a metaphor. They're just trying to make as much of a connection as possible. I know, in The Hitchhiker's Guide, the computer was Earth. The whole Earth was the computer.

'''B:''' Yeah, Deep Thought designed it.

'''S:''' Worldwide distributed computer network.

'''B:''' Yeah, but they, my point is that they bring up Deep Thought and it wasn't Deep Thought.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah, they're making an error in the reference. Well, Deep Thought came up with the answer, 42.

'''B:''' Right, and the planet Earth was created to come up with what the question was. You know, when you're coming up with a really epic question, you better think it out a little bit.

'''S:''' And what was the question? What is six times eight?

'''B:''' How many paths must a person take? I don't know, I forget. It's been so long. It's due for another listen of Douglas Adams reading his Hitchhiker series.

'''E:''' According to Bob, that is the only way-

'''B:''' The only way, the best way, I'll put it this way, the best way to enjoy that series. You could read it, read the words, fine. You could listen to Stephen Fry. I think Stephen Fry and some really awesome people narrate those books, and they're good too. But nobody is like Adams reading his own work. And he was just a wonder, as you can imagine, he was a fantastic narrator.

'''E:''' All right, Jay, you and I have to go and hang out with Stephen Fry and knock a few back and get him to loosen up so that he spills the secret. What do you think?

'''J:''' I would think more about threatening to kill him if he doesn't tell the world. I mean, this is a big deal.

'''C:''' Very aggressive, Jay.

'''J:''' I mean, it's the answer. You know what I mean? It's too big, it's too important for just one man to carry the weight.

'''C:''' I can't fathom the fact that we've been talking about this for 10 minutes straight at this point.

'''S:''' What do you want to talk about, polio?

'''C:''' Geez, yeah, sorry. Onto more pressing matter.

== News Items ==

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=== News_Item_1 (m:ss) ===
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'''S:''' All right, Cara, tell us about polio. Go ahead.

'''C:''' Oh, gosh. Well, I'd like to say that the polio virus saga has been, I think in many ways, a real testament to biomedical science. And we've talked about this before on the show. I feel like we might hit it like once a year, something like that, because I'm always really interested when there are new developments. And so the newest development in the conversation about polio virus is that there is a new vaccine being designed right now that could help with the remaining cases that exist. So let's do like a little quick and dirty background. So poliomyelitis is caused by the polio virus. And there are three different types of wild type polio virus. There's wild type one, two, and three. But there's also a type of polio virus that's a vaccine-derived polio virus. And it typically comes from wild type two within the vaccine. So currently, globally, there are two types of polio vaccines. You guys have heard of the Salk vaccine. That was the first one that was developed, I think in 1955, if I'm not mistaken. And that is an injection. And then there's an oral polio virus vaccine, which was developed like five or six years later. And the difference between the two is that the injection has killed virus in it, and the oral virus is attenuated. So that's like a weakened virus. The oral virus seems to be more effective in single dose. Like you usually need more than one dose of the injectable virus. And it's also easier to administer than having to have the needles for the injectable virus. So the oral virus tends to be used more worldwide. The problem is, every so often, people who take the oral virus will actually, they'll be populated with polio virus, but it's weakened polio virus. It won't make them sick, but it'll undergo mutations in the GI tract. And by the time they kind of poop the virus out into the community, into the water, or into the soil, it may, on very, very, very rare occasions, have actually mutated and be able to be virulent again. And so there are actually a number of cases of polio worldwide, which are caused by this vaccine-derived polio because of this attenuated virus. And I think I have a list here of the numbers we're looking at right now. So this year today, as of this week, this is as of September 11th, so that's the most recently published numbers. Globally, there are 78 cases of wild-type polio virus. That's amazing, isn't it? Can we just take a minute to think about how incredible that is?

'''J:''' Yeah, I never realized that there was that many independent versions of it. I mean, are they all as deadly as the next?

'''C:''' So they are, I actually don't know if one, two, and three vary in terms of their effects. Because the thing about polio is that talking about whether or not it's deadly is very individual. Like most people who actually contract polio don't even show symptoms. A percentage of people who contract it show flu-like symptoms, and only, I think, one in 200 people that contract it will have neurological symptoms. And so when we think of like the most devastating aspects of polio, like we think of like images of the iron lung and people on crutches, that's a very, very small percentage of people who even contracted the virus. But I'm not really sure if type one, type two, type three actually have any sort of difference in effect. I do know that type two is fully eradicated in the wild. So what a lot of people thought about doing is actually figuring out how to remove type two from the vaccine altogether because of the risk of the wild type, or of the vaccine derived. And we'll get to this new development in just a second. But so 78 people globally with wild type virus, all 78 are only in three countries. These are the endemic polio virus countries, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And then 72 so far this year, cases of circulating vaccine derived polio virus. And that's in, 15 of them are in those endemic countries, but a full 57 of them are in non-endemic countries. And so that's where the real fear comes out is that this spreads more. Also, there are a lot of countries where polio has been eradicated for so long that people aren't getting vaccinated.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's scary.

'''C:''' Yeah, so that's a real risk, right? So these researchers were like, okay, what do we do? How do we keep this type two that's in the oral vaccine from becoming virulent again? And they did a bunch of research and they realized that there's four different things that seem to happen in order for the vaccine to kind of mutate and revert to becoming virulent. There were 104 polio cases last year just due to the type two polio virus circulating and actually periodically, some of those cases did lead to paralysis. As I was saying, the things that they had to do, the steps that they had to take are kind of complicated, but there were four important changes that were made. One of them prevents it from folding up into the appropriate protein shape that it can do on its own in order to become revirulent. Another one involved changing the enzymes within the vaccine that actually copy the RNA so that when it makes a copy of itself, it's more accurate and it's less likely to mutate. The third change is that they, I'm not really sure how they did this, but they were able to reduce, oh, it's through the same enzyme that they use to change the way that it copies its RNA. It actually prevents, or not prevents, but reduces its recombinatory capability. So it's less likely to recombine with other viruses that are already populating the person who took the vaccine. And then lastly, the actual attenuated virus in the vaccine had its genetic material kind of rearranged a bit so that regions of RNA, if it were to combine with a different wild virus, would actually kill it instead of allowing it to be a new mutant. So for example, a lot of people in these countries are also carrying other gut viruses. It's not uncommon. One of the ones that they mention, and I don't really know anything about this, Steve, is Coxsackie, Coxsackie virus. So apparently a lot of kids carry Coxsackie virus, especially in these regions where this is a concern. And what sometimes happens is that the attenuated poliovirus will actually combine with portions of the Coxsackie virus, and that's how it'll mutate to become virulent again. But this change actually makes it so that when it tries to combine, it actually kills the virus, which is great. So they've tested this so far in cells. They've tested it in a mouse model, and they've also done a phase one clinical trial, which we talked about a lot last week. So that showed that they did not make people sick. They were pretty well-tolerated. The immune response is there, so the vaccine is working. Unfortunately, it didn't completely eradicate the reversion to virulence, but it did reduce it compared to the original oral vaccine. So that's a really good sign. So long story short, this is what happens at the end of an eradication effort. I mean, I think it's fair to say, or when you're doing really well in an eradication effort, when this started in 1988, we saw a 99% reduction in rates. It might've even been like 99.9 or 0.8%. We went from thousands of cases, maybe even tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases, down to 100 cases a year. It's incredible. But now that we're playing whack-a-mole trying to get rid of these last few cases, because once it's fully eradicated, it's gone. Only humans carry this virus. There's no reservoir. It's amazing.

'''S:''' So it can't be eradicated. Unlike, not every virus can be eradicated.

'''C:''' Yeah, unlike Ebola or something, which is living in bats or rats or whatever.

'''E:''' It would still exist in laboratories and contained areas.

'''C:''' Like, is smallpox eradicated?

'''S:''' Yes, but smallpox exists in labs.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly. So it's like eradicated from the human population, but it might still be in vials. And that's necessary, right? In case if something did happen. Or in case if we detected a virus that was somewhat similar.

'''S:''' It's a debate. There's a debate about whether or not we should get rid of any stored virus once it's eradicated, because then it's gone from the world. There's no possibility of an accident or a theft or whatever. So that's an open question, actually.

'''E:''' Interesting.

'''C:''' Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question, too.

'''B:''' Trivial.

'''S:''' I don't think so. I mean, there's something to be said for it. Imagine it's like there is no smallpox virus in the world. They can't possibly come back.

'''B:''' Big deal. They're gonna be creating, they'll be creating viruses and infections that never existed in nature, that are 1,000 times more vicious.

'''C:''' Who is they?

'''B:''' The bad people.

'''C:''' Oh, the bad people.

'''S:''' The bad people.

'''C:''' But I mean, what happens, Steve, and I'm sure, obviously, this is part of the conversation, if a cowpox virus or some other type of pox does crop up that is genetically somewhat similar to smallpox, and if we still had those smallpox stores, we would be able to fast-track vaccine research. I think that's probably the argument for keeping things is that a lot of viruses are somewhat similar.

'''S:''' And it's so frustrating, because we were so close like 10 years ago, but it was the anti-vaccine fears that kept it going. We missed our chance, and now we're trying to recreate it.

'''C:''' And I mean, we're still, but let's be clear, we're still so close. Like, we're very close. We're talking only 150 cases so far this year.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, but that's so many more than there was when we were close last time. And close doesn't really count. We gotta get over that finish line until it's eradicated, because then we still have to keep up vaccinating everybody, et cetera.

'''C:''' Yeah, once it's eradicated, we don't have to get the vaccine anymore at all. That's amazing. So yeah.

'''S:''' All right, we'll keep pushing. And who knows, maybe eventually we'll be able to reverse aging, right, Jay?

'''C:''' Oh, God.

'''E:''' Really?

'''C:''' That's a whole other conversation we will not be having right now.

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'''J:''' Yes, actually, we are having it right now.

'''C:''' Damn it! Jay, I'm gonna have to keep my mouth shut this whole time.

'''J:''' If you wanna die, Cara, it's gonna happen, so don't worry about it. You'll die.

'''C:''' Thank you. That's a very enlightened perspective.

'''J:''' But for those of us who don't think that a scant 60 to 80 years is quite enough, because it isn't.

'''E:''' 60?

'''J:''' So look, I'll start off by saying that this is a very early, early, early small study. There are a couple of things about this news item worth really digging into, but everything else, we just need a ton more research done before we could actually say anything definitive. But according to a recent study, it seems that a certain combination of drugs was able to reverse the test subject's biological age, and that is a key term in the sentence, which they determined examining changes to their DNA, right? So they're looking at these test subjects' DNA. So let's get into the details. The study was published on September 5th, 2019 in the journal Aging Cell, and it consisted of nine healthy white males between the ages of 51 and 65. Now, three times a week, the test subjects had to administer a combination of growth hormone, a diabetes medication, and what I believe to be a second hormone supplement. These articles that are coming out aren't giving 100% of the details. So at the end of the year of research that they did on these nine test subjects, they found that the subjects' DNA were on average 2.5 years younger than their previous biological ages. Are you already confused? Because it is a little confusing. So let me get into what I'm actually saying here. So this means that over the course of the test year that the subjects were taking the medication and they aged chronologically another year, but their biological age, as I will explain how that is determined in a second, their biological age seemed to decrease by 1.5 years, which if you add it to the year of testing, it's 2.5 years. So anyway, let me get into what's actually going on here. So before the medication was administered, the test subjects had their DNA examined for common signs of aging that biologists call epigenetic clocks. So they're using these markers that are found on human DNA. And over a human's lifespan, DNA acquires these certain chemical tags that are found riding on top of the double helix as we age. And as an example, one of these tags is made up of a carbon and a hydrogen atom stuck together, and they stick to the outside of the DNA strand. And these tags, scientists believe, can alter how a particular part of a genetic piece of information is read. And that's what they think one of the reasons why we have an actual physical effect of aging, one of the reasons why we actually age could be that these epigenetic molecules are sticking to the outside of our DNA and causing it to be, I guess, misread. You can think of these epigenetic changes or chemical tags as flags that demonstrate a person's biological age. So they will look for these chemical tags, they will see a certain arrangement of them, a certain frequency of them, and the scientists have a way to determine a person's quote-unquote biological age by doing this type of examination. And they say that it's as accurate as a two- to three-year range, which is really accurate and a little bit scary.

'''C:''' Yeah, but that also means that the outcome of the study is within the error bars.

'''J:''' Yeah, I know.

'''C:''' Which means that it could have done nothing. Nobody is saying here that they're 100% sure. They're only sure about one thing, which I'll get to in a second. So this early test does not prove that the test subjects actually became biologically younger, meaning that they actually grew to become younger. The scientists are trying to figure out if the epigenetic clocks are the cause of the aging themselves or if they just operate more like an after effect of the aging process. Does that make sense, guys?

'''S:''' Yes, because most of the things that we measure like that, that's what they are. They're markers that are just an effect of the thing that we're looking at, not the cause of the thing, right? So I'm sure there's a lot of things that happen in aging that doesn't mean that it's causing the aging, and that's actually one of the questions they're asking. Are we looking at something that's actually responsible for aging to some extent?

'''J:''' Or the result of aging, right?

'''S:''' Or just one of the probably many markers of aging.

'''J:''' It's kind of like, you can kind of think of it as an accumulation of scars that you get on your skin as you walk through life. Now, the scars aren't making you older. They're the result of just living a longer life. You get more scars. Okay.

'''S:''' That's a good analogy.

'''J:''' What they really did was they first identified the biological epigenetic markers that attach themselves to DNA. They were like, okay, we know that these exist. We know how to read them, and we know that they're pretty accurate in determining somebody's biological age. They administered the drugs for a completely different reason, but then when they went back and tested blood samples and took DNA tests of those blood samples, after the one-year drug regimen was over, they saw that some of those epigenetic markers were gone or changed in what they would read as a younger person's biological age. So that's it. And that's all they're claiming in all the headlines that you're reading. Nobody knows exactly. Like, nobody appeared younger. Nobody like, you know. The only thing that they noticed, and this was the one thing that I was gonna tell you, Cara, was they were testing part of the immune system, and they did find that these medications specifically rejuvenated a part of the immune system. And actually, more tissue was actually present after the study than before the study.

'''C:''' Oh, that scares me. That sounds like a precursor to cancer to me.

'''J:''' No, no.

'''S:''' You're talking about the thymus.

'''J:''' The thymus, yeah. The thymus functionality.

'''S:''' There was some thymic regrowth.

'''J:''' The studies, though, the study was limited, and I'll give you some things that you could talk to people about if they're saying that this is, you know, we're all gonna live forever. So they were saying that work has to be done to disprove the actual effects of the drugs, to prove or disprove. So as an example, there was no control group. There was only nine test subjects, which is amazingly small. And if the participants made any other positive lifestyle changes, they did not take that into account. So they don't know.

'''C:''' Which I'm sure they did in a study like this. Well, I'm not sure, but that's not uncommon.

'''S:''' It's common. They went off that heroin, you know.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly.

'''J:''' But the other thing that they did say was six months after the test was over, they re-sampled blood samples of six of the people that did the test, and the positive, the quote-unquote positive effects of their epigenetic markers was still there. So whatever it did, it did make a change that was lasting at least six months after the test.

'''C:''' My biggest concern with this is, yes, the sample size is small. Yes, there's no control group. Those are massive issues. But also, how much did they baseline test? Did they do a single sample?

'''J:''' I think that their baseline testing is the only thing that they could possibly use to-

'''S:''' How long did they do it for?

'''J:''' Express their-

'''C:''' But that's what I'm saying. Did they also do six months prior to starting?

'''J:''' Well, what this test is gonna do though, because again, and like I said, the initial test, the whole project here, wasn't based on this. This was just another thing that came out of it. So now, of course, they will move on to specifically design a much more robust test and be able to dig in to more detail. And actually, they'll do it much more correctly. I don't know. I wouldn't say they did anything incorrectly. They just didn't have that-

'''S:''' No, they just gotta do more. They gotta do more subjects. They gotta do a better baseline. They have to do a longer follow-up. They need more subjects in a double-blind, placebo-controlled arm. And they also need to test more things. So what they need to do is also is validate this marker as meaning something. In other words, does it predict the risk of dying over that period of time? That would be a good thing to correlate it with.

'''C:''' And also compare the other epigenetic markers that are established. Like, did it do anything for histone length? Did it do anything-

'''J:''' Sure.

'''C:''' I'm sorry, for loss of histones. Yeah, not, sorry, I didn't mean histone.

'''S:''' Not histones.

'''C:''' I didn't mean telomeres. I actually meant hist-

'''S:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Yeah, but that's not what I meant.

'''J:''' Not Cara, another-

'''C:''' One of the biggest epigenetic marks of aging is actually losing histones. And so, like, how is their histone count? Like, how, you know? And maybe, yeah, look at telomeres, look at other types of markers.

'''S:''' Telomere length, histone count, yeah.

'''C:''' Things like that.

'''J:''' Now, there was another cool thing that I didn't say, Cara, but there was one other side effect that one of the test subjects had.

'''S:''' Some monsterism?

'''J:''' The guy was able to shoot lightning from his fingertips.

'''C:''' Oh, see, that's why you're excited.

'''J:''' Yeah, so this, you know, it's a little scary, and he did seem to get more wrinkly in the face every time he shot the lightning out of his fingertips.

'''E:''' So his voice got a little hoarse.

'''J:''' It's a little, it's a little scary. Yeah, so, no, but again, you know, I know, look, as soon as I read the headline, I'm like, ooh, ah, ah, you know? Like, I got a little excited.

'''C:''' And as soon as you read the headline, I was like, uh, womp, womp, womp.

'''S:''' Well, it's just, this is such an early study. The probability of this turning into anything is, like, less than 1%, right? That's basically, at this stage, you have some marker, it's gonna turn out to actually have therapeutic application, very, very low. And it's gonna take us 20 years to know, or more, right?

'''C:''' Not 5 to 10, we've moved on.

'''S:''' No, we're in the, this is definitely in the 20 years. Five to 10's like when you're at the phase three level, like you're starting the phase three trial. This is sort of the 20 year mark. There's a lot to work out, a lot to work out with this.

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'''S:''' All right, Bob, let me ask you a question.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''S:''' Have you ever heard of Red Mercury?

'''E:''' The movie?

'''B:''' What, in science fiction? I have, I have, I have heard of that.

'''C:''' What is Red Mercury?

'''S:''' Red Mercury, that's a good question, Cara. So it is, it's essentially an urban legend that has come around again because of social media, but it's a very interesting story. It goes back, actually, to the Middle East. Not really sure exactly how long. It's kind of like, it's a cultural legend in some cultures in the Middle East. It's like the djinn, right? But the idea is that it is a healing elixir that was used by the ancient Egyptians, and the only way to get it today is from the mouth of an Egyptian mummy.

'''C:''' Wait, what? I just Googled Red Mercury, and it talks all about nuclear waste.

'''E:''' So I was right, science fiction.

'''S:''' That's the second, that's the second life I'm getting to that.

'''C:''' Oh, sorry.

'''S:''' This is partly why it's interesting, because it has its origin in a particular culture and is tied in with a lot of their cultural beliefs, and it's this notion that the ancient Egyptians have this sort of mystique, and whatever is associated with the mummies, you might think there was some kind of mojo going on there. And so, and anything that has even the whiff of healing about it, then people are gonna immediately get very, very interested. So yeah, so Red Mercury had this sort of initial urban legend life as this healing elixir from ancient Egypt, and Westerners heard about it mostly from archaeologists who have had to fend off people who were prospecting for this Red Mercury in mummy's tombs. So people were trying to get it from Egyptian mummies, and they had to fend them off. That's how we came to learn about it.

'''B:''' And therefore?

'''S:''' But in the 1970s, a separate Red Mercury urban legend or myth developed, and it's unclear what the relationship is with the original Red Mercury healing elixir legend. The story, the properties are completely different. Whether it was just a coincidence that they used the same term, or that people used that term because it already was out there as kind of this legendary mythical material. All right, so this Red Mercury was supposed to be a very, very, very high-energy chemical compound, literal mercury that was combined with antimony, and then irradiated in the core of a nuclear reactor. And when you do that, according to the legend, you get this very, very high-energy chemical compound that could be used in order to make, to use as a very, very small trigger device for a nuclear bomb, either a fission or a fusion bomb. So by making a very, very small trigger, this could basically create the possibility for a briefcase fusion bomb.

'''E:''' Suitcase nuke.

'''S:''' Yeah, so that was the fear. But also, it could just be used as a dirty bomb if you had combined it with some radioactive material, or it could just be a high explosive unto itself. There was a lot of interest in obtaining Red Mercury by terrorists. And that caused the intelligence agencies in the West to take it seriously, because we had to figure out, okay, is this real or not? I found an article in the New Scientist from 1995, basically debating whether or not Red Mercury is a real terrorist threat, or is it complete nonsense, and quoting different experts with opposite opinions. Some saying it's nonsense, others saying this could be a real threat to civilization if this thing, if this gets out. It's possible that this was a hoax that was committed when the Soviet Union fell, right? Although the idea already existed, but imagine the Soviet Union is collapsing, and there was definitely a lot of profiteering going on at that time. So if you were on the inside in the Soviet Union, you could tell people around the world, yeah, this Red Mercury stuff's real, and it was made by the Soviet Union, and now we could get access to it, because the Soviet Union's not keeping an eye on things anymore. There was actually a real fear when the Soviet Union collapsed that what would happen to the nuclear weapons and nuclear material, yeah, would find their way, and this whole Red Mercury hoax rode the coattails of that fear, and then people started selling fake Red Mercury for incredible amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of pounds, British pounds, for a vial of it, very, very expensive. There's another angle to this that's very interesting, and it's possible that Western intelligence agencies used the offer of Red Mercury as their own sting operation to flush out terrorists, right?

'''E:''' That I could believe.

'''S:''' Yeah, so pretending to be somebody who's selling Red Mercury, and then a terrorist comes to you to buy it, and you got him, right, so that was the idea. But of course, that perpetuated the urban legend, it perpetuated the myth, it lent it credibility. And now Red Mercury is getting a third life, which is sort of the newsy item, recently on social media. You could actually find YouTube videos online where people show you how to make it, but it's just, apparently all you need is mercury, lemon juice, and cheesecloth, and you could make quote-unquote Red Mercury. But what they're showing is, so you can fake Red Mercury in a few ways on video, you could just, because real mercury is silvery, it's highly reflective, and so if you have anything red above it, it will just reflect that red color, or the red light, and look red. Or you could just put dye, you could put red dye into the mercury itself.

'''C:''' Isn't it kind of dangerous to be messing around with mercury?

'''S:''' Yeah, and if you look at the videos, they're wearing gloves, which does, I don't know if that's just for the drama, or if it's because they're actually using a little bit of mercury. But yeah, mercury's toxic, you shouldn't be playing with it. Or you could use video effects. And there are some videos out there, this is sort of another angle. So it's really interesting how this legend is morphing over time, from a healing elixir to a nuclear material, and now to like this magical substance. So there are videos online purporting to show that Red Mercury has no reflection in a mirror. Why? Which of course is just a very simple video thing. Yes, so there's a vampire connection, because there are, some people claim, so this is how the legend morphs, that Red Mercury can be sourced from bat nests. Of course, bats don't have nests, so that's a problem. But that aside.

'''J:''' That aside though.

'''S:''' And so once somebody made the connection to bat, then vampire bat, then vampires, yeah, bat. And so if there's a connection to vampires, and you can prove that connection by showing it doesn't have a reflection in a mirror. So that's the latest incarnation of the morphing of this legend of Red Mercury, which probably does not exist.

'''C:''' It's so sad too, isn't it, Steve, where people have these like heuristics in their head, where like, depending on how steeped you are in lore and stuff, if somebody were like to just say a few words about it and throw in some of those buzzwords in their head, so it'd be like, yeah, that checks out.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''C:''' Bats, blood, vampires, they all kind of exist. Oh yeah, totally.

'''S:''' It's all connect. That's, yeah. Now, of course, there is a Red Mercury-based mineral. Does anybody know what that is? Cinnabar, yeah, Cinnabar. But it's solid.

'''E:''' I've heard of Cinnabar.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a solid, it's not liquid. But it has nothing to do with this. It's just, yeah, sure, there's some mineral that contains mercury that's red, but it's not this stuff. So anyway.

'''C:''' Non-existent stuff.

'''S:''' A fascinating tale of something that doesn't exist. And of course, this all reminded me of red matter. You guys remember red matter?

'''E:''' That was from Star Trek, yes.

'''S:''' That was terrible.

'''E:''' The movie relaunch, oh gosh, they mined it.

'''C:''' What was it?

'''J:''' Very dangerous stuff, man. Don't mess with it.

'''C:''' Tell me.

'''S:''' It's crazy. So yeah, so Spock had this glob of red matter, which was a liquid mercury-like red substance, which is sort of a similar kind of vibe to it, that had properties so that you could sort of create a singularity with a drop of the stuff. Get this, Cara, he used it in order to stop a supernova from destroying the galaxy.

'''C:''' Well, that's good.

'''B:''' Makes a lot of sense.

'''E:''' Yeah, it's a practical application.

'''C:''' And also vampires.

'''S:''' And also vampires. Of course, Spock had no reflection. I don't know if you knew that.

'''C:''' The conspiracy deepened.

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'''S:''' All right, let's go on to some real science news. Evan, tell us about crystal healing.

'''E:''' Best segue of the night.

'''S:''' The other day, I read an article in The Guardian, Guardian Online, titled Dark Crystal, The Brutal Reality Behind a Booming Wellness Craze.

'''S:''' By the way, does the Dark Crystal reboot?

'''C:''' They rebooted The Dark Crystal?

'''S:''' Yeah, Dark Crystal as a series, as a TV series.

'''C:''' Is it Jim Henson still? Is it puppets?

'''S:''' Well, Jim Henson is dead.

'''J:''' It's his production company, his estate.

'''C:''' Well, I know, but his company?

'''S:''' Yes, it's all with puppets. And although there's a little bit of a CG overlay, just to make it a little bit less puppety. And it's really good. It's gorgeous, actually. And it's a prequel. It's actually a prequel to the movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

'''J:''' It's super faithful to the look and feel of the original movie and the sound. I mean, it's almost identical.

'''E:''' And that was one of the reasons I was drawn to this headline, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Dark Crystal, obviously, the movie from 1982 and Henson and Franca. So it's a very clever title to use for the article. And then subtitle describing the brutality of the wellness craze of crystals, or as we're fond of saying here in America, crystal healing. So what is crystal healing? Well, here's what The Guardian article says about it. Believers say crystals conduct ambient energy, like miniature phone towers picking up signals and channeling them onto the user, thus rebalancing malign energies, healing the body and mind. So that's about as deep as they get, but there's more to it than that. Here's the rest of the pseudoscience of it all. The belief that crystals have healing properties is a form of energy medicine, which we have talked about quite a bit on the show. Crystals can contain, they can amplify, attract, or repel different kinds of energy. And energy medicine in general, we're not talking about any kind of real energy that can be identified or measured by physicists. So the energy referred to in energy medicine is purely metaphorical and mythical. And it's also sometimes referred to as spiritual energy. You may hear it referred to in that context. Can't be measured by science, but apparently it does have effects in the rest of the measurable world. Therein lies the contradiction. This is why it's an extraordinary claim. This is why it's pseudoscience, and why it's nothing more than a belief system.

'''S:''' It's faith. It's faith healing with crystals, basically.

'''C:''' Is this what people push around when they do Reiki?

'''E:''' I believe, yes, that is right.

'''S:''' Reiki is also an energy medicine-based thing. So is acupuncture, so is straight chiropractic.

'''C:''' Oh, okay.

'''E:''' All part of the same.

'''S:''' It's all spiritual energy you can't detect.

'''E:''' Can't detect it. And if you look online, some cursory searching for crystal energy or crystal healing, you can see what they're describing. Now, it's not only scientifically unfounded, but how they describe these things are, I think, rather childish and overly simplistic when trying to tie in the physical characteristics of the crystals to the powers that they claim to have. For example, rose quartz, commonly used for attracting and keeping love as well as protecting relationships. Well, that's because it's pink, and pink is a color of love.

'''J:''' It is. Oh, wait, wait, wait. This is really starting to make sense now.

'''E:''' That's right. But beware the obsidian crystals. Ooh, well, don't beware them. You need them to protect you from shadows, ooh, addictions, fears, anxiety, anger, all this black, ugly stuff.

'''S:''' White walkers. Don't forget white walkers.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh, I almost forgot that. Must have your obsidian crystals around. So it's kind of childish the way it goes. Something so ridiculous must be considered fringe, right? An outlier of society. Belief that only people from a less scientifically advanced time would fall prey to. No, because according to Pew Research Center data in 2018, more than 60% of U.S. adults hold at least one new age belief, such as astrology or psychics. 42% think spiritual energy can be located in physical objects such as crystals.

'''S:''' 42.

'''�E:''' That is disturbing. And more about this article makes it even more disturbing. You know, we've seen a rise in this, especially lately, kind of the last eight to 10 years, we've covered several stories on the show describing examples of how, especially in the United States and a lot of Western cultures, they're abandoning more traditional forms of religion and religious identification, but at the same time, they're embracing more new age beliefs and practices, astrology, psychic abilities, and crystals and crystal therapy. They're seeing a resurgence and ascension. And this is where the Guardian article kind of takes a closer look at it. Check this out.

'''S:''' You could find websites that will tell you which crystal you should use according to your astrological sign. It doesn't get more scientific than that.

'''E:''' In a way, it makes perfect sense. Isn't that right? Pseudoscience begets more pseudoscience. Why not? There's plenty of room on the pile for it all.

'''J:''' I would have been rich by now, guys.

'''E:''' Jay, you totally would have been rich. Hashtags for crystals and hashtag healing crystals, tens of millions.

'''J:''' Yeah, I came up with this idea when it was like a year before we started the SGU. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna make a website that recharges crystals. And I built it. It was done.

'''C:''' It recharges them.

'''J:''' The website was completed. It was done. And Steve had a very severe, I don't wanna say severe, he had a very heart-to-heart with me. Like, Jay, don't do this. And I'm like, yeah, but Steve, they're gonna spend their money anyway. Like, why shouldn't, you know, why can't I have that money, you know?

'''C:''' Or why not like divert all of that money to like embryonic stem cell research?

'''J:''' Cara?

'''C:''' Or like something that'll really help the world.

'''J:''' So many good things would have benefited from me becoming rich 10 years ago.

'''C:''' There's a crystal shop like in my old neighborhood. I just recently moved. So I don't walk by it anymore.

'''J:''' What goes on in there?

'''C:''' Well, it's like they sell crystals and like dream catchers and shit. And there, I walked by it with my very good friend who happens to be really into this stuff. And there was a gift card in the window. And it said like, I love you even though, or like, I love you because you don't mind that I'm into all this woo-woo bullshit. And I was like, that's so us because I really love my friend and I'm constantly trying to like get her out of it. But at the end of the day, I have to just love her regardless of the fact that she believes in all this woo-woo bullshit.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh. There are a couple of people in my life as well, Cara, who absolutely, absolutely believe in crystals and crystal power.

'''C:''' Hook, line, and sinker.

'''E:''' Pyramids as well.

'''C:''' Pyramids, oh no.

'''E:''' It's remarkable. Yep. The thing about this particular Guardian article, getting back to the article, is that although they don't really go into this deep dive about the bunk of crystals and crystal healing, they take a look into the actual trade, the actual market for these things and how the heck do these things get from remote parts of the earth onto the shelves and into the stores of where we can buy them here in America and elsewhere. So it's scary and it reads like something out of the movie Blood Diamond, to be perfectly honest. And they go to Madagascar. Madagascar, large island country off the east coast of Southern Africa. Also one of the poorest countries in the world, but it has lots and lots of minerals and crystals. Rose quartz, amethyst, citrine, labradorite, among others. Some very popular ones that we see and buy here in the West. Gems and precious metals were Madagascar's fastest growing export in 2017, up 170% from 2016. So in just one year, whoa. They are among the other nations such as India, Brazil, China, these really large industrialized nations. Madagascar is right alongside them as far as one of the key producers of crystals for the entire world. But it's human bodies rather than machinery that pull the crystals from the earth. The people are the beasts of burden. More than 80% of crystals mined in Madagascar are mined by small groups of people, families, with no regulation and they're practically paid nothing for their labor. It is so poorly regulated, the mining locations are out there in remote areas of what are already remote areas of the world. Far from the eyes of authority, from health officials and from humanitarian groups. These countrysides are run by gangs. They rule the area using ruthless tactics such as theft and intimidation and rape and murder. So this is the environment in which these mines exist and they are terribly unsafe. They're prone to collapsing. Workers become buried alive to die. They can't always get them out. People are seriously injured in landslides and dirt avalanches. They have little to no protective clothing, these workers. They don't wear masks, they're barefoot. They're constantly breathing in dust and rock particles. They become sick. They're exposed to higher risks of cancer and silicosis. And the longer they try to make a living in these mines, the more subject they are to it. Child labor, child labor is widespread. U.S. Department of Labor and the International Labor Organization estimate that about 85,000 children work in the mines of Madagascar. Ew. And it's a particularly nightmarish scenario for children because in some cases, think of this, they are lowered by ropes into holes in the ground which are barely one meter in diameter and they go down as far as 25 meters below the surface to scrape and dig by hand.

'''J:''' Oh, man.

'''E:''' Which in a space which I would generously define as claustrophobic. I mean, to me, that's the stuff of nightmares. It's hard to even imagine it. No shaft support whatsoever, literally just a hole in the ground. And in some cases, 19 tons of soil and rock above you, suspended only by its own natural cohesion and at any point, these things can collapse. So when we talk about what's the harm, talk about belief in nonsense, we remind people every day that there's a huge cost to the belief in the ridiculous and the non-scientific. Crystals may seem like harmless or at least it's my body, who else am I hurting by believing that crystals have healing properties? Well, you only need to peer down, I think one of these black holes in the grounds of Madagascar to get your answer. Pseudoscience can kill and cause tremendous suffering, not just to the person trying to make use of the nonsense, but all the people and steps it takes to deliver these dangerous goods to our shelves and our markets.

'''S:''' Yeah, but I would say though, that is a distinct problem because nothing wrong with collecting minerals, I love to collect gems and gemstones, et cetera. But yeah, we definitely have to address the issue. It's like the conflict-free diamond thing, trying to be conscious about where your gems are being sourced. Unfortunately, most of these semi-precious stones are being sourced all around the world in these kind of lawless places, but what do we do about it? Even if there wasn't a crystal healing culture, there would still be a market for these. We just wouldn't be as big as this.

'''C:''' And the thing is, you want to support industry, you just want to also support regulation and obviously civil rights. And so that's where the conflict really comes in. We know it's relatively clear how to stay away from blood diamonds now. It's relatively clear not to buy rubies now. We know certain things, but it's hard, I guess, as a consumer to really understand that.

'''S:''' Yeah, but you're not gonna think about rose quartz.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly, or just quartz. It's everywhere, yeah. It's like, where did I get this stone?

'''S:''' I do think though, if your industry is based on pseudoscience, then I do think that's a setup for problems. We talked about the traditional Chinese medicine market, trafficking in parts of endangered animals like pangolin scales, or the supplement industry trafficking in contaminated and adulterated products. If your whole business is a scam, you're probably not worrying about where you're sourcing your raw material. I think that's really the problem. Yeah.

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'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about this massive neutron star.

'''B:''' Yes, the biggest neutron star ever has apparently been discovered. It's so big that some think we may never find one bigger. So are they correct? If so, why or why not? This was recently published in Nature Astronomy. We've talked about neutron stars over and over and over. They're not really stars, right? They're kind of corpses of stars. Beautiful and fascinating, but still pretty much burned out cinders in many ways. But they are still amazing, city-sized with the mass of a sun or two squeezed into that tiny, tiny volume with gravitational effects and behaviors that are just mind-boggling and still very, very mysterious. So the name of this neutron star is kind of long and boring. I won't even say it. I'm gonna call it Fred. Fred is-

'''E:''' Fred.

'''B:''' Fred is 4,600 light years from Earth, and it emits radio waves and spins 289 times per second around its axis, and that makes it a pulsar, of course. The really fascinating part of the story, though, is not just its huge mass, but the method that they used to determine its mass was especially interesting. I hadn't heard of it before. So kind of put your imagination goggles on. We've got, it's a binary system. It's not just a neutron star. It's a binary. There's another player here, and it's a white dwarf. The white dwarf and the neutron star were orbiting each other, and it also was nearly edge-on. The orbital plane was pretty much edge-on to the astronomer's eyes. So then, so you have this white dwarf orbiting around a black hole, essentially, and every four days, it would kind of finish an orbit, or so every four days, it would kind of come between us and the neutron star. So that's kind of critical. What happens when that, in this very specific scenario, is you have what's called a Shapiro delay. When the white dwarf was between us and the neutron star, the effects on space-time around the white dwarf impacted the radio waves coming from the neutron star behind it, okay? And that would actually delay, just by a little bit, the pulsar's radio waves from hitting the Earth. And the delay only amounted to about 1 ten-millionth of a second. So very minor, very tiny, tiny delay. Unless the white dwarf was between us, there would be no delay, but only when it was between us, you'd have this delay. So what that delay would give us is the mass of the white dwarf, because the amount of delay is directly related to the mass of the white dwarf. And so now, we have the mass of the white dwarf, and that would then give us the mass of the other partner in the binary system, because that's a relatively simple calculation. If you have one mass, and you know about the binary system and its orbit, you can then calculate the mass of the other object, which is the neutron star, which is what they did. So that was the technique, very fascinating technique, apparently very, very accurate. So when it was all said and done, the mass was calculated to be 2.14 solar masses. So the neutron star had the equivalent mass of 2.14 of our sun, in terms of its mass. So, oh, big deal, what is 2.14? Actually, that's a very interesting number, because as far as we could tell, as far as what our theories are telling us, that the maximum mass that a neutron star could have is 2.16, or probably maybe closer to 2.17. So this bad boy was really, really close to having the amount of mass it needs, the maximum mass it could have, without turning into a black hole, okay? So, and that's because of degeneracy pressure. We've talked about this a few times on the show. Real quick, once you get past, once you get past, say, 2.17 solar masses, then the neutron degeneracy, the neutrons together, are saying, you can't go any farther than this, it's pushing back, pushing back, but when you have more than 2.17 solar masses, the neutron degeneracy pressure gives out, and that's the last thing that was holding back that mass from becoming a black hole. So once you go a little bit beyond that, bam, you go into a black hole, you have a singularity, and all the beautiful, wonderful, mysterious things that happen with a black hole. And you, essentially, you're leaving the universe, right? I mean, the neutron star is great because it's so exotic, but it's a real thing in our universe that we could learn about. A black hole is, you know, is hidden, and it's mysterious, and some things that we will never, ever, you know, penetrate the veil of the event horizon. So it's a major, you talk about a major milestone there, and this neutron star is really, really, really close to it. So close that if Jay threw a meatball at Fred the neutron star, it could collapse into a black hole. And, of course, that's completely wrong because it's not just a meatball. Jay's meatballs are big, but they're not that big. What you would need is a meatball around 1,300th the mass of the sun to tip over Fred the neutron star into Fred the black hole.

'''S:''' That's a big meatball.

'''B:''' That's a big meatball.

'''E:''' That's a spicy meatball.

'''J:''' Now, Bob, does it matter, like, if I put any pork in this meatball, or does it just have to be beef? Like, give me some straight.

'''E:''' Mass is mass.

'''B:''' None of that matters. You could throw marbles in there, too.

'''J:''' Wait, wait, are you saying that pork in a meatball doesn't matter? What?

'''B:''' A black hole doesn't give a crap about it.

'''J:''' Oh, the black hole, I got you.

'''B:''' So that amount of mass, 300th the mass of the sun, it's a lot, and it's a little, depending on how you look at it. I think it's enough. I think there's enough wiggle room here that we will eventually find another neutron star, that we'll eventually find one that is even closer, you know, 2.15, 2.159, or six, whatever. I think, I hope we'll find one that's even closer and closer, because I would love to find the point where it's so close that maybe we could even potentially catch it in the act of swallowing just a little bit more extra mass and seeing it reach the tipping point and transition from a neutron star into a black hole. That would be amazing. But all of this is amazing, and that's why astrophysicists, astrophysicists?

'''C:''' Fizzle cysts. Fizzle cysts.

'''B:''' Yeah, reminds me of Jay's boy, Dylan. Fizzle cysts, what a great word. So that's what makes astrophysics so fascinating and valuable. It's really a laboratory in space that we will never really be able to truly recreate in a lab on the Earth. It's the only way we can find out some of this type of information until we evolve our technology for another couple millennia, and then we'll be able to just recreate it in our heads. But until then, we have to rely on laboratories in space. It's an amazing universe out there, and we're learning new things like this neutron star every day, and I just can't wait for the next news item.

{{anchor|wtn}}{{anchor|futureWTN}} 
== Who's That Noisy? () ==
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'''S:''' All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' Last week, I played this noisy. [lays Noisy] It's kind of repetitive, huh?

'''E:''' A bit, a bit.

'''J:''' It is more on the noisy side of a noisy, isn't it?

'''B:''' Nice.

'''J:''' So Visto Tutti wrote in and said, okay, it's an alarm siren, but I suppose you want more than that.

'''B:''' What's that name?

'''J:''' Visto Tutti.

'''B:''' Visto Tutti, wow, awesome name.

'''J:''' So I will say that it is the alarm at the Large Hadron Collider. That's funny. So let's say here, he said, you gotta warn people that the tunnel is about to get, as the British would say, quite thoroughly irradiated. So that would be a horrifying alarm noise. Listen to that and think of it as an alarm. [plays Noisy]Wow.

'''C:''' Yeah, because it's like screaming at you.

'''J:''' Yeah. What are you doing? Get out of here now. So Mark Constantine wrote in, hi, goddammit, I knew that Sydney subway won, but I thought it was too simple because I hear the damn thing every day. So anyway, this week, it sounded like a lyrebird imitating a car alarm. That is not correct, my friend. Although I would not doubt that a lyrebird, if it heard that noise enough, could actually make a noise that sounds exactly like the one you just heard. But that's not a cromulent guess, my friend.

'''S:''' Yeah, but about any noise, you could say it's a lyrebird imitating that noise.

'''J:''' Yeah, I will say, well, the only thing is, is if the lyrebird does something so good that I have to play it on the show, I probably, you know, I'm just saying, I'm probably not gonna play a lyrebird imitation again because I've already heard it do amazing things like chainsaws and camera clicks, but you never know, another lyrebird mimicking noise might be worthy to get on the show. But unlikely. Richard Hosker wrote, Jay, this week's noisy is the sound of a screaming hamster running in a hamster wheel. Damn, that's a good guess. You are not correct, but it certainly does sound like that.

'''C:''' Can hamsters scream?

'''J:''' They certainly do, if they're stuck on a wheel, you know.

'''C:''' Ooh.

'''J:''' So, we've got so many weird guesses this week because it's such a weird noise. So we do kind of have a winner. This is a close, so I'm gonna give this person the win. This person's name is Brian and his nickname is iPuppy. I don't know why. I think it's cute. He said, hey, long time, several time. I'm going to try to guess the noisy each week and here it goes, nothing. The sound is like the noise a weather fax machine on the bridge of a ship makes. The screeching is the data coming over the radio. The repetitive mechanical sound is the thermal printer head printing the image on the fax paper or it's something similar, old telephone, fax machine, mimeograph, or large format printer. So this is pretty close. So here's the actual answer and this is coming from the person who sent it in last week. They said, hey, Jay, here's my suggested noisy. It's a recording of a balinograph operating or also known as a wire photo invented by Edouard Bellin at the first way to send photos by wire. He said, he looked into this at his place of work, a university in Toulouse, France. It's on Avenue Edouard Bellin and on the street name sign, it says inventor of the balinograph or balinography. He's recently been getting into the podcast and thank you for listening. So what is this? It is the device that first was able to digitally send or electronically by some means send a photo from one place to another. So it is kind of, I believe, like a fax machine and kind of like a printer at the same time, but I could not find any video of this machine operating and that is the unbelievably horrible noise that it made. And thank God, like we moved away from it, right? Imagine if that's what all of our office machines sounded like.

'''C:''' Well, you remember what it used to sound like when we dialed up?

'''J:''' Well, that was, I did. Cara, I might be romanticizing it, but I certainly did like those tones especially when it worked well. You know, like there was something fun about it.

'''C:''' Nope, not good.

'''J:''' Nope, okay. Man, it's like, if you think back then, like we lived through those years. We were there, we had the computers that were around at the time and to dial up and you had to use your phone line. Like, you know, it's like it was so inconvenient but amazing at the same time. I remember when like the first internet fun stuff started to happen and me and all, you know, all you guys and my friends, we were all like sharing these funny files with each other. We would go to each other's houses with disks and they'd be like, here, man, like look at this stuff I found, you know, and you'd like share like the booty from the past couple of weeks. Those days are long gone.

{{anchor|previousWTN}} 
=== New Noisy () ===

'''J:''' Okay, so this week's noisy guys was sent in by a listener named Patrick Johnstone. And Patrick gave me a single clue that I am not going to give the audience because he did the surprise one where he sent me the noisy and then a file attached that is the reveal, which you don't ever, you know, for future reference, you guys don't have to do that. But if you want to go ahead, but you don't have to. I did not guess what it was. I actually guessed completely wrong. And this is one of those noisies, man. It's a toughie, but check this out.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

Oh, I don't know what happened at the end there. Anyway, very, very fun and interesting noisy this week. So thank you, Patrick, for sending that in. If you think you know what this is, and if you heard anything cool this week, now, Cara, you went to Africa. Like where are my 25 noisies per day that you heard over there that you could have just given me like the download of amazing sounds? What happened?

'''C:''' Yeah, but people would know what they are.

'''J:''' Yeah, but at least one animal making a weird noise that you wouldn't think came out of the mouth of that animal, anything.

'''C:''' Okay, I'll get you something.

'''J:''' Thank you.

'''C:''' You're welcome.

'''J:''' And you know what, when we do it, Cara, we'll do a special, like Cara, who's that noisy as the person who suggested it, and I'll wear a costume or something. I'll do something fun for you.

'''C:''' And nobody will be able to see it.

'''J:''' Right, but at least you would know.

'''C:''' Good.

'''J:''' So email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

'''S:''' All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

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== Science or Fiction (h:mm:ss) ==

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''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Cara, you're coming off a solo win last week. You beat the boys.

'''C:''' I'm gonna not have false confidence.

'''S:''' Good. There's another theme this week. The theme is dragonflies.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''S:''' What do you know about dragonflies?

'''J:''' I don't think anything.

'''S:''' Well, good. All right, here we go. Three items.

'''J:''' Oh, good, good.

'''E:''' Excellent.

'''S:''' That's good. We'll see, we'll see what you know about dragonflies. All right, here we go. Item number one. Dragonflies may swarm in groups so large, numbering in the billions, that they show up on weather radar. Item number two. Of the over 7,000 species of dragonfly, a few dozen have venomous bites or stings, but none threatening to humans. And item number three. Dragonflies are voracious predators, and the large ones have been reported eating hummingbirds and other small vertebrates.

'''C:''' What?

'''S:''' Oh, Cara, that sounds like you wanna go first.

<big>'''Cara's Response'''</big>

'''C:''' No.

'''B:''' That's why I don't say shit.

'''C:''' I know. I think that the, I think that dragonflies have swarmed to the extent that they've shown up on weather radars. I feel like this happened recently in LA, but it wasn't dragonflies. It was like ladybugs. But I feel like I've read that dragonflies do that too, but I could be wrong. I could just be mixing them up with ladybugs. But if ladybugs can do it, why can't dragonflies? 7,000 species. Well, but that's not that weird, right? But I always think of numbers that high as being beetles.

'''J:''' Right.

'''C:''' 7,000, that's dragonfly. That's very specific. That seems like a high number. And venomous bites, I've literally never heard of a dragonfly. You always think of dragonflies as being the quote-unquote sweet insects?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' That they don't bite. So I don't know. That one, just my spidey sense says maybe that one's the fiction. They're voracious predators, and the large ones have been reported eating hummingbirds and other small vertebrates. Hummingbirds can be really small, and dragonflies can be really big. So I don't know. This one doesn't, it sounds crazy, but the more I think about it, the more I think that one could be science. So I'm gonna say the 7,000 with some being venomous is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' All right, swarming in the billions. I don't think I've ever seen two dragonflies together unless they were having sex.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Right? I've never seen a swarm of them, but I haven't seen a swarm of locusts either, and I know they swarm. So what is, yeah. So let's see. Let's jump down to three, voracious predators. Yeah, Cara makes a good point. I mean, hummingbirds can get small, and they can get fairly big. So, and they can, I know they can maneuver like a mother. I mean, with those four wings, two sets of two, they are amazingly maneuverable. So I could see them catching a hummingbird, I guess. But yeah, I'm gonna, I'll have to do a GWC here. 7,000 species seems high, and I've never, being venomous and stinging? Wow. I mean, I thought they were just kind of cool and never anything that could do that to you. So I'll go, I'll say that number two, 7,000 species and venomous is fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' Yeah, I think I'm inclined to agree with Cara and Bob here. Few dozen have venomous bites or stings, but none threatening to humans. None of those few dozen is what you're referring to in that item, Steve, right?

'''S:''' None of the 7,000.

'''E:''' None of the 7,000. Okay, so that's, that takes to that. Well, I kind of still feel like this one's the fiction. Maybe the dragonfly can't really get through your skin, kind of like a, what, a daddy long legs, right? They have poison, but they can't get through your skin. So technically it does have venom that could affect you, but can it even get there? I think maybe it's something along those lines. You know, one flies in your open mouth, you're probably in big time trouble there. And then as far as the other ones, the group's so large and they show up on weather radar. Yeah, I've heard lots of reports of different kinds of insects having that impact on the radar. So I'm not surprised there. And then the large ones, these things do get pretty large in some places. And to eat a hummingbird? Sure, I don't see why not, especially because they do have venomous bites and stings, and a hummingbird, you can get through their skin pretty easy. So I agree, Cara and Bob, the venomous bites and stings is threatening to humans is fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, although you just used that, you used two to justify three, but you're saying it's a fiction.

'''E:''' Used two to justify three? Yeah.

'''C:''' You said that they are venomous.

'''E:''' Well, yes, but-

'''S:''' So I'm sure I followed that. I don't think that quite scanned, but that's okay. You're saying number two.

'''E:''' All right, I am saying number two's the fiction, same as Cara and Jay's.

'''S:''' Okay, all right, and Jay.

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' Well, I'd like to begin by saying that I read the three of these and I don't believe any of them because they're all unbelievable, right? So dragonflies swarming in the billions, what? I see one once a year.

'''C:''' You only see one? Oh, you need to hang out at more ponds.

'''J:''' Okay, well, yeah, I'm not really, pool's good for me, you know?

'''S:''' The pond or the pool.

'''B:''' I'll hang out with you next time at a pond.

'''J:''' So here's my logic. Okay, I'm saying to myself, Jay, remember, these are insects. So then, okay, the billions, okay. Yeah, especially after they all mate, then they all give birth and they're all hanging around the same place because they like to mate and give birth in the same place, or whatever, laying their eggs. All right, but billions, wow, okay, but they're insects. So I'll say that one is a definite possibility. The second one here about having venomous bites or stings, but none of them threaten humans. I listened to what everybody said. I didn't know, like, first off, you could have got me just on 7,000 species. There's biting and stinging. I don't know, I don't think they sting at all. Like my instincts are telling me that these are not stinging type of insects. So that is a check towards me saying this one is fiction. The last one, the voracious predator one, I just, for some reason, I just don't picture dragonflies flying around going, ha-da, ha-da, you know, like they're not slathering like my puppy running around biting sheetrock. They're not those kinds of creatures. Okay, dragonflies and eating the birds, wow. I mean, I'm scared of these bastards, if this is true. I don't know, but everyone's said it. I think I'm gonna go with the group, Steve, because I don't think that they sting, and I don't think that they, yes, this one, that one seems to be the most fictiony of all of them, so I will say that.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Okay, so let's take this in order. Dragonflies may swarm in groups so large, numbering in the billions, that they show up on weather radar. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''S:''' And yeah, I agree with you guys. You usually don't see like a swarm of dragonflies, even like in the summer next to water in their environment where there's a lot of, you see individual dragonflies, or you see dragonflies mating. You know, they kind of make that, you know, that C kind of configuration, the head-to-toe-to-tail thing. That's the male using the long, you know, tail as a sperm depositor.

'''B:''' Let's not get explicit here, we got kids.

'''S:''' And they don't usually travel in swarms, but if the weather conditions are just right, they will tend to bunch up, and these bunches of these swarms can get really, really large. And they have shown up on weather radar. They may be also mixed in with other insects, and not necessarily just 100% dragonflies, but they're primarily swarms of dragonflies. Very cool.

'''E:''' It's intimidating.

'''S:''' Let's go on to number two.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Of the over 7,000 species of dragonfly, a few dozen have venomous bites or stings, but none threatening to humans. So there's a lot of elements there that could be incorrect. You guys seem to think that 7,000's a lot of species of dragonfly, and that you're not sure that any of them are venomous or sting, although Evan is not sure.

'''E:''' Yeah, I'm not 100% sure.

'''S:''' But you guys all think this one is the fiction, and this one is the fiction.

'''C:''' Yes!

'''J:''' All right.

'''E:''' Thanks, Cara.

'''C:''' Woo, you're welcome.

'''S:''' Well, let's break it down. So the 7,000 species is correct.

'''C:''' Oh, jeez, really?

'''S:''' That's not a lot. That is not a lot, guys.

'''C:''' I know, but it's a lot. It's not a lot for an insect.

'''S:''' It's not a lot for an insect. There's over 100,000 species of beetle.

'''E:''' Oh, beetle's the number one. Beetle's the king.

'''B:''' Oh, God is inordinately fond of them.

'''S:''' But tens of thousands is typical for many groups of insects. So 7,000's actually not that much for a group of insects, to be honest with you. You know what the closest relative to the dragonfly is in the same group with it? The damselfly.

'''C:''' Oh, damselfly, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, do you know what the difference between a dragonfly is and a damselfly?

'''J:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Number of wings?

'''S:''' Nope, they all have four wings.

'''J:''' The females fly backwards.

'''S:''' No. So dragonflies have rigid wings.

'''J:''' Rigid wings, there you go.

'''S:''' Always.

'''C:''' Love that.

'''S:''' Always extended. Damselflies can fold their wings back.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''S:''' Have any of you guys seen Carnival Row?

'''B:''' No, I keep hearing about it.

'''C:''' Is that a TV show?

'''S:''' It's great, I love it. Yeah, it's a great show. Carnival Row, I highly recommend it. It's an alternate universe where there are fairies, right? And the fairies have four insect wings. They fly with their rapidly beating wings. But when they're not flying, they fold back down along their back. So basically they have damselfly wings, the fairies. But anyway, but there are no dragonflies that are venomous or sting. So that's the part that's made up.

'''J:''' Okay. Yeah, they don't have stingers.

'''S:''' They don't have stingers. They 100% don't have stingers. And I could not find a statement anywhere that there are no venomous dragonflies. But I read as much as I could, I could not find any mention of any venomous dragonflies. And I read entries that if there were, it would have said it. But still, I was looking for that magic phrase, there are no venomous dragonflies. I couldn't find it. But as far as I could tell, and I'm pretty confident from the extent that I read, that's why I threw in the stings to make it 100% fiction. But they are not threatening to humans, but they do bite. So they do have very deadly mandibles if you're a bug.

'''J:''' And if you're very small.

'''S:''' And if you're very small. Even a hummingbird, yeah, the big ones have these enormous mandibles, these big teeth. And they will bite you though. If you capture a dragonfly and hold it in your hand, they will probably bite you as a defense mechanism. And if it's a big dragonfly, it may actually even hurt. But it probably won't break the skin or draw blood.

'''J:''' Okay, note to self, don't be fearless around dragonflies anymore.

'''S:''' Dragonflies will not attack a human being and they will not bite you unprovoked. But if you threaten them, if you capture one and hold it in your hand, it will probably bite you to try to get away. But you-

'''C:''' But it probably won't even hurt.

'''S:''' You probably won't feel it, right? But if it's a big one, if it's a big one, it may hurt. You may feel a pinch, you may feel a pinch. Yeah.

'''J:''' What do you recommend, Steve?

'''S:''' Harm you, it's not gonna harm you.

'''E:''' Wear gloves if you're gonna capture these things.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I'm just saying that if they get too close, you shoot them with a shotgun.

'''C:''' Oh, what about that horrible tennis racket thing you got me?

'''J:''' Horrible? That thing is amazing, Cara.

'''C:''' But I would never zap a dragonfly. I'm only gonna zap-

'''J:''' No, I would not.

'''C:''' Mosquitoes, houseflies, and cockroaches.

'''B:''' Hummingbirds.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Because dragonflies are voracious predators and the large ones have been reported eating hummingbirds and other small vertebrates is science.

'''C:''' Yay.

'''S:''' And Cara is right, dragonflies eat mostly insects. This is rarely. A large one will occasionally take out a little lizard or a hummingbird or something, but you can see pictures of it online. And it's amazing, you see a picture of a dragonfly that's as big as a hummingbird, holy crap.

'''C:''' That's awesome.

'''S:''' But they eat, they just go through, they are voracious. They eat so many insects.

'''B:''' Like bats.

'''S:''' Yeah, they are amongst the most successful hunters if you keep track of how often they capture their prey when they go after them. What do you think their success ratio is?

'''J:''' For whenever they attack?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' I'd say one in five.

'''C:''' No, it's gotta be higher than that because they eat so much, so they must be pretty successful.

'''E:''' One in-

'''C:''' 60%?

'''S:''' 95%, they are among the most successful hunters. And they have a very sophisticated nervous system. So first of all, they have like among the best, if not the best eyes in the insect world. They have like 30, 40,000 facets to their eyes. They have, the wings give them excellent control, as Bob said, but also their brains. Recently, neuroscientists studying dragonfly brains have discovered that they have incredible ability to focus in on their prey. And they can also like keep track of one fly or one insect in the middle of a swarm. So their brains can filter out everyone else. Like once they focus on their prey, their brain filters out everything else.

'''J:''' Hey, Bob.

'''S:''' Even in a swarm, they can keep track of that fly.

'''J:''' Bob, remember in the movie Alien, the first one?

'''B:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Oh yeah.

'''J:''' And the android actually looks up to the creature, you know, he admires it.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' This is Steve. Steve is, this is Steve acting just like that android right now.

'''S:''' Oh, it's true. But here, one more thing. The dragonflies are really cool insects.

'''B:''' Oh yeah.

'''S:''' The other thing is they don't chase their prey.

'''J:''' They stroll. They're very casual about it.

'''S:''' No, they intercept them. So their brains can calculate distance, speed, trajectory, and then they take an intercept path and they go where their prey's going to be, right? They intercept its path. They don't just chase it down. And that's partly why they're so successful.

'''B:''' Yeah, you intercept Mars. You don't chase it.

'''S:''' Yeah. And then once they capture their prey, the first thing they do is bite their wings off. So they're immobilized. And then they generally eat the insects that they kill. They generally eat them from the head down. And they just will constantly, constantly eat. There was, I read one report of a dragonfly that got caught in a spider's web and then ate the spider.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''C:''' That's awesome.

'''E:''' That'll learn you.

'''J:''' Wow.

'''S:''' Turn the tails on it. They are, they are.

'''B:''' Spiders, and what the hell?

'''S:''' Incredible predators. They are incredible predators.

'''J:''' I'm not trapped in here with you. You're trapped in here with me.

'''B:''' You're trapped in here with me.

'''E:''' The Watchman, that's a great saying.

'''S:''' But it's funny that if you ask people like what the three nicest or prettiest or friendliest insects are, they're butterflies, ladybugs, and dragonflies.

'''J:''' And dragonflies. Yeah, I know. They're pretty, they're beautiful.

'''S:''' I love them, I know.

'''E:''' You can't judge an insect by it's-

'''J:''' I'm gonna stay away from it. And Cara, I am never gonna eat a dragonfly meal or flower, okay?

'''C:''' I don't think they make that, so you don't have to worry about it. Well, there are probably some cultures where they do eat dragonflies.

'''E:''' Oh, I imagine, sure.

'''C:''' But I don't think you can like buy dragonfly flower on the shelf right now. It's mostly crickets.

'''J:''' Okay.

'''S:''' And you can find online, you can find websites for how to attract dragonflies to your property.

'''C:''' Yay.

'''S:''' Yeah, but it's basically you make a little pond and you put little fish in there because they actually will eat little fish. Here's the other thing. The dragonfly larvae, also voracious killers. They will eat fish.

'''J:''' Oh my God.

'''S:''' The larvae themselves, yeah. Yeah, these things are hungry. Now imagine back in the Jurassic era.

'''J:''' Prehistoric.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''J:''' When they were the size of bats, you know?

'''E:''' The size of a bus. Of a bus, not quite a bus, but no.

'''J:''' I'd like to think that back then they had Cockney accents, you know? At least one of you laughed. Thank you, Cara. I missed you. When you were gone, this was a humorless show.

'''C:''' There's a void.

'''J:''' There was nothing going on.

'''S:''' The largest dragonfly discovered had a wingspan of 710 millimeters.

'''J:''' Why don't they just say an inch, you know?

'''S:''' You want to do like that?

'''J:''' No, I'm just joking.

'''S:''' That's about 20 inches.

'''B:''' 30 inches. 30 inches, oh my God.

'''C:''' That's enormous.

'''E:''' Get that thing away from me.

'''C:''' No, that's beautiful.

'''J:''' That is totally out of the movie Caveman, like for real.

'''B:''' Yeah, totally thinking about that, Jay.

'''E:''' And Jay, you would need a shotgun at that point, probably.

'''J:''' Right, at that point. At that point-

'''S:''' You would need a shotgun.

'''J:''' Cara, what if there were billions of them?

'''E:''' Oh yeah, showing up on prehistoric radar. I mean, gosh.

'''C:''' That's true, they would eat you. They would just eat you and carry you away.

'''J:''' You walk outside one morning and one of them's driving your car, you know?

'''S:''' Then you'd wish you'd had that tennis racket.

'''J:''' That's right.

'''E:''' Who's laughing now?

'''S:''' That would be cool, though. Could you imagine seeing a meter long dragonfly?

'''C:''' That would be awesome.

'''E:''' Only if I'm behind six inches of transparent aluminum, yes.

'''C:''' Oh, come on.

'''J:''' It'd be cool on TV. I'm kind of happy we live in a small insect world, okay?

'''C:''' I think big bugs are really cool. I'm always so excited when I see them in other countries. We don't have, you're right.

'''J:''' In other countries, notice Cara didn't say, whenever I see them in my bathroom. She said, in other countries.

'''C:''' Living in L.A., I don't see that many really big bugs and it kind of bumps me out. We do have some periodically, but I follow a friend from South Africa on Instagram and he just posted today that there was a whip scorpion in his garage.

'''E:''' It's called an insect gram.

'''J:''' No thanks.

'''C:''' I'm like, that's so cool. That's that bug that I put on my face when I was in the Amazon video.

'''E:''' Oh, the face.

'''C:''' The face bug.

'''S:''' Cara, you want to go to Madagascar, they have the Madagascar hissing cockroach.

'''C:''' I know, those are awesome.

'''S:''' Those are like five to seven centimeters.

'''C:''' There's so many cool big, big bugs, especially in Southeast Asia. So I'm hoping that I'm going to go to Indonesia at the end of this year and I want to see some really big bugs in Indonesia.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Fingers crossed.

'''S:''' I like big bugs and I cannot lie.

'''C:''' I knew you were going to go there.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

{{qow
|text =
|author = {{w|_try_to_use_a_wikipedia_article_title_here_|_alternate_display_text_for_name_}}
|lived = _birth_year_-_death_year_ 
|desc = 
}}
'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' Hey, Steve, I'm flipping the script tonight.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''E:''' I proposed a quote. I'm changing to a different quote.

'''S:''' Oh, an unapproved quote.

'''J:''' And it's a quote from Evan's wife. It's, get the hell out of the bathroom, you bastard. Jennifer Bernstein.

'''S:''' What are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don't you get out there and give someone else a chance?

'''J:''' Lossy.

'''B:''' Bam, bam, bam, bam. Just trying to remember that quote.

'''E:''' I'm combing my hair. All right, so this is a quote suggested by a listener, Adam Mullis from Iowa. And I'll read the email and then I'll read the quote, okay? Hi, Evan, I'm a graduate student in chemical engineering at Iowa State University, studying nanoparticles that improve the potency of existing antibiotics.

'''B:''' Cool.

'''E:''' I came across this quote on the Chemistry World podcast and I thought it fit in with the medical misinformation theme that comes across frequently in the show. It's attributed to the FDA commissioner's decision during the banning of Laetrile. Here it is. "The Laetrile proponents maintained that even if the drug did not work, people should still have the right to take it because they deserve freedom of choice. But the sellers of Laetrile did not offer a free choice. They persuaded cancer victims, desperate and dying, to buy a drug that did not work on the basis of false hope. Only informed choices are free."

'''S:''' Yep, awesome.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''B:''' Nice.

'''S:''' That's a good quote.

'''E:''' Yeah. Oh boy, the whole Laetrile story. Have we ever, have we talked about that on the show?

'''S:''' We have, we have, but maybe we could come around again. If it ever pops up in the news anywhere, we'll readdress it, but yeah.

'''E:''' So I thought that was a fantastic.

'''S:''' That's old school, old school.

'''E:''' Thank you, Adam.

'''S:''' All right, well thank you, Evan.

'''E:''' Thank you.

'''S:''' Thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure, man.

'''E:''' Pleasure.

'''J:''' Right.

'''E:''' Pleasure.

== Signoff ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
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SGU Episode 652

2025-04-11T15:54:40Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

{{Editing required
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{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 652
|episodeDate = {{600s|652|boxdate}} 
|verified = 
|episodeIcon = File:652 protein folding.png
|caption ={{w|Protein folding}}
|bob =y
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|qowText = Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
|qowAuthor = {{w|Primo Levi}}, Italian chemist
|downloadLink = {{600s|652|download}} 

|forumLink = https://sguforums.org/index.php?topic=49724
|}}

== Introduction, Jay's HFMD, Star Wars VIII ==

{{w|hand, foot, and mouth disease}}

{{tooltip|Olivia|Jay's daughter}}

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, January 3rd, 2017, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Hello, hello.

'''S:''' Jay is on sick leave this week. His whole family has come down with the Coxsackie virus.

'''C:''' Gross.

'''S:''' Yeah, that causes hand, foot, and mouth disease. They have red blisters in their mouth, on their hands, and their feet. It's really itchy. Jay says it's the worst infection he's ever had in his life. He's been totally miserable.

'''C:''' Ugh.

'''E:''' Whoa, yikes.

'''C:''' And that's because of children, right? That's just like purely because of children.

'''B:''' Damn kids.

'''S:''' Yeah, his young daughter caught it from a playmate and then it spread throughout the family.

'''C:''' Gross.

'''E:''' Oh, man.

'''B:''' I patted that patient zero kid on the head.

'''E:''' That patient zero.

'''C:''' Well, and it says it spreads via mucus, so you just patted her on the head. Hopefully she didn't have any slobber on her head.

'''S:''' Kids are all slobber.

'''C:''' I know.

'''E:''' Touching handrail or something.

'''C:''' That's so gross.

'''E:''' They secrete.

'''B:''' Slobberfied.

'''E:''' They secrete. No vaccination for this one, huh?

'''S:''' Nope, no vaccine, no treatment. Just gotta ride it out.

'''C:''' 10 days, it says, it lasts.

'''S:''' Yeah, 10 days of misery.

'''B:''' Yeah, but little Olivia, little angelic Olivia had it just for the one day.

'''E:''' That's the Christmas miracle.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's usually worse in adults. So happy new year, everyone.

'''E:''' Yes, 2018.

'''C:''' Oh, guys, I finally saw Star Wars. I'm only like a month behind.

'''E:''' Oh, wait, Return of the Jedi, right? I had that movie, The Last Jedi.

'''C:''' Last Jedi.

'''B:''' What'd you think?

'''E:''' And?

'''C:''' I don't wanna rehash old wounds. I don't know. I thought it was perfectly fine. I thought it stayed within the canon very well. It didn't ruffle any feathers. It introduced a couple new, interesting, thought-provoking ideas, but it was not in any way innovative or earth-shattering. I thought that the smart thing to do with Star Wars is to play it safe, and I thought it played it very safe. I will say, I really, really like Adam Driver. As much as people do or don't like Kylo Ren's character, he is such a good actor.

'''B:''' He sold it. He sold it big time.

'''C:''' Absolutely.

'''E:''' He was the best thing about that movie.

'''C:''' Absolutely. And if you ever watched Girls on HBO a few years ago, he was the best thing about that show, too. I think very few people could have brought the kind of conflict to the character and the kind of nuance and empathy and all of the things that made him an actually interesting, real character.

'''E:''' The antagonist of the Star Wars saga entirely has always, in a way, been the central character, I think, even maybe as much as the protagonist, Luke Skywalker. But there's been Darth Vader, there's been Anakin, and now there's Kylo Ren, and I think they all kind of anchor the entire franchise.

'''S:''' Right, which is why the prequels are so horrible.

'''C:''' Yeah. All right, well, this is the first episode of the year, so we will be getting to our psychic predictions a little bit later.

{{anchor|wtw}} 
== What's the Word? (3:15) ==
{{Page categories
|What's the Word? = 
}}
* {{w|Hormesis}}<ref group="v">[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hormesis Wiktionary: hormesis]</ref>

'''S:''' But first, Cara, you're gonna start us off with what's the word.

'''C:''' Absolutely. So the word this week was actually recommended by a listener. I love it when you guys send me email recommendations. And this one was from Daniel Corner in Ottawa, and he said that he found this one while researching water fasts, and the word is hormesis. And of course, it's interesting because he was reading about fasting and coming off of a fast and how quickly people eat food or drink water after a fast and some of the kind of woo and pseudoscience, I think, around those like paleo ideas that we should just be the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors were, as if we really fully understand how they were. Anyway, the word itself is much more, I think, interesting and complicated even than that. So hormesis actually comes from a Greek word. It was first coined, I think, pretty recently, like in the 1940s, and its roots are a little bit removed from how we understand hormesis to work and or not work because hormesis, of course, is kind of theoretical. And it's an idea of a dose-response relationship where there's a harmful biological effect at a moderate or high dose, but it might actually be somewhat beneficial at a low dose. What it would end up looking like is sort of a J-shaped curve or maybe a U-shaped dose-response curve so that if you get a little bit of it, it's actually good for you. And then if you get more of it, it becomes bad for you. And so we hear a lot about a hormesis hypothesis with things like homeopathy. We hear about it with things like ionizing radiation. And there are even some examples, like I was just looking at the Wikipedia page where I think people try to say that alcohol is hormetic or exercise is hormetic because at low doses, it can be protective, but at high doses, it can be really dangerous. And now there's a little bit of evidence to support the idea from a purely toxological standpoint, especially if we're looking at early responses to toxins that are, and I hate even using the word toxin because I already sound like I'm helping to peddle woo, but maybe early responses to certain types of compounds that may be beneficial in the sense that it induces an early cell repair mechanism or an early immune response mechanism, maybe an inflammatory mechanism that could actually be protective. But the truth of the matter is we know after just countless experiments that the idea of homeopathy, right, the idea of taking a tiny bit of something, actually in homeopathy, nothing of something, such a tiny bit that it's not even there, does not protect you from it in high doses. Like it just doesn't work that way. It sounds like a good story. And I think if you have a limited understanding of physiology or biology, it sounds like it could work because in a way, that's how we know sort of vaccines to work. I take a tiny bit of something that's been killed and so it induces a little bit of an immune response. And then I'm now protected against this thing if I encounter it in the wild because I've developed the appropriate capabilities within my immune system to recognize that threat and to attack it. But hormesis is really a conversation about a chemical response. Like a lot of the conversations with hormesis have to do with your chemistry. And one of the big ones is ionizing radiation. I see it again and again and again. There's so many people out there who believe, and there's a little bit of evidence, a tiny bit of evidence that supports that a low, low, low dose of radiation may be somewhat protective. But of course, our own government agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says that there's not enough evidence to support this. So they still follow what's called a linear no threshold model for radiation, avoid it at all costs. Even a little bit could be dangerous. And then the more that you get, the worse it's gonna be. So just try to avoid it. Whereas in apparently France, they have looked at some of the little bit of evidence that does exist and said, we're gonna err on the other side of caution. And we're gonna say that there is a hormetic effect. And so we're not going to caution people against low, low, low doses of radiation. So it's kind of interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think it's important to recognize that this effect is different for every source.

'''C:''' Yeah, you can't apply it to everything. Yeah.

'''S:''' So yeah, some substances may be toxic all the way down to the lowest detectable dose. They said there is no threshold for toxicity. And then other things at very low doses may stress out cells and induce essentially a stress response. And that stress response can be protective at doses that are too low to cause real harm.

'''C:''' Yeah, which in the short term can be beneficial. In the long term, who knows? Maybe not. And some, like you were mentioning, some might cause this stress response that could be viewed as beneficial at very low doses. Some toxins don't seem to have a toxic effect until they hit a sort of all or nothing threshold, right? We don't want to confuse the idea of hormesis with just like threshold loading, that a lower dose is required before you see any real damage. But sometimes these conversations are so vague. It's like exercise, like that's not, there's no dose response curve for exercise. It's not that simple. So many things are happening in your body when you exercise. And it also depends on how healthy you are ahead of time. If you are morbidly obese and you have a lot of damage to your tissues already, and then you start a massive rapid exercise program at low quote unquote doses of exercise, it could be detrimental. Like there are ways that you have to go about it. And so I don't know, it's definitely not a one size fits all idea.

'''S:''' All right, thanks Cara.

== Results of Predictions for 2017 ==

'''S:''' Okay, so it's 2018. We're going to do our review of, let's say the more entertaining psychic predictions for 2017 and we'll see how they did. Then we'll review our own predictions for 2017 and see how we did. So who wants to go first?

'''B:''' I'll go first. I'll go first.

=== Sidney Friedman's (9:35) ===

'''B:''' I found some punk called Sidney Friedman. So this guy claims a track record of 72%, 72% accuracy. Some years as high as 77%, but never lower than 62%. And for 20 years, this guy's been doing predictions on big shows, ABC, ABC TV's The View, NBC TV's Today Show, 2020, blah, blah, blah. And so here's a quote. He's like, to a large extent we make the future, but once in a while that curtain parts ever so slightly revealing a glimpse of tomorrow's theater, we all get these hunches. Though a variety of techniques explained in my book and seminar, I attempt to interpret what many of these impressions truly mean. I just love that parenthetical. Explained in my book and seminar. By the way, send me money. So I wish I had more time to actually dive in there and see 72% is quite a bold statement. But as you know, a lot of these predictions are open-ended or they're very vague. So yeah, that doesn't surprise me that he could claim 72%. But here's a few that he predicted for 2017 that were clearly wrong. He said the White House would propose to Congress some form of tuition-free college. Not even close. Way off on that one. Let's see. Oh yeah, this one is really funny because, well, let me just read it. He said Chicago has one of the hottest summers on record. So you'd think a very safe prediction, right? Predicting a hot summer? I mean, come on. Every year is hotter than the previous one. So he made this safe prediction and still got it wrong, which is awesome. I love that one. And then a final one that I found. A dangerous, life-threatening nuclear radiation is found leaking in an eastern state of the United States, very likely upper state New York. And I mean, I didn't see any news on life-threatening nuclear radiation leaks in New York, which is one state over. So yeah, so nothing crazy dramatic in terms of predictions from this guy. But still, and that's probably why some of his predictions may be interpreted as correct more often than not, because he doesn't go for the flashy, showy.

'''S:''' He's going for the high probability.

'''B:''' Yeah, which is always a safe move for these people. But that's just the thing. I mean, really, if you are, if that curtain does part for you and you could see the future, come on, give me something flashy. You want people to believe you and buy that book and your seminar thing? Then give me some of the flashy stuff, which clearly nobody's seeing.

=== Craig Hamilton Parker's (12:24) ===

'''S:''' I went for a guy called Craig Hamilton Parker. He had a lot of juicy ones. So he predicted a crash in the Euro and Denmark and Italy leaving the EU. Nope, sorry, none of that happened.

'''C:''' Oh, this is so random.

'''S:''' Hillary Clinton retires from politics after the release of documents. Nope, that didn't happen. A toxic or biological attack on a school in Europe? Nope. You were so close on this one. North and South Korea will unite into one country as Kim Jong-un.

'''E:''' No.

'''S:''' You guys remember what happened, right?

'''C:''' Wow, these are bold predictions.

'''S:''' Here's a funny one. A worldwide flu epidemic. First of all, if it's worldwide, by definition, it's a pandemic. Thank you.

'''E:''' Yeah, yeah, technicality.

'''S:''' Assassination and kidnap attempt on the Pope at the Vatican.

'''E:''' Well, not that we know about.

'''C:''' Why would he predict all of these bizarre things that are never going to happen?

'''E:''' Because, well.

'''B:''' Well, we know why, we know why. Because sure, they're not safe, but you make the predictions and everyone forgets. But if he hit one of those, he'd be golden. He could cruise on that one prediction for a decade. Easy.

'''C:''' That's so stupid.

'''B:''' So it kind of makes sense.

'''S:''' That and they just make the predictions for the entertainment value. People want to see those bizarre predictions and they know that nobody is going to track them. So it doesn't really matter.

'''B:''' Except us.

'''S:''' All right, who else?

=== The Psychic Twins' (13:58) ===

'''C:''' Okay, I've got some predictions from the psychic twins. Have you guys?

'''E:''' I know them.

'''C:''' You know the psychic twins? Terry and Linda Jameson.

'''B:''' Do they have rings that they touch together?

'''C:''' They should. Well, they have a store. Let me see what they sell in their store.

'''B:''' Ha ha ha.

'''C:''' Twin hearts, love and soulmate meditation and the Zodiac collection. All right. Well, the psychic twins, they played it safe. They made some pretty easy predictions. Big scandals, more corporate and government corruption will be exposed.

'''B:''' Oh, wow.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''E:''' Wow. So specific.

'''C:''' I love this one.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''C:''' Followed by, we see big scandals coming out in the entertainment world and reality TV.

'''S:''' Are they going to take part in the whole Me Too movement now?

'''C:''' I hope so. Oh, I think they will because of something that's lower on the page, but let's see.

'''E:''' For them it would be the Me Too, Me Too movement.

'''C:''' Yeah, exactly. The Me Too Squared movement. Exciting innovation in technology, inventions, drones, robotics and medical technology. What?

'''B:''' That's just pathetic.

'''C:''' I know, it sounds like a bad Google Translate. Doesn't it? It just sounds like they're like-

'''S:''' They're not even trying. They're just like saying stuff is going to happen.

'''C:''' And then, oh, I think they might be Trump supporters because it says jobs. We are seeing Trump creating more jobs for the economy and bringing jobs back from overseas.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're phoning it in.

'''C:''' Yeah, they've got a lot of things under government and politics. The Affordable Care Act will be difficult to replace. Yeah, no shit. Every part of the political process is corrupt. Yeah, but although there is some stuff, there's a whole Trump section here. And they did say Putin will play Trump like a fiddle. We also see Russia will be continuing to undermine American democracy. It's not a normal Republican government. It's a populist conservative alliance. He wants to crush ISIS and take their oil. And he also wants to stay out of wars overseas. I don't know.

'''S:''' These are not predictions. That's just an extrapolation.

'''C:''' And that's the thing. A lot of these are like that. It's like more scandals in media. It's like, really? Is that really that hard to predict? But at the bottom, there is a silver lining because, of course, all of their stuff is super depressing. They say that there's going to be a bunch of cyber attacks. They say there's going to be racial strife. We see advances and breakthroughs in brain diseases, neuroscience and brain technology, new fertility treatments, advances in various forms of cancer. Like, really? No shit. Because we're funneling millions of dollars into this kind of research. Of course we're researching.

'''B:''' These are probably the most pathetic I've ever heard. Because if they hit every one, every one, you'd still say, so?

'''C:''' So, exactly. They also have this great list, you guys, that says deadly terror plots are in the planning stage now in all 50 US states. Attacks and massacres are so common now, we'll list only a few places that we see being in the highest danger. New York City, Washington, DC, Florida, Texas, Washington State, California, Arizona. It's just, it's a joke. But then at the very end, they say, silver lining. In the coming years, we will see more movement toward togetherness, collaboration, harmony, optimism, I mean, and, OK, and more feminine qualities. They actually say that. More feminine qualities expressed in leadership. More women will be gaining power politically and in corporate culture. Well, of course, because that's the trend we're already seeing. It's like we're already seeing that. I see a lot of food being consumed by mouths.

'''S:''' Oh, I see energy. We're producing energy. We're using energy. There's energy all over the place.

'''E:''' Smartphone usage will be up.

'''B:''' I predict a lot of screwing out there.

=== Lyndsay Edwards' (17:42) ===

'''S:''' OK, Evan, what have you got?

'''E:''' All right, so here's somebody named Lindsay Edwards, OK, at lindsayedwards.com. Psychic predictions for 2017. It's interesting. What this psychic does is makes a batch set of predictions through the course of the year, like almost in quarters, like the first quarter of the year, second quarter. And you can see how his predictions develop as the year unfolds, attuning it to current events. It's quite obvious what he's doing. So I'm just looking at the earliest ones, because those are the ones I consider to be, you know, because we do this on an annual basis, not a quarterly basis. Thank you very much. Here are his early predictions. Donald Trump will be assassinated. Theresa May will step down. Donald Trump sacrifices hostages' lives. OK, I guess some hostages are taken, and he says no to them, and they kill them. All that didn't happen. Oh, here's one. The ocean will explode and destroy parts of certain countries. Yes, the ocean will explode and destroy parts of certain countries.

'''B:''' Oh, my god. Oh, my god.

'''C:''' Uh-huh. Yeah, like it does.

'''E:''' London will be bombed from a plane above. Let's see. The pope, oh, here we go. The pope will be targeted.

'''C:''' Why is everybody talking about the pope?

'''E:''' I don't know. I don't know.

'''B:''' He's generally popular in predictions, I think.

'''E:''' He's in good with God, too, I hear.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Something like that. Huge shoot down in Westminster between multiple terrorists and police. I don't think that happened. Plane crashes into Westminster Abbey. Use of nuclear weapons against ISIS. So OK, he's just shooting the moon here, and nothing's even coming close to any of these things.

'''S:''' Yeah, so they did terribly, like they do every year. And we also like to point out the big things that they didn't predict. Because if anybody out there had a circus twinkle, why weren't they getting any messages about things like, hey, we had a visitor from another solar system, an asteroid from outside our solar system visiting?

'''E:''' Hello.

'''S:''' Or the Las Vegas shooting. That was a big event. Or the standoff between Trump and Kim Jong-un. People were talking about North Korea, but they didn't see what actually happened.

'''E:''' Robert Mugabe, he was the dictator in Zimbabwe for, what, 50 years? He stepped down finally? I mean, that's no small news headline. That's significant. Celebrity deaths, including some younger people. Chester Bennington from Linkin Park, and Sound Garden's Chris Cornell, and Tom Petty. I don't see any of their names. They always go for the older folks with the death predictions. They rarely go for the middle-aged ones.

{{anchor|results-bob}}
=== Bob's Results (20:32) ===

'''S:''' Speaking of which, Bob, tell us about your predictions from last year.

'''B:''' All right. All over again. I'm glad my memory sucks, because now I'm laughing at my awesome sense of humor. So I predicted that Emma Marano would die. She was the oldest woman on the planet. You know, pretty damn safe prediction. And man, I nailed it. 117, I nailed it. She died in April. April 2017, so I nailed that one.

'''E:''' She's gone before her time, you know?

'''B:''' I predicted that CRISPR will cure a deadly disease. And I think I got that one too, right? Didn't they do some, was it some in vitro Parkinson's cure? Or was it in some fetus? It was actually like in a fetus? What the hell was that?

'''C:''' They approved the first human trials with CRISPR this year. And what else did they do with CRISPR? Did they actually cure anything? I don't know if they cured anything this year.

'''E:''' Sure, it's a remedy now for a cure, for a disease.

'''C:''' They fixed a mutation this year. It's huge, but they didn't actually, and it was cardiac, it was a mutation linked to, sorry, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. So they did that in embryos. That's what you were remembering.

'''E:''' Yes, it was important enough.

'''C:''' Yeah, it was important, yeah.

'''B:''' So in the third one, I said, Heather, hey, I went out on a limb with this one. Evidence will surface that the dark flow of the universe is due to interactions with the multiverse. And nope, did not happen. That would have been, oh wow.

'''E:''' It just wasn't proven, Bob. Maybe it did happen.

'''B:''' Evidence of the multiverse.

'''E:''' We missed it.

'''B:''' So I did decent, almost 2/3rds.

'''S:''' Yeah, you got one point for a high probability prediction. Then I'll give you a half a point for the CRISPR prediction. And then nothing on the dark flow.

=== Evan's Results (22:20) ===

'''S:''' Okay, Evan, how did you do?

'''E:''' All right, here were mine. I had three as well. My first one was that there was going to be a new spark, a new sort of generation coming forward of JFK conspiracy theorists. What with the release of all them documents and whatnot.

'''B:''' Oh yeah, that's right.

'''C:''' Yeah, that happened.

'''E:''' Yeah, it happened. I knew it was going to happen. I don't think I can take credit though for saying that a new generation sort of conspiracy theorists have arisen and are mobilizing and having an impact of any sort. If they are, they were few and far between. They certainly, some of the people who have been following JFK conspiracy theories for a long time came back to talk a lot about it, but I don't think it sparked any new wave. So I'm going to give myself a no on that one. And they've still withheld a good chunk of the information. It was all supposed to come forward, but some of it has been pushed back into now. They held back some of the stuff. Right, the obvious smoking guns. So there was a little outrage of that, but I'm not, you know, again, I'm not going to take credit for that one. I'll say that's a miss. Second, the lost treasure of the San Miguel would be finally, finally discovered. Well, ship went down in 1715, the San Miguel. It is considered to be the largest undiscovered treasure out there to be found. Estimated value, at least from a few years ago, they said $2 billion in silver, gold, and other goodies. It is still, still lost.

'''B:''' Treasure.

'''E:''' But another ship, well, another ship. Gosh, what the heck was the name of it? They discovered a long lost ship as well that they've been looking for. They discovered a cannonball from the ship. So they're on their way to sort of discovering that one, but it wasn't this mega prize $2 billion discovery. So that's a miss. And then my third one had to do with Cicada 3301. And that is this, well, puzzle that has been occurring. It has occurred in the past that they put out there for apparently a test of code breakers and people's puzzle solving skills, supposedly to be recruited for top secret missions and jobs around the world. Now, my prediction was that the Cicada 3301 project would have a new puzzle in 2017 coming out, and they did. It did come out.

'''B:''' How often does it come out?

'''E:''' They came out in 2012, 13, and 14. 15 was skipped. And then there was a, like an update to one of the old puzzles or some sort of announcement that came out in 16.

'''S:''' Right, so one comes out almost every year.

'''E:''' Almost every year, right.

'''S:''' And we predicted another one would come out again.

'''E:''' Right.

'''B:''' And it did, right? And it did. Way to go, way to go, Evan. So, like, how complex are these things? I mean, how many solutions?

'''E:''' They're rabbit holes, Bob. They're absolute rabbit holes. They involve, hang on. Here's the stated purpose, all right? The stated purpose of the puzzles each year has been to recruit highly intelligent individuals through the ultimate, though the ultimate purpose remains unknown. Some have claimed Cicada 3301 is a secret society with the goal of improving cryptography, privacy, and anonymity. Others have claimed that Cicada 3301 is a cult or religion. According to statements made to the winners of the 2012 puzzle, 3301 typically uses non-puzzle-based recruiting methods, but created the Cicada puzzles because they were looking for potential members with cryptography and computer security skills. And they do all sorts, types of clues. Here we go. They include clues on the internet, telephone. In fact, part of the puzzle this year was you had to discover a phone number, and when you call it, it brings a phone booth out in the Mojave Desert or something like that. They have clues in music, in digital images, bootable Linux CDs, physical paper signs, cryptic books, and many other things. They kind of run the gamut, and one leads to another to another. It's almost a take on that movie National Treasure in which one clue leads to another clue leads to another clue leads to another clue, sort of that. And it seems to, in a way, never end, at least not for 17 version. They couldn't kind of solve it. In a sense, it's still going on. It's interesting, and it really is a thing. Somebody is doing this, even though nobody is taking credit for it, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of organization willing to come forward and spill the beans about it. It could just be a group of enthusiasts, you know, like a Mason Society of cryptic internet people. I don't know. It is interesting.

'''B:''' Yeah, the really cool TV series Person of Interest did something similar over the course of an episode or two where they were recruiting people by having almost, clearly, now that I see this, it was based on this Cicada 3301 idea, so yeah, interesting.

'''E:''' So I'll take a hit for that one, and I've got one out of three.

'''S:''' Okay, yeah, so one high probability hit.

'''C:''' Not bad, not bad.

=== Jay's Results (:) ===

'''S:''' Let me read you Jay's predictions.

'''B:''' Oh, okay.

'''S:''' So Jay's first prediction was Arctic ice shelf will take a massive hit. It's funny, because he started out by saying ice shelf, and then we made him commit. If he had just picked Antarctic, yeah, he would have had a great hit there. He had the largest-

'''E:''' Was it 11 miles or something?

'''S:''' A big, huge part of it broke away.

'''B:''' Have you seen those pictures?

'''C:''' Larsen C, right?

'''S:''' Hit taken to an ice shelf, just picked the wrong one. His second one, he said science funding will take a hit. Vague and high probability.

'''B:''' True.

'''S:''' And then his third one was Snoop Dogg will take a massive hit.

'''C:''' Those were his predictions.

'''E:''' Define massive hit.

'''B:''' So he got two, one high probability.

'''C:''' Was that Snoop Dogg?

'''B:''' No, the science.

'''C:''' Oh, okay.

=== Cara's Results (28:17) ===

'''C:''' Let's see, my 2017, I actually dug up my 2016, which some of them came true in 2017.

'''E:''' That doesn't count.

'''C:''' Yeah, in 2016, I said marijuana would be legalized in more states, but it wouldn't have federal, not appeal, legalization, which did happen in 2016, but also more in 2017.

'''E:''' Yeah, 17.

'''C:''' Yeah, so 2017, I said, the first one, dark matter experiments will make some real progress, including a real detection, so that we'll have more concrete evidence of its existence. I don't think that happened. Bob?

'''B:''' Yeah, nothing dramatic.

'''C:''' Yeah, so I think that's a nope. I did say there would be more advancement with CRISPR, of course, and I said especially regarding gene drives, which is funny, because I feel like gene drives actually didn't top the headlines this year. They sort of fell by the wayside, all this mosquito work, but that was so big at the end of 2016. But we did make some really big impacts with CRISPR. I'm gonna take a half credit for that one. And then the last one said, we will fight harder than ever to protect science from an adversarial administration. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Yeah, okay.

{{anchor|results-ROGUE}}
=== Steve's Results (29:27) ===

'''S:''' All right, here are my predictions for 2017. My first one was direct observational confirmation of planet nine. That did not come true. Yep, so no.

'''C:''' Nope.

'''S:''' But I will be getting credit for the next two. My second one was the FDA will fail to do its job and properly regulate homeopathic products. So they did finally come out with a proposed revision of their regulation, but they haven't enacted it yet. And whether or not you consider it properly regulating homeopathic products is a matter of opinion. I don't think it goes nearly far enough. So that's at least a partial hit. And then the third one is quantum computing breakthrough.

'''B:''' Oh boy.

'''E:''' Oh.

'''B:''' There's been a break in. I mean a breakthrough.

[[SGU Episode 600#predictions-ROGUE|_Rogue_references_predictions_from_last_year_]]

== Rogues' Predictions for 2018 ==

{{anchor|predictions-ROGUE}}
=== Steve's Predictions (30:22) ===

[[SGU Episode 704#results-ROGUE|_Rogue_introduces_their_predictions_for_next_year_]]

'''S:''' Okay, let me give you my predictions for 2018. Number one, a new dwarf planet will be discovered. I like to make astronomical predictions. Number two, 2018 will be the warmest year on record. 2017 is shaping up to be number two or number three. That didn't quite make number one, but I think in 2018 we're gonna get to number one again. And then number three, a tsunami will hit Hong Kong. So that's my really specific prediction for 2018.

'''E:''' Oh.

'''C:''' Oh, that's so sad.

'''B:''' Oh boy.

'''E:''' I really hope that doesn't happen.

=== Cara's Predictions (31:01) ===

'''C:''' It's so funny. I've been spending this whole time, I wrote down on my list last night, number one, something about quantum computing. And I've been spending this whole time looking up other people's quantum computing predictions for 2018, like quantum computing experts, and I don't understand them. So I don't know how to make one myself. Something about qubits.

'''B:''' Qubits, yeah.

'''C:''' There will be more qubits than ever before. That's gonna be my prediction.

'''E:''' Sounds biblical to me.

'''C:''' I know. I think that, I think Bitcoin is going to hit a record high and then it's gonna crash. That's another prediction.

'''E:''' The bubble will pop.

'''C:''' Record high and then crash. And then my third one, 2018 will be the hottest year on record. I stole it. Yep.

=== Bob's Predictions (31:53) ===

'''B:''' I predict that the Halloween asteroid will crash into the moon this late October, early November.

'''C:''' No, you don't.

'''B:''' So basically, yeah, basically there's this asteroid or possibly a comet remnant that under certain light conditions, looks like a skull. It's awesome. It's like so cool. It's actually the wallpaper on my computer right now. It's this artist's rendering of it. But even the real image that I saw of it, you could clearly see what appear to be like eye sockets and kind of a nose. So it's really creepy and cool.

'''E:''' It could be a fossil of a giant hominid in space.

'''B:''' Yeah, right. So I mean, it's big, 640 meters, very dark. It's only a little bit more reflective than charcoal.

'''C:''' Wow.

'''B:''' And so this October, November, we could have another close call, but it's gonna be, unfortunately, the prediction is, not my prediction, the astronomical prediction is that it's gonna be not, you know, within one or two Earth-moon distances, but over a hundred Earth-moon distances. So, but I think there's gonna be some anomalous gravitational interaction with some bodies that's gonna cause it to go into the moon. So that's my low probability guess for the year. Fast radio bursts, FRBs. Those are those anomalous bursts of radio waves. Incredibly powerful, over 500 million suns worth of radiation in mere milliseconds. Very mysterious. Not sure what's going on there, but we are getting close. We've been getting closer. They've kind of pinpointed one location for repeating FRBs in some small galaxy. So I think in 2018, we'll finally have enough data to say, this is what these fast radio bursts are caused by this. Now, my next prediction, I don't know what to say about this because it's already come true. I swear to God. I swear to God. I wrote it down. No, I wrote it down. I wrote it down and I'm sitting here and I had my three predictions and I look on the bottom right of my screen and it says Tabby's star solved. So like what? So the Tabby's star, that's the yellow white dwarf star that's labeled, what is that? KIC 846 blah, blah, 285, whatever. That's the one that's been dimming and undimming by extraordinary amounts. They said, what is it?

'''E:''' A bunch of material is passing in front of it.

'''B:''' Right, is it a comet swarm? Is it a Dyson sphere? Is it aliens? Some wobbly planetary orbit? They're not sure. So my prediction was that this year we would find out. And yes, today it was announced. So I'm calling this one. I had no foreknowledge. I had no foreknowledge. I made the prediction and it was solved and the news came out today. So there. So the deal is, basically-

'''E:''' Iron clad.

'''B:''' The consensus is that it's a cloud of dust. 200 scientists crowdfunded an astronomy project on Kickstarter, which that in and of itself is cool. And they looked at the dimming light in multiple color bands, blue, red, and yellow. Kepler had not done that before. And Tyler Ellis, a PhD student at Louisiana State University said, this selective absorption of blue light has to point to dust. Certainly dust is the culprit. So basically what they think is that very small particles of dust appear to be blocking the blue light's shorter wavelengths and allowing the longer wavelength red light to escape out to our telescopes. So that's why there's a dearth of blue light coming from the star because of the dust that's in orbit around it. So there it is. No, so yeah. I mean, yeah, we knew. How cool would it have been? Sure. But we knew it was just something natural that was just mysterious and we'd eventually figure it out. And sure, this needs to be vetted. And this is just brand new. I mean, just like today it came out as far as I could tell. But I mean, it's pretty funny that this has never happened before, the day that I made the prediction. Sure, it came out at 10 a.m. and I made the prediction a few hours ago. So what? So what? I did not know of it. Stop that.

'''C:''' Likely excuse.

'''E:''' I'll swear on a stack of bibles.

=== Evan's Predictions (36:11) ===

'''E:''' I have two very specific predictions and one more general. Here we go. I'll be specific first. Mount St. Helens, it will erupt.

'''B:''' Oh, damn.

'''E:''' Something similar along the lines to what we had back in 1980.

'''B:''' I remember that.

'''E:''' So that's not insignificant. Number two, here's my general one. We will have, we will experience a significant impact event.

'''C:''' Ooh, that's not that general.

'''E:''' Significant impact event.

'''S:''' The earth will.

'''E:''' Yes, I'll say the earth. That'll leave out Bob's prediction of the skull crashing into the moon. And then here's a very, very specific, very specific. It is the World Cup coming up in 2018. It will be in Russia, Croatia. 40 to one odds they will win the World Cup as an underdog.

'''B:''' Ooh.

'''E:''' There you go.

'''C:''' All right.

'''E:''' We'll know that one for sure.

'''S:''' All right, thanks guys. Well, we'll keep track of these predictions and we'll see [[SGU Episode 704|how we do next year]]. I think overall we do better than the cyclists.

'''B:''' Yeah, right.

'''E:''' I think so.

== News Items ==

{{anchor|news#}} 
=== Protein Folding Breakthrough (37:15) ===
* [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171113111049.htm Researchers fold a protein within a protein]<ref>[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171113111049.htm ScienceDaily: Researchers fold a protein within a protein]</ref>

'''S:''' All right, Bob, start us out with the news items with this protein folding breakthrough that we somehow missed.

'''B:''' Yeah, scientific papers published this year reveal that advances in predicting protein folding are allowing us to create designer proteins not found in nature. This could revolutionize medicine, genetic engineering, even nanotechnology. So yeah, Steve, how did we miss this in 2017? This, if I had an inkling of this, I would have definitely mentioned it on the last show. So let's start with the main scientist behind this advance. And that's clearly David Baker, who's the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington. David has been studying proteins for over a quarter of a century. And this past year, he and his colleagues published a series of papers revealing that they've produced thousands of different proteins that folded into their three-dimensional shape just as they had predicted. Let me say that again. They folded into the shapes just as they had predicted they would. And many of these proteins have no analog in nature. These are just brand new proteins, never existed before. Now, this is big news. This is really big news because proteins are so obviously important, but they also have amazing possibilities and versatility. Now, biological organisms, all of life generally, create proteins by reading a gene. Each gene encodes a specific protein so that that DNA recipe strings together the base units of all proteins, which is what? Amino acids. You line up the amino acids and that's essentially what a protein is. So one by one, hundreds or even thousands of the 20 different types of amino acids are strung together to form the 20,000 different types of natural amino acids. Now, that string doesn't hang around like a spaghetti, though. It curls up in on itself like a string of Christmas lights when you first see them in early December after 11 months in your basement. It's no longer a string. It's all kind of like meshed together into this three-dimensional shape. So each amino acid has an electric charge, though. Imagine each little subunit has its own little electric charge. So that, and that means that the different parts of the amino acid string are attracted to or repelled by other sections of it. So you've got this complex interaction of the string with itself, different parts of itself. But that doesn't matter. I mean, that doesn't really even matter, though, because in a few hundredths of a second, all those little issues are worked out and it folds into its final complex three-dimensional shape. And this shape is actually, that specific shape is what is required to do the job. So the shape determines what the job is or vice versa. And that job could be as an enzyme, it could be a messenger protein, could be a structural component like the actin part of a muscle, could be used for transport or storage, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of different jobs. Everything in your body is proteins, essentially. So the folds, the thing, though, knowing what shape a string of amino acids would fold into is, of course, fiendishly complicated with all these little subunit amino acids kind of interacting in complex ways. Many people have tried to figure it out over a ton of time, unsuccessfully, so much so that it's been called the folding problem. I mean, I've heard about the folding problem for literally for decades. And it just seemed like this incredibly difficult kind of puzzle that computers were helping with but really may never really fully solve for us. So years ago, Baker and a student of his, Kim Simmons, created an ab initio folding program called Rosetta. And to me, this is one of the big milestones in protein folding, in dealing with protein folding. This was the first attempt to actually scan a protein and looking for short stretches of amino acids, which folded in known ways, in known patterns. So imagine you're looking at this complex three-dimensional shape and you scan and you find, oh, look it, here's those 10 amino acids all strung together in a specific order. And we know they fold into this shape. And knowing that, just knowing that tiny little piece predictably probably folds into a specific shape, that information can be used and can be very helpful in determining the final full structure of the program. And that's what Rosetta did, especially in the early years. That's essentially what it did. It took tons of computer resources, as you might imagine. And this led to Rosetta at Home, which you may have heard about. And it's very similar to SETI at Home, which more of you probably have heard about, but essentially using idle computer time of anybody to help do the number crunching. And that helped tremendously. But maybe even more importantly, this kind of evolved into this robust community of a million people worldwide talking about it and working on this and coming up with dozens of Rosetta-like software applications. And Rosetta itself remained free for nonprofits and academics, continually being updated by hundreds of scientists. And I love that they offered it free to those people, if you were in a nonprofit or an academic. But if you were in a company and you wanted to use their software, then you had to pay, I think, something like $35,000 for the software. I mean, if you're gonna be making money from this, then sure, they have every right to pay you for that. And that money that they earned from sales went right back into the company and spurred even more advances. So this is kind of where Rosetta was until relatively recently. It was good for small proteins. If you had a small protein, they could probably do a very good job or a decent job predicting how the chain of amino acids would fold into that small protein. But the big ones, though, were really tough, very difficult to solve. And Baker had even said that, I wasn't sure whether I would even get there. I don't feel that way anymore. So he ended that with, I don't feel that way anymore. So why? What happened? Why is he confident, even for these large proteins? This latest advance was actually proposed in the 1990s by computational biologist Chris Sander. Only recently, though, has technology been available to take advantage of his idea, which was essentially to look at, this is really cool, he said that we need to look at co-evolving amino acids. So imagine you've got a string of amino acids and two of them are far apart, but if you look at their genetic history, they've been evolving together for millennia or wherever. So if that's the case, then it's increasingly likely that those two proteins, when they finally fold together, were right next to each other. So you see what I mean? So imagine you've got a string of amino acids, it folds, and you've got two amino acids that are right next to each other. They're touching each other. And they've been that way for, could be millions of years. And so if you mutate one of those amino acids, chances are that that protein could completely fail and not do its job anymore. Because those two need to be together. When they're not together, the protein cannot assume that final shape. But if they mutate and co-evolve, then that means it can continue doing its task of the protein. It may be even a better job than it's ever done before. But, so that was the key. He predicted that if we could find out where these co-evolving amino acids are, then we could use that information to determine how the protein will ultimately fold. And that's exactly what they did. So once you identify such proteins, Rosetta finally has enough information to predict a folding accurate enough for the really large proteins. So they actually, they brought this software with this new update to a protein folding competition. And yes, they exist, using large proteins. And one of the judges actually said, either someone solved the protein folding problem or cheated. And they definitely didn't cheat. So that's how far they've come with a lot of these large proteins. So for thousands of years and up until recently, we were limited to using only known proteins. Proteins that we've vetted and looked at and has been produced by nature. Or perhaps, you know, maybe we were able to make very slight tweaks to a protein. But otherwise, no major changes to these proteins. It's like, it's kind of like finding fire that's created by lightning, right? You come across this fire, holy crap, look at this. Sure, we could use it and try to maintain it and prevent it from going out. But you still, initially, you don't know anything about creating it from scratch or really, truly harnessing it. So that's kind of like where we were with proteins. We identified them, we knew exactly how they're created and what they can do. But we can't really create them from scratch or design them the way we want them to be designed. So back in the early days of thousands of years ago, we would use what we, the limited information we knew about maybe we didn't even know proteins at all back then. But we used it to make cheese, right? When you're making cheese, you're kind of manipulating natural proteins to get these things that you want, that you wanna eat, that are delicious. And nowadays, we may look at spider silk proteins and dream of using it to make super strong and thin fibers and bulletproof vests. But now we are essentially in the era where we can design a protein tool to optimally perform a very specific task and then figure out what string of spaghetti amino acids will fold up to make that exact protein. I'm gonna end with an example of what we're going to be seeing in the future. So Baker and his team got together with a virologist, Ian Wilson, of Scripps Research Institute to design a protein to fight the flu. Wilson identified through his research in the lab, a pocket on the surface of this virus, of a specific flu virus. And they thought that a protein that fit right in that pocket, a nice fit in that pocket could potentially stop the virus from entering into cells. So Baker got with his team and they used Rosetta to create. Now, let me say that when you're using Rosetta, you're not gonna just like say, this is what I wanna do and have the software spit out the exact amino acid chain. It's not that easy, not yet anyway. What they did was they used Rosetta to create a few thousand promising amino acid chains. And then they folded all of them digitally to see which one would fit the pocket. And then, so they picked from that group, they picked the handful or so that really looked like they could fit into that pocket that was identified on the virus. And then they used engineered yeast to make the real proteins. And they found what they called HB16928.2.3 because it looked like it was a really good fit. So then they had to test it. So they injected mice with a fatal influenza dose. This dose would have killed them without question, this was going to kill them. And they sprayed the experimental protein that they had created into their noses. So what do you think the result was?

'''C:''' They lived.

'''E:''' Half lived, half died.

'''B:''' 100% effective.

'''E:''' I was half right.

'''B:''' Everyone lived. So, all right, that's to me, that is amazing. Now, of course, they haven't done human trials yet, but this is incredibly promising. So in the future, we're going to see solid attempts, hopefully as good as this, for fighting flu viruses, for doing things like breaking down, oh no, actually they're doing this now. They've created these proteins to fight the flu viruses, like I said, but also breaking down gluten in food and for detecting trace amounts of opioid drugs. So that's things that they're actually doing right now. But ultimately, they're going to be able to construct these precise molecular tools for a vast range of tasks that I think are just going to revolutionize many areas of medicine, of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, to construct these tools that are just going to be so useful that I think we're going to be talking a lot about this in the next decade.

'''E:''' And no one made any protein folding predictions for 2017.

'''C:''' Terrible.

'''B:''' I thought about it, I thought about it.

'''E:''' Should have.

=== Nitrite-Free Bacon (49:40) ===
* [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/29/nitrate-free-naked-bacon-rashers-to-reach-british-supermarkets Bacon without the guilt? Nitrite-free rashers to hit British supermarkets]<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/dec/29/nitrate-free-naked-bacon-rashers-to-reach-british-supermarkets The Guardian: Bacon without the guilt? Nitrite-free rashers to hit British supermarkets]</ref>

'''S:''' Okay, Evan, tell us about nitrite-free bacon.

'''E:''' I will do that. You know, it's almost a crime though against nature that we're talking about this news item without Jay. I mean, I like bacon too, but Jay is a baconophile. I mean, if he didn't marry Courtney, he'd have married a side of bacon. Let's just put it that way from all he has boasted over the years about this. But in any case, got this story from The Guardian online. The headline reads, nitrite-free rashers, which are very thin slices of bacon, nitrite-free rashers to hit British supermarkets. Yep, Northern Irish food manufacturer Finnebrog says naked bacon, here we go. Naked water, naked bacon. Naked bacon contains no preservatives, -numbers, or allergens. That sounds great, right?

'''C:''' What's an E-number?

'''E:''' I don't know.

'''C:''' That sounds good.

'''E:''' An Irish term for, nothing unnatural, I suppose. Free of nitrites, yes, will soon appear on the supermarket shelves. This bacon, naked bacon contains none of them. Nitrites are salts from chemicals or natural sources, very important, which are added to bacon and other processed meats as a preservative agent. And they also act as an antimicrobial agent and a color fixative, as they like to say. Now, if you remember back in 2015, the World Health Organization concluded that processed meats, including bacon, they are carcinogenic. Yeah, we had talked about that on the show, I know. Yep, it could, because it could damage your DNA, apparently.

'''C:''' Yeah, it like raises your risk, like 0.5%.

'''E:''' 0.00000.

'''C:''' Yeah, like against the background risk.

'''E:''' The scientists at Finnebrog, they developed a new flavoring from natural Mediterranean fruit. Note the term natural there. Natural Mediterranean fruit and spice extracts, and they applied it to British bacon for the first time. They believe-

'''C:''' Wait, fruit, bacon? I don't want that.

'''E:''' Well, you gotta get your-

'''B:''' Yeah, I don't either.

'''E:''' There are nitrites in fruit as well, not as many as in vegetables, which is where the natural nitrites had come from before. But in any case, they kind of gloss over that. But in any case, they claim nitrite-free. And I suppose it's, they're claiming it's the first time anybody can actually claim this, nitrite-free.

'''C:''' I'm gonna show my ignorance here, but can you explain to me what nitrites are and why they're in bacon and why they're bad?

'''S:''' So sodium nitrite is a salt, it's a sodium and nitrogen and two oxygens. Nitrate, sodium nitrate is sodium, nitrogen, and three oxygens. Nitrites can be converted into nitrates just by reacting with oxygen in the atmosphere. So nitrites turn into nitrates, and then nitrates can also be converted back into nitrites in the gut by bacteria, et cetera. So they often, you'll hear like nitrates, nitrates talked about together because basically they convert one into the other back and forth.

'''E:''' They use that one specifically, they said, because it has the antimicrobial, microbial effects.

'''C:''' It's a preservative.

'''S:''' So where do you think most of the nitrites that you swallow come from?

'''C:''' I'm gonna guess.

'''B:''' Spider legs.

'''E:''' I do.

'''C:''' It's, okay, so it's a way of preserving meat. Wait, wait, wait, I'm gonna guess. It's from-

'''E:''' I actually mentioned it a little while ago.

'''C:''' Oh, you already did, damn. Where is it?

'''E:''' Vegetables.

'''S:''' No.

'''C:''' Oh.

'''E:''' Yeah, your saliva.

'''S:''' Yeah, 90% of the nitrates that you swallow are made in your saliva. Now 80% of the nitrates that you get from food come from vegetables.

'''E:''' That's what I was thinking.

'''C:''' Wait, what's wrong with nitrates and why don't people want nitrates in their food?

'''S:''' Yeah, so the vast majority of the nitrates, in your system that you consume, do not come from preserved meats. You know, bacon and red meat and preserved meats, cured meats, whatever, they only contribute about 10% of your dietary nitrates, which is not that significant. So it's not really that much of an issue. So the only real potential risk here is if you cook meat that has nitrates in it at very high temperature, then that can convert some of the nitrates into a form that may be carcinogenic.

'''C:''' But that's what makes it delicious.

'''E:''' Those crispy, black edges.

'''S:''' So that's really the only note of caution here. Nitrates, nitrates themselves, not a big deal. Eating them in meat, insignificant. Just don't cook it at super high heat. In fact, nitrates may be cardioprotective. There may be an overall protective effect from eating nitrates. In terms of the overall risk of cancer, the evidence is mostly negative. It's a little bit mixed. Most of the systematic reviews show either no real increased risk of cancer. There's actually a decreased risk of cancer for gastric cancer. But for a couple, like thyroid cancer, there was one study or a couple of studies that showed there may be something there, but then a later meta-analysis showed that there wasn't a statistically significant risk there. So the bottom line is the risk is probably non-existent, but we can't rule out a small risk. But at the same time, there's actually a decreased risk with nitrates of gastric cancer. So like most things, overall, I just wouldn't worry about it. If you just eat in moderation, if you just don't eat a pound of bacon a day, you're probably gonna be okay. o just like everything, eat in moderation. Maybe avoid cooking meats with nitrates at super high heat, and that's it. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it.

'''C:''' Ugh, it's so stupid.

'''E:''' That's the false fear, yep.

'''S:''' Yeah, so the whole thing about nitrate-free bacon, yeah, it's just using scaremongering, you know, fear, in order to sell something that isn't a risk to begin with.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's so stupid.

'''E:''' Right, right.

'''C:''' So basically, enjoy your spoiled, rotten meat. Well, it also seems like the weird thing to be concerned about. Like, yeah, if you eat a ton of pork, you're eating a lot of fat. Like, there are other concerns about eating bacon every day, right?

'''E:''' Sure, yeah, cardiovascular issues or other things.

'''S:''' Yeah, this is a good example of a false sense of security. You eat your nitrate-free bacon, you're still getting the fat and the calories. And if you feel like you can overdo it, though, because it doesn't have the nitrites, which isn't the really risky part to begin with, you're actually going to be less healthy. That's why all of these food and medical pseudosciences are usually so counterproductive.

'''E:''' Yeah, that's probably right. Would you say that this company is engaging in sort of this backhanded health claim? In other words, Steve, they're basically saying, eat our cancer-free bacon because ours is the only cancer-free bacon. And that sales pitch is much harder to sell if it were learned, for example, that the nitrites in bacon don't cause an increase in cancer. So it's very, very sketchy, certainly what they're doing. It's fraud, I can't say it's fraud, but it's a, again, a backhanded health claim is what I'm calling it.

'''C:''' It's dubious for sure.

{{tooltip|Courtney|Jay's wife}}

=== Donkey Hide Snake Oil (56:57) ===
* [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/science/donkeys-africa-china-ejiao.html?_r=0 To Sate China’s Demand, African Donkeys Are Stolen and Skinned]<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/science/donkeys-africa-china-ejiao.html?_r=0 NYT: To Sate China’s Demand, African Donkeys Are Stolen and Skinned]</ref>

'''S:''' And now we're gonna go from bacon to donkeys. What's the connection there, Cara?

'''C:''' Yeah, so this is a sad article that just appeared in the New York Times yesterday, but of course it's not a new story, it's just coming to light for more and more people. Donkey hide is the key ingredient in a type of gelatin or glue that is a common thousands-of-year-old traditional Chinese remedy. It's called yi jiao or a jiao, I'm not sure how you pronounce the first letter in it, but it's spelled J-I-A-O, E-J-I-A-O. Sometimes it's all one word, sometimes it's two words. And in some different writings, you'll see it starting with an A. So the English name for that would be, like I said, donkey hide glue, donkey hide gelatin. Sometimes you see it called ass hide glue on packaging.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh.

'''C:''' Yeah, I know. I have, yeah, I have a-

'''E:''' Ass hide glue.

'''C:''' I have an Amazon link to some Shandong yi jiao donkey hide glue gelatin asses glue from the Shandong Fuzhou group, $160, 9.59 shipping. Not eligible for Prime. So you can't get this until January 5th through 10th. Only if you pick expedited. Yeah, it says asses glue on the cover. And here's the thing. So we'll get to why they think yi jiao is important and why it's necessary, but let's talk about the donkey crisis that's happening. This story, it's a really sad, really emotional story that is kind of focusing on one gentleman. His name is Morris Njeru and he is from Nairobi and his donkeys were stolen and killed. And they were taken to a place called Goldox Kenya Limited, which is a donkey slaughterhouse in Kenya that's owned or partially owned by some Chinese owners. And now this has become such a problem. The Chinese donkey population has depleted to about half of what it used to be because of the high demand for these hides that China is starting to import donkeys from other places in the world. And of course, it's quite cheap to do it from Africa, but this is, I think, a good example of when traditional Chinese medicine has horrific effects, not just on ecology and wildlife, because here we're talking about donkeys. And of course, donkeys are domestic animals, but on the economic livelihood of individuals. Because in places like Kenya, people often keep donkeys as beasts of burden. They are their vehicles, they are their tools. For example, the gentleman who this story focuses on is a potter. He works with pottery. I don't know why I said potter.

'''E:''' Harry Potter?

'''C:''' Because I read potter, but it says porter. He is a porter. And so he brings goods around Nairobi using his donkeys. And without his donkeys, his income has plummeted from $30 a day to less than $5 a day. He has to take his child out of school. He can't pay back his loan. These are real outcomes. And so what's happening here is that many, many countries around Africa and even the Middle East have banned the donkey trade because of this issue. They're seeing that the people are speaking out and saying, our donkeys are being stolen. They're going missing. They're being slaughtered. What we used to use them for, there aren't enough available for their use. And so a lot of these countries banned it, like Tanzania and many other countries around there. But because it's still legal in Kenya, you're finding that a lot of neighboring countries are having their donkeys stolen. They're coming across the Kenyan border and then they're being slaughtered and processed there in Kenya and sent over to China really to just fulfill that appetite. Also Middle East is cracking down. There are donkeys that come into China from Mexico, from South America, from Kyrgyzstan, from like a lot of places all over the world. And it's all to feed this appetite for what they call ass high gelatin. And the photos are horrific in this article. Of course, if you want to be tapped into emotionally, you'll see these photos of just like piles and piles of bones of the hide stacked, people high, the meat going to waste, being dumped out in these communities where it's getting into the water table, all of the bacteria from the rotting flesh of the donkeys, where people who live in close proximity are having a hard time maintaining their livelihood because there's basically like a death pile right near where they live. I dug a little bit about Ejiao or Ejiao because it wasn't really that deep in the article. It was much more about the economics and sort of the horrible things that are happening from it. But Donkey Skin, I found a lot of websites that are just sales websites trying to sell donkey hide gelatin. Colochoriacin, gelatinum choriacin is the pharmaceutical name for it. A lot of places that I've seen, they're calling it, they're calling them herbs that tonify blood. What does tonify mean?

'''E:''' Tonify your blood?

'''C:''' How do you tonify something? What does that even mean? I don't know. It says it enters the kidney, liver and lung meridians.

'''E:''' Oh, here we go.

'''C:''' Yep, it's indicated for blood deficiency. Not sure what blood deficiency is. I think that means somebody who's lost blood maybe. Sallow or pale. Yeah, exactly. It nourishes the blood. It helps to stop bleeding. Oh, it nourishes and moistens your yin. In case your yin was dry, you can moisten your yin by taking this. It'll help with your irritability, your insomnia, especially in the aftermath of a warm febrile disease. It moistens the lungs and the large intestines, but it's contraindicated for those with exterior disorders. So don't take this if you have an exterior disorder. Also don't take it, apparently, if you have a spleen or stomach deficiency. I assume it's because it's vile. Like from the things I read on Amazon, it was like, it stinks, it's putrid. It'll probably make you barf, which is why it's like, don't take it if you have focal distention in the epigastrium. Don't take it if you have diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting, or if you have retention of dampness, which apparently is a thing. It's bananas. Like, and you can read about it all over the internet. And a lot of these articles, Western articles are written without irony, how to prepare donkey hide gelatin, how to make tea from donkey hide gelatin. There are forums at the bottom. What if I just use regular gelatin? Can we use simple gelatin powder? I think it's made of pork instead. No, these are two different things. They don't have the same medicinal properties. But then the good news is that I'm seeing over and over and over in the comment section of these different articles. Please don't use this product. Donkey populations are being decimated. The animal deaths are really inhumane. It's unacceptable that TCM should be allowed to exploit donkeys, implicating impoverishing rural communities in Africa and South America. You're seeing on Amazon the top multiple ones. Oh, look, another traditional Chinese medicine that doesn't really do anything. Come on, China, it's 2017, and you have med schools like every other civilized country. You should be ashamed to be selling a product which is causing great suffering. And so I just feel like this is one of a litany, just a long stream of examples of times when traditional Chinese medicine has real impact on real people, on their livelihoods, on their health. It's a bummer. This article bums me out. And when I was in China, I saw a lot of this all over Hong Kong. There are TCM shops all over. When I was in China, I went to a wet market and there was dog. I saw all sorts of herbs that I don't know what they were made out of. There were a lot of animal carcasses there that were animals that aren't traditionally used in food. I also was talking to a lot of the people that I visited in China. And granted, I was there with a bunch of skeptics, so it was nice. They were able to enlighten me about a lot of these things, but they were saying that when you get sick, not just in China, but also in Hong Kong, and you go to a hospital, but especially in China and where we were in Dongguan, when you go to the hospital, the first thing they ask you is, do you wanna see a Western doctor or a traditional Chinese doctor? And then it's your choice, which means do you want medicine or do you want, woo, yeah. And it can cost a lot more than traditional medicine. That's the crazy thing. The cost of donkeys has skyrocketed, so it's affecting the economies in these areas where people rely on what used to be cheap sources of transport. And it's, I mean, look, this bottle on Amazon or this box that I just sent you guys, $160? Think about how much people are getting for their donkeys now.

'''S:''' Yeah, it really is a scandal. It really is terrible. I think China and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners should be absolutely shamed because of their use of endangered species and also animal cruelty and the way in which these markets are served. It really is terrible. Not to mention that the products themselves are a complete scam.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's one thing if you're a small fishing community and this has been your way of life, but that's not the case anymore. We are globalized. The fact that you're having to import donkeys from Kenya is a problem. That's a problem.

'''S:''' All right, so there's no who's that noisy this week because Jay is sick, but he will hopefully be back next week and we'll pick that back up. So let's go on with science or fiction.

{{anchor|sof}} 
== Science or Fiction (1:07:08) ==

{{SOFinfo
|item1 = A new study finds that the double rate of Type II diabetes in African Americans compared to whites is entirely due to increased obesity.
|link1 = <ref>[https://news.northwestern.edu Northwestern Now: Blacks’ high diabetes risk is driven by obesity, not mystery]</ref>

|item2 = Researchers find that using prenatal vitamins are associated with a higher risk of having a child diagnosed with autism.
|link2 = <ref>[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2667432 JAMA Psychiatry: Association of Maternal Use of Folic Acid and Multivitamin Supplements in the Periods Before and During Pregnancy With the Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Offspring]</ref>

|item3 = Scientists have developed a technique for speed breeding, allowing for crops to grow up to 3 times faster, allowing for 6 crops of wheat per year, for example.
|link3 = <ref>[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180101144758.htm ScienceDaily: Speed breeding technique sows seeds of new green revolution]</ref>

|}}
{{SOFResults
|fiction = prenatal vitamins & autism

|science1 = speed breeding
|science2 = t2d rates in usa

|rogue1 = Cara
|answer1 = prenatal vitamins & autism

|rogue2 =Evan
|answer2 =prenatal vitamins & autism

|rogue3 =Bob
|answer3 =t2d rates in usa

|host =steve

|sweep = 
|clever = 
|win = y
|swept = 
}}
''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. All right, first one of the new year. Are you guys all ready?

'''C:''' I suppose.

'''E:''' Bob is.

'''S:''' Item number one, a new study finds that the double rate of type two diabetes in African-Americans compared to whites is entirely due to increased obesity. Item number two, researchers find that using prenatal vitamins are associated with a higher risk of having a child diagnosed with autism. And item number three, scientists have developed a technique for speed breeding, allowing for crops to grow up to three times faster, allowing for six crops of wheat per year, for example. All right, so we're gonna go in the order that you guys were ranked for 2017. So Cara, you go first.

=== Cara's Response ===

'''C:''' Okay, a new study finds that the double rate compared to whites is entirely due to increased obesity. So there's nothing genetically different. It has nothing to do with SES or anything like that except as it is linked with obesity. And obesity is complex, of course, because what we're seeing often is low nutrition, high, like high macronutrients, low micronutrients. Okay, hmm, could be, could be the case. Of course, type two diabetes is correlated with obesity. It's correlated with sugar intake. Let's see. Researchers find that using prenatal vitamins are associated with a higher risk of having a child diagnosed with autism. Ah, crap. I mean, that shouldn't be true, but it's important if we're starting to find certain links and maybe there's like, maybe taking a ton of folic acid actually does something to the baby's brain. I don't know, because there's a lot of stuff in those prenatals, not just folic acid. Let's see, scientists have developed a technique for speed breeding. Oh, of crops. I was thinking of people, people. Let's see, allowing for crops to grow.

'''E:''' Let's fast forward.

'''C:''' Right, up to three times faster, allowing for six crops of wheat per year, for example. So I assume that means there's usually only two crops of wheat per year, but that has less to do with their, like there's no gestational period for crops. It has to do with seasons, right? But we could just take care of that in a greenhouse. Yeah, there's a lot we can manipulate to kind of trick these plants into thinking it's a different time of year. We can give them the right water content, the right temperature. We can probably even change some of their endogenous hormones with different sort of exterior signals. So I think that that one's gonna be science. I'm struggling between the first two, because I feel like it may be the case that there actually is something genetic that's increasing the rate, but I don't know, because so many, you see a lot of times like a higher rate of certain diseases in African-American populations or in Latino populations, and it's always really hard to piece apart, is it because of poverty, or is it because of an actual ethnic difference? Because genetically, there's so much more in common than there is difference. So I don't know, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the prenatal vitamin one is the fiction, because that would mean that it is entirely due to increased obesity in the double the rate of type two diabetes. Yeah, so that, right? I'm doing that right, Steve?

'''S:''' That's right.

'''C:''' Yeah, the prenatal vitamins one is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Evan, you're next.

=== Evan's Response ===

'''E:''' So reverse order, the technique for speed breeding sounds plausible, because you have laboratories set up and controlled environments like Cara mentioned, and sure, you optimize the system and you do some, I don't know if there's a genetic modification or something that goes into this particular wheat, or you can control your environment a lot. So I'm not all that surprised that they were able to push this wheat to this kind of yield. So I think that one's gonna be science. It's like Cara was having a problem, I'm having the same problem with the other two here. Prenatal vitamins associated with a higher risk of having child diagnosed with autism. Oh my gosh, I so don't want this to be true, because can you imagine, here comes the next wave of anti-science people coming along with, but if it is happening, it's happening, and that's, gee whiz, I really hope it's not the case. I mean, I think I'm gonna go with this one as the fiction, because of my own desires. Not that I want to see the African American community have these problems with increased obesity and diabetes, but that's what would be the case if I choose the prenatal vitamins. But I think that's where I'm going. I'm gonna have to go with Cara. I'll say the vitamins are gonna be the fiction.

'''S:''' And Bob.

=== Bob's Response ===

'''B:''' I don't like any of these. Not one.

'''E:''' Not even the wheat one?

'''B:''' No, come on, three times faster? Six crops? Why the hell?

'''E:''' Under ideal circumstances?

'''B:''' That's huge, that's fricking huge. And I gotta resort to the, like, I would have seen it type of shit. I went through a lot of news items, didn't see any of these, especially that one. But I've got problems with the other ones as well. The prenatal vitamins, yeah, that would just be horrible, and it just doesn't sound right to me. But I also have got a problem with the first one because, I mean, you have to conclude that if African-Americans have a double rate of diabetes, entirely due to increased obesity, that would mean that they would also have double rate of obesity. And I don't think that's true. I don't know, but that doesn't sound right to me. I mean, that's more of a, it's more of a low-income, sedentary lifestyle type thing, and nobody's got a stakehold on that. Everybody does that, you know? So that's why I don't like that one. Bleh, I'll just go with my gut. All right, I'll say the obesity one is fiction.

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Okay, so that means you all agree on number three, so we'll start there. Scientists have developed a technique for speed breeding, allowing for crops to grow up to three times faster, allowing for six crops of wheat per year, for example. You all think that one is science, and that one is science.

'''B:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Nice, all right.

'''B:''' Wow.

'''C:''' That's cool.

'''B:''' What's the catch?

'''S:''' Yeah, so Cara was correct. This is under highly controlled conditions, like in a greenhouse. So this isn't something that would be useful out in the field. We're not gonna be growing our crops this way. But what it would be useful for is cultivating or breeding new crops, new cultivars, right? New varieties. Because the limiting factor, like if you're trying to breed wheat, corn, beans, whatever, and then pick the traits that are desirable, if you only could do that twice a year, that's a really slow process. If they're speeding up their breeding rate three times, even if it's only in small, controlled amounts in greenhouses, that could potentially speed up the process of cultivating and developing new varieties, new cultivars by three times, and that is potentially huge.

'''C:''' And if you're basically barred from, not barred, but like the barriers to entry for getting a GM crop on the market are so high, sometimes it's easier to just backward do it with breeding.

'''S:''' Yeah, but this technique would also be useful for genetic modification because, as part of the process of developing a GM crop, you do need to back breed it with the parent cultivar, the parent species. And so there's a lot of this breeding involved anyway. You don't get around that by doing the genetic modification. So even in developing GM crops, this would speed up the process significantly, and that's a huge advantage. So this could potentially accelerate the ability to get new cultivars to market with desirable traits.

'''B:''' I mean, still, like during the apocalypse, you got a warehouse and you could set that up.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah.

'''B:''' You could set that up, and then you would have, in a small warehouse, you could feed a bigger community, three times the community.

'''C:''' Well, people are already doing, it's really cool. Not to hijack the conversation, but just two seconds. I did a piece for our local show, SoCal Connected, maybe last year or the year before, about a really cool company here in LA who basically converts shipping containers into these grows. And they have multiple rows. They fit like acreage of regular land inside of these shipping containers. They're completely sealed and airtight, so there's no water loss. So they can use something like 98% less water than you would need if you're just like watering the dirt. And they can emulate almost any environment. They can grow things that should be growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. They can grow things that should- Well, yeah, because it's all indoors. It's all done with a computer. You know, you just change the lighting conditions, you change the heat, you change the moisture. It's not that hard to kind of like mimic mother nature if you can get all of the, if you know what all of the measurements are. And it's really cool. And then their whole thing is that it's about farm to table, in a sense. Like you can actually physically drive this into a food desert, and then instead of it going on the truck already picked for a week at a time, it's still in its growth medium. So by the time it gets to the community, it can be fresh picked. Yeah, it's really cool.

'''B:''' Holy crap, that's cool.

'''C:''' It's really cool. They're just, you know, having a hard time with scaling, which is what we would expect. But if we saw this happening more and more, it could be a real way to feed communities who are kind of cut off from rural farmland.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Okay, I guess we'll work our way backwards. Item number two, researchers find that using prenatal vitamins are associated with a higher risk of having a child diagnosed with autism. Evan and Cara, you think this one is the fiction. Bob, you think this one is science. And this one is the fiction.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Ah, well, I'm-

'''C:''' Oh, wait, we got it right. Okay, good.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''B:''' Fuck.

'''S:''' So actually, the study showed the exact opposite. It showed that women who take-

'''C:''' Oh, interesting.

'''S:''' -the prenatal vitamins, probably especially folate, had a reduced incidence of autism.

'''B:''' So what does that mean?

'''S:''' We don't know what it means.

'''C:''' But you don't know because rich people take vitamins. Educated people take, you know, it's like-

'''S:''' Yeah, so it's hard to interpret the results because it's correlational only. It's an observational study. Women weren't randomized to taking folate or prenatal vitamins or not taking it. And so there could be a lot of other factors that are involved. Maybe women who are compliant with their prenatal vitamins take care of themselves better in other ways. Maybe they have a higher socioeconomic status. Maybe they're better fed or whatever. There's lots of other things that might correlate with that. So you need to really control for all those other variables as best as you can. We need to study this in multiple ways to see if this is real and if so, what the actual cause is.

'''C:''' Yeah, yeah, because when you're pregnant and you got a baby growing inside of you, it's a totally different ballgame than just eating for yourself.

'''S:''' Yeah, being pregnant is very nutritionally demanding.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' Okay, let's go back to number one. A new study finds that the double rate of type 2 diabetes in African-Americans compared to whites is entirely due to increased obesity.

'''B:''' It's fiction too, right?

'''S:''' Of course, this all means that this is also science.

'''C:''' I think that's, it's good too.

'''S:''' This result is a little surprising. So this has been a bit of a mystery. Actually, African-Americans overall have twice the rate of type 2 diabetes. African-American women have three times the rate of type 2 diabetes as white women. And the question was, what is the cause of this? They knew it was at least partly due to increased obesity rates, but we couldn't rule out that there was a genetic predisposition, something else environmental. And so this was a very, very large study where they looked at a lot of demographic variables. They were able to control for as many variables as possible. Socioeconomic status, obesity, of course, and lots of other things. And the only one that shook out of all the data was obesity and increased obesity rates completely explained the increased rate of type 2 diabetes in the African-American population.

'''C:''' But Bob, I think that like what you were saying, I would just push back and say it does correlate with poverty and it does correlate with lack of medical care. So I'm not surprised that it's that much higher because we have a massive inequality problem in our country.

'''B:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''S:'' But in a way, it's an encouraging finding because this is something that's totally modifiable, right? If it were something inherently genetic, that would be more difficult to deal with. If it's entirely due to obesity, then we know that's the issue we need to address. We need to address the obesity problem in this population.

'''C:''' It is, but it's, I mean, I feel like-

'''E:''' So we can target the problem.

'''C:''' We absolutely can. When we know that it's a lifestyle problem, we know how to put, I think, resources into educational efforts. And sometimes simple educational efforts can go a really, really long way.

'''S:''' All right, well, congratulations, Evan and Cara.

'''C:''' Thanks.

'''E:''' All right.

'''S:''' Bob, you're off to a bit of a rocky start.

'''B:''' Already in the gutter.

'''C:''' Oh, no.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:20:24) ==

<blockquote> Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features. – Primo Levi (1919-1987), Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and {{w|Holocaust survivor}}</blockquote>

'''S:''' All right, Evan, you have a quote for us?

'''E:''' "Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone. Not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change or even increase by incorporating extraneous features." And that was written by Primo Levi, or Lev-I.

'''B:''' Primo, Primo Levi.

'''E:''' When was that written? It was the 1950s? But I don't have the exact date on that. However, oh, yeah, Primo Levi was a Italian Jewish chemist, writer, Holocaust survivor, actually an Auschwitz survivor, and wrote a book called, and I had not heard this, The Periodic Table. He wrote it in 1975, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.

'''C:''' Wow.

'''E:''' How'd I miss that?

'''S:''' Periodic Table. Sounds like I have to read that.

'''E:''' That's exactly what I want to do as well. And I found a lot of other very, very nice quotes from him, so you'll be hearing more from him as the year progresses.

'''S:''' Yeah, so that's kind of a generic skeptical notion, a skeptical quote, but hey, if he said it 50, 60 years ago, good for him.

'''B:''' Yep.

'''S:''' Well, guys, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''S:''' First show of 2018. I think we're off to a good start, although we're missing Jay.

'''E:''' Feel better, Jay.

'''B:''' Feel better, Jay.

'''C:''' Hand, foot, and mouth.

'''S:''' And I hope we don't all come down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. That would suck. I'm like starting to look at my hands now, look for any kind of appearance of a rash. And we're supposed to get walloped tomorrow with a bad winter storm.

'''C:''' I know, I just got an alert. I still am on the City University of New York system for some reason. I still get text messages every time campus is closed.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think everything's gonna be closed.

'''C:''' Good luck, you guys.

'''S:''' Stay warm, everyone.

'''E:''' Stay warm.

== Signoff (1:21:37) ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.

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SGU Episode 576

2025-04-07T18:19:40Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

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|episodeDate = July 23rd 2016 
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|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2016-07-23.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,47024.0.html
|qowText = Denialists maintain their stance - be it in regard to HIV and AIDS, the holocaust, or 9/11 - in the face of exhaustive and irrefutable evidence. It is not melodramatic to say that vocalization of these particular falsehoods have been responsible for many deaths -->
|qowAuthor = {{w|Ben Vincent}} 
|}}

== Introduction ==

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Thursday, July 21st, 2016 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, folks.

'''J:''' Hi.

== Pokémon Go () ==
''(The rogues talk about playing Pokémon Go. Bob is excited about the augmented reality)''

'''S:''' All right, fests up. How much of you guys have been playing Pokemon Go this past week?

'''B:''' Me.

'''E:''' Thank goodness I have not.

'''C:''' Bob plays.

'''J:''' I tried it.

'''B:''' I do it for the fitness and social aspects. That's it.

'''E:''' Yes, right. Of course. Yeah.

'''C:''' I interviewed Bob on my personal podcast on Talk Nerdy last week, which was so much fun.

'''B:''' It was.

'''C:''' Yeah. He, unprompted, started talking about Pokemon Go.

'''J:''' Oh, Bob, don't pretend it's not.

'''B:''' I told you to edit that out, Cara.

'''J:''' I mean, to give it my real review, first off, I didn't even get to level five, so I didn't fight or anything. But I walked around with Steve, and it kind of sucked. I'm like, all right, well, where's this... You see some rustling in the bushes in the app. You see these leaves go up, and you walk over, and you throw a stupid ball at the thing, and it captures it. I guess I'm missing all the fun, right? There's a fun part of this game, Bob?

'''S:''' It's a little bit more fun than you're giving it credit for. So I play with my daughters. It also is, you have to walk around to play. I guess you could drive around, but-

'''B:''' No, it really won't work.

'''S:''' Yeah. To get to places, it sort of forces you to walk around. Plus, you get eggs, and if you have to hatch... In order to hatch the egg, you have to walk, and driving doesn't count. It's like you have to walk five kilometers, then your egg hatches. So it is designed to get you off your ass, get you moving around, get you to-

'''J:''' That's great.

'''S:''' -points of interest. You have to go to points of interest in order to get more Pokeballs and stuff. So that aspect of it is great.

'''B:''' It's critical, I think, because I literally would not be interested, nor would I play for longer than a few days if it weren't for that. If you could just sit on your couch and have them come to you, I would lose interest so fast. So that's what I think is so key about it. Even the social aspect, which is, I think, secondary. I've got a couple friends at work who are like, hey, we just saw a PokeStop that somebody dropped a lure on. Let's run out. So we just left our job and spent 20 minutes walking across the street to do this stupid thing. I'm telling you, I'm cranking up the steps every day.

'''E:''' Exercise goes up. Productivity goes down.

'''B:''' It's-

'''C:''' I'd be interested to see how big the user base is of people who really weren't that exposed to Pokemon. Because okay, I'm 32, I'll be 33 in a couple of months, and I'm just too old for Pokemon. It was a phenomenon that happened just like maybe a few grades below me. My little sisters were into it, but I was just too old. So obviously, Bob, you weren't playing with Pokemon when you were young.

'''E:''' Not that he admits to.

'''B:''' Not in the slightest. Like I said, my attraction is what it is to this specific game. And I had no real interest in Pokemon at all before this.

'''J:''' They're saying 9.5 million daily users are active.

'''C:''' Holy crap.

'''B:''' It's gargantuan. It's the biggest app in, I think, United States history. The biggest app.

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''B:''' Bigger than Tinder.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''B:''' It is a cultural phenomenon. And I think a lot of part, a big part of it that we haven't mentioned, I think, is the augmented reality, virtual reality aspect to it. Because you are walking around a very simplified map of your town, of wherever you are. But then when you actually see a Pokemon, then actually your camera comes into play. And it's like overlaid on top of whatever. I had a Weedle or whatever overlaid on a jar of peanut butter on my desk. It was just a funny thing. So that's another component that I think is important. And I think it also shows you that this is the beginning. This is just the biggest beginning of augmented reality games that I think are just going to sweep the nation, sweep many nations.

'''S:''' Yeah. I think that's the real news. The real news story here is how popular the first augmented reality game is. And this is the chumpiest, most basic version of augmented reality you can imagine.

'''B:''' This is Atari. This is Atari.

'''S:''' This is Space Invaders.

'''B:''' It's a tabletop tennis.

'''C:''' But the smart thing is that it is a social game as opposed to, like, I have a couple of really cool augmented reality toys that, they're kind of museum-friendly toys. I have this deck of cards that's a deck of dinosaur cards. And when you put your camera over it, the dinosaurs come to life. They're really cool. And also, like, farm animals, they're for kids, but they're really exciting and cool. And they're fun, but you can only really play with them for so long, and you can only play with it alone.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' But this becomes this augmented plus going outside of your house, plus having this whole social aspect. It just kind of fits in on the zeitgeist right now. It just makes sense for everybody.

'''S:''' Think about the potential. Imagine wearing-

'''B:''' Oh my god, I have.

'''S:''' Imagine wearing your phone. Imagine wearing, like, augmented reality pretty much wraparound goggles, and playing games like Call of Duty in your neighborhood. Just imagine-

'''C:''' That's awesome.

'''S:''' Right?

'''J:''' Yeah. So augmented reality, meaning that there is a graphical overlay on top of the real world. It's not-

'''S:''' Yeah, but you're out and about in the real world. There's something compelling about that.

'''E:''' Ignore the traffic.

'''C:''' Imagine if you have, like I've seen this before with kind of half VR augmented reality where you have sensors, right? You have a sensor on your outfit, you have a sensor on your toy gun or whatever. So you can basically be playing laser tag, like fake laser tag out in public, but you're augmenting it to be like Call of Duty.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Like, how cool would that be that you actually have the interactive component where it's not just pushing a button on your phone, but you're playing with, like, little toy guns?

'''J:''' I think that's awesome.

'''E:''' Walking Dead scenario, that'd be cool.

'''B:''' Just make sure they don't look realistic, too realistic in real life.

'''C:''' That's the cool thing. They look neon yellow in your hand until you put on the goggles.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Then they look badass. Yeah.

'''J:''' Yeah. If we could start getting some haptic feedback like when you can actually feel things.

'''B:''' Sure. Good word, Jay.

'''J:''' You know, like they have gloves now that give a little bit of sensory feedback from a game, but it'll get better as the tech companies have to start spending a ton of money and then when they sell billions of them, the cost will come way down. Guys, a quick update. Another number I read here that said there are 21 million daily active users on the Pokemon game.

'''C:''' Oh my gosh.

'''J:''' Yep. It's unbelievably huge now.

'''C:''' By the way, an article breaking news right now, an article I just saw on CNN Politics. State Department spokesman calls out reporter for playing Pokemon Go in briefing.

'''E:''' That's it. That's it. It's infiltrated the highest levels.

'''B:''' But did you guys, did you guys see this? Some guy on TV doing the weather, some woman walks in front of him playing Pokemon Go on camera live. It's hilarious. That's the best example yet that I've read.

'''E:''' That weatherman totally got in the way.

'''B:''' Fantastic.

== Forgotten Superheroes of Science (7:12) ==
* Carlos Juan Finlay

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about this week's Forgotten Superhero of Science.

'''B:''' Yes, for this week's Forgotten Superheroes of Science, Carlos Juan Finlay (1833 to 1915), was a Spanish-Cuban epidemiologist who first recognized that Yellow Fever was transmitted through mosquitoes. Huge, huge, huge finding! Yellow Fever, you don't hear much about it, really. We know what it is; we've heard of it. But it was a horror in Finlay's time, and it still is to this day in some countries. It ravaged and haunted the tropics back then.

Often you would get better after you contracted it after a few days, but then sometimes it came back with a vengeance, and with a fifty percent mortality rate. People were dying, a lot of people were dying. In Cuba, Finlay noticed a pattern of Yellow Fever outbreaks during mosquito season, and that was the key breakthrough. His theory, that mosquitoes were the disease vector, wasn't widely believed for twenty years until famous war surgeon Walter Reid and colleagues were sent to Cuba to research the disease that caused so many deaths during the Spanish-American war.

Now, Finlay convinced Reid, and together they identified the specific mosquito species, and had incontrovertible proof; and this was the first time ever that mosquitoes were shown to actually be vectors; and this ultimately led to the eradication of Yellow Fever from Cuba and Panama, saving hundreds and thousands of lives, and also allowed for the completion of Panama Canal, which was taking a huge toll.

And then of course, then vaccines were developed, and it's much better than it used to be. There are still many parts of Africa that are isolated, they're still getting hit with it. There's also many reasons that Yellow Fever is actually increasing a little bit here and there.

So, another interesting aside: History books will often say that Reid made the discovery. But contrary to many similar historical examples, Reid always gave Finlay full credit for being the first to find a link between mosquitoes and disease. So, remember Carlos Juan Finlay; mention him to your friends, perhaps when discussing arboviruses or aides-egypti mosquitoes!

'''E:''' Ooh! Or Zika.

'''S:''' So, some historians insisted on giving full credit to the white guy, even when he was insisting that, “No, it really was ...”

'''B:''' Yes

'''S:''' “you know, the Spanish-Cuban who did it.”

'''B:''' Absolutely, yep. He was great about it, even in personal correspondences, he gave him full credit.

== News Items ==
=== Funding Replications (9:42) ===
* http://www.nature.com/news/dutch-agency-launches-first-grants-programme-dedicated-to-replication-1.20287

''(Some funding has been given by The Netherlands to replicate major studies, in order to make sure they're really true)''

'''S:''' All right, Cara, I understand the Dutch are trying to do something about the problem of replications in science.

'''C:''' Yes, a pilot program funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research or NWO, which is a funny acronym, not the New World Order, was just launched with a specific goal to encourage researchers to replicate studies in the social and medical sciences. Three million euros was put into the national fund for use over the next three years, making it the first ever effort like across the world for replication funded by national organization. Their main focus is so-called cornerstone research. So that specifically refers to studies that are like heavily cited, that have been used to shape public policy, that are represented in textbooks and other curriculum, or that have had a pretty large media footprint.

'''S:''' We call those seminal studies.

'''C:''' Seminal studies.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' There you go. So that cornerstone has less a wee-wee reference in it. So I kind of like that. So according to the NWO, here's a quote, the NWO, sorry, here's a quote, the pilot program replication studies focuses on two types of research, reproduction, which is replication with existing data, the data sets from the original study are reanalyzed, and replication with new data. A data collection is put together, which is subjected to the same research protocol as in the original study. By encouraging the realization of replication research, NWO intends to make a contribution to increasing the transparency of research and the quality and completeness of the reporting of results. The pilot is not aimed at tracing falsified research results and data sets, or other forms of reprehensible research practices and misconduct. The NWO hopes to fund eight to 10 studies a year over the course of the program. Remember, that's three years. And although 3 million euros out of an overall annual budget of 700 million euros doesn't sound like much, it does represent a change in the way that scientists and the public are thinking about replication. So if you guys remember, we have talked about this issue previously on SGU. A few months ago, we discussed a meta-analysis showing that over half of psychology studies failed reproducibility attempts. That was part of the reproducibility project that was led by Brian Nosek, the executive director of the Center for Open Science in Virginia. He's voiced his support for the Dutch initiative, but his own findings have actually gotten a lot of pushback from psychologists, claiming that their methodology might have been flawed and that there were other issues with the reproducibility project. Probably the most vocal opponent of both Nosek's research, but also this new Dutch initiative, is Daniel Gilbert. He's a Harvard psychologist. Here's a quote from him in an article that was published in Nature yesterday by Manya Baker. Quote, If the Dutch government wants to spend its money on research whose sole qualification is its unoriginality, then that's their prerogative. Will we learn something valuable from such research? Probably. Will it be more valuable than what we would have learned if the same amount of money had been spent exploring important new ideas? That's a difficult question to answer, but it is the critical question and it's the question no one asks.

'''S:''' That's not that difficult a question to answer.

'''E:''' I don't think so.

'''C:''' I know. It's a very cynical outlook, especially, I mean, the fact that he chose the word unoriginality I think has bite to it. Other researchers do argue, though, that reproducibility should just be built into the publication process and it should be required before peer review can commence. But I'm definitely interested in what you guys think. I mean, I personally think that this initiative is a great step forward, and I'm not sure I fully understand why there's pushback. And I also think that, yes, reproducibility needs to be built into the publication process, but there's only so much you can do in a single lab.

'''E:''' You want another lab to actually do those studies. Someone else. You want someone else to do it.

'''S:''' We've talked about this in bits and pieces over the years on the SGU. There are lots of potential problems with the way science is conducted. There's researcher bias. There's publication bias. There's perverse incentives. There's incentives to publish new and exciting and contradictory results. And replications are thought of as boring and unoriginal and doesn't do anything for your impact factor, and so they get undervalued. Nobody wants to give them space in their pages. If you back up and think about the bigger question, which is, as a civilization, if we want to get the most bang for our science research buck, right, we have a certain finite amount of resources, time not just money, but time and people and the things that you need to do scientific studies. We have finite resources. We want to make scientific progress as efficiently as possible with those resources. There's a certain sweet spot of balance between new exploratory research, exploring new ideas, but confirming ideas, and replicating studies to make sure that the data is reliable. And I don't think that right now we're in the sweet spot. I think that there's been a ton of evidence, a ton of evidence in the last 20 years indicating that the process has shifted far too far to the new original exciting research end of the spectrum and too little neglecting the boring replication end of the spectrum. And we have to pull it back to, I think, the sweet spot of a more appropriate balance between those two types of research. So that's why I think—

'''B:''' How do we do that?

'''S:''' Well, I think this is one way.

'''C:''' With incentives. That's the problem. There's no incentive. Yeah, like the culture of science and science publication is such that there's really no incentive to replicate or reproduce studies. It's not sexy. It doesn't get you a lot of cachet within the scientific community if you're not—even look at the way he said it. It was like unoriginal research or whatever.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's bullshit.

'''C:''' It just makes you, oh, oh, this guy just redoes other people's studies. He's so unoriginal. So having some sort of incentive, like a monetary incentive, is a really good one.

'''S:''' But the thing is there's something to be said for being a real expert technician at carrying out scientific studies. Somebody should be able to build a career out of just being an experimentalist. Your job is to—

'''B:''' Wow, what a cool idea.

'''S:''' -analyze research that other people do, search it for flaws and weaknesses, fix it, do it better, replicate it correctly. And I have heard researchers—this is like personal communication to me—like when someone brings up, hasn't this study been done before? And the answer is, yeah, but we're going to do it right. And that's the correct response. Who cares if someone's done it before? I'm going to do it right. And that's what everyone's attitude should be. Also, the concept here is that the threshold for when scientific evidence is compelling to the point where we could say, okay, this is probably true. Now we could take this as a given and move forward is a lot higher than I think most people think it is. That threshold is higher if you really look at the evidence, if you look at reversals and things that turn—when you do take a close look at it, it turns out they're not true, etc., etc. So the way to achieve that higher threshold is more replication, basically. That's the primary way.

'''C:''' Because those replication studies that you're talking about that actually do get published are so rarely pure replication studies. They're usually, like you said, original research where part of the methods was that they replicated previous research in order to show that the protocol works. And so even then, it gets buried, it gets lost because that's not the pure point of the publication. But I think this is a step in the right direction. I think it's cool that the Netherlands are doing that. I also think it's really cool that this agency has 700 million euros to just give to scientists within—to Dutch scientists for their research. It's so cool. But I do like that they said, you know what, we're taking money out of the main pot and we're specifically earmarking it for this because it's gotten to the point where we have to do it. We just have to.

=== Data Storage Breakthrough (18:09) ===
* http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a21877/data-storage-breakthrough-chlorine-atoms/

''(Atomic hard drive with a density 500,000 times better than what we have today)''

'''S:''' Anyway, Jay, you're going to tell us about an exciting new breakthrough.

'''J:''' There was a study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. So on 7-19-2016, Dutch scientists at Deft University claimed to have created an atomic hard drive. Awesome. Very, very cool. Before you start getting ready to throw away your existing drive, Evan, this drive exists only in the lab. It's not ready for prime time, meaning there's one. They're using very expensive equipment and people like us won't probably ever get this drive. But there's some cool things about this and then we'll talk about what this news item really means. Today's best day to storage is good. It's a lot better. We have SSDs coming out. But most people are still using spinning drives. You have the big metal drives that have the disks in them that are spinning around. Or you get an expensive solid state drive which has no moving parts. It's like a really big thumb drive and they're very fast, a lot faster than a spinning drive. Everybody is crying about data storage problems on their phone or whatever. We just don't have enough data storage. Now their drive, these scientists that had this breakthrough happen, their drive actually moves around single atoms, which, wow. The technical info behind this drive is that it can store a single kilobyte of data, 8,000 bits in a space under 100 nanometers across, perfectly meaningless to people like us except Bob. But to give you a real – Bob goes, wow, like right on cue. To give you a real world understanding, this technology can store every book that ever existed on the size of a drive no bigger or thicker than a postage stamp. Check that out, right? I mean, come on. Now, wherever you're sitting right now, you should have leaned back and said, wow, that's amazing.

'''B:''' Get the happy chills.

'''J:''' In case you don't know what a stamp is, a stamp is about the size of a one by one centimeter piece of paper. The other half of our audience sat back and went, wow.

'''B:''' If you don't know what paper is, why are you listening to a podcast?

'''J:''' Now the drive that the scientists are using, when they call it a drive, it's a stationary thing, which I'm about to describe to you. It's microscopic. It's not as big as a postage stamp. You can't even see it with your eye. That's how small their drive is. Their storage density is about 500 times better than what we have today. Researchers were placing chlorine atoms on top of a copper surface and they made a grid with the chlorine atoms. So if they were to add or remove an atom from the grid, it represents a digital one or a digital zero in really, really simple terms. That's how they did it. That's how they simulate an actual drive.'''B:''' Oh, that's it?

'''J:''' Yeah. It's not that big of a deal. The big deal, Bob, it's not this big, oh my God, they came up with this unbelievable thing. It's how do they do it? What do they do?

'''S:''' It's not the concept it's the technology to manipulate single atoms at that level.

'''B:''' Well, you would need, typically, you would need a proximal probe, like an STM, a scanning tunneling microscope, but that's a big honking device.

'''J:''' I know. I know. Let's talk about it now, though. But that's what they're using. And of course, we're not going to have tiny versions of that on our desks in our lifetimes. That's not going to happen. What I do think, though, is this is important and the reason why we talk about technology like this is this lab with these scientists might not be iterating their thing down to something that's scalable and doesn't need to be in a clean room and doesn't need to be at liquid nitrogen temperature, which their drive does on all the things I said. But it's the very beginning of just proof of concept. We actually do have a drive that we moved atoms around. We stored, this is the other cool part, is they took Richard Feynman's There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom lecture where he discusses how there's tons of potential technology to be developed on the atomic scale.

'''B:''' That was the beginning of the first real serious proposal that I'm aware of about nanotechnology right there.

'''J:''' Yeah, I think you're right, Bob.

'''B:''' I know I'm right.

'''J:''' And they also stored Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species. Wow. Anyway, they also stored Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species and they proved that they could write the data down, that they could store it, that it'll stay there if they leave it alone for a little while, and that they could read the data. Now that, in and of itself, on the atomic scale, that is a feat.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a proof of concept type of news item. It's just the interesting bit about it is how much data could you store once you have the ability to store it at the atomic level where an atom is a bit? What does that kind of information density look at? Five hundred terabytes per square inch is what it looks like.

'''E:''' Nice.

'''S:''' That's amazing. That's nice.

'''E:''' That fits easily in your pocket.

'''B:''' That's half a petabyte.

'''S:''' Of course, in a few years, we'll be like, 500 terabytes? That's nothing.

'''E:''' Nothing. Bob, we're heading for the yattabyte.

'''J:''' Yeah, we are. But questioning, again, like how much data storage do humans actually need? Like, we're going to start doing-

'''E:''' Pokemon Go?

'''C:''' A lot.

'''J:''' But think about it.

'''C:''' My laptop is always full. I have to delete files every time I sit down to record SGU.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' It's a little extreme.

'''S:''' You need a new hard drive.

'''C:''' I need a new hard drive. It's only 250 gigs, but it's like 250 gigs is constantly full. And I'm offloading to my terabyte hard drive constantly. That's almost full.

'''J:''' We're going to get to the point soon where we're going to be recording our lives, our entire life.

'''B:''' Absolutely.

'''E:''' More so.

'''B:''' And 4K, at least. I mean, our storage, maybe even 10K, our storage requirements are just going to shoot up as high as they are now. They're just going to get much, much bigger.

'''S:''' The bottom line is that whatever storage we have, our applications and use expand to fill it.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' And that there's no end in sight for that. Because as you say, yeah, we're just scratching the surface in terms of video and super high density imaging and et cetera. So I think we'll take it. Dramatically increase the amount of hard drive space we have and we'll fill it.

=== The Connectome (24:08) ===
* http://www.nature.com/news/human-brain-mapped-in-unprecedented-detail-1.20285

''(A map of the connections of the human brain)''

'''S:''' All right, guys. Well, you guys have heard about the Connectome project, right?

'''B:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Well, we have some of the first like really updated data from it recently published is a map of the human brain, the connections of the human brain published, I think just today as we record this or yesterday, actually yesterday in Nature. So what they found was that they were able to identify this is reviewing MRI scans and fMRI scans of the human brain, trying to identify discrete regions in the brain. What makes a brain region discrete? Well, it's the same kind of cells making the same kinds of connections to other parts of the brain, right? So if you have a clump of cells that are all sort of organized the same way, the same type of neurons and they're all making the same connections to other parts of the brain, then we consider that a discrete region. Guess how many different discrete regions they found in the brain.

'''J:''' 10 million.

'''E:''' Four.

'''C:''' A little high. A little low. A little low.

'''S:''' 180. 180.

'''J:''' Is that a lot?

'''C:''' It's a lot more than we thought, more than we had before.

'''S:''' So the previous estimate was 95 and this is so not quite twice as many. This is 180.

'''E:''' Almost twice as many.

'''C:''' Almost twice as many. Yeah.

'''S:''' Almost twice as many.

'''B:''' Well, Steve, did they identify any new cell types? Because I've been reading a little bit about it in terms of optogenetics and I mean, there's lots and lots of different types of cells and subtypes of cells. It's not just neurons. I mean, there's lots of variety there.

'''S:''' Well, I don't think they've identified any new kinds of neurons because that's the kind of classical just dissecting the brain and looking at the neurons under microscopes and staining them to see their shape and their connections, et cetera. So there are many different types of neurons that make different types of connections in the brain. And then the other main type of cell is the astrocytes, which are the support cells, but as we've learned in the last decade or so, they actually participate in modulating neuronal function. And so they're involved with storing information as well.

'''B:''' Aren't they glial cells?

'''S:''' Yeah. Astrocytes are a type of glial cell. Yeah.

'''B:''' Okay. All right.

'''S:''' This is similar. We talked about like this being the connectome project being similar to the genome project. What's interesting is that what occurred to me is that when you're mapping the genome, it's digital, right? I mean, there's an A, T, G, or C in each position. And once you've mapped it, you've mapped it. You know what I mean? There's no issue with resolution, either you have the information or you don't. But with the connectome, even though we've mapped the entire brain, we're just getting started because it's all about resolution. This is just increasing the resolution with which we've mapped the connections to the brain. But there's definitely a lot greater resolution that we can get to. We may not identify significantly more discrete regions, but we will learn more and more about the connections that those regions make and the functionality, how they functionally wire together and work together. And this is this may help us. I mean, the goal of all of this is to help us understand how the brain works, right? How does it encode information? How does it modulate function? We see different parts of the brain lighting up when people do different tasks, but it's hard to interpret that because you really need to think about networks and like the same discrete region or module in the brain might have different functions when it participates in different networks, you know? So it's really complicated. But having a map will definitely help us in that retry to understand what those connections are and what they do. So that's cool. Very cool research.

'''E:''' Good stuff.

'''S:''' So yeah, yeah. This is just, I think, the beginning of a lot more to come with the connectome, understanding the human brain.

=== HAARP (28:13) ===
* http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/us-developed-weapon-system-may-cause-global-warming-govt-116071800897_1.html

'''S:''' All right, Evan.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''S:''' You sent me this interesting article about HAARP ...

'''E:''' HAARP!

'''S:''' in the Business Standard – I had to see if that was a legitimate news outlet or not. It's funny, but ...

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''S:''' Business Standard abbreviates their name as B.S. ''(Rogues laugh)'' Wasn't filling me with confidence. But tell me about it.

'''E:''' All right, well they picked it up courtesy of The Press Trust of India, or PTI, which is a legitimate – for as much as it can be – a news outlet. So that's where they pulled this from. And here's how the headline reads, okay? “US Developed Weapon System May Cause Global Warming, The Government of India Warns.”

Okay, so HAARP, right? When I say HAARP, I'm referring to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program; H-A-A-R-P.

'''B:''' Didn't they close that down?

'''E:''' Yeah, well, Bob, maybe you've heard of it in one of two ways, okay? Here's way number one you might have heard of it: HAARP was a US military-funded project. It was unclassified, non-clandestine; and it was an ionospheric research program whose purpose was to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. And I say “was” because as you alluded to, Bob, the HAARP program officially ended in 2014.

Now here's another way you may have heard of it: HAARP is a secret weapon of the government which has the capability of any of the following evil superpowers: It can cause earthquakes, can control the weather, can boil the atmosphere away, can disable satellites, can destroy aircraft including TWA flight 800 and the space shuttle Columbia. It can control the minds of people and orangutans, or is responsible for global warming.

'''S:''' Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait: “People and orangutans?”

'''E:''' I threw the orangutans thing in there.

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''B:''' Orangu''tans'' ''(Steven and Evan had been saying orangutangs)''

'''C:''' Thank you Bob!

'''E:''' Yes! ''(Applauds)'' Ten points for Bob for picking up the ...

'''S:''' I say it that way just to have Bob correct me every time.

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''E:''' And they also think HAARP is not shut down; it's actually still being wielded to this day for evil purposes. So, which way do you think they're going with this particular story?

'''C:''' ''(Sarcastic)'' Hmm...

'''E:''' So here's how the article reads: “'A US-developed weapons system that strikes the atmosphere with a focused electromagnetic beam may cause global warming,' says the government of India.” And when I say “the government of India,” we are talking about the environment minister Aniel Manhavedave. And he put this down in writing the US has developed a type of weapon called, “High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It strikes the upper atmosphere with focused and steerable electromatic beams. It's an advanced model of a superpowerful ionospheric heater, which may cause the globe to warm and have a global warming effect.

Well, apparently he's not aware that it's no longer in service, but again, there are some people that think that actually it is, and shutting it down is just part of the great cover up in one of the many conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP. That's what you have here.

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''S:''' ''(British accent)'' There you are then!

'''E:''' ''(British accent)'' And there you are! ''(/British) HAARP is responsible for global warming.

'''S:''' It's interesting how something innocent like that just takes on a life of its own.

'''B:''' Yeah

'''S:''' To get in their head that there's something sinister about it, and that's it! There's something sinister about it. And now, nothing that you could say, or that will ever happen will dissuade them from that, because it all becomes part of the conspiracy.

'''E:''' Right

'''C:''' It's also interesting because we know what's responsible for global warming. It's not like that's a big, open-ended question ...

'''E:''' Right

'''C:''' and we needed to find some kind of scapegoat. We know what causes global warming. We don't know ''everything'', but we know a lot of the picture by now.

'''S:''' If you believe that sort of thing, Cara.

''(Evan laughs)''

'''C:''' ''(Sarcastic)'' Oh, yeah. If you believe those climatologists.

'''E:''' But, look, so I think the takeaway from this article, perhaps, is that people in high positions, in government levels and so forth, can easily get swept up in the hysteria of conspiracy theories just as easily as any other human being on the planet.

'''S:''' I think some people are more easy than others, but yeah, I get your point.

=== Bio Bot (32:47) ===
* http://www.theskepticsguide.org/sgu-science-pic-of-the-week-bio-bot-stingray

''(Commercial at 40:07)''

'''S:''' All right, Bob, tell us about this artificial biobot, stingray, cyborg, whatever thing.

'''E:''' Cool.

'''B:''' Do you guys remember the classic Star Trek episode-

'''S:''' Yes.

'''B:''' -Operation Annihilate, called Operation Annihilate, where those weird, flying, fleshy, disc-shaped creatures infected Spock and killed his first brother?

'''E:''' Oh, yes. Yes.

'''C:''' I missed that one. Damn.

'''B:''' Scientists actually created one of those. It doesn't fly. Wait, it doesn't fly.

'''E:''' Oh, wow.

'''B:''' And it can't infect anyone, but it can swim, and that's about all it does. But it's still... It kind of looks like it, but it is still... It's pretty sweet. It's an incredible construct called a biohybrid machine, or biobot made to look and move like a stingray, and it consists of three things, silicone gel, some gold, and genetically engineered rat cells. That's it. And it's engineered to move towards light and undulate just like a real stingray. It's a really beautiful movement.

'''E:''' Neat.

'''B:''' So this is the latest example of nature-inspired robotics. It's created by a team of researchers headed by Sung Jin Park and Kevin Kit Parker at Harvard University's Department of Bioengineering and Applied Sciences. It's tiny. It's only a half inch long, and it weighs just 10 grams. So it may not be impressive in size, but it can move realistically towards light and even be steered by changing the properties of the light hitting it. So how do you even go about making something like this? It's really four layers. This thing consists of four layers. First, you have a silicone gel that's created in a mold, so it's got this stingray shape. And this is the silicone that's just like the outer layers of breast implants. Then you put a gold skeleton inside.

'''J:''' That sounds really cool.

'''B:''' I would love a gold skeleton. Now the reason for this is that silicone is kind of floppy, but with the skeleton in it, it bends back into its original shape because it kind of has a shape memory. And it might sound kind of weird and expensive to have a skeleton that's made of gold. But remember, this is tiny. It's a half an inch. And it just so happens that gold just so happens to have the ideal combination of stiffness and bendiness for this specific application.

'''J:''' Well worth the expensive.

'''B:''' The next part is an interstitial layer of silicone that's super thin. Now this is here for two reasons. It prevents the fourth and final layer from touching the gold, but more importantly, it has these micro patterns in it that are basically from the mold that the silicone was in. And that helps the final layer grow in the precise arrangement required. And then the layer four, the final layer, this is on the underside of the robot stingray. And this is that mouse heart cells. Now these are aligned in a back and forth pattern from the middle kind of going outwards. So when muscle flexing starts, they move the silicone pectoral fins in an efficient stingray like manner. Now these just aren't some any old mouse cells that they throw onto the biobot. These are special genetically engineered cells that are tweaked so they respond to very specific frequencies of light. And this was accomplished, of course, through the new and incredibly promising field of optogenetics. We've mentioned this a bit on the show. I think it's well worth mentioning again and going into a little bit more detail. So optogenetics uses a viral vector to incorporate a gene into nerve cells. And that gene encodes for a very special light sensitive algae proteins called channel rhodopsins and rhodopsins. And this protein is expressed in the cell membrane, which activates the cell when it's exposed to light. So you put light of a certain frequency on the cell, these channels open, it lets the ions flow in or flow out, whatever you want. And it does what the cell is designed to do. So what makes this so fascinating is that – and so efficient is that you're able to activate neurons far more quickly than any drugs can activate them and with far more accuracy and specificity than electrical stimulation. So it's just so much better than any other way. And so with this new powerful tool, it's already essentially being taken for granted that this is going to cause a revolution in neuroscience. It really is a huge, huge field. I think a few years ago, it was recognized as one of the top new science fields of the decade. I mean it's really – it's big now and it's just going to get bigger in my opinion. But it just doesn't work on neurons. It's great for muscle cells as well. So once the cells are in place, all the researchers needed to do was flash two sources of light, one going to each fin and this made the biobot make this undulating pattern heading towards whatever the light source is. And then if you wanted to give it a turn left or right, then all you had to do was make one of those lights on one of the fins brighter or to flash more often and there you go. You're steering a biobot Stingray. So it's pretty slick.

'''J:''' Now Bob, they send this thing out to kill people? Like what do they do with that?

'''B:''' Jay, it's a hunter-

'''E:''' Just to enslave them.

'''B:''' It's a hunter-killer biobot Stingray. Unfortunately, Jay –

'''J:''' Wait. This could go get Steve's snake.

'''B:''' It could. If the snake was in water, possibly.

'''E:''' Or his new outdoor cat.

'''S:''' You're getting ahead of us.

'''B:''' Jay, you're not going to be able to buy this for Dylan for the pool or the tub, unfortunately. The robot needs special nutrients in the fluid because these are living tissue, living cells after all and equally important, these are – so these are just heart cells. There are no immune cells. If you put them in your tub with Dylan, bacteria and fungi would attack them so they would ot last long in the wild. But the potential benefits for something like this I think are pretty cool besides general robotics advances. It can be used to learn more about heart cells. In fact, one of the researcher's goals, his overall goal in this entire project was to create artificial hearts for kids who need them. So very laudable goal.

'''E:''' Yeah, definitely.

'''B:''' But there's just so many applications. Adam Feinberg is a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon. He said by using living cells, they were able to build this robot in a way that just couldn't replicate with any other material. You couldn't replicate this movement with onboard electronics and actuators while keeping it lightweight and maneuverable and it really is remote controlled like a TV set. So you really couldn't do this using any other technology that we have right now. It would just be way too heavy. In my mind, the real question is, what is this thing? Is this biobot alive? What the hell do you even call it besides a biobot?

'''C:''' It's a cyborg. It's a cyborg.

'''B:''' Yeah, in many senses it is. But one quote I got from Kit Parker, who's a bioengineer at Harvard. He led the team. He said, I think we've got a biological life form here, a machine, but a biological life form.

'''J:''' A learning computer.

'''B:''' I wouldn't call it an organism because it can't be produced, but it certainly is alive. And yeah, part of it consists of living cells. So in some sense, it is alive.

== Who's That Noisy (41:49) ==
Answer to last week: Aztec Scream Whistle

'''S:''' All right, Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy.

'''J:''' All right, last week I played you my favorite noisy of the year. This is what you listen to. [plays Noisy] Now, I bet that you guys know that I got a lot of weird email about that.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' Jay, what does it say about you that this is your favorite noisy of the year?

'''B:''' Well, it's mine as well. It's mine as well. Especially once you learn what the hell it is.

'''J:''' Yeah, so I have to admit, I spilled my guts to Bob. It was too cool. I had to talk to him about it. Very, very cool noisy. So I'll tell you a couple of guesses I got. One of them was Ani Koski said, to who's that noisy, this is a hot water kettle approaching boiling temperature. And I ask you, Ani or Oni, who the hell would want their hot water kettle to scream at them like that?

'''B:''' I would. I would.

'''E:''' A person who's hard of hearing, maybe.

'''J:''' Maybe just over Halloween. I don't know. But that was funny. I got a lot of the screaming goat. I got one that was joking around about that's the noise the mob makes of them killing people, I guess. A lot of death references like that. But unfortunately, all those are incorrect. This is the correct answer. The correct answer is that is called the Aztec death whistle. And they have a few ideas of what they did with these. One of them is that they use them to pray to the wind god, one of their gods. But the one that most people believe in, the one that is, I guess, what most people are saying is the correct answer is that-

'''E:''' They want to be correct.

'''J:''' Yeah. This is the one I want to be correct. the Aztec warriors would blow these as they ran into battle. So you would have hundreds of warriors blowing-

'''B:''' Hundreds. Hundreds.

'''J:''' -death screaming whistles to intimidate and to shake up the army that they're running and fighting against. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think somebody stumbled on how to make a shape that makes this noise when you blow through it. Because it's like a skull that you just hold in your hand, you blow like a whistle. And the idea is that the Aztec warriors would be wearing these as they run in and at the appropriate time, they all kind of look at each other and go, blow, and they just freak the crap out of the army. Keeping in mind that you and I and everyone here only heard one and it was scary, imagine hundreds of them. So-

'''B:''' Oh my god.

'''J:''' So again, thanks Nicholas for sending that in. Love it. Love it. Love it. I think it's very cool and there's a little historical component to it.

'''B:''' Jay, I looked these up. I'm going to buy one. I found-

'''E:''' Just one?

'''B:''' I'm going to buy hundreds. I found a bunch that you could buy, Jay, and some of them look really, really cool. The only downside right now is that none of the ones that were for sale actually said, this is how it sounds. Because I could just see you buy one like, oh, this sounds like a wimp. But once I find one that will actually wisely say, this is how it sounds, by the way, I'm going to buy it. It was like 50 or 60 bucks.

'''J:''' Maybe the guy who won Who's That Noisy this week, John in Denver, can help you out. Because John wrote, that's an Aztec death whistle. The Aztec armies would sound hundreds of them to frighten their opponents. I have one myself. So, John-

'''C:''' Oh, no way.

'''J:''' Email Bob at INFO@theskepticsguide.org. It said, John, I have one. Tell us where you got it and help Bob out. He needs one of these.

'''B:''' Excellent. I want it for Halloween. I'm going to walk around in October and just blow that damn whistle. Imagine, Jay, imagine if I did that in the haunted corn maze when I was doing the corn maze. It would have been freaking-

'''J:''' I know. Bob, I actually thought about that. How cool that would be. That could be our lunch break sound or snack break sound. So this week's noisy, I'm doing something that I don't believe Evan ever did and I know I've never done it. I am crowdsourcing an answer to a noisy that somebody sent in and they don't know what it is. And I thought this would be fun. And I think if I get more people sending them in, I'll do this more often because I think it's a really cool idea to see our audience respond. So Lara Chavon sent in a noisy. She said, this noise was recorded by my father just before sunrise. He says he could not see the birds that are doing this noise, but it's so beautiful that I had to share it and maybe someone will know. And this was-

'''B:''' Steve will know.

'''J:''' Yeah. Well, I'd love that too. That would be really cool to test Steve out. And she's in Brazil. So check this noisy out. And if you think you know what it is or if you're 100% certain, email me and let me know. Let me know if you're guessing or if you're 100% certain so I could try to get to the real answer here. So here are the mystery birds. [plays Noisy] What do you think, guys? They're so cute.

'''B:''' I have no effing idea.

'''E:''' Let's see. Brazil. Toucan. No.

'''J:''' Steve, any guesses?

'''E:''' That's the first one off the list.

'''S:''' I'm not familiar with birds of Brazil.

'''E:''' What?

'''J:''' Well, you should be. How about the boys from Brazil? All right. So to all of you people out there that want to help, if you have an idea what they are or you know for certain, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org and please keep sending me in your awesome nosies.

'''S:''' All right. Thank you, Jay.

== What's the Word (47:28) ==
* Estivation

'''S:''' All right, Cara, What's the Word?

'''C:''' Ooh! The word this week is estivation. Anybody have any inside knowledge? Anybody have any guesses as to what estivation refers to?

'''S:''' I know what it is.

'''B:''' That's sleeping, yeah, sleeping during the day, isn't it?

'''S:''' No, no, during the summer.

'''C:''' Ahhh!

'''B:''' During the summer!

''(Cross talk inaudible)''

'''J:''' When you go digging with Emilio Estivez.

''(Cara laughs)''

'''S:''' During a hot or dry period,

'''B:''' I see

'''S:''' but usually the summer, yep.

'''C:''' Yes, yes, yes. So, in zoology, specifically, to estivate is to be in a dormant or inactive state, generally in a hot, dry environment. We see it in reptiles, insects, snails, even some mammals. But it is not to be confused with hibernation. That actually occurs during the winter months, and it generally lasts longer. Estivation, of course, occurs during the summer months.

In botany, it also has a definition. It's the arrangement of petals and sepals in the bud of a flower before it opens. And that's as opposed to vernation, which is the arrangement of young leaves in a leaf bud, before it opens.

And also, because of its usage, you can kind of use estivation in a literary sense. You'll sometimes hear people refer to estivating. Like, I have friends from Texas who like to estivate in the Pacific northwest, in order to beat the heat. So that really just means summering over someplace. It's very hoity-toity.

'''E:''' Huh! I see.

'''C:''' ''(British accent)'' Yes, I see. ''(/accent)'' So, the etymology of this word is interesting. It was first described in the early to mid 1600's in the scientific sense. And it comes from the Latin estis, which is actually the way it's typically spelled, the A-E-S-T, although the American spelling is just E-S-T. And the Latin estis literally translates to the hot season, or summer. Later, it became estivare, which means to spend the summer. So it's like a direct translation there, from the Latin. And that's what animals do.

Estivators, as I said before, are typically snails, earthworms, bees, salamanders, toads, frogs, lizards, crocodiles, some snakes, mud turtles, desert tortoises, and the mammal that I spoke of is the adorable, little hedgehog. Hibernators, we all know, are some small birds, and mammals, pocket mouses – pocket mice – kangaroo mice, bats, insects, and animals of that nature.

'''B:''' And bears!

'''C:''' And bears!

'''E:''' Oh my!

'''C:''' Sweet, little bears. Yes!

'''B:''' It's an amazing process, what their body's actually going through during the hibernation is amazing!

'''C:''' Yeah, hibernation is a much more intense metabolic process than estivation, although it is what we think of as that kind of induced, long term, minimal sort of metabolic processes.

'''S:''' Yeah, they also, they had to develop the metabolic pathways to live off their body fat. We can't live off our body fat, 'cause we need glucose, you know.

'''E:''' Damn shame, too.

'''S:''' But they can, essentially, make glucose out of fat, so they can just live off their body fat.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''C:''' And we also don't have enough of that kind of fat. Like, they have a really high proportion of brown fat, and we don't.

== Your Questions and E-mails ==
=== Question #1: Snake Follow Up (50:31) ===

<Blockquote>Love the show and I’m a long time listener. Occasionally you guys mention things that I’m pretty passionate about and this time it was snakes. As an avid reptile keeper, this hit close to home for me. I agree that keeping potentially harmful wildlife from your yard is important and I would strongly encourage you to use the methods that are least harmful to the local reptile population. Please don’t get a cat and let it outdoors. Since Dr Novella lives next to a natural area, an outdoor cat will patrol far from the yard and kill whatever it can. Keeping a pet cat as an outdoor pet no longer is seen as a socially responsible way to keep cats. Cats are indiscriminate killers of pretty much anything they can take down and don’t distinguish between native wildlife and introduced pests such as rats and mice. The feral cat problems in Hawaii and Australia are prime examples of the extreme side of the problem. If I could suggest other solutions, put a fish pond below your bird feeder, get a Jack Russel Terrier, hang a tray below your bird feeder to catch spillage, convert your bird feeder to a hummingbird feeder, place lots of rodent traps (live or lethal). I’m sure there are other things I haven’t thought of. Keep up the good fight Rogues! Doug Taylor Mill Creek WA</blockquote>

'''S:''' All right, couple quick emails. First a follow-up. You guys, Evan, you mentioned the snake. I got a couple of emails about this. This one comes from Doug Taylor from Mill Creek, Washington. He writes, love the show and I'm a long-time listener. Occasionally you guys mention things that I'm pretty passionate about and this time it was snakes. As an avid reptile keeper, this hit close to home for me. I agree that keeping potentially harmful wildlife from your yard is important and I would strongly encourage you to use the methods that are at least harmful to the local reptile population. Please don't get a cat and let it outdoors. Since Dr. Novella lives next to a natural area, an outdoor cat will patrol far from the yard and kill whatever it can. Keeping a pet cat as an outdoor pet no longer is seen as a socially responsible way to keep cats. They are indiscriminate killers of pretty much anything they can take down and don't distinguish between native wildlife and introduced pests. The feral cat problems in Hawaii and Australia are prime examples of the extreme side of the problem. If I could suggest other solutions, put a fish pond below your bird feeder, get a Jack Russell terrier, hang a tray below your bird feeder to catch spillage, convert your bird feeder to a hummingbird feeder, I already have a hummingbird feeder, place lots of rodent traps, live or lethal. I'm sure there are other things I haven't thought of. Keep up the good fight.

'''C:''' But don't use rodenticide.

'''S:''' So, apparently Doug doesn't want me to kill a lethal snake but wants me to slaughter rodents indiscriminately.

'''C:''' Don't use rodenticide in your yard.

'''S:''' No, no, no.

'''E:''' And get a Jack Russell terrier.

'''J:''' We thought of killing the snake. We were kidding about that.

'''S:''' We never said we were going to kill the snake. I did joke about getting an outdoor cat. I have two cats. They're indoor cats. I'm never going to have an outdoor cat. I agree. They are slaughterers. You know, they just kill. I can't have an outdoor cat and a ton of bird feeders and bird houses. Those things are almost incompatible.

'''E:''' It's a recipe for a lot of violence.

'''S:''' But interestingly, so I did clean up the snake condominium I had going there in my backyard. So, I cleared out all the sticks and the rocks and the underbrush and everything from the borderland between my lawn and the woods.

'''E:''' You're like St. Patrick.

'''S:''' I did not, no further sightings of the copperhead. It might have just been passing through or maybe it's living somewhere else. I don't know. I haven't seen it again.

'''E:''' Maybe a raptor picked it up, flew away.

'''S:''' It's possible. We have hawks that also perch on the edge of our woods. It's a very good place to find game. What's interesting is that I noticed in the last week or so, many fewer rodents in my yard.

'''J:''' No dead bodies out in the backyard?

'''S:''' No, no dead bodies. Just, you know.

'''E:''' Well, fewer rodents.

'''S:''' Well, a couple of weeks ago, I walked out onto my deck and at least a dozen chipmunks went scurrying, you know. And now, I barely see them. So I don't know what that means. It could mean-

'''J:''' They're probably scared.

'''C:''' It could mean that that snake was hungry.

'''S:''' It could mean that that snake's just been dining on that chipmunk. The chipmunks are probably the perfect size for it, like little perfectly sized snacks.

'''C:''' Then it probably means that snake has friends because snakes don't dine that often.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what it means. Just casual, not counting or anything. It's just casual observation. But it was dramatic. I mean, because they were literally all over the place. They have a trail through our backyard. You can actually see the trail, the chipmunks. They've matted down the grass in the pathway that they take.

'''J:''' That's a lot of chipmunk movement.

'''E:''' That's a lot of traffic, yeah.

'''C:''' Are they eating your vegetables? Why don't you like the chipmunks there?

'''S:'' They do eat my vegetables.

'''C:''' They do? Okay.

'''S:''' They eat the bird feed that falls down.

'''C:''' Yeah. Because they're so cute.

'''S:''' They're cute. They're adorable. I don't mind them. Just don't eat my stuff, man.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Don't eat my stash.

'''S:''' Yeah. Just don't eat my veggies. And you could tell. I was like, all right. So I had a zucchini that was half-eaten, and you could see the little tiny little bite marks all up and down.

'''C:''' Oh.

=== Question #2: Archaic Terms (54:23) ===

Guys, It occurred to me that many of your younger listeners may have misunderstood Evan's quote of the week from Thomas Paine. The word 'fabulous' is used by most young people as a rough synonym of excellent. Of course, in Paine's time, the primary meanings (perhaps the only ones) derived from the root 'fable.' In the context of Evan's quote, I believe Paine had in mind the meaning given as definition 5.a. In the OED, viz. Resembling a fable, absurd, ridiculous; or perhaps 3.a., i.e, Of a narrative: Of the nature of a fable or myth, full of fables, U historical, legendary. I've run into this kind of misunderstanding by law students when I teach as a guest lecturer. In reading old court opinions or treatises. They often misconstrue the use of the words fabulous and fantastic as indicative of the author's approval, when, of course, nothing could be further from the intent. Similarly, they sometimes understand the word artificial to have a negative connotation, when in fact in such old texts it is likely to mean something akin to artistic. There was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, a strong preference for the new factory-made products generated after the dawn of the industrial revolution, over the homespun and natural. There was a strong prejudice against the latter, which were thought to be old-fashioned and unsophisticated. Thus, there was a widely held belief that man-made things are ipso facto superior to natural things. Equally fallacious with, and the polar opposite, of the naturalistic fallacy we wrestle with today. It might be useful, when using quotes from earlier eras, to explain the meanings of such words in their time, when their meanings have changed so significantly. Regards, Steve

'''S:''' All right. One more quick email. This one's really cool. This comes from Steve Harris, who actually frequently sends me news items. But he writes an email. It says, it occurred to me that many of your younger listeners may have misunderstood Evan's quote of the week from Thomas Paine. The word fabulous is used by most young people as a rough synonym of excellent. Of course, in Paine's time, the primary meaning, perhaps the only ones, derived from the root fable. In the context of Evan's quote, I believe Paine had in mind the meaning given as definition 5A in the OED, resembling a fable, absurd, ridiculous, or perhaps of a narrative of the nature of a fable or myth full of fables.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Legendary.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' Which is definitely true. I've run into this kind of misunderstanding by law students when I teach as a guest lecturer. In reading old court opinions or treatises, they often misconstrue the use of the words fabulous and fantastic as indicative of the author's approval, when of course nothing could be further from the intent. Similarly, they sometimes understand the word artificial to have a negative connotation, when in fact, in such old text, it is likely to mean something akin to artistic. There was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, a strong preference for the new factory-made products generated after the dawn of the Industrial Revolution over the homespun and natural. There was a strong prejudice against the latter, which were thought to be old-fashioned and unsophisticated. Thus, there was a widely held belief that man-made things are ipso facto superior to natural things, equally fallacious with and the polar opposite of the naturalistic fallacy we wrestle with today.

'''C:''' Interesting.

'''S:''' It might be useful when using quotes from earlier eras to explain the meaning of such words in their time, when their meanings have changed so significantly. Yeah, I thought that was very interesting. And that's true. I did look it up as well. Yeah, absolutely. Like fantastic means fantastical, not true, you know? And fabulous meant like a fable, not wonderful.

'''C:''' Yeah, not like, look at those shoes.

'''E:''' Abfab, baby.

'''S:''' But it's funny how many of these words just come to mean awesome, excellent fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, I noted that too. Like that was simply an archaic use of the word fabulous in Paine's quote.

'''C:''' But the other one you mentioned, the one that he said his law students will sometimes screw up, it was the opposite. What was it again? It was fascinating to me.

'''S:''' Artificial.

'''C:''' Artificial. Yeah.

'''E:''' Of artifice.

'''B:''' More like artsy.

'''C:''' Yeah. Yeah, meaning artistic. That's so weird.

'''S:''' It's all our bias and our narrative, you know? It's marketing. A lot of it is actually marketing.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

'''S:''' The appeal to nature or the appeal to technology or the appeal to science or whatever. It just creates an emotional kind of feel, a halo around some concept that it takes on a certain connotation. But that changes over time. But we're so stuck in our own time we just don't realize sometimes how much things change. We have a very cool interview coming up. So let's go to that interview now.

== Interview With Maria Cork (57:30) ==

'''S:''' Well, joining us now is Maria Cork. Maria, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide!

'''M:''' ''(British accent throughout)'' Thank you so much for having me.

'''S:''' I know Jay in particular has been really looking forward to this interview. We've been setting this up for a couple of months. But, Maria, you have a bit of an unusual job. Why don't you tell us about it?

'''M:''' I do. My day job is that I work in the creature effects industry over in the U.K., and for the last couple of years I've been working on Episode VII of Star Wars, and I supervise the hair department within creature effects.

'''S:''' Creature effects? So you make costumes.

'''M:''' Yep. The practical ones, nothing to do with digital, it's all the practical costumes with animatronic heads and prosthetics and that kind of side of things.

'''S:''' Do you do any full animatronics? Or there's always a person involved?

'''MC:''' It varies. A lot of the characters – I mean, if we're looking at that specific film, The Force Awakens – there was some characters that were people with animatronic heads, some of them were complete puppets that were puppeteered from outside. Some of them were just hand puppets. There was a complete mix of different things.

'''S:''' And what did you primarily work on?

'''MC:''' As you can probably guess from the sort of job that I do, the hair work, most of the build involved working on Chewbacca.

'''J:''' ''(Wookie scream)'' Oh my god! First, I want to ... Steve, you know, you didn't even properly welcome her. I was totally expecting Steve to do this. ''(Strained)'' Oh! Oh god Steve! My light saber is outta juice!

''(Multiple people groan)''

'''J:''' Oh my god! Let me recharge ... oh my god! That hasn't happened to me before!

'''S:''' Okay, you ready?

''(Light saber sound effect)''

''(Maria laughs)''

'''S:''' Jay has saber envy now.

'''J:''' Oh my god! My battery lasted for like, six months.

'''C:''' Oh yeah! That's yours Steve!

'''S:''' Jay, it happens to every guy. You can't get it on.

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''J:''' I really need to go see a Jedi doctor.

'''C:''' Mine's actually right behind you Maria, hanging on the wall.

'''MC:''' Ah, have I got time to grab it?

'''C:''' Yeah!

''(Another light saber turns on)''

'''MC:''' Are we gonna have a virtual saber fight now?

'''S:''' Absolutely! I've already started.

'''C:''' ... Just stick it back in.

''(Maria laughs)''

'''C:''' There we go.

'''J:''' So, can you tell us how did you start with that career? How do you become a hair specialist? Where did it begin?

'''MC:''' When I was a teenager, I was one of the people who was completely obsessed with horror films, and anything along that genre. So I used to watch one of those and go, “I really wanted to do effects!” And I love all the magic as well. It kind of went hand in hand. And I started doing silly make up, slit wrists on friends at school when I was about fourteen, fifteen, and annoying the teachers.

And then I got my first work experience at a small model making company near my house, and then started working at Skepton's Studios one day that I had off while I was doing college. And as soon as I finished to eighteen, I started as a runner in a special effects workshop, and worked my way up, and spent a lot of time in Jim Henson's creature shop, which was my first kind of big break in the industry, as the runner. I worked my way up through that company.

'''S:''' So, did you learn your skills mainly as an apprentice? Or do you get a degree in making Wookies?

''(Laughter)''

'''MC:''' That came much later! But early on, I didn't go to university. I just kind of knew what I wanted to do, and started literally as the person who would run out and buy all of the goods for the special effects companies, and go to havadasherie shops and sculpting supplies, and then started to get the work doing a bit of seaming of the skins, and painting, and helping out and doing whatever I could; and then eventually specialized in hair – I think it was when we did Animal Farm at Jim Henson's creature shop, for an HBO TV series.

And we had lots of animatronic pigs to make. And I was doing a lot of the hair work on that. After six months of that, kind of went, “Yeah, I think I know how to do this! I think I can do more of this.”

'''J:''' But it's quite an honor to be the person on the planet that got to put the hair on the Chewbacca costume. I find that to be pretty profound. Like, you have to be amazingly good at this.

'''MC:''' I've been doing it for a while now. When I got that phone call, 'cause the guy who's my boss, Neil Scandlen, who's heading up the creatures department, I've worked with a lot in the past. We did Sweeny Tart, and we did Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, and lots of other jobs together. But when he called me for that one, and it was always from the outset, he said, “We have to make Chewbacca,” - it's terrifying! It's daunting! It's a legacy character that everyone loves, and you don't want to be the one that doesn't do the right job of it. There's a big weight on my shoulders as soon as I took the job.

'''J:''' I bet. But seeing your work on the screen though, being a part of that film and everything, that's history.

'''MC:''' Yeah, I mean, it's something that I'd never experienced in my job before. We make things all the time, and some one will go, “Oh yeah! I saw that seven-head you did in this TV show.” And then it all moves on. But this is something really different. I mean, I was just saying to Cara before you guys came online, we did the Star Wars celebration this Saturday, which was at the Excel Center. It's like a kind of ComicCon, but specifically for Star Wars. And the creature department heads all did a panel talk for four thousand people. That's not something you normally do in my industry.

'''J:''' Oh god! First off, how was the conference? Was it incredible?

'''MC:''' It was amazing! I'm so happy. Borick Davis headed up our panel, so he was sort of looking after it, and introducing us all. And it was more of a conversation. So that was great, because he's brilliant at that kind of thing. And he put us all at ease, and plus we all know him because we put him in costumes quite a lot. So that was good.

But it was just an experience I've never had anything like, walking out into a room full of four thousand people who love the work you've done. Well, you hope so any way.

'''C:''' And what were you saying to me before we started recording? No where else in world will you see, like, a man in a Princess Leia bikini?

'''MC:''' Yep!

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''MC:''' I think there were two costumes that I loved that I saw on Saturday. There was a beautiful Asian lady with full beauty make up on in an Obi Wan Kenobi outfit with a stuck on beard, which was just fantastic! And then there was a guy who had done his own Chewbacca outfit, and it was just a cardboard tube and a cardboard, like a poncho that he has put over his head; and he just painted Chewie on it, and it was just brilliant! I love it.

''(Cara laughs)''

'''S:''' Cara, I betcha that's not literally true.

'''C:''' Literally? Oh ...

'''S:''' There are plenty of places where you will see guys in Princess Leia outfits.

'''C:''' Yeah, I bet you there's a whole dark corner of the internet just ...

'''J:''' You can pay for that, but ... let's not go there.

'''MC:''' I think there's probably about five hundred of them down in San Diego at the moment, isn't there Jay? Just getting ready for the weekend.

'''C:''' Yeah, already in line.

'''J:''' So, to do the work that you do, so they gave you the body suit with no hair on it. You just got handed this ... what material was the suit made out of?

'''MC:''' So, the body suit itself was a liker suit. The original one they used in A New Hope was knitted, but we decided to go with likert just for longevity, 'cause we knew how much we were gonna have to film on this film. So it was a liker suit that came to us, and we would pattern out where the blends are, so the color changes from ginger into the grey mix. And we would just knot the hairs in one or two at a time using a tiny little crochet hook, double-knotted in the same way that they make high-end wakes.

'''C:''' Oh my god! How long does that take?

'''MC:''' Well, we made five and a half suits in total, 'cause there were three different people playing Chewbacca in the film. We had Peter Mayhew obviously. We did one and a half suits for him. So we did the half one for when he sat in the Falcon, just because it's easier to dress him, and for his own comfort. And then we had a photo double, who was a guy called Jonas Suitarmu. And we also had Ian White, who was a stunt double. And each of those guys had two suits each because for every day that we filmed on a suit, it had to go back to the work shop, and two people had to spend a day getting the knots out and restyling it, every day. So ...

'''S:''' Oh wow.

'''MC:''' I'm trying to think how long that took in total. The peak of the build, we had thirteen people in their department, and they were generally just knotting the suits, and that was for about six months.

'''C:''' Oh my gosh!

'''MC:''' But then we had about a year's development before that, or six months' development before that just to get to the point where we knew what we were doing and could get on with it.

'''C:''' Wow!

'''J:''' So, there was a moment where you finished the first suit, (I'm just assuming that this happened) and did you guys have this moment where you finished the first one and you just stood back and went, “Oh my god! It's gorgeous!”

'''MC:''' ''(Laughs)'' I think we carried on developing the whole time, even when we were done, because the suits – one thing – that their head is whole 'nother ball game because the head consists of the skull. So the first thing we did was try and get the head and the face right. So Luke Fisher in the sculpting and concept department spent quite a bit of time sculpting a head, and then I'd get it and put some hair on it. Then we'd look at it; figure what wasn't right; go back; he'd change the sculpt head; then I'd put hair on it again. So that was our first thing, trying to make that right.

And even once you've got the completed head done, just the styling on it changes, 'cause Chewbacca moves his head (I think I said this on the panel on Saturday) he has a tendency to tuck his chin down and move his head left and right. And as he does, the hair on his chin kind of puffs out, and he stops looking like Chewbacca.

So then we started sewing bits of the hair down to the cowl with invisible thread and things just to try and keep it all in shape, but it was a real monster task. We got as much reference as we could from the original film, and stills, and video footage and things; and just worked with picked out photos we liked that captured the essence of Chewie; and tried to just kind of make that. It was always our brief to try to make it look and feel like Episode IV Chewbacca.

'''J:''' Yeah, and you guys didn't, or the people who made the actual head didn't add anything to it, right? Didn't you say, when you and I talked a couple of months ago, they wanted it to be identical to movies four, five, and six, right?

'''MC:''' Yeah, I mean, we could have tried to add, I think there was talk at the start of maybe adding eyebrow movements and other things, but because it's such a legacy character, and because it's Chewie, and all he had was its real eyes, and he opens his mouth and then has two paddles in the top lip that cause his lips to go up into a snarl. But that automatically happens as he opens his mouth. That's all we did. We didn't add any more.

You can kind of just lose the character. And things that come up on the internet quite a bit is people going, “Why didn't you age him?” And that was always the brief, again, it came from J. J. It was kind of, we just need to make him look like Episode IV. Plus, the folklore of Wookies is they live to about four hundred years old, and he was what, two hundred in Episode IV?

'''S:''' Yeah

'''MC:''' So he's only going to be two hundred and thirty in Episode VII, so specifically trying to age him, I think, might have looked like we were trying too hard, I think.

'''J:''' Were you personally on set, like, every day? What was the job like?

'''MC:''' Once we had finished the build, and we started shooting, I was looking after Chewbacca every day that we shot. We did about forty or fifty shoot days on that film. There were days when we would have two Chewbaccas up, so Peter Mayhew would be doing something, and then we would also have Yonna standing by, or we'd have Ian White standing by for a stunt.

So then we had another team from the hair department; and I'd always be on set, somebody from fabrications, so they would help dress. So there were two of us. But I'd go and do the make up in the morning, black his eyes out, and then we'd both dress him in a tent on set, and I'd look after him on the actual shoot.

'''J:''' So you like standing behind the camera, and every time the actor does something that screws the suit up, you like, “Oh! Don't do that!” ''(Maria laughs)'' “What are you doing?”

'''MC:''' Yeah, yeah. I think I was the bane of the eighties life, because I was always the last person out when they were gonna start rolling, because he would, he'd shake his head, and you were trying to keep some semblance of continuity throughout, and it's hair, it does move around, that was fine; but we had to try and keep it. And sometimes this one bit would just fall across his face every time, and there'd be like, “Yeah, go on. We know you're gonna go in. Go on damn it!”

''(Cara laughs)''

'''J:''' So when you watched the final movie now, do you see anything like, “Oh! We should have brushed the hair to the left! Oh! ...” like, you know, that type of stuff goin' on too?

'''MC:''' I think the first time I watched the film, which was at the pre-screening, which was the first time we got to see it, just before it was released, I think it was about five hours before it was released. They had hired a cinema just for the crew throughout the day to go and see it. I was just – you do, you focus on the things that you did, but then the second time I watched it, I kind of relaxed from it. And I realized, you have to.

'''B:''' Yeah

'''MC:''' You've done what you can do. And it's a seven foot-six wig, and there's only so far you can go with it. You try your hardest.

'''S:''' Was that all human hair? Did you say that?

'''MC:''' It's not human hair, it's yak-belly hair, which is what they use a lot to make theatrical beards from it. It's a little bit coarser, and yeah, as it says, it's from the belly of a yak. But it's quite commonly available for theatrical things.

'''C:''' Oh, really?

'''MC:''' And it's what the original suit was made of as well. So, again, we just didn't want to change anything around.

'''C:''' I have a sweater that's wool and yak, and it's really warm.

'''MC:''' Yak's quite coarse, I mean, maybe that's the top part of the hair. If you look at a yak, it's got this strip of really long hair under its belly, and then its tail hair's even coarser and longer, so again, they use that for beard hair ...

'''C:''' Yeah

'''MC:''' in theaters quite a lot.

'''C:''' I definitely know when I wear that sweater, I feel hot.

'''MC:''' ''(Chuckles)'' They do live in Tibet in the pole, so ...

'''C:''' Yeah

'''MC:''' that makes sense.

'''C:''' Is the full costume very, very warm?

'''MC:''' Compared to some of the other costumes that people are in in that film, which made of foams, and they're really big and hefty, at least with this one we put air conditioning on him or we put a fan on him. It goes through the hair, through the light suit, and he can feel it. Some of the guys who were in the much bigger fabricated suits don't feel any benefit of any air, so they're just stuck in there. The guys in fabrication put fans in there to get air flow going, just to keep them cool.

'''C:''' Ugh! Those suits must smell so bad.

'''MC:''' We use a, our secret weapon is far gone vogcurantri oil at the end of every day. Things that you can't put through the wash, we spritz them with vogcurantritri.  So all the time, production, like, “You can't get alcohol on the production budget.” We're like, “Honestly, we're not drinking it, I promise!”

''(Cara laughs, Jay chuckles)''

'''J:''' You're like, “Just pour vodka all in the suit, and everything's great.”

'''MC:''' Yeah! It's good! It's an antibacterial, and the teetri smells good, and it's also an antibacterial; it works really well.

'''J:''' No, we forgot to mention that your close friends with Richard Wiseman, and he set this interview up for us. He made the connection. He actually turned to me during a live recording and said, “I've got a dead dog in my garden.” No, after he said that,

''(Laughter)''

'''MC:''' I've seen where the dead dog is. I have seen that. I've been to his house. I know all about the dead dog, trust me!

'''J:''' After he said that, he was like, “Oh my god! Jay, I have someone you have to talk to.” And he told me what the deal was, and I lost my mind. I'm like, “Are you kidding? Yes, make that happen!” So I want to thank Richard for making the connection, and I want to thank you for taking the time to come and talk to us. And I'm sure that you made about, at least a solid fifty percent of our audience super-psyched to hear all this awesome info about the movie.

'''MC:''' Aw, thank you so much. No, it's been an absolute pleasure to come on here, and yeah, I'll do anything for Richard. He's a sweetheart.

'''J:''' So, you know, if by any chance you happen to work on a Star Wars movie again, nobody knows, could you please come back and chat with us again? Maybe next year, or whenever?

'''MC:''' If I ever get the chance to work on another Star Wars film, I shall put it in the diary.

'''J:''' Excellent!

'''S:''' Excellent! All right, thank you so much Maria.

'''J:''' Thank you Maria.

'''MC:''' You're so welcome!

== Science or Fiction (1:12:32) ==

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. You guys ready for this week?

'''J:''' Yes.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''S:''' All right. Three regular news items this week. Item number one. A new study finds that heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second extends the shelf life from three weeks to 10 weeks. Item number two. A new analysis concludes that the moon's imbrium basin was formed much more recently than previously assumed, as recently as 10 million years ago. And item number three, researchers have demonstrated that humans can detect a single photon of light. Bob, go first.

'''B:''' Heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second. So basically-

'''S:''' I would say, let me say, this is in addition to pasteurization because with pasteurization you get to three weeks. Just to make that clear.

'''B:''' Heating it by 10 degrees. So does that mean that you're rapidly increasing the temperature within one second? Or just you get it up 10 degrees hotter for one second? That's probably what it means. It seems like an obvious overdramatic result for just such a simple thing. So oh well. I can't think of a reason. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the second one. The moon's imbrium basin was formed much more recently than previously assumed. Ten million. I'm not familiar. So what, can you tell me? I guess you won't give me too much more detail about that basin.

'''S:''' That's the right eye of the man on the moon.

'''B:''' Ten million years ago. So they used to think that those basins, so the seas, right? The maria, the seas, that they were caused by impacts that kind of fractured the crust and then this lava kind of seeped out and spread over. But now I think the conventional wisdom is that these were just eruptions, basalt eruptions, which are impressive eruptions. They have happened on the earth. They are wow. Okay. I'm not buying that one. I'm not buying that one. Let's see. Let's look at the third one. A single photon of light. Damn. You know, I've heard both. For years I've heard both. That we can detect a single photon and then other people are saying, no, it's granular as one single photon. But now they're saying we can. All right. I'm going to go with the moon. Moon fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. Jay?

'''J:''' The one about the heating the milk, I think this one makes a lot of sense. They're not saying you heat it and you leave it at that temperature. You're heating it up really quick, killing off whatever is in there, bacteria, whatnot. And then it'll just increase the shelf life. So it's as part of the pasteurization process, which I just thought when they pasteurize something that they're kind of doing that. But this is like a specific temperature and everything. I mean, sure. So, okay. I really don't have any reason to not believe that one. You know, the one about the Imbrium Basin, it is interesting because to think that's the... What would you call that, Steve?

'''E:''' Feature.

'''S:''' Feature.

'''J:''' Thank you. Perfect word, Evan.

'''S:''' But it's a Mario.

'''J:''' That feature could only have originated less than 10 million years ago. That's not a lot of time when you think about just how much time the moon has existed. Interesting. And I'd like to know why they think that. If there's a study here, I'd like to read that. This last one about the humans being able to see one photon of light, I completely believe that. I think that that's an absolute given. So it's between the milk and the moon's Imbrium Basin. And I drink milk, so therefore I'm an expert on it. And since I have not been to or eaten the cheese from the moon, I'm going to say that that one is the fiction.

'''S:''' Okay. Cara?

'''C:''' Okay. Heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second. I still don't know how you accomplish that. Like physically, how do you accomplish? Because it's either, like Bob said, heating it up 10 degrees within a second or within less than a second's time, or heating it up to 10 degrees and letting it sit there for less than a second, but then like it would stay that warm for longer than a second. I don't know.

'''B:''' You have to chill it.

'''C:''' I'm confused by this one. Yeah. Then you have to super chill it like less than a second later. Yeah. I don't know. I always thought the shelf life was already long, so that doesn't seem too unreasonable. The Imbrium Basin on the moon, well, the moon is, gosh, I hope I'm not wrong here. The moon's like almost the same age or around the same age as the earth. And that's four and a half billion years old. So 10 million is really recent. And I would think that a feature that's that pronounced that you can see with your naked eye is huge. So if something like that happened only 10 million years ago, I would think that there would be other outcomes of that in the solar system of an impact that big, like it would actually change its trajectory or something. I don't know. That seems too soon to me. And then humans can detect a single photon of light. I buy it. Can't we see like a candle at a distance of a mile or five miles or 10, I don't remember, on a clear night? We have really good vision, better than any of our other senses. So I'm going to say that, yeah, I'm going to GWBJ, and I'm going to say that the Imbrium Basin is the fiction.

'''S:''' And Evan.

'''E:''' The reason I think the milk one is science is that, yes, they did figure this one out. The reason it's not being implemented is because of like anything else, cost analysis. It probably costs too much to go through whatever sudden heating process and then cooling process would be involved. Not worth it. They couldn't. They'd have to sell milk for 20 bucks a gallon or something. So but as a proof concept, yes, this that does work. The one about humans detecting a single photon of light, they didn't say every human, but some humans and people who have very, very perhaps clear, as clear or as pure a vision as you can possibly have. They can probably see the photon of light that leaves the moon, the moon's left. So that's fiction. I'm going with the team.

'''S:''' All right. Well, let's take these in order. A new study finds that heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second extends the shelf life from three weeks to 10 weeks. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This is a science.

'''C:''' Yes.

'''S:''' So the shelf life of milk just with ordinary pasteurization is two to three weeks, which is fine. We go through a gallon of milk in four or five days.

'''C:''' You have a family. A single person has a harder time with that.

'''S:''' By a quart then.

'''C:''' I do.

'''E:''' Big milk is taking advantage of this.

'''C:''' I know.

'''S:''' But there are people who live in remote areas where the milk has to go farther, and by the time the milk gets there, it has a very short shelf life left. But in any case, extending the shelf life of milk would be nice. So what the researchers did was they used a low temperature short time or LTST method. This is a Purdue study. First, they inoculated the milk with lactobacillus and pseudomonas. They heated it in a pressurized chamber, rapidly raising and then lowering the temperature by about 10 degrees Celsius. But this was still, it was low temperature, still below the 70 degrees Celsius threshold needed for pasteurization. So they didn't raise the temperature beyond what's already done in pasteurization. This extended the shelf life to 63 days. It decreased the number of bacteria. That's basically how it works. Decreased the number of bacteria to below detectable levels. The fewer bacteria, the longer it takes those bacteria to reach the numbers necessary to alter the milk, to spoil the milk. They tested the resulting milk with panelists who detected no differences in color, aroma, taste, or aftertaste. So it seems to not affect the quality of the milk, but just extends the shelf life. So yeah, I don't know.

'''B:''' It's a shock. It's like the rapid rise and drop that shocks the shit out of them.

'''S:''' I guess so. I guess so.

'''E:''' More testing needed, I think.

'''S:''' You could also just irradiate the milk and kill all the bacteria, then you could store it on your cupboard shelf, you don't need to put it in the refrigerator.

'''C:''' Well, they do. There are milks that you can buy that are shelf stable.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's irradiated. It doesn't make it radioactive.

'''B:''' It's not ionizing radiation that's coming out.

'''S:''' All right, here we go. Number two, a new analysis concludes that the moon's imbrium basin was formed much more recently than previously assumed, as recently as 10 million years ago. All of the rogues quite confidently feel that this one is the fiction, and this one is the fiction.

'''B:''' Yeah, baby.

'''J:''' Sweet.

'''E:''' Moon.

'''S:''' Good job, everyone.

'''C:''' Yay.

'''S:''' And you guys hit upon the reasons why this is fiction. The main basins on the moon, the mare, the black areas, were formed during the area of heavy bombardment billions of years ago, about 4 billion years ago, including the imbrium basin. And for this one, for the imbrium one, there's a clear evidence of a massive crater, of a massive impact. Not just a crater, but I mean, they have the markings left on the surface of the moon by the debris from whatever impacted it.

'''B:''' The ejecta. The ejecta?

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. So what their analysis did show was that the asteroid that formed the imbrium basin was about 10 times as massive as we previously thought. It was protoplanet-sized. It was big enough that it was actually a protoplanet, not just an asteroid. So it was about twice as big and about 10 times as massive as previous estimates. That was the actual news item. Cracked open the crest of the moon, caused the basaltic eruption and formed that sea. Okay, let's go on to item number three. Researchers have demonstrated that humans can detect a single photon of light, which is of course science. This was a controversy for a while, Bob. There were people that didn't know what the lower limit of human light detection was.

'''B:''' That's why I heard both, I guess.

'''S:''' Yeah. It actually was known that a retinal neuron could respond to a single photon. But what was not known was whether or not that would be perceived by the brain. Would that signal make its way to the brain because the brain may filter out background noise and that a single photon would just be eliminated with the noise. You know what I mean?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' So what they did is they put subjects into a very dark room for like 40 minutes, let them completely dark adapt. And then they would look into a device that would either emit a photon or not emit a photon. And they had to say whether or not they saw the photon. They had to do it this way because 90% of the photons would not make it through to the retina, right? They would get scattered by the lens, the cornea, the vitreum the fluid in there. So they had to do a statistical analysis to see if they detected the photon more often than you would predict by chance. And they did, significantly so. So they were able to detect a single photon. They describe it as like you don't, you almost don't really see it. You just have this vague sensation that something happened. You know what I mean? It doesn't, it doesn't like create an image. They said it was a very bizarre experience. Like they were just like barely on the edge, obviously, of detection. But it's almost like just you have this sense that something happened, you know?

'''C:''' Oh, and I misspoke when I said mile, it was 30 miles. A human can see a candle flame 30 miles away on a clear night.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' That is far.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''C:''' If you were like up high, obviously, because you would lose the horizon if you were like at sea level.

'''S:''' Yeah. The horizon's 15 miles away. So yeah, you wouldn't. So good job, everyone.

'''J:''' Thank you.

'''C:''' Yay!

'''S:''' Yeah, the 10 million years. That was, that was very, very implausible.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:25:07) ==

'''S:''' All right, Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' All right, here we go. "Denialists maintain their stance, be it in regards to HIV and AIDS, the Holocaust, or in the face of exhaustive and irrefutable evidence. It is not melodramatic to say that vocalization of these particular falsehoods have been responsible for many deaths." Too true. Too true. Science writer Ben Vincent wrote those words as part of an article back in 2009 titled When Pseudoscience Kills, Trust Denialism and Peter Duisburg.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Very good article and a very good reminder that there are very serious consequences when people give in to the ways of pseudoscience.

'''S:''' Yeah, Duisburg is a scientist who is an HIV denialist. He's like basically the head of the HIV denial. He's the only-

'''E:''' Right, the poster child.

'''S:''' Yeah, he gives it whatever respectability it has or at least plausibility. But-

'''J:''' I wonder how you get on in your life to denying HIV. Like I can understand to a certain degree being a global warming denier, but like why would you deny HIV?

'''C:''' Yeah, because there's good rhetoric around that. There's like enough people kind of on your team. But yeah, how big is the HIV denial movement and how gross is it? You know what I mean?

'''E:''' Oh, it's-

'''S:''' Honestly, a lot of them are dead.

'''C:''' Oh, interesting.

'''S:''' And I mean that seriously. A lot of the people who had HIV and were HIV deniers didn't take the medication and now they're dead.

'''C:''' Ah, yeah.

'''S:''' That actually took a huge toll on the HIV denial movement. A lot of the big people who are like, I'm living with HIV and I don't have AIDS and blah, blah, blah. Now they're dead.

'''C:''' Oh, and that would make sense as a motivation for it because you don't want to admit to yourself that you're so sick.

'''J:''' Yeah, there you go. Thanks.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''B:''' Death by denial.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Yep. The words hoist and petard come to mind in that context.

'''C:''' Well, that was a bummer ending.

'''E:''' Well, no.

'''C:''' Thanks, Evan.

'''E:''' Need to bring everyone down on that one. It's just a friendly public service reminder that pseudoscience kills. Be well, everyone.

'''S:''' That's a running theme on our show. Pseudoscience kills. That's okay. But okay, we'll end on a positive note.

'''E:''' Let's.

== Star Trek Replica Set (1:27:25) ==

'''S:''' Bob, tell everybody what the SGU is doing on July 31st.

'''B:''' We are going on a tour of the original full sets used for the classic Star Trek show that were recreated, lovingly recreated to millimeter-scale perfection in Ticonderoga, New York, and they're used on the Star Trek Continues web series that continues the original voyage of the Star Trek Enterprise with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, all those guys. So yeah, we're just so excited. I've seen the shows. The show is really cool. The sets are exquisite. These are... I've seen a walkthrough of the entire set. You walk through, everything is there. You can just walk from the bridge to the turbo shaft to the sick bay to the transfer. Everything is there. Just all connected. It's wonderful. So we're all excited. We're going to go on the tour July 31st at 10 a.m. in Ticonderoga, and many of us will be in costume, and we're all so excited.

'''S:''' Just like we did when we saw the Star Wars opening, we're going to auction off two of the tickets that we have to lucky SGU listeners who want to join us for a day of Star Trek geeking out and tour an incredible... That's another word, actually, whose meaning has probably changed, but an incredible, fantastic, fabulous recreation of the Star Trek Enterprise, the Starship Enterprise. So yeah, so join us. It's going to be a lot of fun. If you want to go, then email your bid to INFO@theskepticsguide.org. Put Star Trek auction in the subject and just give us your number. So we're going to auction off the two tickets individually, so we'll just take the two highest bids. If you want to bid for both tickets, go right ahead. If you are going to win one, if you have the same bid for both, you'll win both. So just tell us if you're bidding for one ticket or for both. Again, we'll just take the two highest bids, and then we'll let you know. You're responsible for your own transportation, of course. We'll just meet you there, and you've got to do this right away because it's next weekend. So send in those bids if you want to join us for a day at the Starship Enterprise. All right, guys, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

'''J:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''B:''' Anytime, Steve.

'''E:''' Doctor.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.

{{Outro404}}

== Today I Learned: ==

== References ==
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SGU Episode 575

2025-03-14T13:52:24Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

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|episodeDate = July 16th 2016 
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|guest1 = D: David Banachuk
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|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2016-07-16.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php/topic,46987.0.html
|qowText = It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth; on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous-->
|qowAuthor = {{w|Thomas Paine}} 
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== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, July 13th, 2016, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Evening, folks.

'''S:''' And we have a special guest rogue this week, David Bednatchuk. David, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

'''DB:''' G'day.

'''E:''' Where are you from, Dave?

'''DB:''' From Australia. Well, I'm Polish-Australian, I guess, just to explain my strange accent, yeah. And yeah, I met you guys when you deigned to come to Australia for the second time at the skeptic conference, so that was great.

'''E:''' It was a great time.

'''J:''' So that was in 2014. You know what else we did in 2014, guys? We went to WETA Workshop. We met David and Leonard that work there, and we got a behind-the-scenes tour, and for no damn good reason, I just want to thank the people at WETA for taking us on the most spectacular geek experience of my entire life. Thank you, WETA, and everything about you. I love you.

'''C:''' WETA, why didn't you bring me? Why didn't you know that I was going to join The Skeptic's Guide?

'''S:''' Next time. Next time, Cara.

'''C:''' Guys, guess where I went? Yesterday? No, two days ago, on a really fun tour.

'''B:''' Australia?

'''C:''' The Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

'''B:''' Oh, my God.

'''C:''' Yeah, it was really, really fun. My friend Holly is an optics engineer there, and so she took a small group of our friends on a tour, and we got to go to the Mars yard, and we got to go to mission control, and it was really cool.

'''S:''' It sounds awesome.

'''B:''' Wow, that sounds fantastic.

'''J:''' I have to do that. So mission control, this is-

'''C:''' This is the mission control at JPL. So anytime you've ever seen on NASA TV a JPL mission that is going into orbit or entering the atmosphere, if you watched the Curiosity landing and you saw everybody celebrating in mission control, that's where we were.

'''E:''' Cool.

'''J:''' Because I think we have a listener that works there named Ben Honey. Did you meet him?

'''C:''' Maybe. I did not meet Ben Honey, but there were a few guys in mission control when we looked, and they were monitoring Juno, and they were monitoring Voyager. It was very cool.

'''S:''' David, tell me a little bit about your involvement with the Skeptical Movement.

== Interview with David Banachuk(2:26) ==

'''DB:''' I think I can actually pinpoint my start in skepticism. At university, on the library shelf, the library magazine shelf, had this Skeptical Enquirer copy there, and I'd never seen this, and I picked it up, and the one thing I remember from it is this cartoon with a chiropractor standing in front of a flip board or something, and it had buttocks and an elbow, and it's pointing ass and elbow to the wrong part of the anatomy, and he's lecturing from it, and he says a chiropractor, and I said, are you allowed to say that? What is this? Gradually from that, I started subscribing to Skeptical Enquirer, and on and on down the rabbit hole.

'''S:''' Let me ask you another question, David. Have you ever encountered a poisonous snake in Australia?

'''DB:''' Yes, it was at a children's party, and all the kids were running around, and suddenly they congregate in one spot in the front yard, and they were like, kids, what are you looking at? Oh, there's a snake, and it was one of these brown snakes that'll kill you if it bites you. So this is one of the very few times that I'd come across a snake. We don't trip over them on the footpath or anything like that, but we called the snake man, and we were expecting some sort of professional sort of rugged up in hazmat gear or something, and this guy in shorts and flip-flops arrives, and by then the snake had escaped into some bushes or rocks or something, and he just dives into the bush in his flip-flops, and he starts pulling these rocks apart. It seemed very casual, but yeah, you can just sort of look in the phone book, and then the snake man comes.

'''J:''' And he's like, yeah, I put mustard on them, I eat them, they don't bother me nothing. He shows up.

'''C:''' Well, just to be really pedantic for a second, maybe you could put mustard on them and eat them because they're not actually poisonous, they're venomous.

'''S:''' They're venomous.

'''J:''' Don't even get with the words, okay?

'''C:''' I had to.

'''S:''' I asked you that, David, because by coincidence this past weekend, I had my first encounter with a venomous snake in Connecticut. We only have two venomous snakes in Connecticut, the copperhead and the timber rattlesnake. So I was clearing out an area between my yard and the woods. My house is surrounded on two sides by woods, and I was there with my younger daughter. We were clearing out an area that we want to build a garden in, and then I see this very large snake, like a three-foot snake, and I'm about two feet from it. I'm like, I have no problem with snakes. I love snakes. I think they're beautiful. It was a very, very pretty snake. I'm like, oh, that's a very pretty snake. I wonder what kind of snake it is. I've never seen that before, so I'm trying to run it through my very limited data set of snakes. I'm like, oh, it's not a garter snake. It's not a rat snake. It's not a milk snake. I get a close look at it, and I'm like, God, that head is suspiciously copper colored. I took a picture of it with my phone and positively identified it. It's absolutely 100% a copperhead, which is actually a very rare snake. It's a rare thing to encounter.

'''J:''' Yeah, but what happened is you texted it to all of us, right, Steve?

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''J:''' So then I forwarded it to a friend of mine who used to run the Connecticut Snake Legion or whatever. The guy's a snake expert friend of mine. So he's like, oh, my God, that's a beautiful picture. I write it back, and I go, yeah, Steve just took this in his yard, and he wrote back, oh, my God, tell Steve, don't go near. He's like, if it bites you, your hand will get necrotic, and it can't kill you, but it can kill your dog. He just spills all of this Danger Will Robertson crap out. So then I call Steve. I'm like, Steve, get the hell out of there. Steve's like, I know what the hell it is. I'm showing you an awesome picture I took of the thing. So anyway, but the bottom line is, Steve, you have to get that snake removed from your yard.

'''S:''' Yeah, I know.

'''C:''' Do you have a source of water? Because it's an aquatic snake, right?

'''S:''' No, it's not. It's a woodland snake. It does like to be near wetland, but it's not technically a water snake. It likes underbrush. And then in retrospect, looking at that part of my yard, it's like a perfect snake habitat. It's perfect. So number one is I have to really finish cleaning it out, so it's not. But here's the other thing. In our neighborhood in the last few years, especially this year, we have-

'''B:''' Three kids have died?

'''S:''' No. There is an absolute population boom of all rodent species. So we have tons of chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, and mice just running rampant around.

'''J:''' Why?

'''S:''' I don't know. Our dog used to do some population control in our yard, but he's just too old and arthritic now. He's not doing his job. So I actually wouldn't mind having a snake in the yard.

'''E:''' So adopt a snake?

'''S:''' I wouldn't mind it. But not that one.

'''C:''' You want a different snake.

'''S:''' Yeah. A rat snake would be perfect.

'''C:''' Go get yourself a rat snake.

'''S:''' But the other problem is we feed the birds and we inadvertently feed all the rodents too.

'''J:''' That's why you have an explosion of little guys that run around grabbing seeds because you're feeding-

'''S:''' I know. What am I to do? Not to have a bird feeder? But it's not just my yard. It's the whole neighborhood. Like my wife and I go on a walk. I literally counted 11 rabbits just walking around the block. They're adorable, of course. But the thing is, we also, there were reports of hunting bands of coyotes. So the coyote population is also exploding in Connecticut and they're attracted to this small game. So that's why I told my wife, we've got to do some population control here. I don't know what to do. But I mean, either we need to get a new dog or get an outside cat. We have indoor cats because we don't want them eating all the birds.

'''J:''' Steve, stop feeding the birds.

'''C:''' But then he can't bird watch.

'''S:''' Yeah, you've got to feed the birds.

'''J:''' Watch TV or something. I mean, come on.

'''E:''' We need to be more like Australia where species never take over the environment like this.

'''S:''' I wouldn't mind leaving it for a couple of months just to eat some chipmunks and then

'''J:''' Yeah, kill your dog though, Steve. Don't do it. You know, the people that will come take it, they're not going to kill it. They'll move it or they'll put it in to a sanctuary or something like it's the best thing to do, man.

'''S:''' I also found for 20 bucks, you can get a snake trap and that is humane and then you could release it somewhere in the woods. So I may do that as well.

'''J:''' Have David give you the name of the snake guy.

'''S:''' The snake guy with the flip-flops?

'''DB:''' The guy with the flip-flops, he's a pro.

'''B:''' You need to buy a hunter-killer robot snake. Oh, they don't make those yet.

'''E:''' You can dream, Bob. You can dream.

== What's the Word (9:19) ==
* Apoptosis

'''S:''' All right, Cara, What's the Word this week?

'''C:''' Ooh! The word this week, I think, is a really good one. It's a word that I used very often in my research. And it's a word that was sent in by Horhay in San Diego, who just recently came across it.

'''S:''' So, Cara, before you tell us the word, you're somebody who says ''off-ten'' (often).

'''C:''' Oh yeah?

'''E:''' Oh no! You're gonna call her out for that?

'''S:''' I've never noticed

'''C:''' What's wrong with ''off-ten''?

'''S:''' Nothing, it's just wrong. It's actually not wrong.

''(Evan laughs)''

'''C:''' Wait

'''S:''' It is a

'''C:''' You say ''off-in?''

'''S:''' ''Off-in'', yeah.

'''C:''' It's ''off-ten. (Laughs)''

'''S:''' It's both, both are acceptable.

'''C:''' Wait, anything you guys don't say forward, do you?

'''B:''' Yeah

'''S:''' Forward? Yeah.

'''B:''' Forward

'''E:''' Forward – ''foe-ward''

'''C:''' ''Foe-ward'', I know east-coasters, and they all say ''foe-ward''.

'''J:''' Yeah, yeah.

'''E:''' Drop that R ...

'''C:''' Yeah

'''J:''' Well, we also say ''but-in'' instead of ''butt-in'' (button).

'''C:''' ''Butt-in'', yeah. And I say ''butt-in'', and I say ''skeleton''.

'''J:''' ''Skeletin''

'''C:''' But that's 'cause I was a singer. I have a weird mix, because I was both a Texan and a singer, and so I really enunciate everything.

'''J:''' David, wait, David, say the word button.

'''DB:''' ''But-ton''

'''J:''' All right, he used the T.

'''C:''' Yeah

'''J:''' Say the word ''off-in.''

'''DB:''' ''Off-in''

'''J:''' Yeah, all right.

'''DB:''' Wait, wait! I'll say it properly. ''Ofin''

''(Cara laughs)''

'''J:''' Okay, so

'''C:''' I

'''J:''' Cara, I

'''C:''' say ''off-tin''

'''J:''' you're out-voted. You can't say it that way any more.

'''C:''' Nope, gonna say if forever. Also, this next word

'''E:''' Yeah! Cara! Rage against the system!

'''C:''' Interestingly, as per most of the words that I choose for What's the Word, there is some

'''B:''' Multiple pronunciations.

'''C:''' debate around how to pronounce this word.

'''E:''' Naw!

'''J:''' Go ahead.

'''C:''' How do you pronounce it, Steve?

'''S:''' Apoptosis

'''B:''' Yeah

'''C:''' You say ''ay-pop-tosis.''

'''S:''' Yes

'''B:''' Absolutely

'''C:''' I say ''ay-pop-tosis!'' Steve and I agree on something! We say apoptosis! Most people say ''aa-pop-tosis''.

'''S:''' No, it's ''ay-pop-tosis.''

'''C:''' Trust me, I think it's “ay” also, but I looked it up, and almost every pronunciation online is ''aa-pop-tosis.''

'''J:''' Ay!

'''B:''' What the hell?

'''C:''' It hurt my brain when I realized that. That said, I'm not changing the way I say it. Also, there's a

'''S:''' Me neither

'''C:''' whole other pronunciation that we will get to in a minute. Okay, so I'm gonna keep saying ''ay-pop-tosis,'' cause that's how I say it. Apoptosis is also known as programmed cell death. It's a normal, and healthy genetically determined process where damaged or excessive cells, or unwanted cells by the body are systematically kind of killed off, specifically, what happens, is the DNA in the nucleus of the cell actually fragments in response to a specific trigger. And either that's usually a chemical stimulus, or it's when a suppressing stimulus is removed, or damaged.

So, when apoptosis doesn't work correctly, it can actually lead to tumor growth, and therefore cancer. We often talk about apoptosis in direct opposition to necrosis, which is unprogrammed cell death. So, necrosis is cell death that happens because of disease, or because of damage. Apoptosis is cell death that happens on purpose, the body programs the cells to die in order to maintain certain types of processes moving smoothly.

The first authors to use the term, and actually developed the term, were Kurr, Wielie, and Curie, in their 1972 British Journal of Cancer publication. Apoptosis: A Basic Biological Phenomenon With Wide-Ranging Implications in Tissue Kinetics. And they described it as a hitherto little recognized mechanism of controlled cell deletion, which appears to play a complementary, but opposite role to mitosis in the regulation of animal cell populations.

But here's something really interesting: They described the actual pronunciation in their paper, because they coined the term, and none of us are pronouncing it right. Are you guys ready?

'''S:''' Yeah

'''E:''' Yep!

'''C:''' <Blockquote>”We are most grateful to professor James Cormack of the Department of Greek University of Aberdeen for suggesting this term. The word apoptosis is used in Greek to describe the dropping off or falling off of petals from flowers, or leaves from trees. To show this derivation clearly, we propose that the stress should be on the pnultimate syllable</blockquote>

So far, so good.

<Blockquote>The second half of the word being pronounced like tosis, with the P silent, which comes from the same root 'to fall,' and is already used to describe drooping of the upper eyelid.”</blockquote>

So actually,

'''E:''' ''Ay-po-tosis?''

'''C:''' ''Aa-po-tosis,'' not

'''S:''' ''Ay-po-tosis''

'''C:''' ''Aa-po-tosis,'' yep! And apparently, there are some pedantic professors out there who really push this. I've seen so many online forums about it. But most people still pronounce is ''aa-pop-tosis'' and / or ''ay-pop-tosis.'' So, I guess, pick you poison.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, definitely, P-T-O-S-I-S is ''tosis''.

'''C:''' Yeah!

'''S:''' No question about that.

'''C:''' That's funny.

'''S:''' That's ''tosis.'' That's like, droopy eyelids, right? If you have one – if your eyelid's droopy, that's ptosis.

'''C:''' Yeah, so ''ay-po-tosis'' is the P-O-E kind of thinking of it that way, is technically the pronunciation

'''S:''' Yeah

'''C:''' that was intended by the authors. But we have all seen what happens with the ''JIF / GIF'' debates,

'''S:''' Yeah

'''C:''' so, sometimes that not necessarily pan out.

''(Evan chuckles)''

'''S:''' Yeah, I've always one hundred percent of the time heard ''ay-pop-tosis,''

'''C:''' Me too!

'''S:''' but that could also be regional. It's also institution and regional dependent. So that's just what I've been exposed to in the northeast.

'''E:''' Yeah, more ''off-ten'' than not.

'''C:''' Guys, I'm always interested in this. You should Tweet and let us know how you've pronounced the word in your intro bio, or your cell bio classes.

'''S:''' And as you said, apoptosis is critical to developing, and to maintaining subpopulations. But also, it's been identified as the cause of some diseases, inappropriately triggering apoptosis can be a cause of certain degenerative diseases.

'''C:''' Yeah, we'd all have cancer,

'''E:''' Cancer

'''C:''' we'd all be riddled with cancer if we didn't have it,

'''E:''' More so.

'''C:''' apoptosis. Yeah.

'''S:''' And also, just developmentally, like, the reason why your fingers separate. You know, initially, there's webbing between the fingers, then there's programmed cell death to separate them.

'''J:''' Are you telling me that if that didn't happen, I could swim like Aqua Man?

'''S:''' Yes, that's what I'm saying. That's the take-home, Jay, yeah.

'''J:''' Apoptosis can go screw itself, man!

'''C:''' ''(Laughs)'' Yeah!

== News Items ==
=== Solar Panel Impact(15:24) ===
* http://m.phys.org/news/2016-07-solar-panels-reveals-impact-earth.html

'''S:''' All right, Jay, tell us about the environmental impact of ground-based solar panels.

'''J:''' I swear, I remember thinking about this when I first saw one of those giant solar arrays, like, “Guys, it's producing a lot of shade! Doesn't that have some type of impact?” Solar panels are cool! That's the title I gave this news item. And Cara, you will find out soon why I say that.

As the world moves away from what? Fossil fuels, and all that crap that we're putting into the atmosphere, and we head towards renewable energy. And no one is more excited than me. I love seeing countries like Germany completely kick ass with their renewable energy.

We have scientists that are now looking at the impact of things like wind mills and solar panels on the environment, right? So you build a huge wind mill farm, and people were saying at one point, “It's killing birds,” or “It's making vibrations or noise,” this, that and the other thing. And it turns out those are safe, and they're highly effective.

And solar panels, well you put them down, they're covering a lot of ground, and it makes shade, and there's a lot of impact on ecosystems. But it's pretty cool, because this is actually very good news. In a recent study, environmental scientists at Lancaster University, and the Center for Ecology and Hydrology (Bob, that means it's about water), spent a year ''(Jay and Cara chuckle)'' spent a year monitoring a solar park near Swindon that's in Southwest England.

The solar parks in studies were found to have an impact on the local climate because solar panels create shade, and they also absorb and convert solar energy; and they found that there was a five degree Centigrade cooling effect under the study panels during the summer months.

So of course, the results were, on a spectrum depending on the time of year, time of day, and all that stuff. But I guess during the hottest months, they can really say there was a five degree Centigrade cooling effect.

These temperature changes definitely have an impact on the biological processes, like how fast or slow plants grow, or what plants were growing, and the scientists, they want to figure out not only the impact of the solar parks, but how to use the information, how to optimize all the future projects that are coming, right? Researchers know that the world is about to build millions, or spend billions or tens of billions of dollars building solar parks, and we need to know what impact are they gonna have on all different kinds of environments.

The researchers published a paper called, “Solar Park Microclimate and Vegetation Management Effects on Grass and Carbon Cycling.” Now I wrote them and said, “Could you please shorten that title?” And they wrote back and said, “Go screw yourself.” But I still think my title is, “Solar Panels are Cool,” is better than ...

''(Cara laughs)''

'''J:''' The results were published in the journal, Environmental Research Letters. So one other cool thing to think about here: Studies like this are gonna not only give us and land owners, farmers, and people managing solar parks, people that are growing crops; it's gonna give us information to learn things about, for example, “Would the presence of solar panels allow us to grow crops that can't thrive, say, in full sunlight in a specific region?” Which they say, “Yes, they would. The shade that they provide would allow different types of crops to be grown in areas that they can't be grown in today.”

And also, solar panels can actually collect water in arid areas. So they could use them to collect water, and then use them to water crops! So they're actually collecting sunlight and water, which makes them wonderful.

'''S:''' You mean, like, dew? The precipitation?

'''J:''' Yeah! Yeah! So I put it to you, Bob, and David, and Evan ...

'''E:''' What?

'''J:''' How cool are solar panels?

'''S:''' Five degrees, cool?

'''J:''' Come on!

''(Cara laughs)''

'''DB:''' I can see why they did this study in England, because they need all the sunlight they can get at.

'''E:''' That's for sure.

'''DB:''' Anything that blocks that out, they really notice it. 'Cause they only get one month of it a year.

'''S:''' We could power the whole world with a patch of solar panels in the middle of Australia.

'''J:''' Maybe.

'''E:''' Why don't we do that!

'''B:''' Yeah, right!

'''J:''' Maybe.

'''C:''' We have a really big patch out here in the Mohave. I drove by them on the way to camping. They're beautiful!

'''J:''' But I think it's better, instead of doing that, Steve, 'cause you gotta think about distribution and all that, like, electricity is not easy to transport over long distances.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''J:''' We need solar panels everywhere! They gotta be everywhere! We have to have a total distributed network.

'''B:''' We need them in space!

'''E:''' That's right, we need ...

'''B:''' In space!

'''E:''' a Dyson sphere of solar ...

'''J:''' But Bob, how are you gonna beam the energy down?

'''B:''' Microwaves!

'''S:''' But not on roads.

'''J:''' No.

'''E:''' No, no. No. ''(Cara laughs)'' Interesting idea, but not gonna happen.

'''C:''' I think they're trying it again, by the way.

'''S:''' Oh, sure, they're goin' ahead.

''(Cara chuckles)''

'''E:''' Yeah.

=== Ancient Supernovae(20:17) ===
* http://phys.org/news/2016-07-ancient-supernovae-buffeted-earth-biology.html

''(Two supernovae had several effects on the Earth millions of years ago)''

'''S:''' Well, speaking of sunlight, Bob, tell us the effect of ancient supernova on Earth's biology.

'''B:''' So yeah, this is pretty interesting. Recent computer models suggest that effects from radiation from two relatively nearby supernovas millions of years ago were more substantial than previously thought and could have long-term consequences for the climate. We all know what supernovas are, how powerful they are, and potentially very scary. But generally, when you think about it, you feel pretty safe since pretty much everyone we see, or exactly everyone we see, are many thousands or millions of light years away. So you feel pretty safe. To be truly screwed by a supernova, you'd have to be about 25 or 26 light years away, any closer than that, and we're really in trouble. But we're starting to get hints that we could be very lightly screwed by supernovas that are much farther away, on the order of hundreds of light years away, and still can have a very interesting and dramatic effect. So this particular story started in April of 2016, earlier this year. Researchers published very good, solid, ironclad evidence that two supernovas exploded relatively close to Earth millions of years ago. One was about 2.5 million years ago. The other was about 7.5 million years ago. Weirdly, they were both nine solar masses and approximately 300 light years away. Kind of odd that they were exactly the same size and distance. And this was cool as well. They came to this conclusion from deposits of iron-60. Iron-60 is a radioactive form of iron. Did you know that there was such a thing as radioactive iron?

'''J:''' No, I didn't.

'''B:''' I had not heard about that. I can't imagine if Iron Man's suit was made of that. But I digress. Iron-60 deposits are important because they are seen as compelling evidence for nearby supernova explosions. Because of those two studies, Brian Thomas from Washburn University in Kansas and colleagues from the U.S. and Europe decided they wanted to model the effects on Earth's climate and biota of such supernovas just to see what would really happen. Let's really take a deep dive on what would happen because of a supernova that close. And their findings surprised them. One of the researchers said, I was surprised to see as much effect as there was. I was expecting there to be very little effect at all. The supernovas were pretty far away, more than 300 light years. That's not really close. So what are they talking about? Why were they surprised? Well, if you were there during that time, during one of these supernovas, you would have noticed it visibly. At night, there would be like a bluish light in the sky. And that lasted for several weeks. If you were diurnal, you may have even had your sleep patterns disrupted because of that light. It was so bright.

'''J:''' Diurnal?

'''B:''' Yeah. Active during the day, sleep during the night.

'''J:''' Oh, okay. Yeah, got it. All right.

'''DB:''' As opposed to crepuscular.

'''C:''' Which was the word of the day just a few weeks ago, right?

'''J:''' Very cool.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' So the most surprising effect seen in their model, though, was not the visible light, but the invisible radiation. So the radiation in this context means increased cosmic rays from the supernovas. And cosmic rays, we've mentioned them many times. You may remember they're energetic charged particles coming from space basically. The researchers found an order of magnitude increase in cosmic rays in their models. And when these cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere, they create these secondary particles. Most importantly, muons, which I'm now pronouncing correctly, you might notice.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' So muons are essentially fat electrons. Or is that not PC? Is it maybe corpulent electrons?

'''E:''' Rubenesque.

'''B:''' They are negatively charged. They have a mass 207 times greater than an electron. Pretty beefy. So look at a square meter of floor or ground right now. In one minute, 10,000 muons go through that space. So a good chunk of muons are going through there. And really you don't need to worry about them. They generally just go through you and everything, even rock. But considering there's so many of them, the very little amount of damage that they do does accumulate a little bit. Now imagine 10 times as many cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere. And they would then in turn create 20 times the amount of secondary muons. So that's about 200,000 muons per minute going through each square meter instead of 10,000. So you've got a big jump in muon production very close to the ground. And so basically that many muons essentially tripled the radiation dose each terrestrial and many aquatic animals received because of these supernovas. Tripled the radiation dose. Now imagine that happening for 1,000 years. And that's what they think happened. It's pretty much like a CT scan for everything, everything alive every year. But that's – it's just one CT scan a year. That's not devastating. But it could have meant that cancer rates increased worldwide as well as mutation rates, which means what? If you increase mutation rates, then you have…

'''S:''' Cancer.

'''E:''' Cancer.

'''S:''' Evolution.

'''J:''' Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, right Bob?

'''B:''' Yeah, right.

'''E:''' And cancer.

'''B:''' So yeah, cancer, which I already mentioned. But yes, it basically speeds up evolution. So who knows what impact it had on evolution by accelerating it a little bit. So there you go. There's the animal, the effects on the animals on the earth. But that wasn't the only impact at all. So remember those muons. They and the cosmic rays that spawned them were in great abundance at that time, like I said, especially in the lower atmosphere. What's the lower atmosphere called?

'''S:''' Troposphere.

'''B:''' Yes, the troposphere. So those particles mess not only with biology but the atmosphere itself as well. I mean we're talking about ionized particles. They rip apart molecules. They tear electrons away from atoms. Basically, it's ionizing the lower atmosphere and it's ionizing the atmosphere to a level eight times greater than it is today. And it did that for a thousand years. So you've got a troposphere that is much more ionized than usual for an extended period of time. So what does that mean? Well, it's hard to say.

'''E:''' Cell phones won't work?

'''B:''' But there were some interesting possibilities that are being discussed because it may be a coincidence but there was a lot of climate change going on at this time. Africa was getting drier and drier, totally drying out. The savannas were replacing forests. And also at this time, glaciation periods started happening. This is like the birth of glaciation essentially happening repeatedly and repeatedly over and over like we see for many, many thousands and thousands of years today. Pretty interesting. They still have lots more studying to do to really see if there's a connection to climate change. But it seems it's pretty clear though that even supernovas though that are hundreds of light years away, there's nothing obviously to take lightly even in terms of just pure radiation damage. So interesting stuff. So I'm curious to see how this pans out as more research is done.

'''DB:''' How does it make you feel guys when you learn about these worldwide massive events happening in Earth's history? Then you sort of think of this blip on the history of the Earth that is human civilization. If anything like that were to happen right now, would we be wiped out with any one of these things that we are increasingly counting across the Earth's history?

'''B:''' Yeah, some of it is intimidating but it's important to know that a lot of the things we talk about, these catastrophic things that are happening on the Earth, like even this one, they generally take – they act slowly. They take a long time and you probably wouldn't even notice it if it was happening. But of course there are those few things that are absolutely catastrophic and quick like an asteroid impact, which is actually one of the things we could actually do something about but we're not really taking it as seriously as we can. But other things like if there were a supernova 10 light years away or a gamma ray burst that was really close, that is nothing you could do. Absolutely nothing you could do, not with modern technology for sure. So you just got to look at the odds and the odds are so remote that I just don't even think about it.

'''J:''' Well, you're right. First of all, that's an amazingly scary thing and I think as we learn more and more about the universe, we realize just how insanely deadly it is and it could be instantaneous. That freaks me out. Elon Musk wants humanity to be multi-planetary and I would love it if we had people out of our solar system as well. It's time to really think about this stuff because not only do we have the understanding but we can actually see the possibility of doing it in another 50 to 100 years.

'''C:''' I don't know about leaving the solar system.

'''B:''' Yeah, it's a little more dramatic.

'''J:''' No, Cara, it's fine because if they put virtual reality headsets on them, they're going to be fine, trust me. And we have those.

'''S:''' What if they get motion sick from them?

'''C:''' I know.

'''E:''' That's what drama means for.

'''J:''' We'll selectively breed humans to not be sick like that.

'''S:''' VR compatible humans.

'''J:''' You won't make the cut.

'''E:''' There you go.

'''B:''' If you get motion sick, you shouldn't even be an astronaut. Stay home.

'''DB:''' Hey, aren't they all on scopolamine or something up there? You guys talked about this. You guys had a segment on all the drugs that astronauts –

'''B:''' Who remembers?

'''J:''' I like how he said we, right? We talked – I mean you guys talked about this. You're all there with us every week.

'''C:''' And remember things way better than we do.

=== Kubrick Moon Landing Hoax (30:07) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/kubrick-and-the-moon-landing-hoax-conspiracy/

'''S:''' Have you guys, you guys have heard about the Moon-landing hoax conspiracy ...

'''B:''' God ...

'''S:''' nonsense, right?

'''B:''' Ridiculous!

'''C:''' Of course!

'''S:''' We've talked about it many times ...

'''B:''' The lamest grand conspiracy out there I think.

'''S:''' Yeah ...

'''E:''' But it just won't go away, will it?

'''S:''' One of them. Have you heard about the connection with Stanley Kubrick?

'''B:''' Oh yeah.

'''J:''' Of course! Yeah!

'''E:''' Oh, yes!

'''B:''' I read your blog!

'''J:''' What is it? Say it real quick so I can know, Steve.

'''S:''' Yeah, so, just because big stories tend to attach themselves to famous people, right? So there's a conspiracy theory going around there that Stanley Kubrick (the film director who I am a particular fan of), was the director who created the fake Moon landing video. So of course, right? If you're gonna fake a Moon landing, you're gonna get a famous director ...

'''E:''' 2001

'''S:''' whose absence would be completely noticed by the entire industry, ''(Cara laughs)'' and you couldn't just get rid of afterwards, you know? As opposed to using some unknown director who you could then off ...

'''E:''' ''(Chuckling)'' Bump off in the back!

'''S:''' Bump off, yeah, once everything is done. Or just pay him enough to shut him up, or whatever. So this takes a silly conspiracy theory and adds an even sillier angle to it that just makes it even more ridiculous. I'm talking about it because Kubrick's daughter, Vivian Kubrick, lashed out at the Moon hoaxers recently. I guess she gets harassed a lot by them.

So she wrote an open letter to Moon hoax conspiracy theorists. Let me quote you from that. She says, “My father's artistic works are his unimpeachable offence.” Essentially, she's arguing that his life work is that of a man who was very much against a totalitarian government hiding secrets from their populus. He would never have cooperated in this sort of cover up.

She goes on, “Finally, my love for my father notwithstanding, I actually knew him. I lived and worked with him. So forgive my harshness when I state categorically: The so-called 'truth' these malicious cranks persist in forwarding, that my father conspired with the US government to fake the Moon landings, is manifestly a grotesque lie.”

I find that interesting. So she obviously, she knew her father, she worked with her father. She knows he didn't do this, right? From personal knowledge. He didn't disappear for months conspiring with NASA to fake the Moon landing. Interestingly, when I wrote about this, somebody noted in the comments that Vivian Kubrick was a Scientologist, and she's a bit of a crank herself.

'''B:''' Oof.

'''E:''' She's got some interesting notions ...

'''S:''' Right, right. Okay, I get that. That's irrelevant to the point though. I'm not citing her as any kind of authority on anything. Her personal knowledge her own father, all other things notwithstanding. But in any case, you guys also remember the Newton shooting, right? And there was a conspiracy ...

'''E:''' Of course.

'''S:''' that it was a false flag operation, that no kids were actually killed; and we have a personal connection to that. Evan, you and I and Jay, I think, to a lesser extent; we know of a family; the mother was there while the shooter was in the school. They had several kids in the school ...

'''E:''' Two kids.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think three total. One was there at the time, and two were not in the school at the time.

'''E:''' Right. Yeah.

'''S:''' And the husband was a first responder!

'''E:''' Yes, he was.

'''S:''' And saw the bodies. And this is somebody that we've known personally for years!

'''J:''' Since high school ...

'''S:''' They're not crisis actors, right? We know these people!

'''J:''' Absolutely!

'''E:''' I was just with the family again two weeks ago.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' But also, Steve, it's not just we know those people. We know a lot of people in the community. I mean, I was living in the town when it happened. I was living in Newton, Connecticut when it happened.

'''S:''' And Sandy Hook, in Sandy Hook, not just Newton. Yeah. There's definitely a problem with the way these kind of grand conspiracy theorists think. They have a thought disorder. They have a difficult relationship with reality. They're trapped in a number of mental pitfalls. One is the JAQing off, where they're “Just asking questions?”

'''E:''' Excuse me? Oh.

''(Cara laughs)''

'''S:''' You heard that term?

'''J:''' That's not okay now?

'''B:''' I love it!

'''C:''' ''(Laughs)'' Is there another word for that?

'''S:''' J-A-Q-i-n-g? No, I think it's perfect. ''(Rogues laugh)'' So we're just asking questions! You know, I'm curious? Why are there no stars in the background of the pictures? 'Cause you don't know anything about photography. That's why.

'''E:''' Or don't know how to look up the answer.

'''S:''' How come before the Apollo missions, the scientists involved were hunting for Moon rocks in Antarctica? 'Cause they wanted to know what Moon rocks are made of? I mean, they just cast sinister cast on these innocent either coincidences, or things that are not immediately explained, because as if you would know every tiny little detail of how a complex organization operates, or how a complex event unfolded, you know? Like the police caught some guy walking in the woods outside the school at Sandy Hook. What was he doing there? Who the hell knows!

The fact that there's some guy wandering around in the woods is not in and of itself unusual or curious. It's the kind of thing that you would expect to happen when you canvas an area and look for anything unusual going on. You're gonna find unusual things going on.

But the confidence that they have that this is all evidence of a conspiracy is really interesting. And I do think that it does take on another layer when you are personally involved, when you have personal knowledge that they're wrong. You know absolutely that they're wrong, but you can see how... they really are very much like children looking at the world.

They are kind of mystified by reality, if you know what I mean. And they say they “investigate” things, they don't really do any investigation. They don't talk to the people involved. They're not doing any journalism. They're never doing any kind of investigation that would actually uncover the truth.

Like the people who believe in the Sandy Hook conspiracy, they didn't talk to any of the people in the town, or the family, 'cause if they had, if they had done actual investigation, it would become immediately apparent that this was a real event that actually happened ...

'''E:''' They hunt for ...

'''S:''' touched the lives of many, many people, in a web that you cannot unmesh from reality.

'''E:''' They hunt for clues that support their ...

'''S:''' Yeah

'''E:''' their position that they're ... the results they're looking to get.

'''B:''' Not just clues, anomalies.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're anomaly-hunting on the internet. Yeah. I love the Mitchin web video, where they have the people in the back room planning the Moon hoax, and it turns out, they say, “Well, we have to build a huge rocket, because otherwise people won't believe we got to the Moon! ''(Bob laughs)'' We need to show them a huge rocket.” So if we still have all the cost of building a rocket capable of going to the Moon, what money are we saving?

It's like, “Well, we won't have to cater it.” ''(Rogues laugh) “Actually, it will cost us more to cater the film crew, than just to feed three astronauts for a couple weeks.” So that actually will cost them more ...

'''B:''' Right.

'''S:''' But, yeah. It's perfect satire which shows you, when you think about it, how ridiculous the whole thing is. Or, the best one is, if they faked it in order to have one over on the Soviets, why didn't the Soviets just expose it? Or, if the Soviets were in on it, why didn't they fake them going to the Moon too?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Or, whatever! It doesn't hold together. It doesn't make any sense.

'''B:''' Oh, it's ridiculous. And Steve, I just thought of another reason why the selection of Kubrick as a director is ridiculous. Not only is this guy would be missed, world famous, and you would probably get a low level director that you could conveniently kill if you have to.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' But another good reason is, who cares about the director? Think about what you're doing! What's so important? The plot flow? The casting? The motivating? The actors?

'''J:''' No, Bob ...

'''B:''' Wait! Let me finish this thought! You don't need a good director, you need just a merely competent director! What you need is a cinematographer, a special effects guy, a set designer, and science consultants. Those are the important people you need ...

'''S:''' Yeah

'''B:''' not a director!

'''J:''' That's not true Bob.

'''B:''' What!?

'''J:''' The director made it really happen. The idea is that some one like Kubrick would be the only person that would even know how to pull in the talent to pull it off and everything, because he was at the top of his game, and was more connected than anybody in his hayday.

'''B:''' So you're saying they used him more for connections than his directing skill?

'''J:''' No! I'm not saying that at all!

'''C:''' No, it's just the director often would actually hire the DP, they would hire the A-Cam, they would hire all of those people, because it was their vision. So they had to use a cinematographer that could pull off their vision ...

'''S:''' And they were involved in the special effects. They were involved with the cinematography.

'''J:''' Yeah

'''C:''' Yeah

'''S:''' So there is a point there. I think Jay's closer to true than what you're saying, Bob, but your point is well taken that still, you don't need somebody like Kubrick, who is an artistic film director, for a piece like faking the video. You really just need the technical people.

'''B:''' Yes.

'''S:''' The only thing you could really say is that you needed Kubrick for some kind of technical skill, but even then you could just get the people who worked with Kubrick, you know?

'''B:''' I know!

'''S:''' You wouldn't need Kubrick himself.

=== Neurasthenia () ===
* https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/11/snowflake-arizona-environmental-illness

''(Fake disease: Allergic to all unnatural and modern things)''

'''S:''' Evan, what in God's name is neurasthenia?

'''E:''' That's a great question.

'''S:''' It's a great word. Actually, I've heard of it before. It's one of my favorite fake diseases. But tell us.

'''E:''' OK. I was going to ask you if we've spoken about this on the show before, but apparently we haven't. Anyways, the topic came up because there was an investigative article that ran in The Guardian recently. And the title is called Allergic to Life, the Arizona residents sensitive to the whole world, which is actually a topic we've touched upon before on the SGU. We've discussed the claims of health detriments due to exposure to Wi-Fi radiation, cell phone radiation, those sorts of things. But this reporter from The Guardian, and her name is Kathleen Hale, she went to visit this place called Snowflake, Arizona, which is a town or more of a settlement. About 20 people have migrated to the spot in the Arizona desert to escape what the residents perceive to be are the harmful effects of, well, not only things like Wi-Fi radiation, but all sorts of factory processed chemicals, detergents, fragrances, plastics, fabrics, you name it. And they claim that they are highly allergic or have bad reactions to this stuff. So modern society essentially makes them sick. And in the article, they actually bring up the term neurasthenia, which I had never really heard before. Well, it's a term which originates back to the year 1829. It was thought by doctors then that there was some sort of physical problem within a person's nervous system. But the term was then borrowed by the neurologist George Miller Beard in 1869. And Beard used the term neurasthenia to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, palpitations, high blood pressure, depressed mood, and these sorts of things. And he postulated that neurasthenia was a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves. And Beard attributed this to modern civilization. And it became, well, a relatively popular diagnosis in the late 1800s and early 1900s in the United States. And they expanded it into including symptoms like weakness, dizziness, fainting, and other similar sorts of traits. Beard actually advocated electrotherapy as a treatment for it. And then he did these experimental treatments as well. And that position was held at that point to be kind of controversial. In fact, one review posited that Beard's knowledge of the scientific method was highly in question. And he said, don't believe their claims. They are unwarranted. But in any case, it's for the most part been abandoned as a medical diagnosis. It's no longer included as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I'm sure there's an abbreviation for that. But according to WebMD, the term is actually still used in places like the United Kingdom and China. Yeah, these people have gone to this place in Arizona to escape it all. And when I say escape it all, it is everything. They cannot use soaps. They cannot use anything and everything essentially that society has. Heck, they can't even have like insulation and wallpaper and paint in their house. In fact, one of the houses that was visited by the reporter, she described it as wallpapered in heavy-duty Reynolds wrap. So they actually put tinfoil up because metal is okay.

'''C:''' Oh no, because that doesn't look crazy at all.

'''E:''' These people claim to be sensitive to grains, GMO foods, preservatives, artificial flavorings, artificial colorings. In fact, they don't even have blankets for their beds because they release gases over time. I guess the decomposition of the fibers and stuff. They're very, very sensitive to that. I'm actually surprised she's that close to any sort of electronic devices. In fact, when the reporter and the photographer who went there, because they immersed themselves in this town for a couple days. It's actually a pretty interesting way of doing investigative reporting. One night they decided to charge a camera battery while everyone was asleep. The two ladies with which these reporters were staying found out about it like the next day. And they claim that the charging of that camera battery actually did damage to them. And they were pretty upset about it. So that's the kind of level of sensitivity that these folks are claiming. My heart kind of goes out to these people in a certain way. And in another way, when you do have reports like this, you kind of wonder how many people are there at home now reading about this kind of stuff and sort of doing their own self-diagnosis. Saying, oh, wow, I have all these things too. And yeah, these chemicals. I have bad reactions to this and I don't know how to cure myself. Well, maybe I should try doing something like this. In that sense, I fear that it sends out the wrong signals to certain people that they might actually go and try to isolate themselves to this extent.

'''S:''' Well, it may be all in their head or it may be that they have some undiagnosed illness and they have been captured by this alluring diagnosis. So what's interesting is that if you look at the history of medicine, there has always been a neurasthenia in some form or another, right? So after neurasthenia fell out of favor, these patients would have been diagnosed with syphilis. And after diagnosing everything unknown as syphilis fell out of favor, we had chronic Lyme disease and multiple chemical sensitivity. And now whatever, just electromagnetic sensitivity and just allergic to everything. So essentially you have patients who have chronic, usually vague symptoms. I'm a little – I can't think straight. I'm fatigued. I have aches and pains. But they may have some specific symptoms because most people are not perfectly healthy. We all have our aches and pains. So there's a little bit of hypervigilance where you are very vigilant about the slightest symptom, sometimes what we call the symptoms of life, right? I mean who is perfectly symptom-free at any moment in their life?

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' And also if you then focus on things, like try to imagine the top of your head itching, it will freaking itch. Just there's an intention component to this. And of course it's often very comorbid with anxiety and depression and they become self-reinforcing. So they're depressed because they have symptoms, which then makes the symptoms worse, which makes the depression worse, right? So they're self-reinforcing, which may also be comorbid with poor sleep. It's very, very, very common.

'''E:''' Poor nutrition too. They start eliminating all this stuff from their diet and they become emaciated.

'''S:''' Or sedentary lifestyle because they're too painful to exercise. So the thing kind of takes on a life of its own. Sometimes I think that patients get into this because of lifestyle factors, some because of anxiety and depression, some because they have a real undiagnosed illness. But the problem is that the existence of these fake diagnoses, it's like flypaper, you know what I mean? It sort of attracts and traps people and then they can't functionally address what's really going on. And there are things to do. Even if we can't make a nice little label diagnosis for what they have, a nice, clean, neat little label, still we could say what they don't have and we can address their lifestyle factors, we can address their symptoms, we can improve their quality of life. There's a lot of functional things you could do, but they get distracted from the practical things pursuing the fake diagnosis. This is an extreme example of that where they move to out of the way town where they're isolated from the world. But then the treatment becomes a disorder unto itself, you know what I mean? The diagnosis and the treatment for the fake diagnosis itself is then a medical disorder. And that's a problem. And unfortunately, it's promoted by a lot of quacks who don't have the nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between symptoms and illness and psychology and lifestyle. And they just want to give patients what they think they want, which is a nice, clean label that encapsulates all of their symptoms. And that is just often not in existence.

'''E:''' These people feel let down by the medical professional industry, in a sense, because they can't figure out what's going on with them. So they turn to these alternative health practices. In fact, they said that there is a physician apparently in town or nearby who practices integrative health treatments and they're very, very happy for that. In fact, one resident of the town claims to have some sort of device that can detect environmental illnesses in people, a gadget, a black box that they wave around and they say, yeah, okay, yeah, it's definitely you're sick because of the environment. And then you go to address them that perhaps there's a psychological component to all this, and then they want nothing to do with even knowing about that. They're absolutely convinced it has nothing, nothing to do with that, and they are 100% convinced it has to do with these things that you find in modern society.

'''S:''' Right, but that's been reinforced again by the quacks. They're absolutely vulnerable. I consider them to be a vulnerable population to quackery. In many cases, they may have actually been failed by mainstream medicine, not because they weren't diagnosed with something they don't have, but I've experienced personally a lot of patients similar to this who no one's just had the 15-minute conversation with them that they need to have to get them focused in a more constructive direction. It's just like, well, if the workup's negative, we don't know what you have, and they don't explain why that's okay and why they don't need to continue to be on this treadmill of what we call the million-dollar workup where they're just constantly searching for a diagnosis because if you allow them to keep searching, they'll find it. They'll find a diagnosis, and chances are it'll be fake. But that's a skill set unto itself, talking to people in such a way that you can make them feel comfortable with the fact that they don't have some horrible disease, that what they have is just a combination of a lot of things and that we can address them all individually. It's difficult. It's difficult.

=== Tiny-armed dinosaur(52:07) ===
* http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/arm-day-gym-apparently-not-thing-newly-discovered-tiny-armed-dino-180959797/?no-ist

'''S:''' Cara, I understand that T. rex is not the only dinosaur with tiny little arms.

'''C:''' It's not. There's a new dinosaur, guys, and it was just described today. So there's a new article published just today in PLOS One, the Public Library of Science, and it was by Macavicky et al, and the title of the article is An Unusual New Theropod with a Didactyl Manus from the Upper Cretaceous of Patagonia, Argentina.

'''S:''' I love jargon.

'''C:''' Didactyl.

'''S:''' I do. It's like poetry to me.

'''C:''' So, yeah, so this is an unusual theropod, which is a meat-eating dinosaur, mostly meat-eating dinosaur, with these little hands that have two fingers, and they're really, really tiny, and it was discovered in 2007. That's how long it took for them to publish this. When they were on a dig in Patagonia's, I am so going to butcher this, Huincul Formation? Huincul. H-U-I-N-C-U-L. Huincul. Huincul Formation. Anyway, a big boneyard that's approximately 94 million years old. So they're on this dig, and as Brian Swietek, who is both a good friend of mine but also a preeminent paleontology writer, wrote for Smithsonian, what always seems to happen is like, what is it called, Murphy's Law, where the biggest discovery is made the last day you're supposed to be out in the field. So these researchers were out. Researchers from the Field Museum are out in this formation looking around, and on the very last day, Akiko Shinya, who is the Field Museum's chief fossil preparator, spotted this fossil, and as they started to uncover it, they realized that it's a pretty special fossil. They ultimately named it Gualicho, after Gualichu, who is a spirit associated with a certain people of Patagonia. It's like a nefarious spirit who spreads bad luck, and the researchers, of course, experienced a whole lot of bad luck when they were in the field, like often happens when you're out in really intense situations. And so it was ultimately named Gualicho Shinya. So the first part is for Gualicho, the spirit of the region, and Shinya, of course, for Akiko Shinya, the preparator who discovered it. So that must be also really cool for her. And it seems to be an example of convergent evolution. So we talk a lot about evolution on the show. The difference between divergent evolution is where there is an evolutionary pinpoint in the cladogram. So there's a point during the evolutionary track where something splits off and follows two divergent tracks, and they happen to have similar traits, but ultimately become very different in other ways. Convergent evolution is when there are two traits or multiple traits that actually evolved independently of one another. So a good example that we often use are bird wings and bat wings, right? They have, in many ways, similar traits, but they didn't come from a similar ancestor whatsoever. They both evolved things to keep these organisms aloft. And in this case, it does look like these teeny tiny arms are examples of convergent evolution because Gualicho Shinya is actually a type of Allosaurus. And if we think of Allosaurus, we don't think of these tiny arms. We typically think of T-Rex, like you said, Steve, or we think of Carnotaurus, two really good examples of a genus that are associated with these wimpy little arms. But Allosaurus, we don't think of like that. And specifically, Gualicho Shinya looks to be the most closely related at this point to Deltadromeus agilis, which is actually a theropod that was discovered in Africa. It's also interesting because a lot of the reporting on this story goes deep into why these organisms might have had the tiny teeny little arms. And we talked about this recently on the show. Nobody really knows for sure, of course, but there do seem to be a lot of really interesting sort of hypotheses about that. Reduced function in those limbs. Obviously, a lot of people say it's most certainly due to reduced function in the limbs, but why would there be reduced function in the limbs? Some people say it's for balance. Some people say it's for these carnivores needing room for such incredibly large heads and needing the real estate kind of given to these intense neck muscles that if there were arms in the way that they wouldn't be as ferocious a predator, as effective a predator. But there are a lot of different reasons that they could have lost their ability to use those teeny tiny arms. And this is just another organism that allows individuals, I think, to start learning about why that would be because now we have one more data point.

'''S:''' Yeah. I like how they describe it as a shift to head-only prey acquisition and dispatch.

'''C:''' Yeah, that's like really good jargon. I love that.

'''S:''' Yeah, I love that. I think all of those things that you talked about, they're not mutually exclusive.

'''C:''' Exactly.

'''S:''' There's more room for the head, more room for neck muscles. They're out of the way. They're not needed. So it's all good.

'''C:''' And yeah, now we have a third in this kind of class of wimpy-armed dinosaurs that we can study to understand that further.

=== Quickie with Bob: New Dwarf Planet(57:44) ===
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/sifter/astronomers-discover-new-dwarf-planet-within-our-solar-system?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=dwarfplanet-5659

'''S:''' Bob, we haven't done a Quickie in a long time.

'''B:''' That's right! Too long!

'''S:''' Speaking of tiny things ...

''(Rogues chuckle quietly)''

'''B:''' Good one, Steve.

''(Cara laughs)''

'''S:''' Well, actually, I'm referring to the news item.

'''B:''' Oh okay. All right.

'''S:''' But that's interesting you interpreted it that way.

''(Bob and Cara laugh)''

'''B:''' Come on, that's exactly what you wanted me to think. ''(Suddenly very happy)'' Thank you Steve! This is your Quickie With Bob. So, using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Moana Kaea in Hawaii, researchers have found a new dwarf planet beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt. It's called, “2015 RR245” (nice name), and has joined the ranks of Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, as well as Ceres as a bona fide dwarf planets. So here's some stats: It's twice as far from the Sun as Neptune ...

'''E:''' Whoa!

'''B:''' when it's at its most distant point in its journey.

'''E:''' That's out there.

'''B:''' It's, yeah, far away. It's one of the largest known orbits of a dwarf planet, circling the Sun once every seven hundred years.

'''C:''' Wow.

'''B:''' And it hasn't been totally confirmed yet, but they think its diameter is about seven hundred kilometers. It's the smallest dwarf, if that holds out. But it's still a dwarf planet because it meets the criteria, which are: It's in an orbit around the Sun (duh); it has sufficient mass to overcome the rigit body forces so that it's spherical; it hasn't cleared out the neighborhood around its orbit like regular, real planets; and it isn't a satellite. So it is a dwarf planet.

There has been no name decided yet, and it will an upgrade in the name. It may take a few years as they pin down its true orbit. But I would like to recommend, “Dwarfie McDwarf Planet.”

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''B:''' This has been your – yes – this has been your Quickie With Bob. I hope it was good for you too.

'''C:''' Hey, Bob, I have a question.

'''B:''' Yeah?

'''C:''' How do they know it's not a satellite if they haven't fully mapped out its orbit? How do they know it's not actually orbiting something else?

'''B:''' Well, if it was orbiting something else, you would think that would have been detected as well.

'''C:''' You would think.

'''B:''' It would probably be bigger as well, which would make it even more obvious, unless it was much dimmer. But I don't know how much of its orbit it has mapped out. But I think they're fairly confident that it's not a satellite. But even if it is a satellite, then it's in orbit maybe around a real planet or another dwarf planet. So that would be cool too!

'''C:''' So then it might be a Moon, right? Then it ...

'''B:''' Yeah

'''C:''' would be considered a Moon.

'''E:''' Right.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''S:''' So, as Bob said, there are five confirmed dwarf planets. From closest to the Sun to farthest, it's Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris. But there are six already, six possible other trans-Neptunian objects: Orchis, 2002-MS4, Salatia, Quayore, 2007-OR10, and Sedna. So there's potentially, there's definitely five, potentially another six more, and this would be a seventh one. So that's potentially ...

'''E:''' Ooh! Seven dwarves!

''(Cara laughs)''

'''S:''' Potentially twelve dwarf planets if all of the seven possible ones are confirmed, as there's gotta be a ton more. I think we're just scratching the surface.

'''B:''' Oh my god!

'''E:''' They think there are hundreds, potentially.

'''B:''' Many, many, potentially.

'''E:''' Potentially hundreds.

'''S:''' Yeah, cool! Very cool.

'''E:''' They just gotta find them.

'''B:''' Gotta catch'em all!

'''C:''' Oh no!

== Who's That Noisy (1:01:06) ==
* Answer to last week: Carbon fiber bicycle wheels

'''S:''' Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy.

'''J:''' All right. Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] All right. What do you say?

'''C:''' Steve said there was obviously a Doppler effect there. You could hear it. Something coming close and then going past.

'''J:''' This is one of our listeners testing out his new carbon fiber bicycle racing wheels. And the interesting thing about these carbon fiber wheels, you could look them up. There's a lot of videos of them on there, is that he said that they're often acoustically tuned. So I guess the wheels make the same sound because I guess it would be annoying if they didn't have the same pitch as they go. But they make that kind of wobbly, almost like a spaceship kind of noise as the bike rides by. And the Doppler effect made it sound really interesting. But yeah, that's cool, right? So it's just carbon fiber tires just interfacing with the pavement and making a tone.

'''C:''' That is cool.

'''J:''' But this week, a listener named Nicholas Alden sent in a... I'm going to actually say that this now has booted my previous favorite noisy of the year. This is my favorite noisy of the year. What the hell is this? And Bob, my God, Bob, this one is for you, my brother.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''J:''' [plays Noisy]

'''B:''' I know what that is.

'''C:''' That's horrifying.

'''J:''' Don't say it. Do not say it.

'''B:''' No, I'm going to say it. Courtney, when she first saw you naked.

'''J:''' So Nicholas, oh my God, thank you for that. That is so awesome. I'm so excited to tell everybody next week what the hell that is. And I'll tell you right now, it's not just a cool noisy and it's scary. And I'm sorry if anybody got really disturbed by that. But it was freaking awesome. But when I tell you what it is, you're going to even think it's 10 times more awesome. That's how cool this noisy is.

'''S:''' You might be overhyping a little bit, Jay.

'''J:''' I don't think so.

'''S:''' We'll see.

'''J:''' I don't think so. You can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org with your new awesome noisies and your guesses and take any guess guys. Just throw your guesses at me. Don't think, oh, I have to kind of know. No, I don't care if you think it's your dog or whatever. Just send me a guess.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Jay.

== Science or Fiction (1:03:45) ==

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two real and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. No theme this week. Just three regular news items. I think you will find that they are very interesting. Here we go. Item number one. Scientists create a plastic polymer barrier that is one million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Item number two. A biodynamic study of sauropod necks shows that in order to be stable, they would have had to be very rigid with a range of motion no more than five degrees in any direction. And item number three. A new study suggests that a preference for a consonant versus dissonant music is learned rather than innate.

'''J:''' Wow. That's cool.

'''S:''' David, as our guest, you go first.

'''DB:''' All right. The polymer one doesn't seem implausible. I really didn't like the sauropod neck one. They're saying, I mean, sauropods, they're like brontosauruses.

'''S:''' That's right.

'''DB:''' I know. Walking around with this stiff neck sticking out there, I don't see how that's compatible with life. So I don't like that one. And I don't like the music one either because my impression was that a preference for consonant music exists in all cultures, which would work against the cultural hypothesis. But I least, sorry, I most dislike the sauropod one, so I'm saying stiff-necked sauropods is fake.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

'''B:''' Let's see. I'll start with three. Preference for consonant versus dissonant music. Yeah, it just seems obvious that dissonant music was kind of like hardwired. And where would they even find cultures that haven't even been exposed to lots of modern music? They're pretty isolated. That doesn't sound right, obviously. It just seems like such a grating thing that like nails on a chalkboard. Let's see. Let's go to number two, the biodynamic study sauropod. In order to be stable. So what? It would flop around unless it was very rigid? I guess that's kind of what they're saying. I mean this would make sense if a sauropod had a very wide field of peripheral vision. Off the top of my head, I'm trying to think of how the eyes are separated on a sauropod. I don't know how wide. I mean if it was wide enough, I mean if you had like 200 degree peripheral vision, then you would be okay. You wouldn't necessarily have to be pointed at something to see it with, predator eyes. So I could kind of see how that would work. Let's go to one, the plastic polymer. A million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Well, graphene does a lot of shit, but this doesn't sound like something that graphene would be good at necessarily. I don't know. That one's probably wrong more than the others even. I'm going to say that's fiction.

'''S:''' Okay, Jay.

'''J:''' All right. So I'll take them in order. So I don't know, Bob. The plastic polymer with the monolayer of graphene. I mean just don't know how the plastic and the graphene are going to interact with each other to create a better barrier, you know? A million times less permeable though. That's amazing. That's a lot. So I don't know. I think there's something about that one I think is science because they're experimenting with these chemicals and getting properties out of them. They're constantly tweaking for little properties that are beneficial. So I'm going to say that one's science. The second one here about the sauropod, it just this one seems fake, like as if Steve made it up, like, oh, yeah, they're next or they had this. I don't know, Steve, you bastard. I feel bad for them if they did. Talk about a crappy life. They have these amazingly long necks and they can't even really do anything with them. That sucks. How do they drink water, for crying out loud? Five degrees and maybe up and down was fine, but left and right was bad. I don't know. I can see you throwing them off balance though. But this damn one with the music is the one that I just want to be wrong. I do believe that what David said holds some merit here, that we globally seem to have a preference for some type of consonant music. My gut is telling me to say this one is the fake. I'm going to follow my gut and say that this one about the consonant versus dissonant music is the fiction.

'''S:''' An even spread. Three out of three. All right, Cara?

'''C:''' Plastic polymer barrier a million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Well, graphene is obviously magic, so this one is obviously science. Biodynamic study of sauropod necks shows that in order to be stable, they'd have to be very rigid. I would agree with that. With a range of motion no more than five degrees in any direction. That's weird. And not only is that weird because it would not accommodate them eating or sleeping or doing any of the things that modern organisms that we sometimes equate that to like giraffes can do. If you've ever seen a giraffe sleep, they rest their head on their butt. It's really cute. They make little giraffe pretzels. But also sauropods themselves were really differently shaped. You know, Brachiosaur had like a really tall neck that went straight up and then you have Apatosaurus or Camarasaurus that were like longer. So to me, I don't know. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. The last one, a preference for consonant and dissonant music is learned rather than innate. This one also triggers some alarm bells, but honestly, I think it could be true. It's a bummer because I think we want to think that all people like hearing music in the key of C, but that's because we are all people and we grew up in the West. But the truth is, if you really start to think about non-Western music, there are a lot of weird dissonant chords that we often hear. I mean, think about a Gregorian chant, for example. That absolutely doesn't sound like traditional consonant major key stuff. So I'm going to go ahead and say that the fiction is the sauropod, the sauropod one.

'''S:''' And Evan?

'''E:''' The reason I think the sauropod one is going to turn out to be the fiction is that if it had this rigid neck with the five degree range motion, I mean, doesn't it need to kind of look for predators and stuff? I don't know what kind of other dinosaurs hunted these things, but how could it survive for probably as long as it did if it didn't have the ability to kind of sense, determine its environment around it? It would seem like a big, big negative as far as trying to keep that species alive. So I'll say that's the fiction.

'''S:''' OK, so Cara, David and Evan, you think that the sauropod one is the fiction? Bob, you think the graphene one is the fiction. And Jay, you think the music one is the fiction. So I guess we'll take this in order. Number one, scientists create a plastic polymer barrier that is one million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. And this one is science.

'''B:''' What? You totally screwed me.

'''S:''' How did I screw you?

'''B:''' You screwed me because.

'''E:''' Because you read it and you read it wrong?

'''B:''' No, because that was so close to another item that I just assume you morphed the other item into that one.

'''S:''' There's a title of the actual published item. Million fold decrease in polymer moisture permeability by a graphene monolayer.

'''B:''' See? See?

'''DB:''' These titles are so misleading.

'''S:''' So this is potentially an important advance because, as the authors say, you may think that plastics are very impermeable to water, but over time they are not. And if you need to wrap, say, sensitive electronics like organic LEDs and you need to be able to store them for months or even years without any water getting in, plastics just don't cut it. So what they did is they used chemical vapor deposition to incorporate a single layer, a monolayer of graphene into the polymer. And then in testing, this polymer with the graphene was a million times less permeable to water. It can go a lot longer without essentially any significant water getting through. Very cool.

'''B:''' Let me tell you my story now that I read. This is really cool, actually. They created a new source of renewable energy. That unto itself is awesome. Using a three-atom-thick barrier with salt water on one side and fresh water on the other. And the salt water goes through the barrier, through these special pores, and it creates a current. It actually creates a current. So you put these things like on an estuary or something where like a river or a stream empties into the ocean and you can create energy. They're talking about a cubic meter, a square meter of material that's covered with 30% pores could produce like a megawatt of energy. It said it could light 50,000 light bulbs. So first off, that's just cool, very, very interesting. Hey, it's a new renewable source of energy. That's fantastic. And it just sounded so damn close to what this was. Like, oh, he just totally morphed this one.

'''S:''' Yeah, I saw that news item too. Definitely very cool using the osmotic gradient as basically a way of driving a current and generating electricity. Very cool. All right. Well, let's go on to number two. A biodynamic study of sauropod necks shows that in order to be stable, they would have had to be very rigid with a range of motion no more than five degrees in any direction. Cara, Evan, and David, you think this one is the fiction.

'''B:''' I'm saying it's fiction too.

'''S:''' And this one is the fiction.

'''B:''' Oh, bastard.

'''S:''' But this is based on a real study. Scientists are definitely interested in how sauropods were able to maintain their extremely long necks.

'''B:''' Well, how did giraffes do it?

'''S:''' Now, Evan, you asked how do sauropod dinosaurs fend off predators. But actually their main deterrent to predators is their size. It's definitely believed that they just grew big, really, really big as a deterrent to predators.

'''C:''' Except when they were babies.

'''S:''' Yeah, but then the babies just hide in the herd, right? That's their main defense. And interestingly, they know that they have a certain design to their vertebra, the bones in their neck. Now, most vertebrates just have sort of flat vertebra with discs in between. But sauropods have a ball and socket joint for the neck. The study was looking at whether or not the ball and socket joint was more stable with the ball facing away from the body versus toward the body. Now, in sauropods, the ball in the ball and socket joint always faces away from the body. And what they found was that that's because if it's facing towards the body, while it may be overall as strong, it's much more susceptible to dislocation. So the neck vertebra were less likely to dislocate in the configuration that sauropods have with the ball facing outward.

'''C:''' It sounds kind of crazy to me. Are there any other organisms we know of that have ball and socket joints in their necks?

'''S:''' Oh, I don't know. I didn't have time to look into that. I mean, the giraffe might. That's an interesting one. We'll have to see if we have time to check that out. All right. Well, let's move on to number three. A new study suggests that a preference for consonant versus dissonant music is learned rather than innate. Jay, you thought this one was the fiction, but, of course, this one is also science. And, yeah, this one is really interesting. So, Bob, you wondered, well, who would they get to test this hypothesis? Well, there is a very isolated Amazonian tribe. They said that they are days away from any civilization, and many of them had little to no contact with Western culture. This study was led by Josh McDermott at MIT and Ricardo Gadoy, a professor at Brandeis University, and it was published in Nature, the July 13th issue. They studied the Tsimane people, T-S-I-M-A-N-E. Again, a very isolated Amazonian tribe.

'''B:''' Yeah. Yeah, I know. I read it. It makes this even more annoying. Continue.

'''S:''' And they found that when they played consonant versus dissonant music to them, that they actually had no statistical preference for consonant chords. They liked them equally. So that's an exception to the notion that all cultures like consonant music. I don't think this one study is, of course, the end of this discussion or this debate. This is just one line of evidence. It's possible that this tribe, they're outliers. There is something innate about the preference for consonant music, but maybe that could be overcome in certain cultures, or it could be that it's just purely cultural. By reading that I've done, it makes it sound like this is somewhat of a debate. I don't know where the balance of the opinion is, but this is just one piece of information. Again, you have to be cautious against treating these individual studies as if this is the final word on what sounds like a much more complicated question.

'''C:''' Yeah, and there are instruments in other cultures that we don't even have that make sounds that we don't even hear. You know what I mean? I think the reason it feels so primal is because music touches something so primal. For us to have been exposed to music from such a young age, and honestly, most music is the same. It's so structured. It's so built on the same kind of platform that these tiny variations can cause such a big difference in how they resonate with us. I mean, I think it would make sense that it would feel so primal. Holy crap. By the way, I just found out that giraffe cervical vertebrae, specifically just the neck vertebrae, not the thoracic ones, have ball and socket joints.

'''S:''' Oh, cool. Cool, cool. So hey, another example of convergent evolution. Different evolutionary lines finding the same solution to a similar problem. How do you maintain stability in a long neck? That vertebral joint evolves into a ball and socket joint. So obviously it must be easy or at least very plausible for that to evolve. And so we're going to see it crop up in multiple times. It's like a bat wing and a bird wing. Very cool. All right. Well, let's move on.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:18:45) ==

'''S:''' Evan, give us the quote of the week.

'''E:''' "It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth. On the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous." Well said. Basically tearing down the argument from antiquity. And I'm loving it. Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason. He wrote that many, many years ago.

'''S:''' The Age of Reason.

'''E:''' The Age of Reason.

'''S:''' Are we still in the Age of Reason, do you think?

'''E:''' I don't know. We're holding on to threads of it maybe.

'''DB:''' I call it a post-reason age.

'''C:''' Post-reason.

'''E:''' It's kind of this hybrid in which there are pockets of reason intermixed among the fabulous, as Thomas Paine would have said.

'''C:''' The bimodal age.

'''E:''' Just a little bit about Thomas Paine. He was an English and American political activist. Born in 1737. Died 1809. The Age of Reason follows in the tradition of 18th century British deism and challenges institutionalized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible. Pretty controversial for his time, certainly. Definitely not. But he wanted to put it out there sort of in a layman's terms. Made it very accessible to the masses as was his way of communicating with people with the other pamphlets and things that he wrote. It was definitely within his idiom. And he's forever recognized for it.

'''S:''' So, David, thank you so much for joining us. It was a lot of fun having you on the show.

'''DB:''' Oh, the pleasure was all mine. Thank you so much for having me, guys.

'''B:''' Thanks, David.

'''E:''' Well done, Dave.

'''S:''' A lot of people have asked us if we're going to be at Dragon Con. The SGU will be at Dragon Con. We will all be there. We'll be doing a show like we always do when we're at Dragon Con on Saturday night. We'll be doing a private show. We'll try to get on as many panels, et cetera, as they want us to be on while we're there. We'll be hanging out. So if you haven't been to Dragon Con before, it's a ton of fun. It's in Atlanta, Georgia. First weekend in September. So, yeah, check it out. We'll be there. So thank you all for joining me this week.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

'''E:''' Thanks Doctor.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.

{{Outro404}}

== Today I Learned: ==

== References ==
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SGU Episode 540

2025-03-13T16:38:06Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

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|episodeDate = November 14th 2015 
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|qowText = We ignore public understanding of science at our peril 
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== Introduction ==
* Star Wars Prequels, and Jupiter Ascending

''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, November 11th, 2015, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Howdy.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening, folks.

'''S:''' So have you guys seen all of the Star Wars movies because we're going to be reviewing them in a couple weeks.

'''C:''' You know I haven't.

'''J:''' Almost. Almost.

'''S:''' I just rewatched all of them.

'''B:''' They're going to be like almost brand new to me because the first three travesties, I think I really haven't even seen them since in the movie theater.

'''C:''' I haven't seen them at all.

'''B:''' Oh, boy.

'''C:''' It's going to be brand new to me and I'm going to cry in the fetal position.

'''E:''' Oh, my gosh. That's a lot of information you have to digest.

'''S:''' But we won't prejudice you. Just watch them cold.

'''E:''' No, no, no.

'''C:''' Yeah, because I will watch them, but Evan, you're right. When we discuss them, I'm going to be like, I have no idea what's going on. I'm going to have to find some sort of wiki page.

'''J:''' Just call me. I'll tell you.

'''C:''' It's called Wookieepedia.

'''J:''' Steve. Out of the first three, what was the best one?

'''E:''' Wait, wait. When you say the first three.

'''S:''' You mean one, two, and three. Or four, five, and six.

'''J:''' Yes. One, two, and three. Oh, my God.

'''E:''' Well, okay.

'''C:''' They don't mean chronologically. They mean in the story.

'''J:''' We always refer to them as movies four, five, and six, and one, two, and three.

'''E:''' Do we now?

'''J:''' Yes.

'''E:''' I must have missed that memo. Okay.

'''B:''' Yeah. But the first three are ambiguous.

'''J:''' Evan, bend over. [blaster sounds]

'''C:''' Ouch.

'''S:''' I'd say I can't choose. They all have some redeeming qualities, but also are horrible in their own way.

'''C:''' You guys, this is not making me want to sit down for six hours of my life.

'''J:''' It's called being loyal to a brand, Cara. You have to do it.

'''B:''' Speaking of space operas, I even hesitate to even bring this up, but I finally saw Jupiter Ascending. I remember seeing the preview. It looked kind of cool. I heard horrific reviews. Never saw it. Finally saw it. I was so pleasantly surprised. It wasn't a travesty. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but the thing I enjoyed the most was how creative the sci-fi technology that they used throughout. It was just so well thought out and planned. The spaceships were very creative and different. Even the computer consoles. They had a two-second little snippet of somebody using a computer console in a way I have never seen anybody use in a science fiction movie. Just so many things. Even the gravity boots were kind of cool, even though manipulating gravity is silly, but even that was kind of an interesting thing. We're probably going to get a ton of email on this because every review I read was a said that it was a travesty, and I'm just not seeing it. I'm not seeing it.

'''C:''' It's a 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.

'''B:''' Yeah, it's horrible.

'''E:''' Just keep the same low expectations for the new Star Wars movie and you will be fine, Bob.

'''S:''' All right. Let's get on with the show.

== What's the Word (3:02) ==
* Formication

'''S:''' We're gonna mix things up a little bit this week. We're gonna actually gonna start with a What's the Word.

'''C:''' What's the Word this week you guys? You ready for it? You have to listen really, really carefully.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Formication.

'''E:''' Hold the phone, now!

'''J:''' Hey!!

'''E:''' I wasn't listening carefully.

'''C:''' One more time! I'm gonna say it really clearly: ''Formmmication.''

'''B:''' So F-O-R-M-I or A.

'''C:''' M-I.

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' If that happens on the west coast, is that Califormication?

''(Rogues laugh)''

'''B:''' Oh, god! Nice!

'''C:''' Yeah, right? This is one of those fun science words that sound super dirty, even though it's not. Although it is kind of dirty, but not in a sexual way. ''(Laughs)''

'''S:''' It is just one letter off, yeah.

'''C:''' It's one letter off! What do you guys think it means?

'''S:''' I know what it means.

'''B:''' Something about...

'''C:''' Steve always knows what it means!

'''S:''' Well they're medical terms! You keep picking medical...

'''C:''' I know, I keep picking medical terms 'cause they're so good.

'''J:''' Break it down.

'''B:''' Something about a dirt.

'''J:''' What's “form,” Bob? Formi...

'''C:''' Ooh, you're so cold.

'''S:''' Yeah.

''(Laughter)''

'''C:''' You're not getting any warmer.

'''B:''' That's not helpin'.

'''C:''' All right. So I will give you – no, I won't give you the etymology first. I'll just go ahead and define it. It is a tactile hallucination, or parasthesia-

'''B:''' Whoa!

'''C:''' -specifically refers to the feeling that something (most often insects) are crawling all over, or under your skin.

'''E:''' Oh, the heebie-jeebies.

'''B:''' But what about this?

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''B:''' Cara, what about this? What about that buzzing you feel that you are convinced is your phone vibrating, and your phone isn't even on you. ''(Cara laughs)'' Is that formication?

'''S:''' No.

'''C:''' That's not-

'''B:''' Why?

'''C:''' -actually formication.

'''B:''' Okay.

'''C:''' This is very specifically a tactile hallucination of the feeling of creepy crawlies; very specifically has an insect-type feeling, and it is often a symptom of disorder of the spinal cord or peripheral nerves, or even more commonly, a side-effect of cocaine or amphetamine use. And you can also see it associated sometimes with psychiatric disorders.

'''S:''' Or alcohol withdrawl.

'''C:''' Or alcohol withdrawl! Yeah, so formication first appeared in the literature in 1707. We then later saw it in the 1797 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, And they were describing the conditions – Steve, help me out with the pronunciation of this – R-A-P-H-A-N-I-A – poisoning by ingestion of seeds of the wild raddish raphish.

'''S:''' Yes, or course. Raphania. ''(Pronounced the way it looks)''

'''C:''' There we go. All right. So, in the 1797 edition of Encylopedia Brittanica, they're describing raphania, and they say that it includes a symptom, quote, “A formication or sensation of ants or other small insects creeping on the parts.” And then they fully defined it as its own entry in 1890 in the same encyclopedia, saying that it's a quote, “Variety of itching, often encountered in the exema of elderly people. It is described as exactly like the crawling of myriads of animals over the skin.” So, where does this come from?

'''S:''' Formisidae.

'''C:''' Formisidae! Which is the family name in taxonomy of the ant!

'''B:''' Whoa!

'''S:''' And what do ants inject in you when they bite you?

'''E:''' Venom.

'''C:''' I don't know.

'''S:''' Formic acid.

''(Cara shrieks)''

'''B:''' Ah! Nice!

'''C:''' Yeah, so it's the feeling specifically of ants crawling over your skin, which of course, you may not particularly be able to point to it being ants, but it feels like a lot.

'''E:''' Remember that Star Trek episode when Scotty stuck his hand into the situation with the screw driver, and he said, ''(Scottish accent)'' “Ah! Ants crawling all over me arm, it feels like.”

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah yeah.

'''C:''' Yeah, he could have said, “Oh my gosh! I'm suffering from formication.”

'''E:''' Why didn't he?

'''S:''' Right.

'''C:''' Because then people would have misheard it.

'''E:''' Ah, Roddenberry would have.

'''S:''' When Paul Atreides put his hand in the pain box.

'''B:''' Yeah!

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Ooh! ''(Laughs)''

'''C:''' Have you guys ever had this experience?

''(Chorus of uh's)''

'''J:''' How did I know that it was real or not, though? What if I thought it was real?

'''C:''' Uh, then I'd be worried.

'''E:''' Formication.

'''C:''' Yup.

'''S:''' Formication, yep. Yeah, that's cool.

'''C:''' Yep.

'''S:''' I've always loved that word, formication.

'''C:''' I love words – there're a lot of cool science words that sound totally dirty, but aren't. I may do a series on those.

== News Items ==
=== Low Calorie Sweeteners (6:48) ===
* https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/low-energy-sweeteners-and-weight-control/

'''S:''' Alright, so we have some interesting news items this week. We're gonna start with one about low-calorie sweetners. You know, like, aspartame, sucralose--

'''E:''' Stevia?

'''S:''' Stevia... I hate stevia.

'''E:''' That stuff'll kill ya. (laughter)

'''S:''' So there was a recent, systematic review of pretty much all of the studies looking at any information about using so-called low-energy sweeteners, or LES, and changes in total energy intake or in weight and body mass. Very interesting because this has been controversial over many years and it's a good, sort of, review of the different kinds of scientific evidence and how we use them. So, here's the question: if you drink diet soda sweetened with aspartame or sucralose, versus drinking sugar-sweetened drinks, versus drinking, let's say, water, what's the net effect on your calorie intake and your weight? Right, now the common-sense, sort of knee-jerk response is, "Well, if you're replacing 3- or 400 calories of sugar-sweetened drinks per day with zero-calorie drinks, you should be skipping out on 3- or 400 calories." You know, it seems pretty obvious. But, of course, life is always more complicated than that. Because the body is complicated and there's all kinds of feedback mechanisms and unintended consequences. It turns out that the answer may be far more complicated. For example, psychologically, people may think, "Oh, I'm having a diet soda; I can afford to have that cheesecake." ''(laughter)'' You know, it's called compensation.

'''E:''' To rationalize it.

'''S:''' Yeah, you compensate by increasing your caloric intake elsewhere because you feel like you've earned it, because you're--

'''C:''' It's like how, at Starbuck's, I get non-fat milk so I can add whip! ''(laughter)''

'''S:''' So, compensation definitely exists; the question is how much? Is it enough to offset the reduction in the sugar that you're missing out on? There are some biological mechanisms as well. For example, the GI tract has sweet receptors. What are they doing? Does that affect your appetite?

'''J:''' Why does that have sweet receptors?

'''S:''' Well, because the GI system detects things like what you eat and affects your behavior. It send signals--hormonal signals--to your brain. It's also--there's this idea of learning: that you're tricking the brain by giving it something sweet that doesn't have calories that your brain then begins to disassociate the sensation of sweetness with caloric intake. And that can result in you craving more calories overall.

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' Right? Does that make sense?

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' That's the question and it may not be as obvious as it at first seems. So there have been several kinds of studies looking at this question, and you've probably seen headlines over the last 10 years: "Diet sodas make you obese," or whatever. Everytime one of these studies comes out, the press presents it as if this is the final, definitive word on whether or not low-energy sweeteners are good or bad for you.

'''C:''' And, also, sometimes they're funded by, like, "THE AMERICAN BEVERAGE ASSOCIATION." ''(laughter)'' I've seen that happen a couple times recently and you're like, "I don't know about that."

'''J:''' (affected) "Isn't it delicious?" ''(laughter)''

'''S:''' There are animal studies. Animal studies have the advantage of we can control everything that they do and everything that they consume. These are mostly done in rats. You can either feed them--you can sweeten their water with either sugar or low-energy sweeteners, or you can force the pills down their throat, and then you give them food that is sweetened, like, it's a little bit of sweetener in it. And what these studies generally find is that, if you force-feed rats a lot of low-energy sweeteners, they may actually over-consume lightly sweetened food. So that's--most of the headlines that you see, and it says, "Low-energy sweeteners make you obese," probably most of them were rat studies. A couple of problems with these studies: one is that, rats aren't people and the laborotory situations that they're putting the rats in are very contrived. There may be lots of reasons why the rats will consume more feed that have nothing to do with human behavior. That data may be suggestive but it really isn't definitive in terms of its application to people. The next type of study is observational. So you're not randomizing people to eating low-energy sweetener or not, you're just seeing what they're doing and what their weight is. Or you might do cohort studies where you follow them going forward. And those generally show conflicting results.

'''C:''' It seems like there would be so many confabulating factors there.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's the weakness of observational studies--is that they're confabulating. And the authors of this new review argued that you can't make cause-and-effect claims because it's quite possible that people who are overweight choose to drink diet drinks because they're trying to lose weight. You know, they're not overweight because they're drinking the soda; they're drinking the soda because they're overweight. So, yeah, the confounding factors make it impossible, really, to make any kind of cause-and-effect conclusion from those studies. So now we get to the most clinically relevant types of studies, where you do experiments on people and you randomize them, and you might even blind them to whether or not they're drinking sugar-sweetened or low-energy-sweetener-sweetened beverages, and then follow their behavior. And those studies find, in this systematic review, that drinking low-energy sweetener results in a decrease in caloric intake and weight.

'''C:''' Oh, wow!

'''S:''' So those studies are broken down into short- and long-term. Short term studies are basically one meal. You give people--you pre-load them with either sugar, or water or aspartame, and then you let them eat as much of a meal as they want and you see how much they eat.

'''C:''' So that's just caloric intake. You can't look at weight after one meal, right?

'''S:''' Yeah, that's just energy intake, exactly.

'''C:''' Okay.

'''S:''' And they find that there is compensation; that people do eat more if they drank the low-energy sweetened beverage, but not enough to make up for the decrease in the sugar calories. And so there still is a net decrease in caloric intake. And they said any effects of having had the low-energy sweetener probably wouldn't last much beyond that next meal, anyway, so this data is helpful. But there are also long-term studies. Long-term studies last anywhere from days to three years. The longest studies last up to three years. Looking at people, again randomized, and perhaps even blinded to whether or not they were drinking sugar-sweetened, low-energy-sweetener sweetened, and then also compared to just drinking water. And they found, long-term, again, there was an overall decrease in energy intake and an overall decrease in weight with the low-energy sweetener--even when compared to water, which is what I found most surprising in this data.

'''C:''' Oh, wow!

'''S:''' Because there's no calorie difference between the two; between water--zero-calorie water and zero-calorie diet soda. But still there was a little bit of an advantage to the sweetened zero-calorie beverage. But there was a clear advantage over drinking sugar. Which, again, one of those situations where the science confirms your initial assessment, the sort of common-sense assessment that says, "Yeah, not drinking 500 calories of sugar a day is a good thing for your energy intake and your overall weight. So, whatever compensatory mechanisms are in there, whether they're psychological or biological, they're not offsetting the reduction in calories by avoiding the sugar. It's still a good idea, to not drink sugary drinks if you're trying to manage your weight.

'''B:''' Of course.

'''C:''' But what if when you get--when you're accidentally served a Diet coke, as opposed to a regular Coke at a restaurant, it tastes like you've been poisoned!

'''S:''' So you just don't like the flavor of it.

'''E:''' ...or the surprise.

'''C:''' I cannot handle it. It's disgusting. It's so gross. I don't know, I think it's one of those things where it's like an acquired taste, and I've not--

'''S:''' It is, it's an acquired taste, in my experience, and I've had many other people make this observation to me. I think there are just differences in people's tastes, so that could be just genetic for you. But many people have the experience that, at first, they don't like it, it doesn't taste sweet enough, or something, there's just something not right about it. And then, after a while, they can't stand going back to sugar-sweetened drinks because they taste so syrupy and heavy and thick, and they prefer the diet drinks.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' That was my personal experience. I can't stand sugar-sweetened drinks now. I only drink the calorie-free ones. And other people have made the same observation to me. So I think, yeah, the taste thing is personal and also acquired. And also, before we begin getting emails about this, the evidence does not support that there's any cancer risk, or any other health risk from aspartame or sucralose; they're totally fine. We are not gonna do a deep dive on that--

'''E:''' (laughing) Oh, gosh.

'''S:''' --just to say, "Don't believe the Internet." There's just a lot of misinformation about them on the Internet. The data actually doesn't support any health risk--

'''E:''' Dosage matters!

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' (chuckles)

'''S:''' Like, in the studies, even like with saccharine--saccharine got a bad rap as causing cancer, but the amount they were giving the rats in those studies was orders of magnitude more than you would ever consume. And the FDA, and also the European Union and other regulatory agencies set safety limits on how much you can consume by body weight, and it's typically, again, it's about a couple of orders of magnitude more than what a typical person would consume, so, it's just not something worth worrying about. You can drink your diet sodas; you don't have to worry that they're making you fat, according to this latest systematic review. They really did look at--they tried to look at every single study published, of any kind on this question; it was pretty, pretty thorough. Not saying there isn't room for even more rigorous clinical studies, but the data's pretty rigorous that we have so far. The other last interesting thing I want to talk about is that you read so many self-help books and nutrition gurus, they're, talking about this diet advice or that, or how to avoid aspartame, et cetera, and they usually justify their recommendation with wild extrapolations from basic science. You know, it's like, "We have sweetness receptors in our gut and that causes A to B to C to D, and therefore it's not good for you."

'''E:''' There you go.

'''S:''' It's like, yeah, but you know we rarely can take our basic science knowledge and then extrapolate four or five steps to net health effects. You can't do that. That almost never works out. You have to study in people what the net health effects are. Because like here, yeah, sure, those mechanisms are in play, but they're just less than the effect of eating less sugar. It all comes down to magnitude. Even if the effects are real and there isn't something compensating for it, it just may not be clinically relevant. So, until you do the clinical studies, you just can't make those kinds of statements. But that is like almost the entire nutrition industry. You know, self-help industry's based upon these wild extrapolations from basic science. That is just not reliable. Okay. Let's move on.

=== Making Metals Stronger (18:28) ===
* http://phys.org/news/2015-11-metals-stronger-sacrificing-ductility.html

'''S:''' Bob, you're going to tell us about making metals stronger.

'''B:''' Yes. Not just stronger either. I like this because I think material science is so fascinating and so far reaching in our modern society. So this one deals with researchers creating a process to make titanium stronger, yes, but also without making it more brittle at the same time, something that has never been done before. These researchers were at North Carolina State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and they wrote about this in Kara's favorite journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

'''E:''' PNAS.

'''B:''' Hey.

'''C:''' PNAS.

'''B:''' Making a metal stronger but not brittle may sound kind of trivial but it's really – that's the classic tradeoff you encounter when you're trying to make metal stronger and it mostly has to do with grain size. Now not the grain that you put into pyramids. No, this is a different type. To make metal strong, you want small grain sizes, small. Grains are the small or even microscopic crystals of metal that form when many different materials, especially metals, cool down. So you want small grains because – and the reasoning was interesting because if an impact or force tries to break or distort the metal, all the little grain boundaries around every little tiny grain, they prevent those dislocations from going very far. It just kind of impedes their motion so that they can't do major damage. And also, a lot of these grains are randomly oriented so they don't slip over each other very easily too. So all of these kind of work together to make small-grained metals very strong. But unfortunately, the small grains also means the metal is brittle and this is called low ductility. So a ductile metal deforms under stress instead of breaking or snapping. So this is good but it requires large grains that can slip over each other. But the problem is, of course, large grains are not as strong. So either a metal can be strong due to small grains or ductile with large grains but almost never strong and ductile until now, of course, which is why we're talking about this. The technique to accomplish this uses asymmetric rolling. So what you do is you have a sheet of metal and on top of it, you have a fast roller and on the bottom, you've got a slower roller, all compressing and squeezing the metal, making it thinner and thinner. So this creates a shear strain which breaks down the crystals, making the crystals smaller and smaller. So that's the first step. Then the metal is heated to 475 Celsius and this actually makes some of the small grains eat the other smaller grains and they kind of coalesce into these larger grains. So when this is said and done, what you end up with is large grains arrayed in these long columns all surrounded by these small grains, kind of like a payday candy bar, with the long caramel core completely surrounded by peanuts, right?

'''J:''' Oh, yeah. That's good.

'''B:''' Sorry. Sorry. I still got Halloween candy on my mind. The strength is high because the small grains prevent the underlying large grains from deforming easily. But if the strain is high enough though, the small and the large grains kind of like work together. They deform together. But they do that so they can deform but they don't snap. They're not brittle. It's kind of like if you break a Butterfinger candy bar. So there I go again. So this then is the best of both worlds. You've got high strength and high ductility at the same time, something that's never really been accomplished before and that obviously could have a huge impact on many different aspects of material science. And the other good news is that this equipment to actually do this technique is already being used in industry but it's not being used in quite this way. So the researchers say that scaling this up could happen pretty fast because the equipment is pretty much already there. So yeah, let's see if this really does pan out and we may be messing with stronger and more ductile metals in our future.

'''S:''' Yeah, material science is – I mean I read – obviously I read a lot of news items just trying to prep for the show. There's so much crazy stuff happening with material science at this time and a lot of it is just manipulating the structure of matter at the scale.

'''B:''' And of course the ultimate expression of that or one of them is these metamaterials and metasurfaces. They just do stuff that's like counterintuitive, like, whoa, matter shouldn't be able to do that kind of stuff. So yeah, so it is. It's got – it's going to change so much in society once we–

'''S:''' It feels like it. It's hard. It's like one of those things where you wonder, is this all hype? Is this really going to pan out? But you think there's so much stuff going on there. There are so many incredible breakthroughs that are happening in the lab and they just say, we just need to figure out how to scale this up and how to do that and how to do this. But it seems like we're creeping towards massive changes in the materials that we build our civilization out of.

'''E:''' I hope so.

'''C:''' I just saw a commercial for a cell phone that's like bendy and shatterproof and waterproof and it blew my mind. Like that blew my mind.

=== Mafia hitman claims to be missing piece in JFK assassination (23:47) ===
* http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/617775/Shot-JFK-grassy-knoll-Mafia-hitman-assassination-interview?utm_source=traffic.outbrain&utm_medium=traffic.outbrain&utm_term=traffic.outbrain&utm_content=traffic.outbrain&utm_campaign=traffic.outbrain

'''S:''' Well, Evan, apparently a hitman who was involved with the JFK conspiracy is confessing. Tell us about that.

'''E:''' Yeah. Well, this came to us from the November 8th headline. The website is Express.co.uk and the headline reads, I shot JFK from the grassy knoll. Mafia hitman claims to be missing piece in assassination. So, that mafia hitman's name is James Earl Files, aged 72 now. Files has been serving time in prison since 1991. He was found guilty of being an accessory to the attempted murders of two police officers. But the news in this news item is that he is being moved from a high security jail to a less security jail, a lower security jail, in preparation for his release, which is forthcoming in the spring of 2016. That's the news part. The fact that he claims that he shot JFK from the grassy knoll is actually not new news. No. Since an interview he gave in 1994, he claimed then and continues to claim to this day that there was collusion between the mafia and the CIA to kill President John F. Kennedy. Files joined the mob after he spent time, he claims, with the CIA and also having been, after his time, he was kicked out of the military. So after that, he went and worked for the mafia. Of course, that's what most people do when they're working with the CIA. And they're done. He worked under the direction of Chucky Nicoletti, who is another fellow assassin who was reportedly a killer for crime boss Sam Giancana of Chicago, the Chicago crime family. So why the collusion between these two groups, the CIA and the mafia? So why? Why did they supposedly want to kill President Kennedy? Well, if you listen to James Files, he will tell you that the CIA, the people in the upper ranks of the CIA, felt betrayed at the time over the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and how that all terribly unfolded. And basically, they left the CIA hanging out to dry, and Kennedy was about to make sweeping big changes to the CIA. They were afraid that President Kennedy was going to shut the agency down, basically, because it had become sort of a rogue agency. Therefore, the CIA decided to call in the mafia, mobsters, to carry out the killing in Dallas, Texas on November 22nd, 1963. Now, mind you, this is all according to Fields. So here was the plan. Files, along with ex-Marine misfit Lee Harvey Oswald, his fellow mafia hitman Chucky Nicoletti, and another would-be assassin named Johnny Roselli, who was supposedly the CIA link to the mob. The four of them would be the team in Dallas to assassinate the president by catching the president in a crossfire from various points. And Files says that his position, he was assigned to the grassy knoll. Yes. So this is an extraordinary thing by Files, to say the least. And again, it's all part of a testimonial that he has given on camera, and he's done many interviews to this effect, saying sort of these same stories. But he's basically come to prominence because of a particular Dutch filmmaker. His name is Wim Dankbaar. So okay, what's the deal? What's really going on? Could James Files be telling the truth? And who is filmmaker Wim Dankbaar? Well, I'll start by talking a little bit about Wim Dankbaar. He runs a website called jfkmurdersolve.com. He obtained this website. He paid half a million dollars for the website, all the material, and the rights to it from a fellow named Bob Vernon. Bob Vernon was also a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist who had put together a decade's worth of work compiling all this stuff. Bob Vernon himself basically has said that James Files is a liar and a fraud, and he absolutely cannot be trusted whatsoever. But that didn't shake Wim Dankbaar from basically taking Files' story and running with it. Dankbaar has been championing the story, in fact, along with many other JFK conspiracy-related subjects, but primarily the Files story. That's what he's pushing forward. If you go to the website jamesfilesfraud.com, they talk a little bit about Wim Dankbaar and his relationship to Files. They describe him as such, a Dutch national and JFK conspiracy theorist who, through his website and numerous blogs and e-commerce sites throughout the internet, promotes the sale of his books, CDs, DVDs, which many believe are simply perpetuating a massive hoax by imprisoned criminal James Files. Why should you let a good story go to waste? You've got this half-million-dollar investment that he's made, and he needs to recoup his investment essentially by perpetuating the hoax or the myth and selling your books, CDs, DVDs, t-shirts, mugs, and everything else that goes along with it. Wim Dankbaar also has kind of a sordid past. Dutch courts have found him guilty of breaking and entering, stalking, harassing. The court has ruled that his behavior has been abusive and unruly. He engaged in illegal actions against investigative reporters. He has defamed, blackmailed, and threatened American investigative reporter and consumer advocate Judd McIvan, among several other people that he basically has threatened. In fact, Robert G. Vernon, who's also another conspiracy theorist about the JFK assassination, had some dealings with Dankbaar himself. He basically says that this person absolutely cannot be trusted, and he is doing a tremendous disservice to the research of what actually happened, the JFK assassination. Again, these are the other people in the conspiracy theory community coming out against these two fellows, Van Dinkmaar and James Files. It's never a good sign when people in your own community are pushing you to the edge and out. They're basically saying, you guys have got nothing. You're interfering with our other work that we're doing here. We want nothing to do with you, and your behavior, frankly, has been terrible. For Files, for James Files himself, well, there have been many, many investigations about all of his claims about being with the CIA, being part of this assassination of Kennedy, and everything that he has said about it. And well, let's put it this way, Vincent Bugliosi, who's an author of the book Reclaiming History, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he characterized Files as the Rodney Dangerfield of Kennedy assassins, and believes that his story was concocted entirely to achieve notoriety nd royalties. John McAdams has said that Files has changed his story so many times, on so many occasions, it's basically almost impossible to keep track of what he has said, when he originally said it, and how much he has backtracked on so many things that he said. So these are what the experts are saying about these folks, both people from the conspiracy theory communities and people from outside who are doing other investigations, and they can't find – and these two people cannot find any allies anywhere, or people to back up anything that these guys have to offer.

'''S:''' I find that the whole idea that the CIA would hire the mob to kill the president is absurd.

'''E:''' Dubious at best.

'''C:''' Dubious, yeah.

'''E:''' Probably the nicest way to put it. It's pretty absurd.

'''S:''' The exposure that they would be giving themselves by trusting career criminals, that's not a good idea. All right, well, let's move on.

=== Fossilized Brains (32:14) ===
* http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-fossilize-brain-180957219/?no-ist

'''S:''' Cara, you're going to tell us about fossilized brains.

'''C:''' Yeah, I'm going to do a quick and dirty dive into a new publication in Current Biology, which describes the fossilization of 520 million-year-old Cambrian arthropod brains. These would be the oldest known creatures to have such soft tissues preserved. And of course, prior to this new publication in Current Biology, four of the authors involved actually described fossilized brains in a 2012 edition of the journal Nature. But those descriptions were limited to single specimens, and when they published, they were met with a lot of blowback, kind of broad skepticism from the paleontology community. And of course, this was for good reason. These people were saying, you guys, we found fossilized brains. And everybody goes, yeah, that's impossible. And then they go, no, but look right here. And they go, yeah, that's just one example, and that could be an artifact. You know, we talk about this a lot when it comes to how science works. Until we can replicate things, it's very difficult for us to dive face-first into a new way of thinking. The problem with fossils is that it's very hard to replicate a study when you're working with limited information. But luckily, these researchers have since then been able to collect seven different specimens of the same species. And of course, I'm mad at myself for constantly picking stories with words in them that are almost impossible to pronounce, but I'm going to aim for it. Fuchsiania protensa.

'''E:''' That's closer than I would have gotten.

'''C:''' I know the F-U-X-I-A is fuchsian. Yeah, so anyway, this specimen is an arthropod. It looks kind of shrimp-like. It's a beautiful preservation there. And there are obviously six others like it. And what these researchers did is pretty interesting. They were able to use scanning electron microscopy to look at the fossilized matter that they first identified as being brain-like. And they noticed that it was preserved as a flattened thin film of carbon. And in a couple of the specimens, it was overlaid by microscopic iron pyrite crystals. The researchers hypothesized that the only way this brain tissue could have been fossilized is if F. protensa was first caught under a rapid mudslide, an underwater rapid mudslide, likely burying it alive. And this would protect it from predators. It would protect it from the influx of bacteria that would typically eat away at these soft tissues. And the mud would preserve the tissue so that they could lose moisture over time. Now, in order to test this hypothesis, the authors actually replicated this process with earthworms and cockroaches. And they were successful in preserving their nervous tissue as well. But they said that's only the first part of the problem here with fossilization of 520 million-year-old soft tissues. What it really comes down to is the density of the arthropod tissues. And that's really what made the difference. Arthropod tissues actually are much denser, and so they're more likely to fossilize. So study author Nicholas Strossfeld says, his words are probably more descriptive than mine. He says, quote, dewatering is different from dehydration, and it happens more gradually. During this process, the brain maintains its overall integrity, leading to its gradual flattening and preservation. F. protensa's tissue density appears to have made all the difference. And a really interesting thing is that it turns out that these brains look quite a bit like modern crustacean brains. The authors actually hypothesized that these nervous systems likely evolved, again, over half a billion years ago and have been pretty well conserved ever since, which is a pretty striking finding in paleontology, but of course, potentially opens up the floodgates to creationists making their standard claims that species were put on Earth in their current form by God and did not evolve over time as biologists and every other person in the scientific community says that they do. So this is not saying that there has been no evolution, but it is saying that some of this early organization of the neuronal structures in these arthropods seems to have happened quite a long time ago, and this is the first, I guess, repeated description of these fossilized brains. It's really interesting.

'''S:''' Yeah, I mean, we know that basic body plans formed very early in the Cambrian explosion, and then...

'''C:''' It's easy to see those hard structures, the exterior skeletal structures, the exoskeletons, but the interior squishy stuff, when these researchers first said a few years ago, look, I see a brain, everybody's like, that's not a brain. We don't buy it. But now they're like, hey, I've got seven.

'''E:''' That's good.

'''C:''' They're all pretty brain-like. Yeah. So at this point, paleontology is really coming around as a discipline and saying, hey, we get it. This is interesting. Let's dig into it deeper.

'''J:''' Do you think that there could be something significant they can discover because they have the brain?

'''C:''' Well, I think a big thing that it's already starting to reveal, if they're correct, is that this evolutionary process happened way earlier than they originally thought it did. I mean, based on the body plan and based on the development of the eyes, paleontologists thought that the brain was much simpler back then in the Cambrian. And so they're already starting to rethink how the nervous system of these organisms evolved.

== Who's That Noisy (37:43) ==
* Answer to last week: Architectural Instrument

'''S:''' All right, Jay, who's that noisy. Get us up to date.

'''J:''' All right, last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] What the hell is that?

'''S:''' Here's my guess. My guess is that it's some kind of animal playing some kind of musical instrument.

'''J:''' An animal.

'''E:''' Right.

'''C:''' I think it's somebody blowing through a natural instrument like a horn or like a conch shell or something like that.

'''J:''' Evan, what do you got?

'''E:''' It sounds like the Max Rebo band from Star Wars tuning up their instruments before they play for Jabba the Hutt.

'''J:''' That is such a good guess.

'''E:''' Thanks.

'''J:''' That is the sea organ of Zadar in Croatia.

'''C:''' Okay, what are those words?

'''E:''' The sea organ?

'''C:''' Of Zadar?

'''B:''' It sounds like a science fiction movie.

'''E:''' It sounds like a magic item from Dungeons and Dragons.

'''J:''' It's an architectural object. It's considered to be an experimental musical instrument. The instrument is a giant structure of tubes that are touched by ocean water and as the ocean tide comes in, it pushes air through the tubes.

'''S:''' Oh, cool.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''J:''' They're located underneath these huge marble steps and it's part of the rebuilding of this area of the coastline, Nova Riva. You can walk all over this thing and hear all this wonderful noise and it's really earthy. You know what I mean? It has a real earthy sound to it.

'''C:''' Can you imagine living right next to it?

'''J:''' Oh my God, yeah. You don't live right near it, hopefully. Laszlo Kapschick, I'm so sorry, Laszlo Kapschick, winner this week. He guessed it, knew exactly what it was.

'''C:''' Is he Croatian?

'''S:''' You win Jay mispronouncing your name.

'''E:''' That noisy almost reminded me of the pipes in the caves of Virginia. We used that as a noisy a few years ago. It reminds me of that sort of natural pipe.

'''S:''' Those were not pipes. Those were stalactites.

'''E:''' Stalactites.

'''C:''' Oh, cool. It sounds very Seussian.

'''S:''' Yeah. It does sound Seussian. I agree.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' A bombastor or something like that.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' What's a bombastor?

'''S:''' It's one of those Seussian instruments they played in Whoville, right? It's in one of those books. It's one of the things they played in Whoville.

'''C:''' Sure.

'''S:''' What do you got for this week, Jay?

'''J:''' This week's Who's That Noisy. What is this? [plays Noisy] Guys, what is that?

'''C:''' It's annoying.

'''B:''' What's that? Where do you find this crap? Holy shit.

'''E:''' It got closer to me towards the end there.

'''B:''' Weird.

'''C:''' It's like making us all really grumpy, Jay.

'''J:''' I know. I had to edit it down. I had to listen to a much larger sound file of it. And I got-

'''E:''' I got a sense of formication.

'''S:''' It sounded like a blue-footed boobie having an orgasm while somebody played a didgeridoo in the background.

'''E:''' Oh, right. You said boobie, orgasm, and doo all in the same sentence.

'''J:''' Wait until you hear what it is. It's quite interesting.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''J:''' If you have a Who's That Noisy suggestion or if you think you know the answer, please send it to me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Anxiety (42:49) ===
<blockquote>I would like to begin this message by telling you that I love the show and have been a loyal subscriber since 2008. However, Jay mentioned something in the last episode that I would like to correct. He stated that people who needed anxiolytic medication didn't have the 'brass balls' to do things such as go to space and that they allowed their emotions to overcome them in such a way that they would be unsuitable for such a rigorous environment as the ISS. I would like to point out that Isaac Newton's notebooks record his anxiety, fears, and depression during his college years, as well as suicidal thoughts. Nicola Tesla almost certainly suffered from social anxiety. Scientists often work in collaborative teams these days, but there are many quiet, meticulous, solitary tasks that a person with anxiety is exceptionally good at completing. Our tendency to double and triple check things can be a good trait for lab work, as does the anxious brain's tendency to keep churning our every word and action after the fact. I know that it is a common trope in pop culture to portray those of us who suffer from what is essentially a lack of seretonin as nervous wrecks, but I assure you, we are quite capable. There are many medications that can remediate this chemical imbalance and settle our thoughts, but the anxious person can offer something to a team, just as it benefits with both introverts and extroverts, or autistic and other neuro-atypical people. Jay, I'm sure you didn't mean to stigmatize anyone or to downplay the accomplishments of those with psychiatric illnesses. And there is a concern about being stranded and without the trusty SSRIs, a la The Martian, where it might be harder to function. But, in the future, remember that every team needs diversity. People whose brains function differently can be an asset as well as a risk. Sincerely, Someone who worries an awful lot http://www.space.com/26799-nasa-astronauts-psychological-evaluation.html</blockquote>

'''S:''' All right. We have a few questions I want to get to. The first one comes from, well, they signed their email, someone who worries an awful lot. Jay, this is in response to a comment you made during science or fiction recently. We were talking about the medications given to astronauts on the ISS, and the fiction was that the most commonly used medications for anxiety, and you said that you think that NASA pretty much tests their astronauts to make sure that they don't have anxiety.

'''J:''' Yeah. My thinking was that it's ridiculous to put someone that has any kind of panic disorder inside a spaceship in situations where they would have panic disorder attacks, they'd have panic attacks.

'''S:''' Yeah. So I kind of interpreted what you said as, you're not going to have somebody be an astronaut who becomes anxious by the things that astronauts do. Not that – so the person writing was worried that we were suggesting that people with anxiety can't be fully functional members of society, and we're certainly not saying that. In fact, I found an article on space.com which reviews the psychological evaluations that NASA puts their astronauts through, and it's pretty extreme. In fact, it may even be – it was more than I thought. They really do put their astronauts through a lot of psychological evaluation, and you basically wouldn't make it through, astronaut screening if you had an anxiety disorder.

'''J:''' Oh, without a doubt.

'''S:''' Yeah. And that's what we were saying. So, just to be clear here, Jay suffers from anxiety, right? You were open about this. My wife has an anxiety disorder. My eldest daughter has an anxiety disorder. Cara, you're very open about the fact that you have just depression or anxiety and depression?

'''C:''' No, just a major depressive disorder.

'''S:''' So yeah we're very familiar with this. It's very common. We're very familiar with it. We're very open about it. And yeah this is just part of being human, and it's – we're not making the point that these are not just regular people who are fully functional members of society. It's just that NASA is very particular about the screening that they put their astronauts through. I mean, obviously, they're picking people who are in their physical peak as well. That doesn't mean people who aren't physically fit are not contributing members of society. They wouldn't pick somebody who's obese. It's not a knock on obese people. They just don't want to pay for the fuel to put them into space.

'''C:''' And they physically can't.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' Let me get into some details real quick, guys. So 6,000 people applied, as an example, in 2013 to be an astronaut. And out of the 6,000, eight were selected. The vetting process takes about two years until the final selections are made. And then once they're vetted and selected, it could be up to 10 years before they actually get to even go on a mission. And of course, during their 10 years of training, and they're still evaluating them. But they vet the astronauts psychologically in two different ways. They run a set of interviews first that's pretty obvious. And then the second round is a lot more rigorous, where they're interviewed by a psychiatrist on several occasions. They also get run through simulations at the Johnson Space Center that simulate being in a spacecraft and a lot of other situations. And this is where they're most likely tested to see if they're claustrophobic, if they can go without sleep, if they can handle 10 straight hours of Justin Bieber talking about his teeth.

'''E:''' I'd fail.

'''J:''' They're trying to break them. So potential astronauts can be disqualified for many reasons. And some of them from psychiatric disorders to actually marital problems was a huge thing that if somebody is having marital problems, they don't have anything to do with them at that.

'''C:''' And now I think that they are starting to understand psychological dynamics. And I think that NASA does see that maybe somebody who is more in touch with their psychiatric issues is better than somebody who sublimates everything in their lives. You could say that that guy looks like he has the right stuff because he doesn't feel. But that's probably not even a good version of what an astronaut would be. You would want somebody who understands their own emotions and can cope with them. And so I do think we're seeing some evolution there too. But you're right. If somebody has anxieties that you would have on Earth, imagine how amplified they would be on a spacewalk.

'''S:''' Yeah. You can't have somebody have a panic attack in the middle of a spacewalk. That's the bottom line.

'''C:''' No.

'''S:''' And it's not just spacewalking. If you're a surgeon and you have panic disorder that's not under control, you can't operate. You can't have a panic attack while you have somebody's heart open in front of you either. There are certain critical professions where it's not a judgment against people who have these disorders. It's just that you can't be in certain critical jobs that where having a panic attack could put other people at risk.

'''C:''' And also some people are controlled. Some people who have an anxiety disorder are well controlled with their medication. And that's another layer to this.

'''J:''' As a side note, if you suffer from panic attacks, you absolutely, especially if it's minor here and there, that's one thing. But if it's changing the quality of your life, please go to a psychiatrist.

'''S:''' It's very treatable.

'''J:''' Go speak to your doctor. Cognitive therapy changed my life. It allowed me to control my panic attacks. As much as this is a sci-fi quote, it is so true. I bend like a reed in the wind when I have a panic attack. I let it pass through me. I don't stop it anymore. And as soon as I stopped fighting my panic attacks and just rolled with it, they come and go super fast. And they're almost a joke. I laugh at them now compared to what it was like in my 20s. So you can get help. You can get over it and be happy and move on and fully move on. So please don't live your life thinking they'll go away eventually.

'''S:''' Don't suffer in silence. Those are our options. You need to know that. Okay.

=== Question #2: Meat Consumption (48:45) ===
<blockquote>Toni, I tried to find some specific statistics on meat consumption. 2010 statistics from the USDA http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3045642/ 'Results: Overall meat consumption has continued to rise in the U.S., European Union, and developed world. Despite a shift toward higher poultry consumption, red meat still represents the largest proportion of meat consumed in the U.S (58%). Twenty-two percent of the meat consumed in the U.S. is processed. According to NHANES 2003–2004, total meat intake averaged 128 g/day. The type and quantities of meat reported varied by education, race, age, and gender.' 22% of 128g/day = 28 grams of processed meat per day on average, less than the 50grams in the study. Given this, I think we gave a reasonable bottom line interpretation of the implications of the study. Regarding meat and total health outcomes, I did refer to it on the show, here's the link:http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/63/abstract I did link in the show notes to my blog article which contains this link and others. Regards, Steve Dear Steve, 'Given this, I think we gave a reasonable bottom line interpretation of the implications of the study.' Yes, indeed. The statistic you provided puts the WHO study into context. Now I'm a vegetarian thinking, if only people would eat more processed meat.. But, as I clearly have no case anymore, I concede my position and thank you for taking the time to respond. This was fun. Kind regards, Toni</blockquote>

'''S:''' Another email. This is really, really interesting. So this is a follow-up to our review of the study. The World Health Organization write new pronouncements about the risks of eating meat, red meat and processed meat. A listener by the name of Toni wrote in saying—I'm not going to read the whole email, but basically saying that—

'''E:''' Who's Toni?

'''S:''' We said that the amount of processed meat that was associated with even the lowest level of increased risk of colon cancer was a lot and really more than a typical person would eat. And he took exception to that saying—actually, I'm not sure if Toni's a he or a she, because it's T-O-N-I, which is kind of gender neutral. But Toni said that given the amount of meat people eat, it was actually not a lot. So we had a couple of backs and fourths, and this is the bottom line. So first of all, Toni was mistaking all meat for processed meat. So what I did was I looked up—I tried to find out how much processed meat does the average American consume a day. The average American consumes 128 grams of meat per day, and it's all meat. Interestingly, it's mostly red meat, but the proportion of red meat has been decreasing over time. It's now at 58%.

'''C:''' Wow. It's mostly red meat?

'''S:''' And the proportion of poultry and fish has been increasing.

'''C:''' That's good.

'''S:''' But those lines haven't crossed yet. Red meat is still greater than chicken, but they're getting close. Now of the 128 grams per day, 22% is processed meat. That's 28 grams per day. Now if you remember, the study showed that there was a risk for eating 50 grams per day, and we said, well, 50 grams every single day. That's a lot of processed meat, and yeah, it's almost twice as much as what the average American consumes. So I still think it was reasonable for us to say that if you eat a moderate amount of meat, even just an average amount of processed meat, you're going to be below that 50 grams per day, and the numbers bear that out.

'''C:''' But on the other hand, if you just eat twice as much, which I'm sure regionally you'll see increases, or in terms of socioeconomic status, you might see increases in eating processed meat over fresh meat or meat from the butcher. Yeah, that means that there is a real risk. So I think it's on both ends of that.

'''S:''' Yeah, I'm sure there are some people who eat more than that lower amount, that 50 grams per day, and that's what we said. Just don't eat bacon every single day.

'''C:''' Or if you do, just eat less than two pieces.

== Interview with Simon Singh (51:23) ==
* http://simonsingh.net/

''(Interview music)''

'''S:''' Well, we're sitting here at TAM 2015 with our good friend, Simon Singh. Simon, welcome back to the SGU.

'''SS:''' Nice to be back. ''(He has a British accent)''

'''S:''' So, get us up to date. What's been going on in your life?

'''SS:''' So I – gosh, like everybody else who's kind of active in scepticism, I've been doin' lots of things that distracted me from what I should be doing, which is writing books.

'''S:''' Right

'''SS:''' So, a couple of years ago, I set up a little foundation called Good Thinking, or the Good Thinking Society.

'''S:''' Been following your work, very … yeah

'''SS:''' Well, we had a slow start, but we've now got Michael Marshal, or Marsh from

'''J:''' Yeah, we know Marsh

'''SS:''' liberal – ''(inaudible 52:08)'' society sceptics. He's now working full time. We've got Laura Thomason. He's working part time. A very active sceptic. Johnny Shan's been working part time. I try to put in as many days as I can. And it's great to have this little hub where we can take on our own projects, we can investigate things, we're doing some undercover videos, we're making complaints against various alternative therapists, osteopaths, chiropractors, yeah.

And also, the other part of it is helping others. So, if there are skeptics who are investigating things, and they want some back up, some support, we've got some experiences and guidance, to kind of help them out with those problems.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's great, because we meet a lot of skeptics who are very enthusiastic, and they want to help, go and do stuff. I get it. That's exactly where we were when we started this out twenty years ago. It was like, “Let's do stuff, let's do investigations or whatever.” But it's hard, and it's complicated, and you don't necessarily have a lot of the background to do the kind of job that is sort of ironclad, you know?

'''SS:''' But sometimes, those people have what we don't have. So, for example, in our little group, at Good Thinking, we don't have any experts in dentistry. None of us are dentists, but there are dentists who we found, who are concerned about some of the practices within their

'''S:''' Right

'''SS:''' profession. And so they can come to us with their concerns, we can come back to them and say, “Well, look, what's the best way to address this? Let's look at the regulations in the general dental council in the UK.” And so, one of our projects has been working with dentists to look at their colleagues who may be scare-mongering about mercury fillings, and so on. So, sometimes it's about matching skill sets in one area with the skill sets we may have at Good Thinking.

'''S:''' The skeptical community's always very complicated in terms of how it's organized, or how it's not organized. That's, what you guys are doing are what I think what we really need, is just providing resources so that people can be more effective in their activism.

'''SS:''' Yeah, and also, when people get into trouble, as well.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' And that's not because they've done something wrong, or they've done it in the wrong way. There's a chap Mark Hillbrook,

'''E:''' Yes

'''SS:''' who wouldn't even identify himself as a sceptic. He was just concerned about psychics. So he went to see a show by Sally Morgan. She's our biggest psychic.

'''E:''' Oh yeah

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' He just handed out flyers, which just said, “What would a real psychic look like?”

'''E:''' No, I like that.

'''SS:''' So, would a psychic give you vague readings, or would they be specific? Would they ask questions, or give you answers? It was very much a kind of, “This is how to spot a

'''S:''' Right

'''SS:''' real psychic.” And if Sally's real, then she'll tick all the boxes, and you'll be fine. For doing this, which he was doing this, I think he was doing it in Machester. Sally's son-in-law and her husband came out and really put the fright in his on. ''(Inaudible cross-talk 54:58)'' Yeah, yeah. Well, that's it. So, after it happened once, instead of kind of backing down, Mark went back a second time, and videoed what happened. And it was really quite physical, it was really aggressive, it was very abusive, it was, “You're gonna end up under a bus. We know where you work.” Et cetera.

So Mark just didn't know what to do, this stage. He came to us. He was then threatened with libel.

'''E:''' That's right

'''SS:''' After what happened to him, he was, yeah, anyway. So, we got friends, and we got solicitors, and barristers that help out with this. So we spent about four months helping him get out of this libel accusation, which was ridiculous.

'''J:''' But what was the actual accusation?

'''SS:''' Well, I think it was about what was in the flyer. The flyer was perhaps accusing Sally of not being a real psychic. But it wasn't about her at all.

'''J:''' I get that, but isn't it okay to accuse someone of not being a – fake psychic?

'''S:''' You mean real psychic.

'''J:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' ''(Hesitates)'' It's libel as you all know yourselves, full of grey areas, you know. It's murky. I would say that the claimants in this case didn't have a foot to stand on.

'''J:''' Yeah, because she would have to prove that she's a psychic in order to prove that he said something that's libellous.

'''SS:''' Not necessarily, not necessarily, because someone may be a fraudulent psychic. In fact, they may not know they have powers, but may try and exploit that to make money. Or they may believe that they are a genuine psychic. So there are all sorts of different boundaries there. But the bottom line was (and this leaflet was absolutely fine). So we battered away that libel action, and then we put this video online, and we showed what was happening, and I think a lot of people who had been Sally Morgan fans in the past were able to see that it's not such a cozy industry. There's a slightly darker side to what goes on.

So we were able to help him. And then, also, once we got rid of the libel action, we recruited sire sceptics all over the country to leaflet at psychic events every day in October right up to Hallowe'en. And when British psychics went over to Norway, then the Norwegian sceptics leafleted in Norway too. So that was a great example of how we could help coordinate

'''S:''' Coordinate, yeah

'''SS:''' something. Sometimes, the things we do, really, you couldn't do as a sceptic working on your own.

'''S:''' Right

'''SS:''' It takes an organization. So, for example, we've been looking at all of the regional health authorities, and the funding that they have for homeopathy. And over the years, that funding's been coming down and down and down as they've realized that it's very hard to justify funding homeopathy when there's no evidence for it.

And so we focused on the ones that continue to fund homeopathy, and been looking at their decision-making processes. And in the case of Liverpool, we identified a fundamental flaw in the way they decided to fund homeopathy. We challenged that decision, working with solicitors again. And the solicitors, I think, put forward a very strong case. Liverpool acknowledged what we'd accused them of was correct. They've now decided to review that decision. And we're hoping that when they remake that decision later this year, they will no longer fund homeopathy. And that will be a major cut in ''(inaudible 58:24)''

'''S:''' So, let's talk about homeopathy

'''SS:''' Yeah

'''S:''' for a minute. 'Cause I do think (and I've thought this for years) that if there's any established, funded pseudoscience that is vulnerable, it's homeopathy, because it is sort of the easiest to explain to a non-scientist, to the general public, why it's utter nonsense. And most of the public who believes in homeopathy, they don't understand what it really is. They think it's herbalism or just natural remedies or whatever. So the gap, all ya gotta do is fill that gap, and then people are like, “Oh, that's what it is? Well that's nonsense.” 'Cause it's so patently absurd.

'''SS:''' Maybe. ''(Laughs)''

'''S:''' Well, we all know that people can people can believe patently absurd things.

'''SS:''' It's interesting.

'''S:''' I do think it's just – it's not easy. I'm not even gonna say we notorious, but I do think it's one of the more vulnerable pseudosciences because there's no equivocating about it. It's impossible. It is magic. It is nonsense. And it makes our job a little bit easier.

'''SS:''' I agree. If we can't win homeopathy

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' then it's much harder to win on many other cases.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' But I saw you do something very interesting yesterday, where you were getting people to argue against you, where you would defend homeopathy.

'''S:''' Yeah, right.

'''SS:''' And you would show people how easy it is for homeopaths to just fend their position with false arguments

'''S:''' Yep

'''SS:''' or with

'''J:''' You just need a strategy.

'''SS:''' Yeah

'''J:''' Gallop or whatever.

'''SS:''' Yeah. And I've done the same thing in Sceptics In the Pub events in the UK. You go in there, and say, “Well, I'm gonna talk to you about homeopathy.” And you know that pretty much everyone in the room already thinks that homeopathy is nonsense. So instead, I said, “Why on Earth do you think it's nonsense? You know, it doesn't look too bad to me.” And I try and counter every single one of their arguments. And I can do a pretty good job because I've done all the ...

'''S:''' You've heard it

'''SS:''' And I think that shows why so many reasonable, sensible people think homeopathy works, because there are kind of semi-reasonable, semi-logical arguments that

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' suggest that it does work. And I remember, there was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Brian Josephson, who invented the Josephson Junction. So he got the Nobel Prize back in the seventies. And since then, he's had a very strong interest in supporting things like telepathy and so on. And it's unusual, it's odd, but he's a lovely, sweet guy. I think he's a little bit naive. But I think he wants to support the underdog. I think, when he came up with the idea of a Josephson Junction, people thought he was maybe a bit crazy, and he turned out to be absolutely right.

'''J:''' What is that?

'''SS:''' Uh, god. It's a semi-conductor junction where you do various things, the voltages and different layers. It's not quantum tunneling, that's something else. But I'll look it up, and I'll get back to you. ''(Chuckles)''

'''B:''' Yes. My understanding, I can't do any better than that.

'''SS:''' But it's – yeah, people thought he was crazy, and it wasn't crazy. He won a Nobel Prize for it. So I think when he hears crazy ideas, he doesn't want to dismiss them. He wants to investigate.

'''J:''' Just to see if there's a kernel there, yeah.

'''SS:''' Yeah

'''E:''' That's okay. I mean, is he really being thorough in his investigations? I mean, why hasn't he been able to pick up on all the research that has been done that turns out to be negative?

'''SS:''' He was providing a platform for homeopaths, and I said, went to meet him one day, and I said, “Look, this is why it's not just harmless discussion, because people will take this seriously, and patients will make decisions based on what they hear, and they will be influenced. And they will maybe take one path of medication rather than another, and people can die as a result of this.” So I was saying, “This isn't just intellectual speculation.

'''B:''' Right

'''SS:''' This is peoples' health.” And at the end of the hour, I thought I'd won him over. He was kind of nodding a lot, and he could see what I was saying. And I think he thinks I'm a nice guy. I think he's a nice guy. We're both reasonable people. We both care about patients. But forty-eight hours later, I got an email from him. And somebody else had spoken to him for an hour, and he changed his mind again.

'''E:''' Ugh!

'''SS:''' So, again, that's the problem when it comes to patience and homeopathy. We can put forward very strong arguments, but a day later …

'''S:''' But – that's correct. But when we're talking about regulations, then that's different. 'Cause now you're talking about, you're on a different level. You don't have

'''SS:''' Yeah

'''S:''' to convince the general public. You're having a discussions at hopefully a higher level. Not that politicians don't make dumb decisions, but at least you could say, “All right, let's transparently talk to scientific experts and come up with some way of deciding whether or not this is worth funding, or should be funded, should be part of the NHS,” right? And then – so, there's a standard.

'''SS:''' Yeah

'''S:''' You can apply a standard in a regulatory context. And I think that's why homeopathy's vulnerable. And I think you have been making progress in the NHS.

'''SS:''' Yeah, absolutely. We've been charting – imagine the amounts of money that's been spent on homeopathy, we've been charting the number of prescriptions, and it's a very rapid decline.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' And now, there are only, literally, handful of regional health authorities – they're called CCG's. And the few remaining funders of homeopathy, and I think it's only a matter of time before they back down.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' And because – and again, I think it's, what other patients are beginning to realize is that they're losing out on their treatments.

'''S:''' Right

'''SS:''' 'Cause for every million Pounds that get spent on homeopathy,

'''S:''' Right

'''SS:''' that's a million Pounds that's not being spent on nurses,

'''S:''' real medicine

'''SS:''' and counseling, and effective drugs, and so on. So, we're getting there. And I remember when James Randi came to London about ten years ago, he gave a talk at Comway Hall. And he was a little bit negative about whether we would ever win the battle against homeopathy. But that week, one of the homeopathic hospitals – we used to have five homeopathic hospitals in the UK.

'''B:''' Unbelievable.

'''SS:''' That week, one had just closed. And we were just seeing a decline

'''B:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' in the number of …

'''J:''' Is that because they ran out of water?

''(Laughter)''

'''SS:''' A global warming problem, yeah. So, and the good news is that that trend has continued.

'''B:''' Yeah, that's good.

'''SS:''' Two more hospitals have closed.

'''B:''' Yep, absolutely.

'''SS:''' And those CCG's, those local areas that still fund homeopathy are really just around those hospitals. And I think they're gonna go soon.

'''S:''' And in this country, the FDA, which basically given homeopathy a free pass for the last sixty years, has said, “Hey, we're reevaluating our regulation of homeopathy.” And what we've learned in the process of investigating this is that actually, the FDA has the authority to fully regulate homeopathic products as drugs. They just simply choose not to.

And they made that decision sixty years ago because it was too small potatoes for them. It was only prescribed by a few homeopaths. It wasn't really a big, over-the-counter market. And so they said, “Well, okay, we'll just let them regulate themselves,” was what they decided to do. “We won't spend our limited resources regulating this tiny, little thing.”

But now, sixty years later, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. It's a huge over-the-counter industry. And like, “Ah, maybe we should reconsider,” actually doing our jobs, and regulate against – so, we have an opportunity. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I never thought we'd get this opportunity.

'''SS:''' It's the same thing in the UK. A bit of a free pass was given to homeopathy when it was a small cottage industry. And there's a special regu– oh god, I'm terrible with regulations. But we've got a couple of people in the sceptic movement, particularly a chap called Allen Haness of the Nightingale Collaboration. He just pores through pages and pages of regulations, and can give you chapter and verse on homeopathy, and how it's regulated. And so we're now thinking about

'''B:''' Right

'''SS:''' What is the weakness in homeopathy. And the extra complexity is having to fit in with European law,

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' which is not necessarily a bad thing, because European law on trading and fair trading is pretty strong. It's stronger than the old British law used to be. So that's a good thing. But we still, when we look at these regulations, we have to bear in mind what the European regulations say. But we're gonna get there. We're gonna get that Allen's key in trying to figure out what regulations are gonna be relevant.

'''S:''' All we need the FDA to do is something they have the authority to do, which is to require evidence for efficacy before allowing each thing to be

'''J:''' That would kill it!

'''S:''' That's it! If they require evidence for efficacy, it's dead. And I don't know what the chances are that they'll do that. It seems like we have a huge thing … I can't imagine why they ''wouldn't'' do it, except out of just completely misguided political correctness, or industry influence, or whatever. But there's no way they could – they know. They ''know'' it's BS. They know it's nonsense, and they know what their job is. God I would just hope we can pressure them to do it.

'''J:''' Imagine if that happened, how much

'''S:''' Yeah

'''J:''' It's such a massive win.

'''B:''' But more than that, Jay, they've got such a sweetheart deal. You say, the FDA said, “Oh, let them regulate themselves.” They've got a book.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''B:''' Here's the drugs! They can open up a blank page, and they write in what a new drug, and then that's all they gotta do.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''J:''' That's unbearable

'''S:''' Homeopathic pharmopea, and it's supplements. They just supplement it, and there ya go. It's now FDA approved.

'''SS:''' I think one of the things we don't like in the UK is there's an organization called NICE, which is the National Institute for Clinical Evidence. And they review drugs and treatments and interventions all the time. And they, we know they've been keen to review homeopathy. And unfortunately, the department of health hasn't requested that review to be done. That could be the influence of someone like Prince Charles.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''J:''' Yep

'''SS:''' God, for several years, it's been known that Prince Charles was writing to government ministers about a range of issues. And for years, those letters were confidential. And there have been appeals to various courts to have those communications disclosed. And some of them have been revealed, just a few months ago.

'''E:''' Yeah, and how revealing ''are'' they?

'''SS:''' Well, he was certainly lobbying on behalf of herbal medicines. We know that was clear. We don't know what else was said in the years prior to that, or the years since then, or what was said in face to face meetings,

'''B:''' Right

'''SS:''' or what was said by his representatives, and so on. But that may be one of the reasons why NICE, this National Institute for Clinical Excellence hasn't got involved in homeopathy. But yeah, we're looking

'''B:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' for what could we do in terms of regulation. Who has the authority to make these kinds of … The other area we're looking at is advertising, because you shouldn't be able to make a claim

'''S:''' Right

'''SS:''' that's not backed by evidence.

'''E:''' Right

'''SS:''' And the advertising standards agency in the UK is pretty good.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' They're very good at analyzing evidence, they're very good at looking at claims from all sorts of areas. Where they're weak is they don't actually have any teeth.

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' So, let's say a big supermarket's making some claim, and you report it to the ASA, the Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA make a judgment. The supermarket doesn't want to look bad. So it changes what it's doing. In fact, it tries to preempt that by not having a complaint in the first place.

'''J:''' Right

'''SS:''' Image is very, very important. When you've got a thousand homeopaths, who have no concept of what evidence is in the first place,

'''S:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' and have no realization that they should be honest in their advertising. When the ASA rule against them, nothing happens, because the homeopaths

'''S:''' don't care!

'''SS:''' They've actually campaigned against the Advertising Standards Authority, and saying that they're some kind of government agency trying to close our homeopathy, and they should be ignored, and so on. So what would be great in Britain would be if the ASA had more teeth.

'''J:''' Right

'''SS:''' Or, were also better funded, 'cause to chase down a thousand homeopaths is a lot of work.

'''B:''' Yeah

'''SS:''' They've got other things to worry about, apart from homeopaths, so funding is a big issue for them.

'''S:''' Thanks for joining us Simon. It's always …

'''J:''' Good to see you Simon

'''SS:''' Good to see you again. Cheers.

'''B:''' Thank you.

== Science or Fiction (1:09:51) ==
[http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/11/quantum-dots-made-from-fool%E2%80%99s-gold-boost-battery-performance/ Item #1]: A new report describes a method for adding quantum dots to standard lithium ion batteries, allowing a cell phone to fully charge in 30 seconds.
[http://www.aaps.org/News/Press_Room/Press_Releases/Medicines_Do_Not_Seem_to_Degrade_Faster_in_Space/ Item #2]: A study looking at medications stored aboard the ISS finds that, on average, drugs in microgravity degrade at twice the normal rate.
[http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2015/11/11/Scientists-invent-worlds-first-porous-liquid/5471447277687/ Item #3]: Scientists have created the first porous liquid, a liquid with holes, allowing it to dissolve large amounts of gas.

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two real and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of sceptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. Are you guys ready for this week?

'''C:''' I'm never ready.

'''E:''' As bad as it was last week.

'''S:''' I think this is going to be interesting this week. Item number one. A new report describes a method for adding quantum dots to standard lithium ion batteries. Allowing a cell phone to fully charge in 30 seconds.

'''C:''' Shut up.

'''S:''' Item number two. A study looking at medications stored aboard the ISS. Finds that on average drugs in microgravity degrade at twice the normal rate. And item number three. Scientists have created the first porous liquid. A liquid with holes. Allowing it to dissolve large amounts of gas. Cara, go first.

'''C:''' Oh God. Okay. I'm going to go down the line. A new report describes a method for adding quantum dots, don't know what that is, to standard lithium ion batteries. Kind of sort of understand how those work. Allowing a cell phone to fully charge in 30 seconds. That sounds black magic. Let's see. A study looking at medications stored aboard the ISS finds that on average drugs in microgravity degrade at twice the normal rate. I'll buy it. Your muscles and bones seem to not do so well in microgravity. I'll assume that maybe pharma follows that same tack. Let's see. Scientists have created the first porous liquid. What? Liquid with holes? Okay. Let me think about this. Porous liquid. So obviously a solid can have holes in it. A liquid. So we're kind of redefining the word porous here. A liquid that allows large amounts of gas. Oh my gosh. Quantum states of matter are so confusing. This might not even be quantum. Huh. Okay. I think the thing I don't buy is the quantum dots. I don't understand it so I'm skeptical of it.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''C:''' Yeah. I'm going to go with the cell phone is not going to fully charge in 30 seconds.

'''S:''' All right, Jay.

'''J:''' Okay. So the first one here, this is one about adding quantum dots to a standard lithium ion battery and it allows it to charge in 30 seconds. Interesting. So I do know some things about quantum dots. I mean, in this application, I'm not clear because I have a different idea of what they do. Fully charge in 30 seconds. Wow, that would be epic. Oh my God. Man, that is so... We need batteries to go there right now. That's awesome. Okay. Yeah, I'm right. From what I understand about quantum dots, I can see, sure, that makes sense. A study looking at the medications. On average, the medications degrade in microgravity twice the normal rate. A study aboard the ISS finds that, on average, drugs in microgravity. So it's microgravity? What about radiation and whatnot, Steve?

'''S:''' It was a study of the medications aboard the ISS.

'''J:''' Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. This is the first time in science we've created a first porous liquid. It has holes in it, Kara. There's holes in the water.

'''C:''' Yeah, because that makes sense.

'''J:''' And it can dissolve large amounts of gas. Interesting. Oh, I see. Oh, I get that. I understand what's going on there. All right. Sure. That makes sense because there's actually a place for the gas to go. All right. The one about the medication in microgravity is the fake.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

'''B:''' Let's see. The porous liquid. Yeah, I could see if they're actually creating a liquid, then they could make it so that the molecules have little containers or whatever to make it absorb whatever it needs to absorb. Let's see. The other ones are a little harder. The quantum dots one, I'm not really buying that. I know what a quantum dot is. It's just a bit of semiconductor that can emit light. They're really cool, but I just don't see any connection between quantum dots and battery technology. The medications aboard ISS. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't sound very likely either. Twice the rate? I mean, I'm not sure how microgravity would do that. You seem to be implying that it's all due to microgravity and I could potentially see it would be something else. Oh, damn. This is a tough one because microgravity, I'm not buying that at all, but the quantum dots, I'm not buying either. Let me put my dime down here. Quantum dots, standard lithium. Yeah, I'm going to go with Cara. I'm going to go with Cara.

'''J:''' What? Bob, what?

'''C:''' Bob and I are together. We're unstoppable.

'''B:''' Yes, we are.

'''J:''' You suck right now, Bob. You suck.

'''S:''' And Evan.

'''B:''' That's actually making me more confident, Jay. Thank you.

'''E:''' Here are my silly comments. I'll do the two that I think are science first. Quantum dots. The first thing I thought of when you said that, Steve, was that stupid ice cream made of dots. I don't know why.

'''C:''' Dippin' dots.

'''E:''' Dippin' dots. What the hell is that anyways?

'''C:''' Space ice cream that they sell at Disney. Come on, man.

'''E:''' Right. It just seems so strange. I'm not brave enough to try that. In any case, it has nothing to do with this. But that was the first thing I thought. Now, I think the trick here, standard lithium ion batteries. Maybe we're not talking standard lithium ion batteries. That would lead me to believe, though, that that was fiction. But I actually think that that one's going to turn out to be true. The other one I think is going to turn out to be true is the porous liquid. I pour liquids all the time. Oh, porous, porous liquid. Pour us liquid. Right. See what I did there? And with holes, allowing it to dissolve large amounts of gas. Jeez. That's amazing. They probably accidentally stumbled upon that. I think that was some sort of accident. The penicillin sort of experiment again, which was an accident. And then, so that leaves the microgravity with the drugs. I think this one is going to wind up being the fiction. I think, yeah, right. Bob, I thought the same thing. I put a lot of emphasis on the microgravity portion of this. I don't think it's going to turn out to be the case. So I think drugs. Jay, you said that one, right? Fiction? Yeah, gravity. I'm with you. I'm with you, Jay.

'''J:''' Fantastic, man.

'''S:''' So you all agree with the third one. So we'll start there. Scientists have created the first porous liquid, a liquid with holes, allowing it to dissolve large amounts of gas. You all think that one is science. And that one is science.

'''E:''' The way you said it, you were totally kidding.

'''J:''' Steve, my first thought, though, was who cares?

'''S:''' I'll tell you why you care. First, I have to point out that Evan was incorrect in saying that this was discovered by accident. This was actually designed from the ground up specifically to have this property. They designed a liquid molecule that could not fully occupy its three-dimensional space because of just the arrangement of the atoms. And therefore, there would be spaces in the liquid, obligate spaces or holes.

'''E:''' Like when spheres are all bunched together, you get little—

'''S:''' Yeah, there's a—

'''E:''' Is that what I should be picturing in my head?

'''S:''' There'll be a picture in the link. The link I have will have an artist's conception of what it looks like. And you'll see you end up with all these little almost like cages surrounding cavities. Now, why would they bother doing this, trying to specifically find a liquid that is porous? Well, so that it could dissolve a large amount of gas in it. So what gas do you think is at the top of the list that you would like to have dissolved in liquids?

'''B:''' How about hydrogen?

'''S:''' Carbon dioxide.

'''B:''' Oh.

'''S:''' Carbon, yeah. So this could be a way of removing carbon from the atmosphere.

'''E:''' Awesome.

'''B:''' That's what I was thinking. That's my second choice.

'''J:''' Me too.

'''S:''' Yeah, they were saying that this liquid could hold perhaps 500 times as much as—

'''B:''' Whoa!

'''C:''' As regular water?

'''S:''' As other solvents that they would use, yeah.

'''C:''' Wow.

'''J:''' You think it would be good for heartburn?

'''S:''' So anyway, so that's, yeah, very cool. And it's a designer material that—for a specific purpose. And remains to be seen if it could be actually used that way. But that's the idea behind it. But they did succeed in creating the first porous liquid, which is very interesting.

'''J:''' Awesome.

'''S:''' All right. Well, let's go back to number one. A new report describes a method for adding quantum dots to standard lithium ion batteries, allowing a cell phone to fully charge in 30 seconds. Bob and Cara think this one is the fiction. Jay and Evan think this one is science. And this one is science.

'''E:''' It's science.

'''B:''' I knew it. Quantum dots!

'''E:''' Finally guessed correctly.

'''B:''' Quantum dots?

'''S:''' Yes. Quantum dots, Cara, are nanocrystals 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

'''C:''' That's small.

'''S:''' Yes. The reason that these vastly increase the time it takes to charge or even discharge a battery is because at that size, you're down below the diffusion length of the materials. And so they can very, very quickly turn from one form into another, right? Into the form that carries the energy, that stores the energy. So it can happen extremely quickly. However, you had to know there's a downside.

'''E:''' A trade-off.

'''S:''' There's a trade-off. There's a reason why—

'''E:''' High extreme heat.

'''S:''' No. You only get about three cycles out of it.

'''B:''' Ah!

'''C:''' Oh!

'''E:''' Oh!

'''S:''' So—

'''C:''' Ha!

'''S:''' But what the news item is, I mean, it is that, but also that it's already been known. It's already known that you could get these rapid charge times with quantum dots even on lithium-ion batteries. But what the new research—this is published in ACS Nano, researchers at Vanderbilt University, that if you use quantum dots made out of iron pyrite—you know, pyrite, fool's gold—

'''E:''' Fool's gold.

'''S:''' That they could get the recharges up to dozens. They said they might be able to get the same effect, the rapid charge rate, but with dozens of recharges. And then, of course, they always say—and then they hope that they could with advancements, get it into the thousands of recharges, which is where you—

'''E:''' That would be good.

'''S:''' You kind of—that's where you'd like to be a thousand plus for—right? Because if you have to recharge your phone a thousand times, that's basically three years, of use.

'''C:''' Yeah. Dozens is not helpful.

'''S:''' Dozens is not there yet.

'''C:''' Unless your phone is so cheap that you can just throw it out.

'''S:''' The thing I like about this—again, I'm always cautious about these kinds of news items because there's always this massive downside, and the promise they'll overcome the downside, which almost never happens. But it's interesting to know that it's possible to charge a battery that quickly, you know? It at least makes it possible that they could solve the technical problems and get it to work in such a way that you'll have a viable battery. It's not—and forget about cell phones. Imagine charging your car in a minute. You know, that's the real game changer.

'''C:''' Yeah, because you do that with braking.

'''S:''' Well, yeah. It would make regenerative braking more efficient because of the rapid rate of recharge. Absolutely. But you still need to have an external power source, you know? But if you could charge your battery in the time it takes to fill your tank of gas, you're there. Then you're there, right?

'''C:''' I had to give up a job this week because my car wouldn't make it. Isn't that a bummer? This is the first time it's ever happened. But I was going to be booked to go do a story in Santa Barbara, and it's 95 miles, and it wasn't worth it for me to take the risk. But if I could stop off at a station on the way and just recharge—

'''S:''' You have an electric car?

'''C:''' Yeah, I have an electric car. Fully electric. I can't rely on gas at all.

'''S:''' Yeah, I think that's why—I think we've talked about this before. What killed the electric car, that's what killed the electric car.

'''C:''' Which in LA is almost never a problem. But there's no way I could have this car if I still lived in Texas. Are you kidding me?

'''S:''' Yeah. The range isn't quite there yet. There's situations where it's inconvenient, even to the point where you can't do what you need to do. So you can't replace your gas car because it doesn't have the convenience of unlimited, potentially unlimited range.

'''C:''' Well, it can, but only if you have a very particular lifestyle and you live in a very particular place. So this is the first time this has been an issue for me in a year and a half.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' You know, so it's like, okay, once in a blue moon, it's still worth it to have the car. But yeah, I mean, if I could stop off and push a button, oh my God, that would be amazing.

'''S:''' And the time it takes you to go into the Kwik-E-Mart and buy a drink and come back out, your car is charged. Yeah, that's what we need.

'''C:''' So cool.

'''S:''' So this means that a study looking at medications stored aboard the ISS finds that on average, drugs in microgravity degrade at twice the normal rate is the fiction because the study showed that they degrade at the exact same rate as medicines on earth. So medicines do not seem to degrade faster in space, study published in the AAPS, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. Pharmaceutical scientists, yep. So that's interesting. Good to know that drugs, I mean, that's what I would figure. Radiation, Jay, that would make sense. Radiation might degrade. But I think that the ISS is pretty well shielded. I mean, astronauts are spending a lot of time up there.

'''J:''' It just didn't make any sense that microgravity would be able to do anything.

'''S:''' Yeah, I just made that up.

'''C:''' Oh, you guys. Doesn't it degrade your bones? Did I just make that up?

'''S:''' Yeah, but they're alive, you know?

'''C:''' That's true.

'''S:''' Medicine is not alive. Yeah, but anyway, they did the study because it wasn't known. They wanted to know, do drugs last longer? And that's the other interesting thing how drugs have expiration dates. They're real. The expiration dates on drugs are real. It's not just one of those things like-

'''J:''' Yeah, they lose their potency to the point where they're not effective.

'''S:''' Chemicals break down over time.

'''E:''' Is it 80%? Or is it based drug per drug? Is there a different number per drug as to when the expiration date is?

'''S:''' Well, the time is drug to drug, but the cutoff is the same. I think it's something like 80%.

'''E:''' 80%? That's what I thought it was.

'''C:''' To be clear, that just means-

'''S:''' Down to 80%. Yeah.

'''C:''' -they've degraded. It doesn't mean they're now dangerous to take. It just means they're not effective anymore.

'''B:''' Or useless.

'''S:''' They don't work. So you can't rely on the dosing anymore.

'''B:''' Not as effective. Not as effective.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:24:15) ==
<blockquote>"We ignore public understanding of science at our peril" - Eugenie Clark</blockquote>

'''S:''' All right. Evan, give us the quote this week.

'''E:''' This week's quote. "We ignore public understanding of science at our peril." Yes, we do. I'm sure many people have perhaps said that or something like it, but this quote-

'''S:''' Carl Sagan certainly expressed that.

'''E:''' -this particular quote, right. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we may have come across it before in other readings that we've done, but this is specifically attributed to Eugenie Clark. Now you may know the name Eugenie Clark. She is sometimes referred to as the Shark Lady.

'''S:''' Of course.

'''E:''' Known for her research on many sorts of fish, including poisonous fish of the tropical seas, but mainly, mainly for her behavior of sharks. She was a pioneer in the field of scuba diving for research purposes. She only passed away earlier this year at age 92.

'''S:''' 92. Good run. It seems like a lot of the scientists we talk about live a long time.

'''J:''' Because they're probably living healthy.

'''S:''' Yeah, probably. Maybe just being smart makes you live longer.

'''E:''' That would be nice.

'''S:''' Being skeptical makes you live longer. That'd be nice.

'''E:''' Boy, if Carl should have lived to be 130.

'''C:''' I don't think it works that way. Yeah, exactly. Let's look at a hitch there. I don't think it always works that way.

'''S:''' That was self-inflicted. He knew it, too.

'''C:''' That's true.

'''E:''' That was his bent arm.

'''S:''' He wrote about it. He said he had throat cancer, basically. He said it was so predictable, it's embarrassing. Living a life of drinking and smoking, and you get the exact kind of cancer that those two things predispose you to.

'''C:''' Yeah, even strong, strong skeptics have blind spots. It's true. Especially when it comes to their own reflections in the mirror.

'''J:''' If you enjoy the SGU podcast, please head over to our Facebook page. You can go to facebook.com forward slash the skeptics guide and like our page if you like it. You could also become an SGU member.

'''C:''' It's kind of the coolest thing ever.

'''J:''' It is because you get to pick a level and be a cool sci-fi type hero.

'''S:''' If you are a premium member, we have to mention, if you're a premium member, which is a mere $8 a month, then you get access to our premium content. There is over 60 pieces of premium content you get instant access to. Including hour-long interviews, uncut interviews, extra bits for the show that we do, lots of material that you can't get any other way, just as a thank you for supporting the SGU.

'''C:''' That's so cheap. That's two Starbucks drinks a month. That's it. That's two nonfat lattes with whip.

'''S:''' You probably drink too much caffeine anyway, so just cut out those couple extra cafes a month and get some premium SGU, feed your brain with premium SGU content. Well, thank you for joining me this week, everyone.

'''J:''' You're welcome, sir.

'''B:''' Sure.

'''C:''' Thanks, Steve.

== Signoff ==
'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}.

{{Outro404}}

== Today I Learned ==
* Jay has an anxiety disorder, and so do other members of Steve's family. Cara has a depressive disorder. Mentioned during the email about anxiety.
* Cara says that she drives a fully electric car during the Science or Fiction segment

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}} 

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|Neuroscience & Psychology = y 
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SGU Episode 525

2025-03-12T18:47:05Z

Hearmepurr: episode done

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|episodeNum = 525
|episodeDate = August 1st 2015 
|episodeIcon = File:Emdrive2.jpg 
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|qowText = "Science has taught me (Science warns me) to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile.My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations." 
|qowAuthor = {{w|Thomas Huxley}} 
|}}

== Introduction ==
* Jay identifying blaster sounds
* Steve, Bob, and George Hrab went to see Ant Man together

''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Thursday, July 30th, 2015, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Cara Santa Maria...

'''C:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' [blaster sounds]

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Oh, my God, I've been shot.

'''S:''' You're busting out over there, Jay. What's going on?

'''J:''' The Star Wars movie is coming out. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not celebrating and getting super excited.

'''E:''' Only 130-something days till...

'''J:''' Yep, I bought a blaster a few weeks ago. That means I have three super awesome high-end blasters.

'''B:''' Jay, that sound effect was awesome. Where'd you get that?

'''J:''' Actually, Bob bought me a little sound effect machine for my birthday.

'''C:''' Oh, how fun.

'''J:''' That sound is embedded in my DNA.

'''C:''' Does it only make spacey sounds?

'''J:''' It's all the blaster sounds from Star Wars, Cara.

'''C:''' Gotcha.

'''J:''' Which you clearly don't know, and I will have to educate you.

'''C:''' Nope, not at all. You can identify each of those sounds?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah.

'''C:''ou're such a nerd. I love it.

'''J:''' Do we do it?

'''E:''' He knows if it's left-handed or right-handed.

'''J:''' No, but I swear to God, when Bob gave it to me, me, Bob, and Steve were together, and I was telling Bob, like, I know all of them. And I'm like, I click it, and I named it. I clicked it, and I named it. And I clicked it, and I named it. And Steve's like, oh, no, no, that one was this one. And he was like, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. We had to make a minor edit. I was right, but it was slightly off. So the details are incredible. I mean, I could picture the thing shooting it. Like, one of them is the ion cannon. One of them is a stormtrooper blaster. One of them is the sound that a snowwalker's gun makes. Yeah, I have them all memorized.

'''B:''' Yeah, it was impressive.

'''C:''' You're like one of those guys who can say what the hot rod is when he just hears it on the road.

'''J:''' Exactly. Except much cooler, I can identify blasters.

'''S:''' No, it's funny. We went to see Ant-Man over the weekend.

'''J:''' It was George.

'''S:''' George Hrab was with us. And we saw our first in-the-theater Star Wars preview.

'''E:''' Oh, yes.

'''S:''' George was sitting between Bob and I. And when, like, the Lucasfilm thing came on the screen, and we realized that it was a Star Wars preview, Bob and I both gasped at the same time. On either side of George, we're like, oh. And George just started cracking up.

'''B:''' He was laughing.

'''S:''' Nerdgasm in stereos.

'''C:''' How was Ant-Man, though? Did you guys like it?

'''S:''' It was solid.

'''B:''' We all enjoyed it. It was fun. Just a fun romp. And I don't think nobody had a problem with it.

'''E:''' It carried its weight.

'''C:''' Nice.

'''S:''' All right. Let's get going. We have a great interview with Kevin Folta coming up later in the show.

== Forgotten Superheroes of Science (3:03) ==
* Gerty Cori: The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, for elucidating the metabolism of glucose in the human body

'''S:''' But first, Bob, you have your Forgotten Superhero of Science.

'''B:''' Yes! For this week's Forgotten Superheroes of Science, I'm covering Gerty Cori (1896 to 1957). She was a biochemist who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. She and her husband shared half the prize for elucidating the metabolism of glucose. Ever hear of her?

'''S:''' I've heard of glucose.

'''B:''' Probably not! Yeah.

'''S:''' Glucose metabolism.

'''E:''' I've heard of Galloping Gerty, but...

'''B:''' I feel a little bit like a broken record, because this is the point where I cover the problems that these women had decades ago, being a scientist. So, typical for women of her time, Cory had a difficult time procuring jobs in her field. And even when she did get a job, the pay was crap. It was really pathetic. One thing I find that was interesting, even after they had made their big discovery, and her husband and she were looking a job. One university actually told them that it was un-American for a husband and wife to work together.

'''E:''' Okay.

'''B:''' Un-American. They said that his career would suffer, even after their major discovery, Mr. Cory would get jobs very easily, but she was offered salaries that were one tenth of his, even though they were equal partners in the lab. So yeah, it was really pathetic. We've come a long way, although we're not where we need to be. But we've definitely come a long way. So she and her husband did their major work at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases. Sounds so cool. That's now called a Roswell Park Cancer Institute. Now, they investigated, like I said, carbohydrate metabolism in humans, and the hormones that regulate it. So in 1929, they outlined the biological cycle that describes the breakdown of the carbohydrate glycogen in the muscles to make glucose for energy, and lactic acid. And lactic acid is causes that burning sensation if you're lifting weights in your muscles. They also figured out how that lactic acid is converted back into glycogen by the liver for later storage in the muscles. So this is how the body produces and stores energy. Pretty fundamental stuff. Very, very important. And this cycle that I've been talking about became called the Cory Cycle, named after both of them. And it won them the Nobel Prize in 1947. And she was the first American woman to win a Nobel. So that was quite a milestone. Their discovery contributed to our understanding and treatment of diabetes and other metabolic diseases. But not only was the Cory Cycle named for them. But the Cory Crater on the Moon, and the Corty Crater on Venus are named, also. And I believe after Gerty specifically. See, now I'm thinking about the SGU crater, but we'll address that in a future episode. So, remember Gerty Cory; mention her to your friends, perhaps when discussing gluconeogenesis, and the conversion of lactate into pyrovate.

'''C:''' Yup. I'm always talkin' about that with my friends.

'''B:''' Yep, it comes up. It comes up.

'''S:''' I have actually had that conversation, but...

''(Laughter)''

'''J:''' That's awesome, Steve.

'''E:''' But they weren't really a friend, were they.

'''S:''' Well, you know, classmates. All right.

'''J:''' That's awesome.

== News Items ==
=== EM Drive Revisited (6:09) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/despite-headlines-the-em-drive-is-still-bullshit/

'''S:''' Evan, I understand that the propellant-less EM drive is back in the news.

'''B:''' Ah, why?

'''E:''' It is back in the news. With the Apollo space mission successfully sending people to the Moon late 60s and the 70s. Well, how long did it take to get to the Moon in those days? Do you remember, Bob?

'''B:''' You mean to fly there?

'''E:''' Yeah, fly there.

'''S:''' With the Apollo mission?

'''B:''' It was three days. Three days.

'''J:''' Yeah, three days.

'''E:''' Three days to reach the Moon. That's exactly right. Now, how long did it take the New Horizons probe to get to the Moon? What, past the Moon?

'''B:''' I actually read that.

'''S:''' Eight hours, I think.

'''B:''' It was very impressive. It was far less than a day. Far less than a day.

'''E:''' Eight and a half hours. Exactly. Good job, Steve. You remembered. And they just strapped that to a bed of rockets, hurled it into space, and off it went. But what if I told you that these scientists working alone in a basement in Germany somewhere have developed a space drive system which could reach the Moon in a mere four hours? Could it really be true?

'''C:''' I don't believe it.

'''S:''' Ah, you close-minded skeptics. Trying to crush innovation and dreaming, how dare you?

'''E:''' If you've read about the EM drive in the past several years, and it has been discussed before, these engineers have been working on this, an electromagnetic drive that will work by bouncing a bunch of microwaves within its container around. And like you said, Steve, no propulsion, yet there it goes.

'''S:''' No propellant.

'''E:''' No propellant, yes. Here's the most recent news on this right now. Scientists have finally confirmed that the EM drive actually works, and that more robust tests of the drive system are coming. That's incredible, and it's also a bunch of crap.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' But that is the news that's making the rounds right about now. So here's the main critique. It's this insurmountable thing to overcome by the EM drive proponents is that the system produces thrust without a propellant. That's considered a violation of the laws of physics, specifically the one having to do with conservation of momentum.

'''S:''' Those conservation laws, man, they are...

'''E:''' Pesky.

'''S:''' Yeah, they are uncompromising.

'''B:''' Inconvenient.

'''S:''' The device allegedly works by bouncing microwaves back and forth within its chamber, and there's this subtle asymmetry to it bouncing harder in one direction than the other, and that produces thrust of some sort. But the engineers really don't have a good hand on exactly why it moves, why it creates the thrust. It's got to be quantum something or other, right?

'''C:''' And does it go in a specific direction, or does it just kind of like fall over?

'''S:''' It produces thrust in a direction, yes.

'''C:''' In a direction.

'''E:''' Steve, I know you wrote about this in a blog post, and certainly a lot of scientists have chimed in on this as well. Not only the feasibility of it is not there, but there are also some other problems with this.

'''S:''' Yeah, this is basically the equivalent of cold fusion or free energy, right? Where you have a machine that apparently breaks a well-established law of physics. And the research that's showing this effect, the effect size is minuscule, right? We're talking micronewtons. I hear conflicting things reading around. You know, some people are saying this is within the noise of the error of the devices doing the measurement. Other people have claimed that the error is less than the measurement. But when I wrote about it, I linked to a good article that quotes many physicists and scientists who looked at the—the paper's not peer-reviewed, but it's been released so you could read the paper. And they were very critical. For example, one physicist noted that the thrust sort of lags when you turn the machine on and off, right? When you turn the machine off, the measured thrust doesn't go off right away. It sort of fades away, which is consistent with heat. Yeah, so it's like—yeah, as it heats up, the apparent effect occurs. And then you turn it off, and then as it slowly cools down, the effect goes away. So that sort of screams artifact. You know, it doesn't go away when you turn it off. They also said that, yeah, that heat actually throws off the measuring device. So it could just be that the error goes up as the heat goes up, you know? So there's lots of things that have not been eliminated by this test. What's interesting is that the author, Martin Tajmar, who writes in the conclusion, our test campaign cannot confirm or refute the claims of the EM drive. They say that they didn't confirm that it works right in the conclusions. Just that, yeah, we measured some anomalous thrust, and we can't figure out where it's coming from. But they didn't really confirm that the thing is working, despite the fact that that's how it's being reported. You know, that they confirm that it works. They said it. They're not confirming that it works. You know, the reporting on this has been so gullible and so terrible.

'''C:''' Yeah, welcome to writing for the headline. Gosh.

'''E:''' Exactly right.

'''S:''' But even worse, I have to say, I posted this on our Facebook page. I know I'm not supposed to read the comments on our Facebook page. But I knew we were going to be talking about this tonight, so I wanted to see what people were saying about it. And my God it's obvious that most people are commenting by the headline of our Facebook post and didn't actually read my article. Because they make comments that I address in the article. It's like, seriously, I didn't say that. Either that or their reading comprehension is so blinkered by they just want to think that this thing is real or they start to get on their high horse about let's stop being very skeptical to be dismissive. Dude, this is implausible. I'm just saying it's implausible. It's about as plausible as cold fusion or free energy.

'''E:''' Homeopathy.

'''S:''' And the results here are razor thin. They're well within the noise. Scale this freaking thing up before you make any claims about it. And the scientific, I mean, I'm just quoting the scientific community who are more dismissive than me, that I was being directly there's like Sean Carroll said, this is a total freaking waste of time. I will focus my research on something that's real.

'''E:''' I'm going to spend my time thinking about ideas that don't violate conservation of momentum.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's what scientists, people who actually understand physics, you should probably take them seriously.

'''C:''' This is such a frustration with science journalism or not just science journalism, any journalism and how we consume journalism. I get so frustrated by people. It's a common device to make your headline something like, is the moon made of cheese? And then, of course, the very first line of the article is like, no, no, it's not made of cheese. But nobody reads the article. They just feel the need to comment on the headline.

'''S:''' Right, right.

'''C:''' And also, I mean, I remember having a real frustration back when I was at HuffPost, because what some people don't realize is that a lot of journalists don't get to write their own headlines.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' And so I wrote about the Higgs boson and I had this whole part in it about how I hate that it's called the God particle, because that's really a bastardization of the goddamn particle because it was so hard to find. And I actually went on like a diatribe, chiding journalists for calling it the God particle because I had a really just I really had a hard time with that name. And so in the middle of this piece there's this long rant. You find it on the homepage and it's titled God Particle Discovered.

'''B:''' Oh, God.

'''S:''' All right. Well, let's move on to the next item.

=== Hope for Malaria Vaccine (13:53) ===
* http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/07/first-malaria-vaccine-takes-key-step-forward?rss=1

'''S:''' Cara, you're going to tell us about hope for a new malaria vaccine.

'''C:''' I am. I'm actually really, really excited about this. It's not necessarily the newest of stories, but there was progress was made recently because this malaria vaccine has been in development by GlaxoSmithKline for years, for a very, very long time. But today there was not really a ruling, but a statement that was made by the European Medicines Agency. This is sort of like the EU's answer to the FDA. And so they make statements about the safety of drugs, about their utility. And they went ahead and said that they think that this vaccine should be used. And based on that, now the World Health Organization is going to assess this vaccine candidate and their decision will ultimately affect whether or not young children in Sub-Saharan Africa get this malaria vaccine. So to back up a little bit, it's called Mosquirix. That's the brand name. So you might start hearing about that, Mosquirix. Its sort of clinical name is RTSS. So that's the shorthand that you'll sometimes hear. And it was given to 16,000 young children in 13 African research centers in Sub-Saharan Africa. So from Gabon to Kenya to Ghana to Nigeria to Tanzania. And these kids were very, very, very young. The problem with vaccine with this vaccine is that typically when you're in a clinical trial, you're looking for at least 50 percent efficacy, if not closer to 90 plus percent efficacy. And they just don't have that with this vaccine. So this is wherein lies kind of the conundrum, I think, for the researchers and also for the regulatory agencies. It says that at the end of the trial, there were four doses of the vaccine given, three a month apart and then a booster 18 months later. At the end of the trial, the vaccine reduced malaria cases by 39 percent in children age 5 to 17 months and by 27 percent in infants. And that was after three years. So here's the question. You know, it's not fully effective. Is it worth the risks that come along with vaccines? Is it worth the expense? Is it worth having to deliver four doses of this vaccine knowing that it only has a reduction in malaria of between 25 and 40 percent? Well, the European agency says, yes, it is worth it. And now it's up to the WHO or the World Health Organization to decide, because whatever they decide will actually affect whether certain nations are required to start providing those vaccines.

'''S:''' That relates to another item that I wrote about recently where scientists were looking at vaccines and they found that for imperfect vaccines, vaccines that do not provide essentially enough resistance to the disease that it prevents spread of the disease, what they call a leaky vaccine you still get the infection, you still pass it on, but you'll survive the infection. And they were specifically looking at a viral infection in chickens, a herpesviral infection. There's a vaccine for that. There used to be a huge problem in poultry industry and now basically all the chickens get vaccinated and so it's not a problem anymore. But they found that this vaccine can cause or increase the occurrence of more virulent strains of the virus. It's like a bacteria developing antibiotic resistance. You know, the viruses that are more virulent and can spread despite the vaccine are the ones that predominate over time. The solution, just like with antibiotics, is thorough coverage. So if everyone gets vaccinated, then it's not an issue. Or if you have a non-leaky vaccine, it's not an issue. It's only an issue for, quote unquote, leaky vaccines. And the reason I bring it up is because they specifically mentioned that malaria is a difficult disease to vaccinate against. You get this imperfect result and that's the kind of leaky vaccine that we have to be careful about because it actually could make the infecting organism more virulent.

'''C:''' Yeah, for sure. I mean, we're not getting anywhere close to typical results with what we think of as a traditional vaccine, which generally speaking is for viruses. There are also some vaccines for bacteria now, but this vaccine would be the first ever vaccine for a parasite. You know, malaria is caused by plasmodium. So it's a totally different life cycle. It's a totally different functionality. And what it really does, the vaccine sort of boosts the immune system of the person so that they resist the parasite before it can go in and infect the liver, which is when most people get sick. The parasite infects the liver and then it spreads out into the blood and you start to get a lot of damage to red blood cells. And that's where you get those terrible, terrible, we call them here in the West, flu-like symptoms. But in a lot of parts of the world, they actually call them malaria-like symptoms.

'''J:''' Yikes. Wow.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's just horrible. And you have these children that are getting malaria three, four times a year. You've got death rates hanging around the half a million point for the last many years. And is it worth it? You know, to me, and who knows? I'm definitely not an epidemiologist. I have no idea. It seems like, man, if we can even prevent a few of these cases, maybe we should. And that also seems to be the opinion of this medical agency in the EU. But time will only tell whether the World Health Organization says the same thing. And even then, it might not be available in significant doses to the individuals who need it until 2017. I will say, as a random follow-up and maybe a little piece of good news, as I was researching this story, I also read that as of this week, Nigeria has now been polio-free for one year. Which is just a huge, huge accomplishment. And get this. I found this crazy statistic. In 1988, there were 125 countries harboring polio. Now that Nigeria has reached total eradication, which technically they haven't yet because it has to be measured, I think, four or five years out. But once they do, there will only be two countries remaining, Pakistan and Afghanistan, that have any cases of polio. This could be a disease that is fully eradicated from the planet. And the only other disease we know that we've done that is is smallpox.

'''S:''' In humans.

'''J:''' So is that possible, though? Like, I thought I read somewhere that if we vaccinated a disease, quote unquote, away where nobody actually had it, that it doesn't mean it's gone from the ecosystem.

'''C:''' Yeah, it's not. It might still be in a reservoir. You know, it's like, this is a big problem with things like Ebola, which, yeah, we don't have a vaccine for Ebola, but Ebola just goes away. Usually, it pops up in a very small area, and then it just goes away. The problem is it exists in a reservoir. There are animals that carry it. And then you have these, what they call spillover events, this kind of zoonotic infection that comes from an animal into a human. And that can happen with viruses. It's probably how most viral infections, or I should say many, not most, but many viral infections started. But if we can prevent it, and if we still have enough vaccine on hand, let's say that there was another spillover event, we'd be able to contain it immediately.

'''S:''' Yeah, but, Jay, polio does not have a non-human vector.

'''C:''' Oh, it doesn't? See, that's even better.

'''S:''' Polio is a virus that can be eradicated. Smallpox, no non-human vector. That's why we were able to eradicate it.

'''C:''' That's amazing.

'''S:''' We don't talk about eradicating infections that have non-human vectors, because you can't.

'''C:''' Because they will pop up.

'''S:''' They will survive in the animal vectors. That's right.

'''B:''' What if you vaccinated the animals?

'''S:''' Well, yeah, but...

'''C:''' The wild animals.

'''S:''' You're going to vaccinate every bat in Africa or something? It's just not going to happen. It's just not feasible.

'''J:''' Well, you won't even try, Steve, huh?

'''E:''' Yeah, Steve.

'''S:''' Well, unless you come up with some new way of doing it. I mean, it's not impossible. Let's move on.

=== Cannabis Oil (22:35) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/anecdotes-and-cannabis-oil/

'''S:''' Have you guys heard that cannabis oil cures everything?

'''J:''' Sure.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah. I hear that every day.

'''J:''' Yeah, man, yeah.

'''S:''' It's good for whatever ails you. There's a study going around where a man claims that he was given... This is the title. He was given 18 months to live, but he illegally cured himself of his cancer with cannabis oil. That's basically the story. So as I like to do, I read the story and deconstructed it a little bit. So first of all, the man in question is David Hibbett. He was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2012. He was treated with surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. And then he had a recurrence in a lymph node. He was treated with chemotherapy, which shrank the lymph node to the point where it could be removed surgically. Then he said, I'm going to try cannabis oil. And credits his current cancer-free, apparent cancer-free state on the cannabis oil. What do you guys think about that? That's perfectly cromulant. It had nothing to do with all the surgery and chemotherapy and radiation. But also, reading multiple versions of the story and delving into some of the details. So the headlines are, man given 18 months to live. Actually, which I always know is dubious, first of all. We don't tell patients, you're going to die on September 23rd. Yeah, there's a range. It's always a statistical range. And it's purely statistical. And some diseases have what we call a long tail. You could survive, maybe 90% of people will survive for three years. And 5% of people will survive for six years. And then there's decreasing percentages of people survive for longer and longer. And sometimes people survive for a really long time. So if you're at the top 1% of survival, statistically, of a disease, that could mean you're surviving much longer than the 95% typical range that we might tell patients. And of course, you're going to think that you massively out-survived or outlived your prognosis. What if you're in the top 1 in a million of your disease, right? That is a story that's going to be told far and wide, right? And this is why anecdotal evidence is worthless. Because you have no idea how highly selective it is. Anyway, it's even worse than that in this case. So this guy was not told he had 18 months to live. He was told he had between 18 months and five years to live. But they conveniently dropped the five years and just kept the 18 months.

'''C:''' And I'm sure it's still within that five-year period, right?

'''S:''' Yeah, we're three years into that five-year period. He hasn't even outlived his prognosis yet. But that's lying. That's like...

'''B:''' Kind of important, yes.

'''S:''' That's beyond distorting it. When you turn 18 months to five years into 18 months, now you're over the line into lying. So again, I have to always emphasize when we talk about these cases that are made public, of course, I hope this guy is cancer-free and lives a long and healthy life. Obviously, I wish nothing but the best for him. But you've made your story public in order to promote snake oil. We've got to address the details of this story, at least as we know them.

'''C:''' Well, and that's another thing that pisses me off too. It's like a misuse of a legitimate drug. Cannabis has real quality effects for people who are struggling with cancer.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's a drug.

'''C:''' It's not going to help the case. It's not going to help the case for decriminalization or for medical usage of this drug for what it can do, which is help you have an appetite and help you sleep at night and all of this if you've got this other group of people saying, oh, it cures everything from cancer to diabetes.

'''S:''' Yeah. It's interesting why cannabis has been the focus of so many of these snake oil claims, and probably because there is this existing decriminalization movement, which is a completely separate issue. And again, I'm not commenting about that at all. I'm just saying that people have latched onto this herbalism, snake oil-type claims for it that it can cure anything. But if you just strip away all of the political nonsense and just look at the actual data, it's a drug. It's a drug that has some very interesting effects. It's probably very useful for nausea and appetite, maybe as treating the side effects of chemotherapy, for example. We may develop many other uses out of it. There's a lot of preliminary evidence, basic science, preliminary evidence, and some clinical evidence for these applications. But again, people latch onto every mouse preliminary study and say, it cures this or it helps that. That's where the pseudoscience comes in. But let's look at specifically for cancer. David Gorski, who is our cancer expert on science-based medicine, did an excellent review of the literature. And it's just not that impressive. There's been, first of all, no human trials. There's a number of animal trials for different kinds of cancer. And the bottom line is this. When you're doing an animal study or a Petri dish study, you're looking at the anti-cancer effects of a drug. I'm reminded of that. I think it's an XKCD cartoon where they say, always think of this. And he shows a picture of a scientist holding a gun at a Petri dish. That kills cancer, too. It makes a legitimate point is that it's not, does it kill the cancer cells? It's, how effectively does it kill the cancer cells? Which specifically deals with, are we going to be able to get it into you in a concentration that is sufficiently lethal to cancer cells that you will tolerate? So it's not, does it kill cancer cells? It's just, at what dose does it kill cancer cells? And when you ask that question, it's actually not that impressive. Its effectiveness is actually lower than what we like anti-cancer compounds to be.

'''C:''' I'm wondering from you, or I guess from David, but maybe from you through David, do oncologists, do doctors like to talk about cancer in those kinds of terms, like curing?

'''S:''' So we talk about remission. Remission is the term we use for a quote unquote cure, which just means that you're cancer-free, there's no detectable cancer, but because it could always come back. So you're like, you're in remission and here are the statistics about staying in remission.

'''C:''' Yeah. Okay. Because it definitely seems like everything about this article is woo, that there's obviously no control because he was having legitimate medicine at the same time. The fact that he's still in his prognosis period. But just anytime I read something that says, blah, blah, blah, cure cancer, I'm always like, I don't buy it.

'''S:''' Yeah. You have to be cautious about that. I mean, you can use the word cure as a shorthand if you talk about somebody who survived, in remission for a certain amount of time, where basically your risk of recurrence is now down into the background rate of just getting cancer for anybody. So you're effectively cured.

'''C:''' I see.

'''S:''' That's a reasonable shorthand, but not technically to be true. We talk about in remission, but I don't mind if somebody says, yeah, they've been cancer-free for so long that their risk of recurrence is negligible. Fine. You could call that a cure.

'''C:''' Then they're cured.

'''S:''' You can call that a cure if you want to. That's fine. That's a reasonable shorthand.

'''C:''' I guess I have a hard time with it because it's so common in the general public that people don't fully understand that cancer is more of a process, that it's not one disease. And so I feel like it just confuses things further to talk about potential cures.

'''S:''' I do agree with that. And also, there's something that we call the honeymoon period. So the usual course of many cancers, not all, obviously, but is you get diagnosed, you get treated, which could include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy if necessary, whatever, the standard course of treatment. You're done with that treatment, and the cancer is removed or shrunk or whatever. But we don't know if we got all of it or if it's going to come back. You're in the honeymoon phase where anyone can feel as if they're cured because the immediate effects and signs and symptoms of the cancer are gone. But we don't use the term cured because you're still within the period of high risk for recurrence. We don't know if we got it all yet or if the chemotherapy worked, et cetera. And so that's often the phase, though, where people come out and say, I cured myself with this natural, all natural crap because they're in the honeymoon phase. It's easy to make that claim when you're in the honeymoon phase, right? Because everyone feels like they're cured at that point in time, especially if you've had the surgery or whatever. It doesn't really become a meaningful claim until you've survived beyond the bell curve, right? Beyond the survival curve for somebody with your type and stage and et cetera of cancer. But then you often don't hear about them when the cancer comes back two years later.

'''E:''' That's right.

'''S:''' And also what they do is they'll take the fake natural treatment instead of chemotherapy. And then because they go three or four years without a recurrence, they say that it worked. But with breast cancer, if you have the lumpectomy or surgery, that's 85% right there, right? You're already down to only like a 15% recurrence rate. And then the chemotherapy doesn't really treat the cancer or get rid of the cancer. It just reduces the risk of recurrence. It drops it to like 7%. So somebody who does the surgery but skips the chemotherapy and then takes a natural treatment and feels like that worked, well, you have no idea. Chances are you weren't going to get it back anyway. You're still 85% likely of not having a recurrence, which is great. And that is the pattern that they use to tell their anecdote and convince the public that their natural treatment worked and they did it instead of the standard therapy or instead of chemotherapy. But you have to actually be a physician, hopefully an oncologist, and know how these things normally play out and know the statistics to be able to even interpret what's happening, which is why David Gorski is always writing about this, correcting the record. But it doesn't make for the sexy headlines as man given 18 months to live cures himself with cannabis oil. That's a little bit more exciting.

=== Washington DC is Sinking (33:12) ===
* http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150728101212.htm

'''S:''' All right, Jay, I understand that Washington DC is sinking.

'''E:''' What are you sinking?

'''S:''' So predictable, so predictable.

'''J:''' So have you guys ever heard of a four bulge collapse? I know that this sounds like Bob's sex life, but it's actually something important that we should pay attention to. So the latest research has confirmed that the land under the Chesapeake Bay is sinking.

'''E:''' You mean the swamp is sinking? Who would have thought that?

'''J:''' So this is the bay found, where is it? It's near Washington DC in the United States. The researchers determined that the area of land that DC is located on could drop by more than six inches in the next hundred years. Six inches. So, of course, that would dramatically affect the coastal area. What would it do?

'''S:''' Especially if the ocean is rising, it'll exacerbate the loss of the coastline.

'''J:''' Yeah, of course. So the shore would creep. It would threaten things like wildlife refuges and, of course, military installations. Yep. And in DC, all those monuments could be washed out. So measurements over the past 60 years that they've been taking have indicated that the sea level in that area has actually been rising two times faster than the average rate compared to other test areas on the East Coast in the United States. Right? That's interesting too. So this might sound odd, but there seems to be a logical reason and it's not Bob's sex life, but it is called the Four Bulge Collapse. I just can't stop laughing when I think about that. So as the prehistoric North American ice sheet formed during the last ice age, that thing reached as high as a mile. A mile. And it came down as far as Long Island, New York.

'''E:''' Yep. And all that debris along with it.

'''J:''' Yeah, I actually read somewhere that Long Island was made out of the debris that the shelf was pushing. I don't know how accurate that is.

'''S:''' Well, those kind of structures like Long Island and Cape Cod specifically, those are glacial geological features. Whenever you see that, you know a glacier has been there.

'''J:''' So if you picture, you visualize this frigging ice shelf that existed and all the weight that it was pushing down, it was like so hard pushing down on the landmass that it was sitting on, it actually pushes the landmass up in other areas. Right? So Ben de Jong, the lead author of the recent published study said, this is a really cool thing he said, it's a bit like sitting on one side of a water bed that's filled with very thick honey and then the other side goes up. But when you stand, the bulge comes down again. But you would think you'd have to push really hard to push that honey on the other side of the bed, but it will slowly push, right? So that's what that ice shelf was doing to the actual landmass. And now that it's gone, I mean, it's really gone now. Of course, there is still some ice mass there, but it's nothing compared to what it was. The ground is coming back down. As the ice plate, the ice mass continues to decrease and that weight decreases and the ocean levels rise, that's it. There's nothing stopping it. Now this is, of course, you could blame man-made global warming and things like that. But this thing is going to do this. This is going to take place over the next 100 years, no matter what happens.

'''S:''' I think it's going to continue happening for thousands of years too. It's not done yet.

'''J:''' Yeah, but in 100 years, the water level will have gone up. However you want it, wherever the water line is right now, it'll be up six inches more.

'''C:''' So what does that translate to? How low is DC now? How long until there's actually... How long until the mall is flooded?

'''J:''' Well, I would think that if we say in 100 years, it's going to go up six inches. I mean, I've seen simulations of what the slow creep of the rising sea level would do. And six inches is a lot more than it sounds.

'''C:''' Yeah. Especially if you're already close to sea level.

'''S:''' All right, I have to interject my little bit of pedantry, Jay.

'''J:''' What do you got?

'''S:''' You called it the Ice Age, which is a popular term, but it's actually really the last glacial period.

'''J:''' Oh, whenever. Whenever cavemen and dinosaurs coexisted, okay? You saw it on TV.

'''S:''' We're in the current Ice Age right now, which goes back about a million years.

'''J:''' A million years, yeah.

'''S:''' Two million years.

'''J:''' Two million, right, exactly.

'''S:''' Yeah, and the Ice Age has periodic glaciations. The most recent one was the one that was from 110 to 12,000 years ago.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' That's right. Thanks.

'''E:''' Wooly mammoth time.

'''S:''' Right, exactly. And then when the glaciers melted, then there was mass extinction on the North American continent.

'''J:''' Speaking of wooly mammoths, come on. Are you telling me that early man or Neanderthals didn't ride those guys? Like, come on.

'''C:''' No, they ate them.

'''J:''' Yeah, but they had to ride them. I mean, where do you think George Lucas got the idea in Star Wars?

'''S:''' Yeah, that's true. All right, but you know what else, Jay? You know what else? It's time for Who's That Noisy.

== Who's That Noisy (38:25) ==
* Answer to last week - longest interior echo

'''J:''' Who is that noisy? Okay, so last week I played a sound, or this was weeks ago, Steve. How far away are we going now?

'''S:''' Whatever, you bring us up to date.

'''J:''' I'm bringing you up to date. When last we had played Who's That Noisy, I played you this sound. [plays Noisy] It's going to keep going. Any guesses?

'''B:''' Is that a supernova?

'''J:''' Nope. Anybody else?

'''E:''' It started with a bang of some kind.

'''C:''' Some sort of like a firework?

'''S:''' Well, I heard last time that it had a really long tail.

'''J:''' Yeah, it did.

'''B:''' Gamma ray burst.

'''J:''' So check this out. All right, so first, the person that guessed it was Mark McDonald. Good guess, Mark.

'''E:''' He had a farm.

'''J:''' Mark actually knew exactly what it was. This is the world's longest interior echo, and it was produced in an old oil storage tank in Rossshire, Scotland. Now, these tanks were created between 1939 and 1941 to provide a huge bomb-proof reserve supply of furnace oil for the warships of the home fleet against the growing German threat. Alan Kilpatrick, an archaeologist, investigator, and Trevor Cox, who is a professor of acoustic engineering, shot a gun inside one of these giant, and when I say giant, I mean giant. It doesn't look real when you look at the picture. It looks fake. These giant storage tanks, and they echo lasted 112 seconds.

'''B:''' Can you use them for propulsion in spaceships?

'''J:''' Guys, as a quick comparison, guess how long the previous record was?

'''E:''' Four foot one.

'''B:''' 42 seconds.

'''E:''' 12 seconds.

'''C:''' Yeah, I'm going to go 12.

'''J:''' All right, Steve?

'''S:''' 13.

'''J:''' 15 seconds.

'''E:''' Damn it, Steve.

'''J:''' We went from 15 seconds to 112.

'''S:''' I price is righted you.

'''E:''' Totally. I hate that.

'''J:''' So the tanks were designed to hold 25.5 million liters of fuel and has a wall that's 45 centimeters thick. The space is about twice the length of a football field, nine meters wide and 13.5 meters high.

'''C:''' Jeez.

'''B:''' That's gargantuan.

'''J:''' Moving forward, this week's Who's That Noisy. [plays Noisy]

'''S:''' What is it about that that you want us to identify?

'''J:''' I just want you to listen to that and tell me what I'm hearing.

'''S:''' Okay.

'''B:''' Okay. All right.

'''J:''' Now, so Cara, you don't know this, but I'm about to tell you where people want to write in. They write into WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

== Interview with Kevin Folta (43:15) ==
* https://gmoanswers.com/experts/kevin-folta
* Bizarre GMO report
* GMO Soybeans loaded with Formaldehyde

'''S:''' All right. Well, let's go on with our interview with Kevin Folta. Joining us now is Kevin Folta. Kevin, welcome back to the Skeptic's Guide.

'''KF:''' Hey, great to be here again.

'''S:''' And Kevin is a professor and chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida in Gainesville. You have your PhD in molecular biology and you're one of those guys who futzes around with plant genetics, right?

'''KF:''' Yeah, that's what we do. We try to use genomics tools to make better tasting fruit crops.

'''S:''' Right. I've sampled some of the – I guess they were the rootstocks of strawberries that you're, some of your research focuses on strawberries and those were quite delicious.

'''KF:''' Oh, that's right. Yeah, last year I sent you a whole bunch of different varieties that were not things you could buy in the store. And hopefully those are still productive for you.

'''S:''' They didn't do well over the winter, I got to be honest with you. They didn't winter well up here. We had a really, really cold winter and a lot of my plants didn't survive.

'''KF:''' Yeah, that happens. But maybe the future of genetic engineering can install some cold tolerance that can survive a winter up there.

'''E:''' That would be cool.

'''S:''' That would be nice. So, Kevin, I wanted to bring you up back on the show to talk about a very interesting story that I came across. This actually happened over – this happened mainly in 2013. But it is, in my opinion, it was like a perfect example of what is happening within the mainstream anti-GMO activist movement. Their anti-science activities really is shocking. So can you give us a summary? This was a stunning corn comparison that was published in March of 2013 on a website, Moms Across America by Zen Honeycutt. Was that group formally called Moms Against Monsanto or are those two different groups?

'''KF:''' I'm not sure. I think they are one and the same, but it certainly is Moms Across America has a very strong anti-GMO, anti-Monsanto bend. So I wouldn't doubt it.

'''S:''' So tell us what happened.

'''KF:''' Well, this is interesting because I got an email from a friend of mine that said, how do you explain this? It talked about something called the stunning corn comparison. It was allegedly a data table that was comparing GMO versus non-GMO corn and a breakdown of the relative nutrient content of both types. When you analyze the information, the bottom line that they wanted you to see was that these two things were like apples and oranges, that GMO corn was from outer space and loaded with toxic stuff like formaldehyde and glyphosate. Any kind of compound that was ever potentially construed as negative, the levels were very high. Those looked at as very positive. The levels were low or non-existent. If you looked at the data carefully, you saw that this really wasn't a test of a biological material. The numbers didn't make sense about something that would come from something alive.

'''S:''' I don't think you had to look at it that carefully to figure that out, to be honest with you. I glanced at this table and immediately, like the first line is available energy. The non-GMO corn is 340,000, whatever units they were using, and the GMO corn was 100. So that means, if I'm doing this right, that's 3,004 times as much energy in non-GMO corn than GMO corn. That's impossible. I mean, what the hell are they talking about? It's like they're not even—immediately, I think anybody with the slightest amount of scientific literacy would say, there's something not right here. This is like incompatible with a living organism.

'''KF:''' Yes. And when you go down the table, the next one, percent bricks, they say it's 1%, which bricks is a measure of soluble solids. And so corn to have 1% bricks has never happened. And as you go down the table further, you start seeing terms that don't make sense. Things like cation exchange capacity. What the heck is that in testing a biological material? And then as you begin to go through this table, you start to see terms that aren't compatible with what you would test for in a corn sample or soybean sample. And it turns out that this is really an analysis of soil. And this is a soil table that was made to analyze soil. They took some soil numbers and then substituted in their own to make it look really scary.

'''S:''' This has to be fake, right? I mean, this isn't a mistake. It's hard for me to imagine this is anything other than fraud, just a hoax, if you will.

'''KF:''' That was my first inclination was that these are just fabricated numbers. And whether or not it was moms across America that did it, these allegedly came from a company called ProfitPro in conjunction with a guy named Harold Vlieger who allegedly produced these data. And there was kind of a paper trail as to where this came from at one time. I think most of those websites are gone now. Yet the moms across America stood by these data. And when I mentioned on their website, assuming at the time that maybe they just made a mistake or that they had been fooled, they went after me big time. And they certainly were upset by the idea that somebody had called them out that they were promoting false data or fabricated data. And to this day, they stand by it as though this is legitimate.

'''E:''' Oh, wow.

'''S:''' Yeah, they really doubled down. Reading the comments to their post where they present this report, they call it a report because it's not really a study. It hasn't been published. It's not peer reviewed. So they call it a report, right? So they're not claiming it's an actual study. But the operator of the blog, Zen Honeycutt, essentially says, hey, it doesn't matter if this is real or not. Stop questioning it. This is information we're giving to parents so they could make decisions to protect their children. That was basically her position.

'''KF:''' And that's a position she maintained. And throughout this entire process, I've always reached out to her. People I know have had rather unfavorable interactions with her. Yet I've always maintained the idea that maybe she was misled and that it gave her the benefit of the doubt that someone was pulling her chain. And as somebody who was an anti-GMO activist and very much leaning that direction, this kind of favorable bias would certainly be compatible with her worldview and therefore promoted. So I did the next logical thing. I said, well, let's replicate those numbers. And so we talked a little bit about that just in conversation online. And she put me in touch with who is Dr. May Wan Ho and said, talk to them about replicating the study. The big issue was, is that when I tried to get the info, it started out great. Dr. Ho says, this is wonderful, we'll replicate this, we'll do a great job, we'll show you that this is toxic corn. And all those email exchanges are on my blog. And others were involved in the thread, such as the person who was allegedly the origin of the original table, this Harold Vlieger guy, and Don Huber, this former plant pathologist from Purdue, who claims that there's a secret organism that's killing people, livestock and plants. And he's got his own credulous set of claims. So I asked her if she would do this and they were on board. They were excited to do this. And I really was starting to think they must have just got some bad information that maybe they thought this was legit.

'''S:''' But then they pulled the plug before they did the study.

'''KF:''' Yeah, I had everybody ready to go. I was trying to source the materials. And I said, it would be great to have the lines that you looked at. Give me the, if we can have access to the same seeds or the same seed lines, same plants. We'd like to grow them in a variety of different environments. We had farmers lined up in Wisconsin, Indiana and Florida to grow the seeds. We had this all ready to roll, except for we couldn't find out from them what the materials were that they used. And as this started to get increasingly real and as we held their feet to the fire, and as I said, the only thing I'm asking is that I need you to be an author on this paper. Then all of a sudden they said, we're going a different direction.

'''J:''' What was the direction?

'''E:''' Away from you.

'''KF:''' That's right. Away from the scientist. I was just asking for evidence and asking to replicate their claim. And I was being kind about this because I didn't want to dismiss out of hand something that they may have considered to be reputable data and give them the benefit of the doubt. But when the light of day comes onto your situation and you scurry away, it's quite telling.

'''S:''' Yeah. I mean the doubt in this case about who knows what is actually quite irrelevant because their behavior is what matters. So you showed me, or I think it was in the email exchange was published on your blog, and they essentially said, well, we decided not to do this with you because you're pro-GMO. And your response was, no, I'm not pro-GMO, I'm pro-science. The science just happens to support the position that genetic modification is a safe and effective technology. And if it said otherwise, I'd believe that, whatever the science says, right? So they don't get that difference, you know. That reply makes no sense. This is how you resolve differences in science. The two opposing sides get together. They agree on a protocol that will resolve their difference. They sign off on it, and they agree to sign off on the results, and then that's it. The results are what they are. But they were unwilling to do that. They were unwilling to put their nickel down on actual evidence, which I do think speaks absolute volumes. This affair, the reason why I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about this, because this is this is a group. This is an activist group, this Moms Across America, that, among other things, is anti-GMO. And the whole exchange reveals so many things. As I said, if you look at this report, this GMO corn versus non-GMO corn, as you say, they don't mention specific cultivars or anything. It's not the actual kind of information that a scientific report would have. But if you look down these numbers, it's clear that they think that GMO crops are not even real. It's not even food. The fact that they would believe this report speaks volumes about what they think. Like I love there's one line that just says chemical content. What does that even mean? Chemical content was huge, of course, it was like 60, it's parts per million, like 60, and zero for the non-GMO, because non-GMO corn has no chemicals in it.

'''E:''' Well, Steve, the other categories, there are chlorides, formaldehyde, glyphosate, all these very scary, scary terms.

'''S:''' In red, yeah. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about was I know recently you had a very similar run in. So there's another scientist who's now claiming that his study shows that GM soybeans are loaded with evil formaldehyde. You remember this?

'''KF:''' Ah, this is so good. I love this, because this is a guy named Dr. Shiva Adhidurai, and he claims to be a systems biologist. And so systems biology, for people who don't know the discipline, it's where we take data from a variety of reports and a variety of information sources, build a computational model that integrates that information to help us make predictions about other genes or other factors that may influence or may be influenced to give us, let's say, a model of new genes or new processes that may be affected. It's a way of integrating multiple data sources to get some sort of output. And what he published in Agricultural Sciences, a rather low-impact journal, is a computer simulation that at the end says that GMO soybeans, compared to non-GMO, are loaded with formaldehyde. And, of course, decreased in glutathione, which is an antioxidant. And what was really sad about this is that he publishes this in this journal, and I'm thinking, oh, I hope this just goes away. I don't even want to deal with listening to what's going to happen here. But within days, the activist media, the websites exploded, GMO soybeans full of formaldehyde. So here's a computer prediction that makes a testable hypothesis that, if it's true, you would be able to measure the formaldehyde levels. But no one measured it. No one looked at whether the model was valid. They just went with the conclusion. And sadly, all of these rather credulous websites that are in the business to scare the hell out of parents, concern people, to scare them away from good food, are now bearing this title of full of formaldehyde in your soybeans. So I, right away, and this was on Twitter, reached out to Dr. Ayadurai through various mechanisms and said, OK, let's do the test. And we've arranged a laboratory in Minnesota that will measure the formaldehyde levels, an independent laboratory. I'm paying for this personally out of pocket. And I said, join me with this. Let's do this together. You're a co-author. And he has not responded. Today I found my first samples of soybeans with their corresponding isolines. I have more coming this week. And we will do the test to validate or to refute his model. And this is something where he should be involved. He should be so excited to have a scientist poised and ready to test his conclusion. Unfortunately, he's not doing it. And he's actually going all over the internet speaking on these various platforms, talking about the formaldehyde-laced soybeans. So he's refusing to do the test, yet he and his wife, Fran Drescher, are saying that we need new testing standards for GM crops, but just let's not test this first batch.

'''S:''' Let's not confirm my model. Let's not do any preliminary testing. Let's just run with it because it says what we want it to say.

'''KF:''' Right. And as I put in my blog, I said it's like you did a model of a computational model that predicts Munich is off the coast near Tampa. And you automatically now start planning your trip to Oktoberfest, getting in the boat and heading out that way. If you make a prediction that is totally wrong and inconsistent with everything we know about science and metabolism and plant product content, it doesn't mean that it's true. It means that you need to redo your model and it means at least you have to test your model to determine whether or not what you're claiming is true. And I've been really lucky to have these opportunities like with Zen Honeycutt, with Don Huber and his pathogen, and now with Shiva Adhiduri to be able to say, let's do the test. Because when you ask them to do the test, they run.

'''S:''' Yeah. So we often make comparisons between like the hardcore anti-GMO activists and the anti-vaccine community and their behavior is really the same. They're just making up their own science. They're making up their own propaganda. They're not interested in what is really, really true as is I think clearly demonstrated by these episodes and the fact that they're so unwilling to do that. I mean, it's absolutely irresponsible to run to the public with sensational conclusions that have not been validated, which is what Shiva is doing.

'''KF:''' Yes, and making it very visible and he's going out there and not saying, here's a hypothesis we can test. Let's do the next step. He's going out and saying, we need to change the laws and it's maybe no coincidence that this work, which if you look at the submitted and accepted date, were just a couple, it was very short time, shorter time than anything ever gets peer reviewed these days. It coincided precisely with the votes on GMO labeling, on national policy towards GMO labeling and what's going on as a dialogue in the House of Representatives and Senate. And so there's a very aggressive movement underfoot right now to introduce that modicum of question and that modicum of suspicion, just that one in a million chance that something might be wrong. To put the fear, that one possible possibility into the ears of our leaders in hoping to gain their favor for a political reason. And I think it's really wrong.

'''S:''' Yes, do you think they're just doing this to create some fear and doubt about GMOs right at the time where this is being debated in the Senate.

'''KF:''' It's to do that, and it's also to mobilize their organizations and their followings and the people who are the anti-GMO movement. Get them fired up about calling their Congress people. Get them to march with a sign. And let's ignore the science, as usual, and let's go after conflating bogus issues to try to scare parents away from transgenic food and transgenic technology. What they don't realize is that these are technologies that can have tremendous benefits for us and do have tremendous benefits. And I look at my laboratory and other laboratories in our country where we've solved problems that are important. Like citrus screening, the disease in our state, could be solved with a GMO solution. The problem is, is that this kind of fear keeps those technologies from advancing and keeps the good technology out of the people that need it the most.

'''S:''' Yeah, I agree. All right, well, Kevin, you keep up the good work. We'll keep plugging away. Hopefully, we could start to make some progress in this area.

'''KF:''' Well, thank you so much. And I will let you know if anybody steps up to the plate to actually test the science that they claim.

'''S:''' Yeah, keep us up to date on that. We'll maybe bring you back for a follow-up if you actually do this study.

'''KF:''' Oh, yeah, we're going to do it for sure. I'm going to do it fast so that we can let a little air out of this balloon and stop these activists from stealing places in our literature, using it to scare people away from food. It stops here.

'''S:''' Yeah, awesome. All right, take care, Kevin.

'''KF:''' All right, thank you.

== Science or Fiction (1:02:05) ==
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150729215735.htm Item #1]: Scientists have created the first artificial ribosome, which is able to manufacture proteins.
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150730130727.htm Item #2]: In an extreme case of convergent evolution, DNA analysis indicates that the East African golden jackal is actually more closely related to lions than to jackals.
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150717092303.htm Item #3]: Researchers have released a new variety of peanut that has a shelf life 10 times that of current varieties, with greater disease resistance and a healthier fatty acid profile.

''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Cara, you're at 100%.

'''C:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right, let's see how you do this week.

'''C:''' Uh-oh.

'''S:''' Here we go. Number one, scientists have created the first artificial ribosome, which is able to manufacture proteins. Item number two, in an extreme case of convergent evolution, DNA analysis indicates that the East African golden jackal is actually more closely related to lions than to jackals. Item number three, researchers have released a new variety of peanut that has a shelf life 10 times that of current varieties with greater disease resistance and a healthier fatty acid profile. Evan, go first.

'''E:''' Scientists supposedly have created the first artificial ribosome able to manufacture proteins. Very handy. I imagine all the things you can do with that. The genetic engineering involved here is off the charts as far as I'm concerned.

'''S:''' Do you want to know what a ribosome is, Evan? It's an organelle inside cells that make proteins from RNA.

'''E:''' RNA.

'''S:''' Which comes from the DNA.

'''C:''' They're what make the rough endoplasmic reticulum. Rough.

'''S:''' Mm-hmm.

'''E:''' Now, I'll remember that for a long time. Exactly.

'''B:''' It's a biological nanomachine.

'''E:''' Well, regardless, scientists creating artificial ones, that's quite a feat of engineering, no matter how you cut it, no matter what it is. The next one, DNA analysis indicates that the East African golden jackal is actually more closely related to lions than to jackals. Oh, gosh. I know nothing about jackals.

'''C:''' Can somebody tell me what a jackal is? Is that bad that I don't know what a jackal is?

'''J:''' I'll tell you after Science or Fiction.

'''C:''' Okay. Don't tell me now. All right.

'''J:''' Don't cheat.

'''E:''' More closely related to lions, maybe. I really have no idea about that one. I'm so off the reservation. The last one, researchers have released a new variety of peanut. It has a shelf life 10 times of current varieties. Okay. Greater disease resistance, healthier fatty acid profile. Well, Bob will be pleased with this. He is the peanut butter aficionado of the group. I don't have a problem with this one. This is exactly the type of research we're doing trying to get our food to last longer and be more healthy for us so we can live nice, happy lives and spread all that goodness around the world. So it's down to the artificial ribosome or the jackal. More closely related to lions. Well, I'll say it's the jackal one as the fiction only because I really am in the dark on that one. I think regarding the artificial ribosomes, scientists have gone ahead and made that leap. Yeah, jackals I think is the fiction.

'''S:''' All righty, Bob.

'''B:''' Okay. The artificial ribosome. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm really a little shocked that they could construct something so small to manufacture proteins. I suspect that it would be very basic, being able to create very, very simple proteins. I normally probably would consider this one to be fiction, but I'm not going to. The peanut one. Yeah, whatever. I mean, sure. I mean, there's nothing there that's standing out, that's leaping out at me. But number two, convergent evolution, I see a big problem with this one that I think it's – I just hope it's not because it's unfortunately worded. Because what you're doing here is saying that convergent evolution is essentially the same as genetic propinquity, I'll say. And that is bullshit.

'''S:''' No, no. You're misinterpreting it. So let me explain it to you.

'''B:''' Please do.

'''S:''' The convergent evolution is that a big cat looked so much like a jackal that people misidentified it as a jackal. So the East African golden jackal was misidentified as a jackal. And now recent DNA analysis said, whoops, it's not a jackal. It's actually more closely related to a lion. Now you get it?

'''B:''' Shit.

'''C:''' I love how stressed out this makes everybody.

'''J:''' Mostly Bob.

'''E:''' It's not like we win $10,000, is it, Steve?

'''S:''' So the question is, did they confuse a cat for a jackal?

'''B:''' Right.

'''S:''' That's the question.

'''B:''' Oh, man. I went through a lot of damn news sites. None of this came up. I don't know what – I'll say the convergent one is bullshit anyway. I'll say it's fiction. Whatever.

'''S:''' All right. Cara?

'''C:''' The artificial ribosome seems legit. It's true. It seems small, but we have so many cool kind of nanomaterials now that I could see this happening and could really open up a lot of new avenues, I think, like medical treatments and things like that. So I'm excited about that one and I'm going to say that that one is true. For me, it's between two and three. The reason is because, as you guys said before, there's nothing going on with three. Sometimes they're deceptively simple. I know that I've read recently that researchers are working on peanuts that are low allergen, but there's nothing in this about it not causing an allergy. So that's kind of throwing me. And two is throwing me because I still don't know what the freak a jackal is. I feel like if I were more aware of my East African golden animals, I might be more comfortable with this one. But you know what? I think if they're working on a peanut that has a reduction in allergens, maybe some of these things could come along the way greater disease resistance, longer shelf life. So I'm going to go ahead and say that the peanut thing is real. The ribosome is real. I'm going to say the jackal one is not real, mostly because I don't know what a jackal is.

'''E:''' There you go.

'''S:''' And Jay.

'''E:''' That's how I got there.

'''J:''' Yeah. So just to take these quickly in order, the one about the ribosome, I see no reason to not believe it because just out of the sheer volume of testing and manipulation that scientists are doing, I think the devil is in the details on this one. And when we say created the first artificial ribosome, like what do we mean by artificial? With a moderately loose definition of artificial, yeah, I could see them taking an existing ribosome, modifying it and saying this is a new one. So I'll just say that one is science. Bouncing to the third one about the peanut. Absolutely. Of course. Yeah. There I don't know if this is a genetically modified peanut or if it's been selectively bred, but yes, we could this is the types of things that even Kevin Folta is doing to pull out properties that we want. So yes, that one is science. I really don't believe the one with the jackal mix up the way Steve described it at all. The thing is like that type of animal is not even close to a lion. They're two very different kinds of animals.

'''C:''' No fair. You know what a jackal is.

'''J:''' I do. I do know what a jackal is. Yeah. So whatever. This is, I think Steve swapped out something because the jackal has nothing to do with a lion. They don't even really look like each other.

'''C:''' So you think this is a real story, but it's a different animal.

'''J:''' They're all real based on something real.

'''C:''' Gotcha.

'''J:''' But it's not a lion. It's something else. That's it. So Steve, I know what you did here.

'''S:''' Okay. You think you do, Jay. I guess we'll take these in order. You guys all went for the second one about the jackal, but we'll start with the first one. Scientists have created the first artificial ribosome, which is able to manufacture proteins. You all think this one is science, and this one is-

'''B:''' Say it.

'''S:''' Science.

'''B:''' Yeah, baby. Tell me about it. How big is it? Is it big?

'''E:''' Is it in a plant?

'''S:''' No, it's small, like a ribosome.

'''B:''' Whoa.

'''S:''' Yeah. So they've been having trouble doing this for a while because they couldn't get it to keep together because there are two sort of subcomponents of the ribosome, and they kept falling apart every time they tried to have it make a protein from an mRNA. But they finally figured out how to stitch it together. So this is called a riboT, a new study published in the journal Nature. RiboT may be used to create functioning polymers. Polymers are proteins, basically. Well, technically, a protein is a polymer that's folded into a specific shape. Did you know that?

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah, the polymer is just a string of amino acids, and when you fold it into a protein, the protein has the functionality. In fact, they were able to keep bacteria alive with just the artificial ribosome making its protein.

'''B:''' Whoa.

'''C:''' Cool.

'''B:''' What the hell?

'''S:''' So they are pretty confident that it's actually working. Now, this could have a ton of applications. We could use this to make protein-based drugs, for example. You could get a vat of these ribosomes.

'''J:''' Cranking it out, yeah.

'''S:''' Cranking it out, yeah. So this could have industrial uses in medicine or in research that is quite promising. This would be a protein-making factory.

'''C:''' Or fuel. Yeah, lots of cool things.

'''S:''' Yeah. And also, Bob, this is like one more step on the way to synthetic biology.

'''B:''' Shit, yeah, man. Absolutely.

'''S:''' All right, let's go to number two in an extreme case of convergent evolution DNA analysis indicates that the East African golden jackal is actually more closely related to lions than to jackals.

'''J:''' Steve, can I dump my info now?

'''S:''' Yeah, go ahead.

'''J:''' All right. So I happen to know this because I have a two-and-a-half-year-old. The golden jackal is also called the reed wolf. Yes, and they're just small.

'''B:''' What the hell?

'''J:''' They're small wild dogs. So it's got to be a wolf. It's not a fucking lion. It's got to be.

'''S:''' Yeah, you're exactly right. It's a wolf.

'''J:''' I knew it.

'''C:''' So what are normal jackals? Will somebody please tell me what a jackal is?

'''B:''' Google it. Google it.

'''C:''' Oh, I can now. Okay.

'''J:''' They all look amazingly similar except some coloring and spotting and whatnot. But jackals are really cool wild dogs. They're actually really cool.

'''S:''' They're all in the family Canis. They're all in the dog family.

'''C:''' Gotcha.

'''S:''' So there are two species, the Eurasian golden jackal and the East African golden jackal. They were actually thought to be two populations of the same species.

'''J:''' I thought they were the same thing.

'''S:''' Yeah, they were the same thing. And then they did DNA analysis and like, holy crap, the East African golden jackal is actually a wolf. It's not a jackal at all. It probably separated from its common ancestor with jackals a million years ago. So they were off by a million years of evolution. That's not trivial.

'''J:''' They look like foxes, you know?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''C:''' They do. It's a little foxy.

'''S:''' Yeah, I thought it was more foxy than jackally, than like a jackal.

'''C:''' The jackals look foxy.

'''S:''' Yeah. But if you look at the East African golden jackal, it does look like, to me, it looks like a wolf. Very pretty, though. Beautiful golden black fur. Very, very pretty animals.

'''J:''' Now, in the Lion King, Steve, weren't the jackals like the kind of evil guys?

'''S:''' Those are the hyenas.

'''J:''' Right. Those are the hyenas.

'''C:''' And I know hyenas. Why do I not know what a jackal is?

'''S:''' I don't know. There was a gap in your knowledge.

'''J:''' They look like little wolves, and they're adorable.

'''C:''' It's so weird, though, that this is just an animal that I'm unaware of. It's just like he's kind of shit on at the zoo. He's not out in front, I guess, because I do not recognize him.

'''S:''' It is amazing how little knowledge we have about the animal kingdom, just like the average person.

'''C:''' Seriously.

'''S:''' It's true, because we hear about the same animals over and over again. We have this very simplified view, this sort of Noah's Ark simplified view of the animal kingdom. Yeah, there's giraffes and elephants.

'''E:''' There's 26. One for each one letter of the alphabet.

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. But when you start to read about any family or group of animals, you realize, oh, my God, the diversity within this group is so much more massive than how it gets simplified and distilled down. It's amazing. That's why I love reading about that.

'''E:''' Tamers, lemurs.

'''S:''' Yeah, there's so much diversity out there. Even in large mammals, you'd think we would know all the large mammals.

'''C:''' But yeah, we don't.

'''S:''' It's surprising.

'''C:''' You know, I was wearing a sweater the other day, and it's 50% yak. And I know of a yak, but I was like, I don't know if I've ever seen a yak.

'''S:''' They don't live around here.

'''C:''' What a weird thing. But even at a zoo or anything. And that's the same thing with jackals. I've totally heard the word. It's not like when you said jackal, I was like, what is this magical word you are saying? I've heard the word so many times. I literally had no idea what it was referring to.

'''J:''' Well, it's amazing how much you learn when you have kids. I mean, all I do is look at animal books and animal videos.

'''S:''' Well, yeah, I got into birding with my daughter, Julia. And then you realize, oh, my goodness. Even in your backyard, the diversity of birds you just were completely blind to is amazing. Which means that researchers have released a new variety of peanut that has a shelf life ten times that of current varieties with greater disease resistance and a healthier fatty acid profile is science. Bob, are you excited?

'''B:''' Yeah, it's all right. It's all right.

'''E:''' Oh, he's beyond. He can't even speak.

'''S:''' He's stunned. Stunned into silence.

'''B:''' I mean, what the hell?

'''J:''' He won.

'''B:''' What's the relation to peanut butter?

'''S:''' Yeah, everyone did. Swept me. Swept me. I didn't sell the jackal lion to you.

'''C:''' Wait, so when we win, does that mean you lose, Steve? No, we all, everyone wins.

'''J:''' Yes, yes.

'''B:''' Oh, he cries himself to sleep.

'''S:''' Cara, did you have fun?

'''C:''' I had fun, so I guess I'm a winner.

'''J:''' Cara, when we sweep Steve, Steve doesn't give us shit. When Steve sweeps us, he can go fuck himself. You can just hear it in his voice. He has a little bounce in his step.

'''C:''' Oh, trust me. We are from the same. We are cut of the same cloth because I am the biggest shit talker for no reason because I never win at anything, but I love shit talking when I do.

'''S:''' All right, so the Olay peanuts. These are called Olay because they're Spanish. That's not why they're called. That's not why they are Spanish. That's not why they're called Olay. They're called Olay peanuts. They are also called Spanish peanuts, but they are high in Olayic acid.

'''C:''' Oh, that makes sense.

'''S:''' Yes. Olay for Olayic acid. That's one of the types of fatty acids in peanuts. Another type is linoleic acid. Now, there's an important difference between linoleic acid and Olayic acid. Linoleic acid has more double bonds between the carbon and the hydrogen, and it is those double bonds which break down over time, which cause peanuts to taste rancid. Have you guys ever tasted rancid peanuts?

'''J:''' Terrible.

'''S:''' Hence the term rancid.

'''E:''' Disgusting.

'''S:''' Yeah, they're bad. They're bad. So that's the breakdown of the double bonds in the fatty acids. So Olayic acid has fewer double bonds. It lasts much longer. In fact, the shelf life of these Olay peanuts, they estimate will be 10 times that of the previous popular cultivar of Spanish peanuts.

'''C:''' Interesting.

'''B:''' Did you know that peanut butter lasts a long time? But you know what spoils peanut butter? It's when you get stuff in the peanut butter from the other things that you're making with your sandwich or whatever.

'''S:''' Like jelly.

'''B:''' That's the stuff that makes it nasty.

'''C:''' That's funny.

'''S:''' And it gets moldy.

'''B:''' Keep it pure. Keep it pure.

'''J:''' Cara, do you love peanut butter?

'''C:''' I actually am not a peanut butter eater.

'''B:''' Good. More for me.

'''C:''' Is that terrible? Yeah, more for you.

'''B:''' That's good.

'''C:''' I don't know. I'll eat it if it's like there, but I'm not somebody who's like, I just want a Reese's peanut butter cup.

'''E:''' Or if it's baked into something.

'''S:''' I'll take a spoon and just take a huge spoonful of creamy peanut butter and just eat it right off the spoon.

'''C:''' Yeah, I don't have that.

'''B:''' Peanut butter and chocolate is magic. Such synergy. But here's something. Here's something. I read years ago that peanut butter is essentially an American phenomenon and it's like a male phenomenon. That's like the biggest demographic for peanut butter.

'''C:''' Boys like peanut butter.

'''J:''' Bob, more of a guy thing.

'''C:''' Weird.

'''B:''' I remember reading that years ago.

'''E:''' Don't say that on Facebook. You'll get bashed.

'''J:''' Peanut butter was created to save people's lives for real.

'''C:''' What?

'''J:''' Yes, it was created. God, I can't remember the details.

'''B:''' Saved my life.

'''J:''' I think it was a priest who was trying to feed old people and they needed to give them something they didn't have to chew that had protein and had a caloric value, had nutritional value. And peanut butter was like perfect because it's actually good for you.

'''C:''' It's like Plumpy Nut. Have you heard of Plumpy Nut?

'''S:''' Didn't George Washington Carver invent peanut butter?

'''E:''' No, that's a myth.

'''C:''' That's a myth?

'''E:''' That's a myth.

'''J:''' No, but he used to grow weed.

'''E:''' He didn't invent it. He may have manufactured it, but I don't think he would do it. He wasn't the first one to do it. Yes, that was debunked by Seth MacFarlane of all people.

'''S:''' Yeah. While he may have made peanut butter, the preparation arose in other cultures independently. The Aztecs were known to have made ground peanuts. Wow.

'''C:''' Interesting.

'''S:''' That's cool.

'''C:''' I prefer an almond butter myself.

'''E:''' Oh, that's Jennifer. My wife eats almond butter.

'''J:''' It's expensive as crap though.

'''E:''' It's very expensive.

'''C:''' It is expensive, but I don't really like peanuts.

'''E:''' $15 a jar.

'''C:''' Yeah, but you can make it yourself if you have a really good blender.

'''J:''' Yeah, for $14 a jar.

'''S:''' The oleic acid is also more heart healthy, and they've cultivated this species to be more resistant to fungus and stuff that plagues peanut farming. I love roasted peanuts too.

'''J:''' Yeah, they're awesome.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

'''S:''' Walnuts are good. Yeah, I like walnuts. Almonds are good. I like everything in the culinary nut family. It's all good. Do you know that raw, raw almonds are poison?

'''E:''' Oh, yeah. Don't do that.

'''C:''' It also does not sound like it would taste good at all.

'''E:''' Cashews. Cashews as well.

'''S:''' Raw cashews are also poison.

'''B:''' Gesundheit.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:20:58) ==
<blockquote>"Science has taught me (Science warns me) to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations." - Thomas Huxley</blockquote>

'''S:''' All right. Evan, give us a quote.

'''E:''' We have a quote. Here it is. "Science has taught me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations." And that was said by, written by, Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog himself.

'''S:''' One of my favorite philosophers. He is, again, amazing. He had it pretty much all sorted out, that guy. Really, he was a total skeptic, you know?

'''E:''' Absolutely. In fact, he's credited with coining the term agnostic.

'''S:''' Yeah, that's right.

== Announcements (1:22:23) ==
* LiCon: Long Island science and science fiction convention. August 14-16 2015SGU will be there for a live show - http://li-con.org/

'''J:''' Steve?

'''S:''' Yeah?

'''J:''' I'd like to welcome Cara to our show.

'''S:''' Yeah, this is our first regular recorded show.

'''C:''' Oh, yeah.

'''B:''' Yay!

'''E:''' Yes! Yay, Cara!

'''C:''' Yeah!

'''E:''' How'd it go?

'''C:''' It's feeling good, you guys. I mean, I spent all day at a sex doll factory shooting a TV show, which was weird.

'''J:''' It's awesome.

'''C:''' And I rushed back to the hotel. It's a little out of the ordinary, this episode, for me, because I'm doing it with a headset in a hotel room. But the Wi-Fi held up. And I'm feeling like part of the family.

'''J:''' Awesome. Yeah, me too. That's great.

'''E:''' Dynamite.

'''S:''' All right. Hey, in a couple of weeks, actually two weeks from the time this show goes up, August 14th to 16th, we are going to be in Long Island at the Long Island Con, Licon. It's the East Coast's newest convention of science, science fiction, fantasy gaming and anime.

'''E:''' And skepticism now.

'''S:''' And skepticism. The SGU will be there. We're going to be doing a live show on Saturday the 15th and some other stuff. But we're really looking forward to it. Cara, this came up you're on the other side of the country. So, hey, we'll check it out for you this year or next year. We'll bring you along.

'''C:''' Sounds good.

'''S:''' Well, thank you guys for joining me all this week.

'''B:''' You're welcome, Steve.

'''J:''' Thank you, Steve.

'''E:''' Good show.

{{Outro404}}
== References ==
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SGU Episode 699

2025-03-12T09:43:40Z

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== Introduction ==
''Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

'''S:''' Hello and welcome to the {{SGU|link=y}}. Today is Wednesday, November 28th, 2018, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

'''B:''' Hey, everybody!

'''S:''' Jay Novella...

'''J:''' Hey guys.

'''S:''' ...and Evan Bernstein.

'''E:''' Good evening folks.

'''S:''' Cara is off this week. We're all prepping. We're going to be out of town this weekend. We're going to be at the Smithsonian and then doing an event for the Capital Area Skeptics on Saturday. So I got home from work yesterday.

'''B:''' Cool.

'''E:''' Yes.

'''S:''' And my younger daughter was home. She's 15. And she was a little verklempt. Right?

'''E:''' Oh.

'''B:''' Her lamp didn't work?

'''S:''' So she's like, she's a little worked up and she doesn't get worked up over a lot. And she's like, so like something really bad happened. I'm like, okay.

'''E:''' Oh no.

'''J:''' Here we go.

'''E:''' Oh, the laundry.

'''B:''' Don't say it that way.

'''S:''' And the water.

'''S:''' She says-

'''B:''' Where's the dog?

'''S:''' She says Stephen Hillenburg died.

'''J:''' Oh yeah.

'''E:''' Oh.

'''S:''' Now for those of you who don't know, Stephen Hillenburg was the creator of SpongeBob SquarePants.

'''J:''' Now didn't he also voice SpongeBob?

'''S:''' No.

'''E:''' No, he didn't.

'''J:''' Who voiced him?

'''S:''' Tom Kenny?

'''B:''' Yeah. That sounds right.

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' Yes, we met at Dragon Con this year. So yeah. That's how big a role SpongeBob played in her life. That she was like emotionally upset that this guy should be just the creator. He was young too. He was 58.

'''B:''' Oof.

'''S:''' He announced in March of last year, of 2017, that he had ALS.

'''E:''' Ah, damn it.

'''J:''' And it went pretty quick, huh?

'''S:''' Yeah. Then from that point forward, he said, listen, I'm going to try to work as long as I can. But he asked for privacy, which is why you weren't hearing a lot about it.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh. Of course.

'''S:''' And then it was announced yesterday, as we're recording this, that he had died the day before of complications of ALS. So yeah. Very, very unfortunate.

'''E:''' Steve, where is science right now in the battle with ALS? Where do we stand?

'''S:''' We are lost in the field.

'''E:''' Oh my gosh. We've made no progress in this?

'''S:''' No. You can't say that. It's not that we've made no progress. At the basic science level, research is active. We're learning lots of stuff. We understand what's going on a lot more than we did. But it's one of those diseases where so far, the more we learn, the more complicated it becomes and the more we realize how much we don't know. And what's been extremely frustrating is how little of the basic science research has translated into actual clinical treatments. So it's still, we're just nibbling around the edges in terms of altering the course of the disease clinically. We can't really stop it. We can't reverse it. We can't cure it. So we basically have extended survival like 20%. That's the fruit of all of the research that we've done so far.

'''E:''' Do the quacks and cranks move in on that position and basically say, hey, science can't solve this, so why not try our remedy?

'''S:''' Yeah. Oh yeah. So ALS patients are targeted and are victims of all kinds of quackery.

'''E:''' Oh gosh.

'''S:''' It's a hard diagnosis to take. And so yeah, absolutely. It's a vulnerable population. So of course they get targeted.

'''B:''' What about genetic manipulation with that? Are we at the point where we could even think about that?

'''S:''' So there is an inherited forms, actually multiple inherited forms of ALS and those would probably be the most amenable to genetic treatments. So it might be true in 10 or 15 years. We'll be using CRISPR to cure people with genetic ALS. But with sporadic ALS, we don't really know what causes it. And it's one of those things where it's not one disease. It's probably multiple factors conspiring together in different ways in different people. Yeah. It's tough. It's a really, really, really tough disease.

'''E:''' Steve, I recall you saying a while ago, this is going way back when, that roughly does it take 50,000 lives annually? And is that still the rate or is it being diagnosed more? Are we better at identifying it?

'''S:''' There are about two cases per 100,000 people per year. And I think we're not getting any better at diagnosing it because it's actually not that hard to diagnose. You know, it declares itself pretty definitively because it's relentlessly progressive.

'''E:''' Gee whiz. And does it attack a certain age group more than others?

'''S:''' Yeah. The risk of it increases with age, but the peak age of diagnosis is between 55 and 65. But that's only because there are fewer people as you get past 65. The risk for an individual keeps increasing as you age.

'''E:''' That was Hillenburg. He's right in the middle there.

'''S:''' 58, yeah.

'''J:''' And there's nothing you could do to improve your odds of getting it?

'''S:''' Not that we know of, no.

'''J:''' Is it painful?

'''S:''' No. In and of itself, it doesn't cause pain. Your muscles waste away and you get weak. It doesn't affect anything else. It's purely a motor disease. I mean, there are syndromes where you have ALS plus other stuff, but ALS itself is purely motor.

'''E:''' Is it proper to say a person died from ALS or complications related to ALS?

'''S:''' I mean, it's the same thing. I mean, it depends on how you manage it, but for most people who decide to let the disease take its course, in other words, they don't, you get to the point where you can't breathe, right? You're too weak to breathe. And then at that point, people either are in hospice and we make them comfortable or they have to permanently go on a ventilator. Most people decide to go to the hospice route.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' At that point.

'''B:''' Really?

'''S:''' Yeah. So I mean, that's dying of the disease. You get too weak to breathe because the disease itself progresses. Complications of the disease would be like you caught pneumonia or you asphyxiated, you choked on something you couldn't swallow. That would be a complication of the disease. If you just progressed to the point where you couldn't breathe, that's of the disease itself. You know what I mean? But that's a subtle distinction. So, but getting back to SpongeBob though, I do want to, I mean, yeah, get people updated on ALS, but also that was my favorite cartoon to watch with my daughters.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' It was the most intelligently written children's cartoon because it really wasn't, and it's not like South Park or The Simpsons, which are really an adult oriented cartoon, even though kids like it too. SpongeBob was a kid's cartoon but it was so well written. It was almost like they wrote it so that parents could watch it.

'''B:''' Oh, God, yes. Absolutely.

'''S:''' You know?

'''E:''' Oh, definitely.

'''B:''' There are some episodes now, like creepy Halloween type episodes and stuff, or just especially funny ones. I'll just go back once in a while and just watch it by just by myself. It's like, that's funny. Come on. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

'''S:''' No, because there was layers. They had layers in it. It's a layer. The kids are laughing on one layer and the parents are laughing on a totally different level.

'''J:''' That's always the best writing. You know, that's what you want. You want the because if the adults don't enjoy it, it's not good for movie going or viewing, you know? So the, did you know that SpongeBob's personality was influenced by Stan Laurel, Pee Wee Herman, and Jerry Lewis?

'''S:''' That makes sense.

'''J:''' Does that make sense?

'''S:''' But I just, I think probably, I think it was Monday, so it was like the day before he died or the day before we learned that he died, I was having a long conversation with my daughter about the SpongeBob movie because she's interested in writing and we were talking about the structure of narrative, right? And I used the SpongeBob movie as an example because the movie is written explicitly to follow the epic quest narrative arc, right?

'''J:''' I didn't know that.

'''S:''' And it's actually a meta joke. Like it's so in your face, the epic, like Campbell's epic quest, that if you know that it's funny on that level. But my daughters didn't, totally didn't see that level to the movie, but like my wife and I did. So that's why we were, again, we were sort of enjoying this movie at different levels. And like, all right, so here's like one joke where SpongeBob is saying at the end, like if I didn't want to do like A or B, and like he gives two real examples, then he says, or some other third thing, which is funny, like you know it's funny, but we say that all the time, or some other third thing now, it's like a runny joke, but it's especially funny because like if you read anything about narrative structure or screenplay or whatever, it's like there's the rule of threes, right?

'''J:''' Of course, yeah.

'''S:''' Yeah. So Autumn was learning about the rule of threes, and I'm like, that's why that line in the SpongeBob movie was so funny, because he couldn't think of an actual third thing, so he just said, or some other third thing. I had to say something.

'''E:''' Clever.

'''J:''' I have a favorite SpongeBob moment.

'''S:''' That was the level of the humor, it was great.

'''J:''' Do you guys have a favorite SpongeBob moment? Because I have one.

'''S:''' Yes. Yes.

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' I do.

'''J:''' This was inspired by Steve's oldest daughter, Julia.

'''S:''' I know what you're going to say.

'''J:''' The video, the show, SpongeBob is like the guy that's watching somebody back up a car, and he's telling him-

'''S:''' But it's a ship. It's a ship. They're backing up the ship.

'''J:''' It's a ship. Yeah, it's a ship, but they drive the ships. And he's going, you're good, you're good, you're good. And the whole while, the guy that's piloting the ship is scraping the whole right-hand side like terrible. Oh my God. SpongeBob is such a weird character, because you don't know... What is his major malfunction, Steve? Did you ever figure it out? Is he just a goof?

'''S:''' He's a goofy goober. He's hopelessly naive. He's like the maximally infinitely naive character. He's good hearted, but he's just a goofball, yeah. He is a perpetual kid.

'''J:''' His actual name was supposed to be Spongeboy. That was the original name, Spongeboy Ahoy.

'''S:''' Spongebob is funnier.

'''E:''' That is better.

'''S:''' My favorite moment when he's trying to prove how tough he is, so that he can get into the tough bar, and he says, I'll have you know, I stubbed my toe last week while watering my spice garden, and I only cried for 20 minutes.

'''J:''' Did you guys know that Hillenburg, he taught marine biology?

'''S:''' Oh, yeah?

'''J:''' Yep.

'''E:''' That's why the adventures took place in the sea.

'''J:''' SpongeBob's one of those things. It got deep into the culture, and he was very lucky to come up with it, and very talented to come up with SpongeBob, and it's sad to see him go.

'''E:''' Wow. 1999, and still going. Amazing.

'''J:''' Longest running show on Nickelodeon, man.

'''B:''' Oh, really?

'''E:''' Mainstay, sure.

'''B:''' SpongeBob was huge. I haven't watched it in so long, and from what I gather, the latter season just didn't quite keep up, which is hard to do, but it still got a balloon in the Macy's Day Thanksgiving Parade.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' All right. Well, we have a good show coming up.

== News Items ==

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'''S:''' We're going to get right into some news items, including a pretty heavy one, Jay. The U.S. government just came out with a report on global warming.

'''J:''' Oh, boy, yeah. This has been kind of like an escapade. It's the one that's following this story of global warming, and the science of global warming, and the denialism of global warming. This is the fourth National Climate Assessment Report, and it was recently published on November 23rd, which happened to be Good Friday, and unfortunately, there was nothing good in it, because the science is good, but what they're saying is pretty remarkably bad. In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress mandated that this report on global warming, it should be published. They wanted it to come out every four years. It has to be focused on global warming and its effects on the United States, and it's put out by the U.S. Global Change Resource Program. These reports are presented to Congress and the U.S. President, and the goal is to inform politicians, decision makers, public health officials, emergency planners, utility and natural resources managers, the general public. This information needs to be given to everyone. It's sourced through 13 federal agencies, including, and you don't have to remember this verbatim, but keep this list in mind, NASA, the EPA, the Smithsonian, the National Science Foundation, USAID, the Departments of Defense, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, the Interior, State, and Transportation. That is a massive list of U.S. agencies. Now, it summarizes the latest findings on climate change and how these changes will impact the environment, things like the economy and society in general, like what's going to happen if it goes unchecked, and it goes into details about what we should do as well. What should the U.S. be doing to combat global warming?

'''S:''' Although, it stops short of making specific policy recommendations.

'''J:''' Not policy recommendations, but it talks about, like, if we do this, these things might be effective. You know what I mean?

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' You know, which the data's already been out there.

'''S:''' Yeah, it talks about the goals, not the mechanisms.

'''J:''' So this year's report analyzes the likely outcomes, right? You know, what will human welfare be like, societal, environmental impacts of climate change? And the report illustrates what the possible outcomes are if the U.S. doesn't take action against global warming. And it also goes into some different countermeasures that could reduce some of the worst outcomes. That's what I was talking about. It warns that the world is heading towards catastrophic climate change. And if drastic measures are not taken against greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, we are going to be in extraordinarily bad shape. When I say we, that means globally, humanity will be in bad shape. But I thought that the first sentence really, it just summarized the whole thing really well. So here it is. We are now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities. The impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future. But the severity of future impacts will depend largely on action taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur. That's it in a nutshell. Now, it goes into detail about what changes we can already measure, like extreme weather, extreme droughts, more energetic hurricanes, frequent and heavily destructive wildfires. You know, California, if you've been paying attention to the news. And the least amount of temperature change will be 1.3 degrees. That's what they're saying. That's the absolute lowest temperature change from pre-industrial levels. And the worst will be 6.1 degrees. These are in Celsius.

'''E:''' Whoa.

'''B:''' Oh.

'''J:''' Now, it's 6.1 degrees. They're saying that if any temperature reaches above 3 degrees, from 3 up, it's devastating and long-term consequences. You know, we're talking like legit massive die-off of species, of humans, massive loss of property, land coastal areas.

'''B:''' [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9NMt42il4Q Dogs and cats living together.]

'''J:''' The next few things I have here that I listed out that I want to read to you, this is all the bad stuff. Ready? The report goes into detail saying that there'll be degradation in clean air and water. Crop pollination. Wood and fiber production. Think about that. Clean air and water. Crop pollination. Without crop pollination, you don't have crops. And wood and fiber production, I mean, wood is far and away like wood and steel. You know, these are the things we build our reality out of. Fiber production to name the most obvious, like take cotton out of the equation. So like I said, increase in coastal flooding, wildfires, a die-out of important native species. You know, like imagine if animals that are hunted for food, like fish as an example. Imagine if we have a major drop-off in oceanic fish. Well that's a huge chunk of the food that a huge chunk of the human population lives on day to day. And then they were talking about massive increases in disease and insect outbreaks. So climate change will dramatically impact something else that I found very interesting. They were saying the cycle of rain and snow. Now it's good that it doesn't rain a lot every day. And it's also good that it's not dry every day, right? You want a balance and you don't want either one of those two extremes to get too extreme. So what climate change is going to do is it's going to turn up the volume on the extremes. So we'll have these intense droughts and then these intense torrential downpours. And that is going to impact everything. That's going to impact one of the things I probably wouldn't have thought of at the top of the list is energy production because hydroelectric power plants, crop yields would significantly change down into the very low numbers. Soil erosion would be horrible. There would be rampant insect growth that would eventually spread disease. And this you could draw an absolute straight line between all those things I listed to economic hardships and price increases, food shortages humans will have to deal with much more hotter weather. That will increase human mortality rates and the report just simply suggests a drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. So when I say simply, I don't mean it's simple to do it, but it's just reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That's what we need to do. So anyone following global warming wasn't surprised to find out that the White House released this report on Black Friday. On Black Friday. Now that is not a coincidence. You know, they released the report two weeks before it was actually supposed to get released. The authors of the report were shocked that it was released when it was because the White House did it strategically hoping to bury it and there's politics for you. You know, politicians are making decisions like this deliberately. You know, you don't release a report like that on Black Friday. You know, anyone that is following politics knows that that's just give me a break. You know, you don't release that Thursday after Friday afternoon on Black Friday when everyone is with family and shopping and no one's reading the news, no one's paying attention.

'''S:''' And Trump's response to this fairly thorough report put out by his own government was, I don't believe it.

'''E:''' OK. There you go.

'''S:''' That was his response.

'''E:''' Great.

'''S:''' Did you guys see the ManBearPig episode of South Park this season?

'''J:''' Well, the new one. You mean the one where they hated it?

'''E:''' No, I've not seen the new one.

'''J:''' Yeah, the new one.

'''E:''' But I heard about it. I heard about it.

'''S:''' It's great. So, to me, this is a little bit of a bright spot in all of this because what I'm seeing is that the effects of global warming are starting to become so obvious. You know, like, oh, we're having the worst fire ever and the worst hurricane ever. And I mean, is this all a coincidence or this is exactly the kind of things that we've been predicting for the last 20 years we're going to start to happen around this time when with global warming. And so we're seeing some people on the reasonable right like Max Boot, who's a conservative columnist, although he's anti-Trump, wrote a column recently saying, I was wrong. I was wrong on global warming. I believed all of the denialist rhetoric and now it's clear that I was wrong. I looked at the science and the science is pretty clear. The authors of South Park, same thing. They thought that Al Gore was an alarmist about global warming and they basically made fun of him with his whole man-bear-pig thing on their show. And now they're doing a show basically saying you were right and in the show, of course, man-bear-pig is real. But the thing that's brilliant is the people who are denying man-bear-pig in the face of the the blatant evidence and they're just repeating all of the global warming denial rhetoric, but in the face, like the bears literally killing people behind them over their shoulder.

'''E:''' Oh, yeah.

'''S:''' And they're denying it. And then they see it and he's like, well, what are we going to do about it, you know? So the thing is, the global warming denial approach is the conclusion is we do nothing, that we don't have to do anything about this. That's their conclusion. You know, pseudoscience and denialism as a pseudoscience starts with the conclusion and then reverse engineers back from there, right? So if that's your preordained conclusion, it doesn't really matter what you use to get there. So you start by saying, well, the planet's not warming. And then once that becomes too obvious to deny, it's like, well, OK, maybe it's warming, but it's a natural cycle. It's going to get better. It's like, OK, no, it's man-made. It's like, well, even if it's man-made, it's not going to be a problem. Nope, it's going to be a problem. Well, what are we going to do about it? If China's not going to do anything about it and India's not going to do anything about it, it's nothing we could really do. It's going to cost too much, blah, blah, blah. It's like, actually, no, it's going to be cost effective. So I was sent a commentary in The Wall Street Journal, which is basically their editorial policy as global warming denial, that was quoting this report and saying, oh, this report came out, and it's not going to be so bad. It's only going to cost us half a trillion dollars a year by the end of the century. We can afford that. Basically, it was like, we can afford global warming. We don't have to worry about it. If you compare that, it's like 10% of our economic growth between now and then. It's no big deal, nothing to see here. And then they're quoting like the most extreme alarmists. Again, it's like that, if you say you want to do anything about global warming, you're an alarmist, right? That's the premise. And what really needs to be done about it is minimal to nothing. But I do see that they're starting to say, OK, maybe we should have a carbon tax, maybe. You know what I mean? Like they're starting to, the denialism is starting to crumble at the edges. Here is Senator Ben Sasse. I think his response is typical. So he says, I think the real question, though, becomes what do you do about it? Because you can't legislate or regulate your way into the past. Right now, you don't hear a lot of people who put climate as number one issue. You don't hear a lot of them offering constructive, innovative solutions for the future. It's usually just a lot of alarmism. What the U.S. needs to do is participate in a long-term conversation about how you get to innovation. And it's going to need to be a conversation, again, that doesn't start with alarmism, but that starts with some discussion of the magnitude of the challenge, the global elements to it and how the U.S. shouldn't do, shouldn't just do this as a feel-good measure, but some sort of innovative proposal. This is right out of South Park, where they're literally going on, yes, I think that we should begin to talk about having a conversation about what we could possibly...

'''E:''' Yeah, right. Let's form a committee to talk about a committee.

'''S:''' Yeah, this is not far off from what South Park was making fun of just a couple of weeks ago. The guy has no awareness. Right? But you get that. It's all like, oh, we can't have any of this alarmist. Let's just begin to explore this and talk about thinking about having a conversation about innovating and blah, blah, blah. It's like, as long as we don't have to actually do anything.

'''J:''' The problem is the deniers out there are all revolving around the same maypole. It's the same rhetoric. It's so predictable. It's like any time you see any kind of debate, and I was watching Bill Nye talk to some senator about it, and it's like they're not even being innovative in what they're saying. It's like what you just said, Steve, they're like, well, first off, you're not a scientist, Bill. I'm not a scientist. No one really understands this.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's just doubt and confusion.

'''J:''' And then it clicks over to Bill, and he's like, you don't have to be a genius to understand this. The fact is that we have a scientific consensus, and we have to respect that consensus and respect what those people say, and then it clicks back, and every time it clicked back, it was just more denial and more confusion and not actually trying to help the situation in any way.

'''S:''' I think it's multifactorial. I mean, clearly, there's a lot of money flowing from the oil industry to people who are taking the denialist position, but in addition, I do think, and we talked to a lot of true believers there as well, I think that they've created a narrative, and the narrative is that these crazy liberals are using climate change as a way to push through their socialism and to take control of industry. That's the narrative, and they believe it. We talk to a lot of people all the time who actually believe that narrative, and nothing you say has any effect because it's all a liberal conspiracy, and they're utterly convinced that that's the case. And once again, once you crawl inside of a conspiracy theory, you have rendered yourself immune to facts and logic. And so that's the people who I think will never change their mind. Florida will be under six feet of water, and they'll have some excuse about it's all a liberal plot.

'''E:''' It's temporary.

'''S:''' Yeah, right. And then I've actually I've heard people say, well, it'll cost less to just deal with the effects of global warming than to prevent it from happening. How do you know? I mean, that's just, it's like, whatever the argument they can come up with so that we don't have to do anything, because doing something is somehow giving in to the crazy liberals in their mind. It is absolutely a triumph of motivated reasoning and ideology and narrative over facts and reason. And the scientific consensus is strengthening. It's moving consistently in the direction of higher and higher degrees of confidence that man-made global warming is happening. And the consequences are not going to be good. And it's not just about money. I mean, the thing that was good about the government report is they said it's actually cost effective for us to prevent this from happening. It will cost us less to prevent global warming than it will cost to deal with the consequences of it. And so even if you're taking a narrow economic argument, it makes sense to start to do things to actually prevent it. But it's, you can't just count up the numbers because also people's health are going to be adversely affected, right? Not just from the direct pollution, but also by increased temperatures. So this will make people sicker and increase the number of deaths due to climate and due to pollution. And that is going to have a huge cost associated with it as well. And then it's not for nothing, I mean, displacing people from coastal cities. Like, yeah, we could deal with it. I'm sure we'll adapt. You know, they say, yeah, we'll build levees. We'll adapt. OK, yeah, sure. But it's going to be extremely disruptive. It's going to be a massive negative impact on our quality of life collectively.

'''J:''' Well, I mean, and how do you put a value on one life, 10 lives 10,000 lives, you can't even calculate it. You know, this is what we, there's no question that if we believe in the science, that we have to take massive action and everyone's going to...

'''S:''' But the thing is, the action can also just be making our energy infrastructure better. You know what I mean? It's like, even if you don't believe in global warming, a lot of the things that we could do to prevent it or to minimize, you can't prevent it, but to minimize it at this point are things that are beneficial in and of themselves.

'''E:''' I mean, my gosh, why would we stick with old, worn out, damaging technologies? That's not how we are we still driving Model T Fords? Of course not. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy to think that way. Why wouldn't you want to be more progressive in your technology, in preserving your environment? It makes no sense.

'''B:''' Yeah. Not just that. How could you possibly advocate? Yeah. Let's potentially put the climate over a tipping point where there probably could literally be like no way to come back in any way reasonable. To me, that's the most ridiculous. Why would you even want to flirt with that possibility to reach some point where the climate just settles into some new place that's like, oh boy, what's going to happen now where it's like you really can't predict with any certainty? Why would you want to even do that? Get that huge gamble.

'''S:''' Oh, Bob, you're just being an alarmist, Bob.

'''J:''' Another thing that Bill Nye said was that, he's like it's smart for countries to invest in technologies that are going to counteract this because it's going to be massively valuable. It's going to be a huge investment in technology that you would sell to the world.

'''S:''' All right. Let's move on.

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'''S:''' So have you guys heard that they changed the kilogram?

'''B:''' Yeah. About time.

'''E:''' They changed it?

'''S:''' Yeah. Well, they tried to keep how much a kilogram is as stable as possible, but they changed the reference. So this is-

'''E:''' Oh, it's no longer that weight, that dumbbell kind of shaped thing?

'''S:''' Right. Le Grand K. It was a cylinder, right? So in 1879, the kilogram has been defined by definition by the weight of a physical artifact, a cylinder of platinum and iridium, right? This is the International Prototype Kilogram or the IPK. And then copies of that were made and sent to standard institutions around the world. I think the US had a couple of them, whatever. And then those were used as then standards, the standard kilogram in their area. So if you had to calibrate a scale, you would use your local copy of the kilogram. Then every now and then, you would ship it back to France and compare it to the prototype to see how far off it is.

'''E:''' So that changed.

'''B:''' But who would actually make that comparison locally? Who would actually do that? Universities or government institutions?

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah. Businesses? Scientific organizations? Yeah. Bob, everybody would. Eventually, every scale gets calibrated off of that.

'''B:''' Well, Stu Leonard's isn't calibrating with any standard. You know what I mean?

'''S:''' No. But the scales that they bought, that technology was calibrated to a copy of a copy probably of the prototype.

'''J:''' Yeah. But when you say a copy of a copy, are you saying that there is a diminishment in accuracy from the copies?

'''B:''' Sure.

'''S:''' Yeah. But it's so tiny. It doesn't...

'''B:''' Thousands of millions of atoms difference.

'''S:''' Yes. Right. But unless you're doing scientific research, it doesn't matter, right? If you're measuring the weight of produce or something, it's not relevant.

'''B:''' Yeah. It's millions of a penny.

'''S:''' Right. But if you're trying to do a scientific measurement, it could be. But there's a problem with the physical reference, right? Because it changes over time, no matter how careful you are. Further, this is something that I didn't think about explicitly until I was researching this topic.

'''B:''' roton decay?

'''S:''' No. It's hard to scale. What if you need a scale that you're using to measure tons or micrograms?

'''E:''' Right.

'''S:''' It still has to come off of that kilogram.

'''B:''' Oh. Errors magnify.

'''S:''' Yeah. But not only that, but so you can't calibrate a microgram scale with a kilogram. You have to use that... You have to do multiple intermediate scales to work your way down or to work your way up, right? So it's not scalable easily. That does introduce errors, and it's just very time-consuming. So all of the other metric measures have, over the years, gone over to something universal. It's not based upon a physical artifact, not an artifact-based reference.

'''B:''' But a constant of nature.

'''S:''' Yes. An idea-based constant, a constant or a physical law-based reference. And the kilogram is the last one to do that.

'''B:''' Yeah. What took so long?

'''S:''' Well, I'll tell you what took so long is we literally didn't have a way to do it. We didn't have a way to base a mass measurement on a physical property that was accurate enough. We didn't have the accuracy. So now we do. And so it was waiting for a scale, a balance, that was accurate enough to serve as the standard. What we have now is the Kibble balance. Have you ever heard of that, Bob, a Kibble balance?

'''B:''' I have. Maybe.

'''E:''' My dog has.

'''B:''' I think I heard and then forgot.

'''S:''' Yeah. There's only like six of them in the world. I tried to find out the exact number, but I couldn't find any primary reference. But that's what I read as a secondary reference. So there's not many of them. It's single digits, whatever there are. So it's based upon a couple of laws, right? So it's based upon E equals MC squared, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. It's also based on another physical property where it is Planck equation, energy equals the frequency of radiation times Planck's constant. And since you have energy in both of those equations, you could then make HV equal to MC squared. And so now we have an equation with mass in it and with frequency in it. So if you could measure the frequency, you could then measure, you can calculate the mass. Does that make sense?

'''B:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' Yep.

'''S:''' So we needed a very precise measure of Planck's constant because that's in the equation two, which we now have. So that was another barrier, right, Bob? So now that we have... So they used a Kibble balance in order to precisely measure Planck's constant. And now we can use an agreed upon precise number for Planck's constant with a Kibble balance to precisely measure a kilogram. So that completed the circle. So let's see. The Kibble balance is based upon Josephson's constant and the von Klitzing constant. These relate electrical resistance to frequency. So it basically uses the force produced by a current carrying wire in a magnetic field to balance the weight of a mass.

'''J:''' So it uses the force?

'''S:''' It uses the force, yeah. So you could measure precisely the force necessary to balance the weight and that on a Kibble balance. And then that could give you... If you know Planck's constant, you could calculate a precise mass. So then you could define a kilogram in this way.

'''B:''' And you could scale up and down.

'''S:''' And it's infinitely scalable. That's the beauty of it. Yeah. Exactly. So that's the... It's very, very useful because of that scalability.

'''B:''' Wow. This is fascinating.

'''S:''' Yeah. Isn't that great? Science and technology moves forward.

'''E:''' Now what becomes of the...

'''S:''' Artifact. The cylinder.

'''B:''' I saw it on eBay.

'''S:''' It becomes a historical artifact, but it will no longer be necessary as an actual reference. But now it's just a historical curiosity.

'''E:''' Does that mean we can touch it now?

'''S:''' That's a good question.

'''B:''' You could spit on it now.

'''S:''' I mean, they'll probably still keep it. It was in a double bell jar. I guess they'll probably still keep it there. Why not?

'''E:''' It'll wind up in a museum.

'''J:''' What do you think a scientist would do if they're walking it around and they drop it? Would they pick it up, brush it off, and just put it back on the small bell jar?

'''E:''' First they look around to make sure nobody saw that.

'''S:''' There's a big dent in the side of it.

'''E:''' Five second rule.

'''S:''' They can't even touch it with their skin. They had to handle it with gloves. Even like your fingerprint would change the weight of it.

'''E:''' That's crazy.

'''J:''' You can't handle the kilo.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks.

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'''S:''' All right, Evan, you're going to finish off the news section with an update on the Mars InSight lander.

'''E:''' Yeah, InSight. Once again, we humans have successfully landed a machine on the planet Mars. It's called the InSight mission. InSight stands for the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport. InSight, yes. It's a robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of the planet Mars. We know a lot about its atmosphere. We know a lot about its surface. We do not know a lot about its interior. This is going to help us. A few little stats on the project, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Though it's a NASA project, it is also a multinational effort comprised of scientists and engineer from multiple disciplines, including personnel and companies from the United States, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It launched back on May 5th, 2018. That is our official birthday, isn't it, May 5th, SGU day. It rode aboard an Atlas V-401 rocket and successfully landed at the Elysium Planitia on Mars November 26th, 2018, so just a few days ago. Yeah. It took almost seven months to get there. It traveled 438 million kilometers and touched down. I love when these things happen. It's so exciting.

'''B:''' As Douglas Adams said, a ballet of technology.

'''E:''' It's so much fun to watch the control room when these things are happening, because everybody is so tense. I mean, you can see people biting their fingernails and rocking back and forth in their chair. You're feeling the emotion. You're feeling the excitement. When it actually happens and the moment is announced, everyone just breaks out in celebration and high fives and hugs. It's awesome.

'''B:''' Oh, yeah. Can you imagine? I mean, this is not only the culmination of a project. I mean, they've spent years on this, but one big, bad mistake, one big conversion from metric to some other non-metric can totally kill it, and that's it. You just lost like five or 10 or more years of research and your degree. All this stuff you lose, because this is obviously incredibly difficult. They messed that up, man.

'''E:''' It's so risky.

'''B:''' You're done. It's like, oh, that's it. Now what do we do?

'''E:''' Yep. Yep. It's only as good as the weakest link in the chain, as they say, but this chain was strong the whole way through. Now that the lander is down, before the scientists actually hit the start button for InSight to conduct its experiments, the scientists today are now working with the InSight test simulation here on Earth. They're calling it Foresight, and it's a way that they can do rehearsals and tests and scenarios to play out here on Earth in a simulated Mars environment. So when they game these things ahead of time, they can reset it as many times as needed, and it will really help reduce the chances of something going wrong when they instruct InSight to get to work. Here's the thing. Scientists don't know exactly where on Mars InSight is, but they have a rough idea. They've got it down to a few, I think a five square kilometer area, but they're trying to hone in on it again. They have been able to learn some more about its location, but it's going to take probably another week, maybe two, for them to nail it. And the observers that are going around Mars currently will be able to confirm some more pictures for us later on next week. So we'll know much more about this next week, exactly where it is. Now their initial analysis is suggesting, this is the news today, because it landed two days ago, but today they're saying that they hit pay dirt, or rather pay sand. They believe that InSight landed inside the rim of a very small crater, which has a nice blend of sand, which gets everywhere, right Jay?

'''J:''' Yeah. It's coarse.

'''E:''' It's coarse. But it's good, because the sand inside of the crater has fewer large rocks and other things to get in the way. So it's on a nice bed. And they're saying it's not too sandy either. So there's adequate support in this spot to support the weight of InSight appropriately as it goes into its full operational mode. So they're very optimistic about where it actually did touch down. And they're going to be able to dig, they said with no problem, one of the instruments, it's called the HP3. It's a heat probe instrument. They're going to measure the temperature of the interior of Mars. And they say getting through this level of sand and down below will be, should be no problem. They anticipate it's going to go very well. So they hit a real good sweet spot where it landed.

'''S:''' Good.

'''E:''' That's where we are.

'''S:''' I watched the whole news conference they had. Everyone's so excited. But it sounds like it just went, it's going perfectly well. So far it's a really successful mission.

'''E:''' Definitely is. Definitely is. It's got a couple of different devices on there. There's the HP3, which is the temperature reader, the seismic detector. It's going to map out the seismic waves of the planet that it's generating. And there's also a radio science experiment called RISE, and it's going to measure the wobble of Mars's pole. And they're also going to use RISE to sort of help them hone in on exactly where this is, where it is, and they'll be able to track it in to actually locate it, which is why they think maybe in another week or so they're going to find out exactly where this is, pinpoint it.

'''S:''' Cool.

'''E:''' Continue their tests. And in a couple of weeks, they'll be digging and getting to work. So more to come on InSight.

'''S:''' Awesome.

'''B:''' And to bring it full circle, I'll end with a Facebook meme I just saw. Scientists have again landed a spacecraft on a proverbial dime on a planet 40 million miles away that rotates at 241 meters per second. I think I'm going to trust them on this climate change stuff.

'''E:''' Very good point.

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== Who's That Noisy? () ==
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'''S:''' All right, Jay. It's Who's That Noisy time.

'''J:''' So last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] What the hell is that, guys? What is it? What is that noise?

'''E:''' Had a little bit of a treble quality to it, but I don't think that's right.

'''J:''' The worst guess came from Nathan Spahn. Nathan said it's a vacuum tube radio from the 1930s switching between different frequency bands.

'''E:''' Why is that the worst one?

'''J:''' I know. I asked myself that. Somebody has to have the worst guess, and that's why I just put it in that slot. I thought it was a fun idea.

'''S:''' It was an erudite guess.

'''J:''' Yeah. I've never heard that noise that he's saying. I'd like to hear that noise. But no, that is not the correct answer. So the notable answer came from someone who signed... His Gmail account is always geologizing, and I think his name is Devin Coetzee. So thank you for the email, Devin. He's from South Africa and currently teaching high school geography in the UAE. And he starts his email. I'm so angry with myself for this noisy. I thought I'd sent it in the 21st of October, but never sent it to the Who's That Noisy email. I used Steve's email as a backup and it failed. Ha, Steve. Thanks a lot for forwarding that to me. So this week's noisy, the noisy is seismic waves traveling through the Arctic ice shelf recorded on super sensitive seismic sensors. One more time, super sensitive seismic sensors. For a period of two years, showing various changes in melting of the uppermost layer of ice. I hope you all keep well, love the show, binging every moment I can since I only became a true skeptic in 2014. So there it is. That's what it is. It's a wonderful noisy, super entrenched in science and global warming. So I love it. But the winner for this week, this comes in from John Garrett. And John said, hi, Jay, long time, first time. You're always asking for noisies. And last month I finally heard one I wanted to send to you. I love your segment and I often have decent but always wrong guesses. Don't we all? My wife and I have a two month old daughter, Lucy, and life is busy as you can imagine. So I just saved my noisy figuring I'd get back to it later. So now we fast forward to this morning, Lucy and I were listening to the November 17th show. And we get to the Who's That Noisy segment and they hear the exact noisy he was going to send me. And he said, it's the humming of the Ross ice shelf.

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=== New Noisy () ===

'''J:''' Now I have a new noisy. This noisy deserves no explanation. And here it is.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

'''J:''' So of course I need to know who that person is. And I would like also to know what they were wearing during that recording. I'm just kidding. You can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

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== Announcements () ==

'''J:''' Guys. We are 180 patrons away from reaching our goal of 3000 and 3000 as you know, is my goal to become a full-time employee, 180 people.

'''S:''' Getting close.

'''J:''' We're so close. We're so close guys.

'''S:''' We want to get there by the end of the year. And to help that along, we are going to have a holiday special, Jay, tell them all about it.

'''J:''' Oh my God. This one took a lot of work. So lots of people have been asking for signed copies of the book, which we understand. So this is what we did. Now this is a multi-tiered thing. I'm going to explain it to you, but know ahead of time that you're going to go to a page on the website. And I'm going to tell you what that page is right now, because I'm going to make up the name of it right now. It's the skeptics guide.org forward slash SGU holiday, 2018, no spaces, no, nothing SGU holiday, 2018. When you go to that page, you're going to be, you're going to see three options that you have. Option number one, you can download an image. The image is going to be a mad lib. You know what a mad lib is? It's a sentence that's not complete that you get to fill in some details on. It basically will let you fill it in and say the gift giver, which is you is giving a present to the person that's receiving it. So I was like, Steve is giving Jay this present. And the present is, the first version of it could be a gift of patronage. You can give them a gift account at Patreon. The way that you would do that is simply go and create them an account. Then when you fill out the form on the webpage, you're going to tell me how long you want it to last. And I will email you when you, when it expires. So if you say, Hey, I want to give someone a $30 present or a $40 present, you're going to give them three or four months at the $8 level, then I'll email you when you want it to expire and to remind you to expire it and help you, exchange hands with the person if they want to continue the membership. That's the simplest thing. You download the file yourself. You can give it to them as a Christmas present and it would take you all of 10 minutes to do everything you need to give someone a Christmas present. Level number two, you want to buy someone a signed copy of the book and you fill out the form that says, I want to buy a signed copy of the book. You pay us through PayPal and I will mail you a signed copy of the book.

'''S:''' But also you're going to send us information on how you want to personalize. We will personalize every book.

'''J:''' Yeah. But you could also say they like this, they like that, make up something and we'll, we'll come up with something for you. No problem. Or have Jay or Bob make a funny drawing. We'll do anything you want. The third level, this is the motherlode. I'm formally naming it the motherlode. You are going to give someone a signed personalized copy of the book and you are going to give someone to some degree, a gift membership to our, our, to become a patron of the SGU.

'''S:''' Yeah. So it's both together.

'''J:''' It's both together. Now, if you do that, what I will do is I will print out the card for you and I will fill it out with the information that you want me to put in there. I'll make it, it'll, it'll be better cause it'll be done on computer and not be done, by somebody writing it with a magic marker. But the cool thing is, is I will package that on top of the book cause the card will be the size of the book cover. So in essence, you're going to get one package. It'll be the book with that card and packaged inside of it. And all you have to do, I'm going to mail it to you and all you got to do is wrap it and give it to them. It's very simple and very easy Christmas present. So the instructions will be on a page called the skeptics guide.org forward slash SGU holiday 2018 you'll see the three different things that you can do. So please do help support the SGU. If you can, you can give the gift of reason. Give our book, give the gift of patronage and anybody that becomes a patron during this three week special that we're running is going to get a link to a, a video that only those people will be able to see. So no existing patrons are going to see it. It's all only going to be patrons that join from the first to the 25th. But if you want that book delivered to you before Christmas, you better order it before the 15th.

'''S:''' And supplies are limited because you only, you only got a a lot of books that we're assigning and once they're done, they're done.

'''J:''' Yeah.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks for all of that Jay.

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== Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups () ==
=== Question_Email_Correction #1: _brief_description_ () ===
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'''S:''' We're going to do one email. This is a fun email. I had a good time researching this. This question comes from, it's written, it says regards Kick from the Netherlands.

'''E:''' I like that.

'''J:''' That's good. That's clever.

'''S:''' And he writes, this might make a nice segment on the classic skeptics subject of Atlantis. This channel on YouTube claiming to have found Atlantis in the Sahara has a few million views already. It did make a good segment for the show. I got two blog posts out of this email because first I went down, I went down one rabbit hole and that led me to a tangent leading to a second rabbit hole. You'll see. So, okay. The video. Video's by a guy named Jimmy and Jimmy believes that he has found Atlantis in Africa. And he thinks that it's the so-called eye of the Sahara or the Richat structure. That's R-I-C-H-A-T. And he makes all kinds of parallels between Plato's description of Atlantis and this structure and said, there you go. It's got to be it. Right? Classic pseudoscience in that he is he's taking all of the superficial similarities and then really exaggerating their specificity and their significance. And he's ignoring all the fatal flaws or just like really dismissing them with some very casual hand-waving. So it's good like when you have your conclusion, this is like motivated reasoning, right? It's a great example of it. Okay. So, quickie background on Plato.

'''J:''' It's a thing that kids play with. It comes in all these different colors.

'''S:''' That's right.

'''J:''' You know, you can eat it, but you shouldn't, but you can.

'''E:''' It's a little salty.

'''S:''' So, Plato wrote about a mythical city of Atlantis that was beyond the pillars of Hercules, which is basically beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, which means in the Atlantic Ocean.

'''J:''' And it predated him by what, 9,000 years, Steve?

'''S:''' His source by 9,000 years. That's 11,600 years ago from today, 9,600 years ago from Plato. And he said that, so it's the ancient advanced civilization that displeased the gods and then the gods destroyed them in a night of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and the islands sank into the ocean and they were never heard from since. He used it as a rhetorical device when discussing his perfect moral city of Athens and the Atlanteans were attacking the Athenians, right? So, they were the evil empire a long time ago and far, far away. If you recall.

'''E:''' Yeah, sure.

'''S:''' That lecture we had on it used that analogy.

'''E:''' That's right. Kenny Feder talked to us about that.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. You have the initial question of, did Atlantis even exist? You know, did Plato intend this to be a real claim that the city actually existed sometime in the past? If we just look at it that way, not archeologically, just historically, right? The consensus is that Plato was using Atlantis as a rhetorical device and he didn't really, he wasn't making a serious claim that, yes, this place Atlantis really existed. But actually I think that when you're talking about the existence or non-existence of these historical places or mythical or legendary places that you shouldn't fall into a false dichotomy, right? It's not as if the Atlantis as described by Plato existed or it's 100% mythology. It's probably a complicated combination of many things, of culture, of the kinds of things that people believed at that time, their own narrative about their own history, stories about other places that were destroyed by volcanoes or whatever, gets woven into this, okay, like he didn't, Plato didn't make it up out of whole cloth. There's probably lots of inspirations that went into his neat little story about Atlantis. What we can say is that the Atlantis that Plato described is mythology, right? He did not have knowledge. There was no chain of reliable knowledge that came down from Atlantis to Plato. Even if you make assumptions that like Plato was horribly wrong about the date, maybe it was only a thousand years before he lived or whatever. Some people try to do that. It's only like 3,000 years ago, not 11,000 years ago, to make it more plausible. It's still, that's a thousand years. We have no chain of provenance for that information, you know what I mean? And there's no other reference to it, only references to Plato.

'''J:''' Right. He's the only person that ever brought it up.

'''S:''' Yeah. Before Plato, there's no reference to it. Now, there are actual historical ancient places that we only have one reference to. So that is not a fatal flaw to the claim in and of itself. But you have to think, what's the plausibility that Atlantis existed based on Plato's reference to it? It's very thin. And even if there are some tendrils of history that found their way into the legends that resulted in Plato's description of Atlantis, it's not Atlantis. It's not the mythical Atlantis of Plato's description. It's very similar to when we talked about the historicity of Jesus. Maybe some guy or multiple people existed whose life events got woven into the Jesus myth, but the Jesus of the New Testament didn't exist, right? As a historical figure. Same kind of thing. So it defies saying it's not 100% myth or 100% fact. It's mostly legend, but you can't rule out that there's some real tendrils in there from something transformed out of recognition from whatever they were originally. I also liken it to Robin Hood.

'''E:''' OK. Mm-hmm.

'''S:''' You know, the legend of Robin Hood is based on a lot of real stuff. You know, that was a real place, and King Richard was real, and the Crusades were real, and Nottingham existed. That doesn't mean that the legend as told was of a real person, that it's historical or factual. You know what I mean? Robin Hood is a fictitious character, but there's elements of real history woven in there. Imagine what that's going to be like in 10,000 years or even 1,000 years, especially without, if we don't have the continuity of culture that we currently have. But anyway, so Atlantis probably doesn't exist. So even saying that I found Atlantis is really problematic. What did you find? What is that place? You know, is that place the Atlantis as described by Plato in his writing? I mean, there's no reason to think that that exists. Did you find something that maybe something happened to that could have been an indirect inspiration for elements of the story of Atlantis? Perhaps you're now getting so many steps removed, who knows? But let's go over the specific claims. So Atlantis, as described by Plato, was an island, but there was concentric circles of land, like two concentric circles of land and then a central island, and therefore three concentric circles of water, like canals. And then there was a canal that ran down the middle of it, connecting all of the waterways to the central island. And it was in the middle of the ocean, right? Or at least it had to be connected to the ocean. But again, this is sort of where you choose the details you want. And say, look, Plato got that exactly right. And then you ignore the details that you don't want, because they have nothing to do with the find.

'''B:''' It's an interesting shaped mountain peak.

'''S:''' Yeah. So you look at this, it's actually not a mountain. It's a dome.

'''E:''' Volcanic, isn't it?

'''S:''' It's a dune. It's not volcanic either. And it's not a meteor impact, although you might think that from looking at it. But what it is is a dome that collapsed. So yeah, so it's a geological structure. There's no question that it's a geological structure. And geologists have been poring over it for years because it's a very interesting geological structure. And even Jimmy now has to admit that, yeah, OK, it's a natural structure, but maybe they built Atlantis on the natural structure. Special pleading. That's just a nice little example of special pleading. And the circles it's not like they're walls. And they're not really complete. You know what I mean? They sort of go all the way around, or they're more a little like overlap on each other, like a spiral would a little bit. But here's a massive problem to his claim. This whole thing is 1,200 feet above sea level.

'''E:''' Oops.

'''J:''' That doesn't work.

'''S:''' If anything, yeah, it's like that's a fatal flaw. If anything, the ocean was lower thousands of years ago. So there's no way this thing could have been accessible from the ocean, in which case Plato's description cannot possibly match it. But Jimmy just doesn't even address that issue, that fatal flaw to this location, which is massively inland. It's inland, and it's way too high above the ocean. He says, oh Plato said it was built out of black, white, and red rocks. And you could find rocks of those colors on the site. You could find rock-colored rocks at the site, but not, again, walls, not worked stone. There isn't a single worked stone anywhere to be found. And it's not any different than any other similar location in terms of the colors of the rocks. Of course, Plato also said there was platings of copper, and brass, and silver, and stuff there. None of the metals. Well, what about the complete absence of any artifacts? So some of Jimmy's apologists say, well, what if a tsunami came through and wiped away all physical evidence that there was anything there? It's like, you're telling me there was an advanced city on this location, and we can't find a pottery shard. That does not exist.

'''E:''' Sorry.

'''S:''' That does not happen archaeologically. You know, you can't have a city existing in a place for decades, hundreds of years, however long it was there, allegedly. And there's no evidence left behind. Then they say, well, we haven't looked. It's like, well, archaeologists haven't been looking, because it's not an archaeological site. But geologists have been looking, because it's a geological site.

'''E:''' And don't you think they would have called in the archaeologists if they saw something that might have even possibly resembled some sort of artifact?

'''S:''' Yes. I mean, one of the things that geologists do is figure out what's natural and what's man-made, right? If they came across anything man-made, they would be all over it, right? And then he does other superficial things, like Plato said there were mountains to the north. And look, there's mountains to the north. Wow. What are the odds? And there's a plain to the south. Like, OK. Actually, then he points to a sand, like a sand dune to the southwest. It's actually more west than south, but he's counting that as south. So he's kind of forcing the fit. So he's like just picking the things that sort of fit. He's forcing fits. He's using superficial similarities, high probability things, like what are the chances of a circular structures? There are circular structures all over the place. And ignoring fatal flaws. So this is just his claim is terrible. It's just terrible. So when you pile all up, it's like all the circumstantial evidence, you pile it up and you present it without any of the negative stuff, it can be compelling to the naive, right?

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' So people watch as they go, wow, it's too many coincidences for this not to be onto something. It's like, no, actually there isn't. This is where the critical thinking comes in. When you're familiar with that process of circumstantial evidence and forcing fits and looking for things, you could make correlations out of anything, you know what I mean? If you really try hard enough. And he's not doing what he should be doing, what an actual scientist would be doing, which is trying to shoot down his own hypothesis, right? Because as soon as you start to do that, it collapses as the flimsy structure that it is. The guy's a crank is the bottom line. He's not a scientist. He's just a crank and he's getting millions of hits because he's trying to make a YouTube career for himself.

'''E:''' Jimmy the crank.

'''S:''' Yeah. So you would think that that's where the story ends. But there's at the current moment, 209 comments on my blog post about Jimmy and the reshot structure. And what's interesting is, I mean, a lot of people are just attacking skeptics, right?

'''E:''' Sure.

'''S:''' Saying like, oh, all you're doing is sniping from the sidelines. This is how science works. You make a claim and then other people pick it apart. If you don't want to do that, then you're not doing science. Get out of my way. You know what I mean?

'''B:''' Get out of my way. I love it.

'''S:''' And then all the apologizing. Wouldn't erosion have to... No. No. It would not have obliterated the evidence of a city on this location. If this were the location of a city, no. But here's the one that really caught my attention and that led me down the second rabbit hole. Multiple, multiple people made the analogy to Troy, which I've heard many times before as well. And it's just like one of those background claims. It's like one person wrote, Atlantis, a myth, perhaps the story, but is the story based on something? Let's remember, Troy was a myth until rediscovered in 1870. Another commenter writes, they laughed at Heinrich Schleiman. That's the guy who discovered Troy, but he found Troy and started for the most part, the science of archeology. Another guy writes, back in 19th century, the consensus of actual scholarship is that Troy is a myth. Thank you, Heinrich Schleiman, for not caring about consensus, right, in a way of dismissing the scientific consensus. One more. This is like an endless game of spot the logical fallacy by reading these comments. So I said, yeah, but we haven't found any evidence so they found evidence of Troy. We found no evidence of Atlantis. That's the difference between the two. And the commenter writes, yes, because they were digging. Before digging, Troy was a normal hill. Troy walls were found after archeological excavations. No digging were done in reshot structure, so nothing was found, obviously. So much for your logic. My logic, Schleiman used solely Homer text to locate Troy. Then he started digging and found it. Jim used solely Plato's text to locate Atlantis. When somebody starts digging, he, she may find it. Until you learn about how Troy was found, all you have is bad logic. Here's the thing. Everything in those comments is not true.

'''E:''' Other than that.

'''S:''' Yeah, other than that. But all of the skeptics in the comments were correctly pointing out that just because Troy turned out to be true, it doesn't mean that Atlantis exists, right? Just because that we didn't know that Troy was real, then Schleiman found it and we said, oh, okay, that Troy was real. That doesn't mean that every single thing in legend and mythology is real. And it doesn't really even lend plausibility to Atlantis, because you had, the texts are completely different. But then I said, yeah, but you know what, I bet you that even that story that I'm being told here, even though it's so I dismissed the logic, but I'm like, I bet you that that story is more complicated.

'''B:''' Yeah, of course.

'''S:''' And yes, and not only is it more complicated, it's so much more complicated that it's basically not true. So this is the second rabbit hole. Did we actually find Troy? And again, I go back to my original comment about false dichotomies. It depends on what you mean by Troy. And here's all the disanalogies here, the poor analogies. First of all, Troy was in the Trojan War that Homer wrote about in his epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, allegedly took place in the 12th to 13th century BC or BCE, if you prefer, which was 400 years before Homer wrote his poems, not 9,000 years, but 400 years. So that's a lot closer. And he was writing about mostly places that we knew existed, right? And in fact, at the time Homer was writing, there was pretty much continuous knowledge that Troy had existed, you know what I mean? Like at that point, Troy was part of history. And Troy was part of, was known to have existed from antiquity into modern times. So the idea that everyone laughed at Schleiman and the consensus was that Troy was mythology is actually not true. In fact, the place where Troy was found, Hisarlik, is in Turkey and the locals knew that that location was an ancient city and the local belief was that it was Troy. In fact, it was a tourist attraction. So hardly unknown. Now what is true is that in the 18th century, a guy by the name of Wolfe wrote a paper deconstructing Homer's Iliad and saying that actually a lot of this was pieced together from preexisting legends. So he did an analysis of the text and said that the most parsimonious interpretation is that the whole thing is mythology. And so there were people who were in that tradition in the 19th century, but it was a very short tradition, less than 100 years old. So it was actually only a recent belief that Troy was maybe mythology and it wasn't the consensus, but it was one school of thought. There were still plenty of archaeologists who thought that Troy was real. So it was much more complicated than saying that they all laughed at Schleiman. It's not true. In fact, there's a notion that Schleiman figured out where Troy was from Homer's text is completely not true. Schleiman, by the way, let me back up a little bit. He's a very interesting character.

'''B:''' You're good. You're good.

'''S:''' He was a rich guy, very smart, spoke a lot of languages, used that to trade goods. He was German and he made lots of money. He became so wealthy that he retired young and he became an amateur archaeologist in his 40s because he could. And he was fascinated with Homer's Troy and wanted to find it. And so he was looking for it, but he didn't know where it was. He's an amateur, although apparently very smart, although he also was apparently a con artist and a relentless self-promoter. He found another archaeologist by the name of Calvert, who was living on the land where Hisarlik was contained, where Troy was eventually found. And he did some preliminary excavations of Hisarlik and he believed that that's where Troy was. Now Hisarlik is what's known by archaeologists as a tell, T-E-L-L. A tell is a large mound that's artificially created by building on top of ruins, right? So it's like multiple layers of buildings, which eventually build up into a massive artificial mound. And when you see a tell, it's not like that one comrade who said it was an ordinary hill. No, it wasn't. It was a tell. Everyone knew that it was ruins. The only question was, what ruins are under there? And so Calvert was convinced that Troy was under there, but he didn't have the money to excavate it and he couldn't get a grant. So he went to Schleiman and Schleiman said, yep, I'll pay for the excavation. So then Schleiman did the excavation and didn't give Calvert any credit for the claim. He totally stole all the credit for himself, even though it was Calvert's idea. If Calvert were able to get funding, he would have been the guy who discovered Troy. Schleiman did not invent archaeology, by the way. He was just its first real popularizer. So there were many archaeologists that believed Troy existed. One of them told Schleiman where it probably was. Schleiman then excavated it. He did a very clumsy, amateurish job. He used explosives. He just destroyed evidence as he went. And he found what he claims were the treasures of Priam. Now Priam, Paris's father, king of Troy in the Trojan War in the Iliad, and said, therefore, this is Troy. This is not only Troy. This is the Troy of the Iliad, of Homer, because I found Priam's treasure. It turns out he probably faked a lot of that evidence. He almost certainly collected jewels and gold and stuff that he found there and then claimed to have located it all in one place. But he probably also purchased artifacts and faked artifacts and included them in the treasure to make it more big and impressive. However, despite all that, he did uncover actual cities in that location and did reinvigorate the belief that Troy was probably a real place. Later, more careful excavations found that there's actually nine cities in that location, which are called Troy 1 through 9. Schleiman found the alleged treasures of Priam in Troy 2, which was an early Bronze Age level, which was before the Trojan War and absolutely could not be the Troy of Homer. If the Troy of Homer exists there, it's probably Troy 6, because that's a late Bronze Age level. That's the right age. So just by dating it, and yes, there are big city walls that do match the description, roughly, it's plausible that what we're finding there at that time was a city similar to the Troy of Homer. Was it the Troy of the Trojan War? We get back to our false dichotomy again. The Trojan War, as told in the Iliad, probably never happened. But there probably were wars occurring in that location and probably some of those stories eventually got woven into this one nice poem that Homer wrote, you know what I mean? He probably he is bringing together a lot of these tendrils and then tying it up in a nice little story. And some of them are, were modified, were altered, were mixed in from other traditions. There's one speculation that because Poseidon is the god of horses and earthquakes and the ocean, that a city that was destroyed by an earthquake by Poseidon could have been interpreted as destroyed by a horse, which could have led to the Trojan horse legend. Who knows? But that's the kind of level that we're dealing with, right? It's like a 400-year-old game of telephone by the time you get to Homer. So there probably wasn't a Trojan War. There was probably lots of conflicts and maybe some of that information got incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey. Some of the details were only talked about after the fact in the Odyssey.

'''E:''' Well, geez, what's next? We're going to go looking for the freaking Cyclops and send a team out to find out the Minotaur?

'''S:''' Yeah, exactly. So it's still not clear. It is still not clear if that is the Troy of Homer. So it wasn't true that we didn't think it existed. It's not true that afterwards we knew it existed. It wasn't true that there were other archaeologists who didn't believe in it or that they laughed at Schleiman. Schleiman also screwed up a lot. He didn't actually find what he said he found. There are papers today deconstructing that claim the claim that this was, that this is Troy. It's still not completely accepted. And it's just a mess. It's just a complete and total mess trying to find out what actually is going on there. And the idea that, well this, again, the actual myth of Troy is now the story that the Atlantis apologists are telling, which has evolved into, oh, they all laughed at Schleiman because the consensus was that Troy was a complete myth. And then he found Troy and proved it was real.

'''E:''' All wrong.

'''S:''' Yeah, it's just, it is, that's apocryphal, right? That is not what actually happened. I knew a lot of this stuff, but it really crystallized for me, like how little we actually do know about the past, about the ancient past, and how hard it is, these little thin tendrils of evidence that we have. So the claim that a narrative like the Iliad and the Odyssey was based on a real city, Troy, therefore Plato's writing is based on a real city, Atlantis. That's the logic that they're trying to use, but it does not stand up to scrutiny. It just falls apart when you actually look, even scratch even a little bit beneath the surface. And I'm giving you a hyper-simplified version of these things, right? This is what I've been able to wrap my head around on these topics. I'm sure if there's an actual scholar listening to the show, an archaeologist or a scholar on Plato or Troy, yes, I'm missing a lot of nuance.

'''E:''' Oh, you missed a bunch of stuff.

'''S:''' I'm sure, absolutely. I'm missing a lot of nuance, but again, this is like, this would be a three-hour show just on this topic, just to get to any kind of, that's like, you could teach a course on this. You can watch, you can write multiple volumes of text about this. Of course, we're not going to get to that level, but I think I tried to give a good impression of, at least you could see a little bit how deep it goes and that these simplistic narratives that people are using for rhetorical purposes are nonsense, are just complete nonsense. Because I think both Troy and Atlantis have really captured the imagination. That's why there's so much interest in them. There's something very romantic about these stories and about these places. They have good marketing. I also think there's a lot in the name, like the name Atlantis is cool. I think that's like Nostradamus's fame is 99% that he has a really cool name. Right?

'''B:''' Right.

'''E:''' What's in the name?

'''S:''' I mean, Nostradamus has the coolest prophet name ever.

'''B:''' It's pretty awesome.

'''B:''' And the Disney Atlantis movie, I actually like that.

'''E:''' Oh, gosh.

'''S:''' That was, oh my God. That was total nonsense.

'''E:''' Based on a true fiction.

'''S:''' Let's move on. Well, I guess it's time for science or fiction.

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== Science or Fiction (h:mm:ss) ==

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''Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.''

'''S:''' Each week I come up with three news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panelist, Scott Fix, to tell me which one is the fake. Guess what the theme is this week?

'''J:''' Christmas.

'''S:''' Archaeology. Archaeology.

'''E:''' Archaeology.

'''S:''' Yes.

'''E:''' Ar.

'''S:''' Are you ready?

'''E:''' Yar.

'''S:''' Okay. Here we go. Examination of the ruins of the great library of Alexandria result in an estimate that it once contained 700,000 scrolls. Number two, the Voynich manuscript is a 15th century book entirely written in an unknown language or code and full of mysterious images of plants, zodiac signs, and other undecipherable images. And item number three, the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal is a 2,600 year old archaeological find containing 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. Evan, go first.

<big>'''Evan's Response'''</big>

'''E:''' The examination of the ruins of the great library of Alexandria. They're saying it once contained 700,000 scrolls. So, therefore, they must have counted the shelf space. I mean, or something equivalent, right? Is that, that must be how they're basing it.

'''S:''' That's the idea.

'''E:''' Yeah. And I suppose you could do, I think you could flesh that out pretty accurately and come to a pretty good.

'''J:''' It gets them close, right?

'''E:''' Yeah, it gets you pretty close. On a scale of 700,000. Okay, so maybe it was 698,000 scrolls. I have a feeling that one's right. The Voynich manuscript. The 15th century book. Voynich, I say. Written in an unknown language or code full of mysterious images, plants, zodiac signs, and other undecipherable images. Gosh, I don't know a lot about this one. I've heard of it. Yeah, weren't Yale scholars trying to figure this damn thing out? And it is. It really is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma and a puzzle. How's that go? And, yeah, I think it's, I think to this day it remains indecipherable. I think that one's right. Now, this last one, the Royal Library of Ashbury Park is a 2,600-year-old archaeological find containing 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. This is the one I've not heard of before. In India?

'''S:''' Iraq.

'''E:''' Iraq. Modern-day Iraq, huh? Mesopotamia. Oh, 2,600 years old.

'''S:''' At that time it would be Assyria or Neo-Assyria.

'''E:''' Okay, all right. It doesn't really help me. I don't know what to do. Well, I have a feeling, I'm pretty confident about the Voynich manuscript. I know nothing about this Royal Library, the Great Library of Alexandria. I'll say it's the Great Library of Alexandria. I think that their estimates didn't come to the conclusion of 700,000 scrolls. It's either an order of magnitude larger or smaller than that. How's that?

'''S:''' Okay. Jay?

<big>'''Jay's Response'''</big>

'''J:''' Okay, this is really hard, Steve. Wow. My first question about the first one about the Great Library of Alexandria is, were there ruins? If there were ruins, because it burned down a long time ago. What kind of ruins would we have? If it burned down, then what would we know? What would the ruins tell us that would be able to give us an estimate of 700,000 scrolls? I think I agreed with what Evan said. Maybe it was its capacity. Most of the stuff that it had in there were in scroll form and not actually in what we would consider to be a book form. I don't know that. I'm just saying. If it's scrolls, then maybe they could figure how many could they fit. But that would be very hard to do because how big were the scrolls? What about the variability in size of the scrolls? I would imagine that if they have a number like 700,000 scrolls, that that was written down by someone. So I'm not sure the ruins would say that it held 700. That the ruins would be able to, through science, they'd be able to figure that out. The second one, the Voynich Manuscript. Now, I have definitely heard of it. So, yeah, there's not much to say because it is a mystery. It is a very weird thing. I always thought that it was like somebody was having fun creating their own thing. You know what I mean?

'''E:''' Yeah.

'''J:''' So, I mean, I don't know if the Voynich Manuscript has anything to do with that. But, I mean, everything here seems okay with me. And then we've got the Royal Library. And, again, I agree with Evan. Agree, whatever. I haven't heard of this. I don't know. I don't have much to go on here. 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. Is that a lot? I mean, I would imagine a clay tablet. I always kind of picture it like in the biblical sense. You know, like this big clay thing. You know, I've seen them in museums. I don't know. Like a clay tablet versus another clay tablet. How big are they? Is 26? I mean, is 30,000 a lot? Probably. Sounds like a hell of a lot. So I don't know, Steve. Okay. So let's do this. I'm going to the first one, though, again, I think I'm hitting on something there. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and instead of picking the last one about the Royal Library of Asher Ben-Tapal, I'm going to say that there's something wrong with the first one about the Great Library of Alexandria.

'''S:''' Okay, Bob.

<big>'''Bob's Response'''</big>

'''B:''' Yeah, I thought similarly to both you guys, the second two, the Voynich manuscript, I don't think I've heard of that. And I was thinking maybe it is just these scribblings and kind of a joke. But the thing is, though, if you created a whole book of nonsense, you could mathematically prove that, yes, this contains no information. You could actually determine that, I think. I could still see that happening. And the same for the last one with the Royal Library. I mean, I don't know enough to say whether it's reasonable to have 2,600 years ago to have such a number of clay tablets. I don't know. So the only one that's really rubbing me wrong is the one I know most about, which isn't that much, admittedly, but the Great Library of Alexandria. And, I mean, the way you're phrasing this is a little bit sketchy. You don't give any evidence of when this examination of the ruins was done. It kind of leads you to think that it was a recent examination. And then, of course, I think, well, what the hell's left? How the hell are you examining anything about the Great Library at this point? I just agree with everyone else that the Great Library is fiction.

'''E:''' Oh, boy.

=== Steve Explains Item #2 ===

'''S:''' Well, let's go to number two, then, since you guys all agree on number one. The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th century book entirely written in an unknown language or code and full of mysterious images of plants, zodiac signs, and other undecipherable images. You all think this one is science. And this one is science. Yep, this one's cool. It's a mystery. We still don't know.

'''B:''' Still a mystery, huh?

'''E:''' Still a mystery.

'''B:''' People with modern computers and code breaking.

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a whole book. It's handwritten. This is in the age just before the printing press, right? So the thinking is—

'''B:''' Language, right? Probably a language.

'''S:''' Well, it's probably a code. I mean, it's probably not a made-up language. So one hypothesis is that this is the whole thing's a hoax, right? But that's not the dominant belief. The other hypothesis is that this is a personal book.

'''E:''' A diary?

'''S:''' It was not a diary. So before the printing press, before you could go and buy a copy of a book people would curate information and write their own book out of the information they needed from multiple other references, right? You would go to a library or whatever, and then you would—

'''E:''' Oh, it's the equivalent nowadays of downloading your information and storing it all in one device.

'''B:'''Like a mixtape.

'''S:''' Exactly.

'''E:''' A mixtape.

'''S:''' This is a mixtape. So whatever information is in there, this person wrote it for themselves, and therefore they're the only ones who had to read it. And so they wrote it in some notation or code or whatever. So what the hell is it then? If you look at this book, what the hell is going on here? There was a recent paper that the hypothesis is that this is a book about women's medicine. It's a medical book about women. A lot of the pictures are of women, of naked women, of like weird shit with naked women. So they're thinking maybe this is just a pre-scientific book of medical treatment of women and female ailments. And that's why there's a lot of picture of plants. Maybe it's an herbology kind of text that he's copying here, parts of what was thought to be female anatomy. You know, there's obviously a lot of magic mixed in as well, which there would be in a pre-scientific medical text. Could be a lot of alchemy, whatever. So that's possible, but that hasn't really gained wide acceptance, that hypothesis. And a lot of other scholars have kind of ripped it apart a little bit. So I'd say at this point, really, that's just a hypothesis that has not been proven. And it needs further examination, I think, before that hypothesis is really supported. But no one has totally cracked the code, right? This guy just thinks, oh, look, these abbreviations could be the kind of abbreviations that were used for herbology or whatever from these other texts. So there's some tantalizing clues there, but no one's cracked the code, which is interesting, right?

'''B:''' Yeah, I just see an article here. AI didn't decode the cryptic coinage manuscript. It just added to the mystery. It made it worse.

'''E:''' Oh, great.

'''S:''' And it could be the the imaginative ravings of some kind of practitioner who just was making up weird crap about how we thought the female body worked. Who knows?

=== Steve Explains Item #3 ===

'''S:''' Okay, let's go on to number three. The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal is a 2,600-year-old archaeological find containing 30,000 clay tablets and fragments. You guys all think this one is science, and wouldn't that be amazing if we have 30,000 tablets from 2,600 years ago? What a treasure trove of knowledge of the ancient world that would be.

'''E:''' Would.

'''S:''' And that one is science.

'''B:''' Yeah, baby!

'''S:''' Good job, guys. This is like the best archaeological find that we have in a way. It's 30,000.

'''B:''' Better than the Dead Sea Scrolls?

'''S:''' 30,000, Bob, and older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. And some of these tablets are, like, complete. When I say fragments, I'm not talking about a little chip. I'm talking about, okay, they have half of this one, two-thirds of that one. There's a piece broken off of it. But I've seen pictures of, like, complete tablets covered in writing, and it's literature, it's history, it's science, it's government records, it's all kinds of writing from the time. This is a massive library, and 30,000 is a lot. That's huge. This is the single biggest window we have into that time and place in history, the Near East, basically, from the Bronze Age. Very awesome. Okay.

'''E:''' Now we know.

=== Steve Explains Item #1 ===

'''S:''' All of this means that examination of the ruins of the Great Library of Alexandria results in an estimate that it once contained 700,000 scrolls is fiction because both of those components are fiction. We don't even know where the ruins of the city of Alexandria are. And 700,000, while that is quoted as a figure for the number of scrolls it contained in its heyday, is almost certainly an overestimate, probably by an order of magnitude.

'''J:''' So I nailed it, Steve. I nailed it.

'''B:''' We all did.

'''E:''' Some of us nailed it first.

'''J:''' I didn't say that. I didn't say that, Evan.

'''S:''' You got the first part.

'''J:''' I'm saying that I nailed it. I didn't say Evan didn't and Bob didn't.

'''E:''' Okay, fair enough.

'''S:''' You got most of the way there, Jay. We don't even know if the Great Library of Alexandria existed. How about that?

'''E:''' Wait. What? Wait, Hypatia?

'''B:''' Don't even say that to me. Next thing you'll tell me, Atlantis doesn't exist.

'''E:''' Or leprechauns.

'''B:''' Or Eskimos.

'''S:''' The story that Sagan tells in Cosmos is largely a fiction.

'''E:''' Oh, no.

'''S:''' It's a nice, tidy little story like the Trojan War that probably is just as loosely based on reality.

'''J:''' See, this is why I don't believe in anything.

'''S:''' Well, you got to be very, very careful about any kind of simple story like this. So, all right. What was the Great Library of Alexandria?

'''J:''' Well, what we know, it was great.

'''S:''' It was probably something that it is based on probably did exist. And it was the Temple of the Muses. The Muses were – and that's where we get the term museum from, right? This was the museum. And that did contain a records room, a book room, right? So, they did have a book collection, which probably did not look like a big open library with stacks of shelves. It was probably just a series of rooms where people could go to study and learn. And there was books stored in each room, or in this case, scrolls.

'''J:''' And did you ever hear, Steve, that any ship that came into the port –

'''S:''' Yeah, yeah. The idea was that any ship that came into the port, they would have to turn over all their scrolls. And they would be copied and they would be given back the copies. And the originals were kept in the Library of Alexandria. Who knows if that's true or not. So, here's the thing. We're not really sure what the building was like. We have no information about the building itself, right? No architectural information. The ruins have not been discovered. We're not really sure what was in there. Some guy estimated that probably at that time, there probably only were about 30,000 scrolls of knowledge in the world. And so, 700,000 is massively an overestimate, unless you're including a lot of, again, government bureaucratic reports and stuff like that. If you add up all of the literature that existed at the time, etc., there probably was only 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 scrolls worth of information at the time. I don't know how accurate that estimate is. But the estimates of how many scrolls probably were in the Temple of the Muses ranges from about 30,000 to 700,000. But the 700,000 figures totally pulled out of someone's backside. There's no data to support that. And it's probably almost certainly a massive overestimate. Now, there was no, like, oh, the library was in its heyday and it was burned to the ground, right? We don't know what the fate of the library was. But what we can piece together, it was probably destroyed over decades, maybe even centuries of neglect and events happening. There may have been a fire at some point. There is writing that Julius Caesar burned part of it when he was there. The city was a central point. It was a very volatile location. And it was sacked a lot of times, Alexandria. But there was also sub-libraries, like other places where books were kept. It's not clear if the scrolls were kept in the same place that the school was. So all these questions exist. So, again, that neat little story of that it was like the center of knowledge in the ancient world and it was destroyed is certainly not true. The other thing is there were hundreds of libraries around the ancient world at that time. And the idea that this was unique is also probably nonsense. So, anyway, it actually – I was actually happy when I was, like, doing a deep dive on this today. It's like, okay, so it wasn't as much of a tragedy as sort of we've been led to believe. It wasn't that big a deal. I mean, it was probably a great collection of scrolls. Absolutely. It was a center of learning. It probably was a massive collection there. And it was lost to history, but it's not clear exactly how or why. And it probably was multiple events over a long period of time. But there's no reason to think that it was a unique collection. There were competing libraries that were probably as big elsewhere.

'''J:''' So I'll say it, Steve. We don't know shit about it.

'''S:''' Yeah, and we haven't found it, you know. Some people think that it's – we probably will – if we looked under Alexandria, we may find the ruins of what was the Temple of the Muses.

'''E:''' So in Cosmos, when Carl Sagan was on the streets there and he actually walked into a small little doorway into this dust-filled room and said –

'''S:''' All CG, yeah.

'''E:''' Well, no, not – yeah. But he was – what was he basing his information off of?

'''S:''' Yeah, again, that's sort of one version of events, but it's not really scholarly.

'''E:''' Oh, boy.

'''S:''' It did serve his rhetorical purpose as well for that show, but it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

'''E:''' Oh, he was pulling a Play-Doh on us.

'''S:''' Yeah. Yeah, totally.

'''E:''' Wow.

'''S:''' I have to say.

'''E:''' You got to follow the bouncing ball here. It moves quickly. Jeez. It's a hell of a simulated reality we're living in, I tell you. Very, very creative creators, whoever they are.

'''S:''' Yeah. But there are reports of Hypatia being the daughter of the last librarian in Alexandria, and she was killed by a Christian mob, apparently. But it's not – the library may not have even existed at that point, you know.

'''J:''' Well, I learned a lot tonight, you know.

'''E:''' Yeah, we touched on a lot of cool stuff.

'''S:''' Yeah, I like archaeology.

{{anchor|qow}} 
== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==

{{qow
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|author = {{w|_try_to_use_a_wikipedia_article_title_here_|_alternate_display_text_for_name_}}
|lived = _birth_year_-_death_year_ 
|desc = 
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'''S:''' Okay, Evan, give us the quote.

'''E:''' "Atlantis continues to captivate people's imaginations because it offers the hope that lost ideals or some untapped human potential will someday be uncovered, not the masonry blocks of a dead civilization." And that was written by Kevin Christopher in 2001 in an issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

'''S:''' Yeah.

'''E:''' And the main sentiment there is that, yeah, Atlantis is more – really more of an idea. And that's what people – that's why we keep coming back to it, and people are fascinated with it. And some have legitimate wanting to understand it and learn about it and figure out what really may have been going on. And there's others like Jimmy out there who are taking a whole different cranky approach to it. So...

'''S:''' Right.

'''E:''' It's a good reminder.

'''S:''' All right. Thanks, Evan.

'''E:''' Thanks.

'''S:''' All right, guys. Well, thanks for joining me this week.

'''J:''' Right. You got it, Steve.

'''B:''' Sure man.

'''E:''' Thanks, Steve. See you in D.C.

'''S:''' Yep. We'll see you guys in D.C.

== Signoff ==

'''S:''' —and until next week, this is your {{SGU}}. 


{{Outro664}}{{top}} 
== Today I Learned ==
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