SGUTranscripts - User contributions [en]

SGU Episode 450

2014-07-23T00:59:33Z

Lmwood: /* Subway and Azodicarbonamide (30:05) */

SGU Episode 450

2014-05-09T00:46:55Z

Lmwood: /* Subway and Azodicarbonamide (30:05) */

SGU Episode 450

2014-05-08T01:34:07Z

Lmwood: /* Pseudoscience Vandalism (20:45) */

SGU Episode 450

2014-05-08T00:23:20Z

Lmwood: /* Genovese Myth (08:35) */

SGU Episode 450

2014-03-27T03:13:11Z

Lmwood: /* This Day in Skepticism (01:10) */

SGU Episode 450

2014-03-26T03:19:00Z

Lmwood: /* Introduction */

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-25T04:24:23Z

Lmwood: /* Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:21:09) */

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|episodeNum = 449
|episodeDate = February 15th 2014 
|episodeIcon = File:Burgess2.jpg 
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|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=48798.0.html
|qowText = The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it. 
|qowAuthor = {{w|Otto Pfleiderer}}, 1902 
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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 Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 12th 2014, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Ello guvna

S: Happy Darwin Day everyone!

B: Yay!

R: Happy Darwin Day! I’m wearin my little Darwin t-shirt, available at skepticalrobot.com.

B: I’m sitting here all evolved and everything.

E: What exactly is Darwin Day?

R: It’s the day Darwin was born.

S: Otherwise known as his birthday, yeah. Did you guys know, here’s my Darwin Day factoid for the day, a scientist named a new species of beetle after Darwin? The beetle was discovered by Dr. Stylianos Chatzimanolis from the University of Tennessee

B: Wait wait wait, say that again.

S: NO. This is a uh a rove beetle. There are fifty-seven thousand described species, but apparently Darwin collected this specimen when he was on the beetle. And then it sat lost in a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London; and was rediscovered in London in 2008. And then somebody realized hey this was actually collected by Darwin

B: Oh!

S: So it was just described and it was named Darwinilus sedarisi

B: Oh sweet

E: very nice

J: what’s this bug called luv?

B: I would have put that on EBay

E: Imagine if someone would have opened the drawer and said, “Ew there’s a dead bug in here. Let’s dump it out and get rid of it ew!”

R: There are tons of Darwin specimens that are just sitting in drawers underneath the uh London Museum of Natural Science. My friend, Karen James, used to work there and she gave me the behind the scenes tour and it was amazing! There was all of…they have so much incredible stuff. They keep Darwin’s own samples in a basement somewhere. Ya know, not even open to the public.

E: Have you guys seen the show on HBO called Questioning Darwin?

R: Nope

E: HBO’s ran that, I think, starting last week. And I didn’t watch all of it; I watched parts of it. And it had some very parts. Apparently, something I didn’t know about Darwin before, is that during his seminal time in which he was writing the Origin of Species – that he spent twenty years accumulating – all of his notes and everything in doing this… He basically cloistered himself inside of his house and his wife kind of made, ya know brought everything to him. He had his family all around him and the varied species and all the animals and things and plant life and his his green house was immense and everything. But he basically stayed there for twenty years and worked like eighteen hour days like every day for twenty years just in pursuit of this… of of of learning more about the origin of species. And that is dedication

B: How many wives would put up with that crap? Like yeah this is gonna be a revolutionary theory, I need eighteen hours a day for the next two decades.

E: Apparently she was entirely on board

B: Wow

E: and made it possible for him to do the work that was necessary for him to get that book published.

B: Glad she did, but what a hard sale that must have been…

== This Day in Skepticism (03:20) ==
* February 15: Happy Decimal Day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day
R: Hey, speaking of…England uh Happy Decimal Day everyone! Uh the day we record this is Darwin Day, but the day this episode comes out is February 15th. And February 15th, 1971 was Decimal Day. Which, personally I think they should celebrate every year; just because it’s a wonderfully dorky sounding holiday. But, in 1971 that was the date when the UK and Ireland switched their currency to using decimals instead of, you know, the ridiculously confusing system that they used to use.

E: Don’t you like having a pocket full of farthings and three pence and…

R: I wrote this down just so I could get it all right. They were two farthings in a hay penny, two hay pennies in a penny (obviously), twelve pence in a shilling, two and a half shillings in a half crown, twenty shillings in a pound, twenty-one shillings in a guinea

B: OH! Twenty-one!

R: And sixty-seven guineas in a pandapiddle(?)

B: You made that last part up

E: Did you make up that last one?

R: I did. I did. It took you guys a minute. So, in 1824 decimalization was proposed based upon the fact that the French did it. So…

B: Wait, I think that’s the first time I have ever heard that word.

R: Decimalization?

B: I like it!

R: It’s a word!

B: I believe it!

R: But yeah, even though it was proposed in 1824, it took almost a century and a half for it to actually happen. Which, you know, should make all of us in the US feel a bit better about our metric system concerns. When it did finally happen, the government broke the pound into a hundred pennies. And they started, actually, in 1968 when they issued 5p and 10p coins. And in 1969 they issued the 50p coins. And then finally, on Decimal Day, they introduced the last three coins which were a half penny, one penny and two pence coins. And yeah, they eventually… they started by marking all prices in stores in stuff with both the old currency and the new currency; and they eventually dropped off the old currency. They also had two full years of educational PSAs and stuff teaching people how to use the new currency system. So that when Decimal Day finally rolled around it was pretty easy, not many complaints about it.

E: Because they realized, hey this actually makes sense.

R: Yeah

B: I don’t have much hope. We’re… There’s only three countries on the planet that aren’t metric, and we’re one of them.

E: Yay…

S: Well we’re semi-metric. I mean we buy two liter bottles of soda at the store…

E: Yeah, we’re hybrid sort of…

B: We’re hybrid. Lame hybrid

E: We are. Look at your speedometer. It’s got both miles per hour and kilometers per hour.

B: How often do you even look at that?

R: Every time I go to Canada

E: For every furlong I drive.

S: Alright, Rebecca I have to point out that we got an e-mail last week by a listener calling themselves Sharon. Who said that they were disgusted and dismayed, that you had turned This Day in Skepticism into this day in feminism…talking about all of your female scientists and everything.

R: Right. And like, pennies are girls so… this one too.

S: Which, yeah I immediately recognize this nonsense. But I did a tally of the last years’ worth of This Day in Skepticism; and it turns out that there were twenty-one males mentioned, seven females, and twenty-eight not mentioning a specific person… Like Decimal Day, they were not about a specific person.

R: Right

S: Right. So you talked about female scientists about 13.5% of the time over the last year.

R: And that is

S: Clearly saying

J: That’s too much

E: Stop shoving it in our faces

R: It’s ridiculous

S: And one third as often as male scientists

R: So yeah, Steve, I really appreciate your response…so much so that I published it on SkepChick. Which inspired another response that I found quite funny. It was actually from, you guys wouldn’t have known this but I recognized the name as somebody who has harassed me in the past on Twitter and Facebook and such and I’ve got him blocked pretty much everywhere. His response was, “If you think about it, men have contributed a lot more to the sciences that women. So really, when you’re talking about This Day in Science, you should talk about men, the preponderates of time. And that proves that I was talking about women way too often.

S: Right

B: Wooooooow

R: Which I just love. This demand that, without evidence, well I believe that man have contributed approximately ninety-nine percent of our scientific knowledge and therefore, you highlighting things people haven’t necessarily heard of that they might find interesting and educational, should also adhere to this ninety-nine percent/ one percent split. It’s

S: a totally made up split. Yeah it’s also saying that we have to perpetuate past inequities.

R: Yeah

S: And also, I pointed out, when I responded to the original e-mail, that part of the purpose – our mission of the SGU – is to promote science…is to create enthusiasm for science. And evidence clearly shows, that women are not as encouraged as much as men to go into the sciences, or to any stem field. And, that when they are encouraged, they go in greater numbers. So, we are getting the message out to the people who need it. That’s part of our mission. It’s just ridiculous

B: I’d argue that we’re not; not at thirteen point five percent.

S: We’re not doing it enough!

R: Yeah

S: I ended it by saying that now that we’re actually running the numbers, we’re actually not doing it enough. Thanks for pointing out the deficiency for us.

B: Hahaha

R: And like, you know even as an aside, I really do…what I try to do when I’m choosing an item, is to pick something people probably haven’t heard of before, something they could learn a bit from. So, today for instance, is also Galileo’s birthday; which is quite notable. I’m pretty sure most people in the audience have heard of Galileo. And it’s also Richard Feynman’s death day. I try to avoid death days, because they’re depressing. And it’s also the anniversary the meteor exploding over Russia last year. You know, these are all things we’ve talked about, you know we’ve gone over them a million times…why not talk about something a little weird and you know…different.

B: That was a year ago? Geez

R: Yeah

J: Ten years ago, Chappelle’s Show Rick James skit appeared.

B: Oh my god, that’s what we should have talked about

J: It’s a celebration bitches!

R: Ten years ago today, I’m Rick James, bitch.

J: It was actually yesterday, but still…ten years ago.

== News Items ==
=== Organic Molecules on the Moon (10:15) ===
* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2556947/Could-creatures-one-day-live-MOON-Ice-pockets-lunar-surface-hiding-building-blocks-simple-life.html
S: Alright let’s move on to some news items. Jay, you’re gonna tell us about why there might be, but not really, life on the moon.

J: Yeah, let’s not jump to conclusions. I mean when we say life, people tend to think of

S: Or life-like molecules

J: Ya know creatures. Yeah we’re talking about molecules here. So let me give you the background. So back in 2009, the lunar crater observation and sensing satellite was sent to the moon; and part of the mission was to crash a used part of the launch vehicle that was still attached to the ship into the moon to help us understand if the moon is actually made of cheese or if it’s a dessert pasty. But it actually also analyzed a plume of debris that the ship that they crashed into the moon’s surface kicked up by the impact. And what we ended up with, after observing the plume of debris that came up, is that there are organic molecules trapped in the moon’s ice. Organic molecules are, simply put, molecules that contain carbon; but these could be solid, liquid, gas or solid chemical compounds. So the organic compounds are often called the building blocks of life. So how strange is it to find them on the moon, right? Which is just a really big ball of marzipan, after all. Thank you Rebecca. So how did those organic molecules get to the moon? Some believe that they came from comets that crashed into the moon’s surface. So these comets, which have been traveling through space for unknown amount of time either picked them up or whatever. But ya know somehow those organic molecules got on the comets and the comets brought them to the moon’s surface. But recently, the University of Hawaii’s Sarah Crites said that cosmic rays are powerful enough to create a reaction that could actually create organic compounds. Cosmic rays you say, huh? Bob, what’s a cosmic ray?
B: Cosmic rays are particles, they’re not rays…it’s a funny misnomer. But they’re particles. Alpha particles and protons that come from outside of our solar system and they’re very energetic and can be nasty.

J: Yeah, high energy particles that are mostly protons; and they come from outside the solar system and they exist pretty much everywhere in the universe. So Sarah and her team believe that up to six percent of the moon’s simpler molecules, found in the polar ice, could be converted into organic compounds over a billion years of being hit by cosmic rays. And to put that time scale into perspective, that is approximately one quarter of the moo’s age. And the funny thing is that cosmic rays also break down complex molecules. So once these organic molecules are finally created, they could be damaged by the same rays.

S: mhmm

J: So the first thing to think about, in my opinion, is if this is happening...if cosmic rays are hitting inorganic molecules and creating organic molecules, then this is happing possibly anywhere that there’s ice or water in the entire universe. That was a little…that puts a different twist on the idea of billions and billions. You know what I mean? Like, wow! That blew my mind.

S: Yeah but ya know, I think it’s pretty well established that organic molecules are pretty common out there in space.

J: Well the thing is, Steve, have we really observed or have any information on things that are outside our solar system?

S: Outside the solar system, not that I know of, no.

J: Right, but that’s the point though.

S: Yeah
J: So now if by observing this stuff on the moon we can…I’m not saying we’re certain or anything, it’s still something to think about. That’s a pretty profound thought.

S: Yeah. I mean although there is a general principle of, that we’re not unique. Ya know that whatever we see here is probably typical of the rest of the universe

J: So pretty much all over the universe, like movies are really just eye candy now with not much real content? That’s happening everywhere now?

S: Is that a question?

E: *laughs* a rhetorical one

R: Steve, have you ever given a patient a hug?

B: *laughs

S: Why do you ask?

J: I want to hear the answer to that question.

E: Like an inappropriate hug?

R: Cuz my doctor today gave me a hug, and it was fine at the moment. Then when he left the room, I was like that was weird! Why did he give me a hug?

B: How well do ya know him?

R: Uh this is like my third of fourth visit.

J: Rebecca, maybe he surmised that you’re gonna die and he felt bad.

R: Yeah that’s, he wasn’t giving me bad news or anything. It was just like a physical, and then

B: And then he got physical

E: Very physical

J: Have you ever hugged a patient?

S: I have never initiated a hug; but if patients initiate a hug with me I allow it.

R: And it’s always like when you’ve just told them something horrible right?

S: No no! I just…ya know I just have some like older female patients that are very huggy

R: Oook

S: and feel

E: cultural

S: they feel comfortable doing that.

R: He’s an older man who looks like Richard Dreyfuss and sounds like Richard Dreyfuss.

S: Interesting. Doctors have different personalities with their patients. But there are lines that we try to be cognizant of.

R: Yeah

=== Astrology Belief (15:14) ===
* http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/public-opinion-astrology-dumb
S: Um Alright, Evan, you’re gonna tell us about public opinion regarding an oldie, but a goodie…astrology.

E: Oh boy, oh boy. Yeah Chris Mooney, author, long-time friend of the SGU and the New England Skeptical Society; he wrote an article at motherjones.com the other day. A very revealing piece in which he showcases the latest analysis of how well Americans understand science. Or, rather, how terribly Americans misunderstand science. Chris reports that, according to a new survey by the national science foundation, nearly half of all Americans say astrology – which is the study of celestial bodies’ reported influence on human behavior, worldly events and other human centered notions – astrology is either very scientific or sort of scientific. Nearly half of Americans.

S: Mhmm

R: Wow

E: And this was part of a larger comprehensive analysis contained within the 2014 science and engineering indicator study; which has revealed that American attitudes about science are moving in the wrong direction. Skepticism of astrology had hit an all-time high in 2004, when sixty-six percent of Americans believed that astrology was total nonsense. But since then, each year fewer and fewer respondents have dismissed connections between star alignment and personality as bunk.

S: So basically you’re saying right when the SGU started, it was all downhill from there.

E: I hate to have to say that, but that’s correlation and causation, by the way folks.

S: Yeah

E: We can actually not ascribe anything really meaningful to that. But you’re right, Steve, that is an interesting little tidbit. But here’s how it went, they first took this poll in 1979. And at the point fifty percent of Americans were skeptical of astrology as a science, fifty percent were skeptical. And then the skepticism, it crept up it rose and kept rising until 2004 sixty-six percent had skepticism of astrology. But since then, 2012 were the latest numbers, and it’s dropped down to fifty-five percent skepticism, which is the lowest number since 1983. And young people are especially inclined to offer astrology scientific legitimacy. A majority of Americans aged 18 to 24 considering the practice at least sort of scientific. And the 25 to 34 age group was not far behind them. This is extremely disconcerting

S: Mhmm

E: Um remember when Carl Sagan famously wrote in his book, The Demon Haunted World, he wrote that if pseudoscience is embraced it might be argued in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. I don’t think there’s ever been a more succinct way of putting it. And what he’s basically saying is the understanding of science is in decline; as result, the embrace of pseudoscience is on the rise.

S: Yeah actually the data shows that there’s not a linear relationship, there’s more of a curve there that actually…People who know a little bit of, as you know more and more science you get more interested in pseudoscience and the paranormal. And it’s only as you start to get to the higher levels of science education that it starts to drop off. Isn’t that interesting?

E: That is very interesting.

S: So I think it makes people more curious and open minded and they start to think about interesting things. But you got to get to a pretty high level of science understanding, or you need critical thinking skills. And that, I think it hasn’t really been tracked separately with that same data. But before you can start to deconstruct and understand why the pseudoscience is more pseudoscientific. But there is separate data, just looking at the ability to think critically; and that definitely correlates with rejection of pseudoscience.

E: Right. Very unfortunate. Um

S: Yeah

E: What can we do? What aren’t we doing?

S: Let’s start a podcast.

E: Yeah, let’s do that. What can our society…and we’re talking about Americans. And they did do some research with other places in the world. And surprisingly a place like China, they’re acceptance of astrology as science is low, very low. Only about ten percent in China compared to the numbers over here. Again it’s called the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicator Study. A lot of good information and data collected there from lots of different sources; not only the National Science Foundation but others. And they kind of put it all together there for you in one nice package. So we’ll recommend that folks go there and check it out for themselves.

S: Yeah so we still got a lot of work to do.

E: A lot.

=== New Burgess Shale Find (19:53) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-burgess-shale-find/
S: Hey well let’s move to a really cool science news item. Uh have you guys ever heard of the Burgess Shale?

B: Yes

R: Yeah

E: Uh, yes

R: He was in a Twilight Zone episode with (?)

B,S,E: *laugh

S: Uh Charles Walcott discovered what is now called the Walcott Quarry about a hundred years ago; right after the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. And this is a uh excellent bed of soft-bodied fossils from the Cambrian Explosion, from the Cambrian era. 570 to 530 million years ago, this was soon after the first proliferation of multicellular plants and animals. Tons of really weird and bizarre species, you know, were pulled out of the Burgess Shale. If you’re interested in this, I think probably still probably the best book that describes the Burgess Shale is Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. Well, recently scientists reported that a discovery of another find – the Kootenay National Park find. It’s in the Burgess Shale, it’s only forty kilometers Southeast of Walcott Quarry; so it’s in the general geographic area. And this is a fossil bed from slightly later in the Cambrian than the Walcott Quarry; so creatures are a little bit more developed. And the early reports are that it could be an even bigger fossil find than the original Walcott Quarry. I mean they’re pulling tons of specimens out of this. And the shale is like these plates; so when you find the fossils you pull the plates apart so you have basically two images of the fossil. You have the negative and the positive image of the fossil. Because of the way the fossils were preserved, it preserves the soft parts. So it’s not just the bones, cuz they’re because early multicellular life didn’t have a lot of hard parts to fossilize. That’s why you need to have these optimal conditions.

E: So when you can see the soft parts you can actually get a sense of what the creature really looked like from the outside.

S: Yeah

B: What kind of preservation are we talking about? These soft parts, what are we talking about here?

S: Well essentially you can reconstruct three dimensional images of these specimens from the two plates ya know. Ya know you may have to get multiple specimens, they do get flattened out. So you have to kind of infer their three dimensional structure. So it takes a lot of work to really reconstruct these fossils, but you can do it. So far they have yielded three thousand and fifty-three specimens, representing at least fifty-two taxa. Of these, half of are known from the Walcott Quarry.

B: And fifteen of them are new right?

S: Yeah, totally new.

R: Wow

B: Amazing

S: And they’re learning new details about previously known species from the Walcott Quarry. So this find, it’s something we’re going to be hearing about for decades I would think.

B: Oh, sure

=== Boeing Anti-Gravity (23:06) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Bob, you’re gonna tell us about another interesting item. This one, I think this is probably more towards the pseudoscience end of the spectrum. You let us know what you think.

B: Oh yeah!

S: Apparently Boeing has been researching antigravity.

B: Yeah…

J: What?!

B: Jay I mean, how extraordinary is that? If that’s even true. Didn’t NASA, I mean how many government agencies have done like ESP and stuff like that? There are no bastion of skeptics in these corporations and in the government. I wasn’t terribly surprised. So basically, a prominent aero researcher named Nick Cook claimed Boeing is working on antigravity projects. He claims that Boeing is kind of trying to get in on some Russian research that has claimed to produce a gravity-like energy beam that can produce, get this, a force of about a thousand Gs on an object, vaporizing it. That’s pretty heavy stuff, this is I think what you can safely call a game changer, if it’s true. Not only for the military offense and defense but for physics itself. I mean is it any surprise though that my skeptical and physics alarm bells are totally going off on this one. So I wanted to take a look at just some of the players behind this. Nick Cook has an interesting resume; he’s a British aerospace researcher and writer, he’s considered an expert on military black projects, and he’s also the current aerospace consultant and was for fourteen years the aviation editor for Janes Defence Weekly. Have you guys heard of that?

E: Oh absolutely, it’s considered like one of the standards of aeronautics.

B: Well it’s an important, it’s an international defense journal. Which basically covers and analyzes military defense activity around the world. If you want to know what’s going on around the world in those realms, this is one of the most prominent journals to look through. Now Nick of course has some red flags in his resume. He’s been on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast a number of times – DING DING DING!

R: Who hasn’t?

B: Yeah, well

E: Phil Plait’s been on there.

B: But not everyone is espousing their beliefs in zero point and ant gravitation devices, among other things. Regarding the zero point energy, he says that it has a potential and limitless power source that pervades all of science. And, I quote, he says it’s rooted in science. Now we’ve covered that before, on zero point energy. But um, there’s another good quote from him, “some theories say if you spin the zero point energy field that exists all around you, some weird and magical things start popping out, one of which is an ant gravitational effect.” So okay, whatever. He admits though that he’s not a scientist, very good’; but he has enlisted some help. So who do you think he asked for some help? None other than Dr. Hal Puthoff. Puthoff was an, he helped pioneer this whole dubious zero point energy field idea in the first place. And he’s also famous for endorsing Uri Geller, enough said about that. And he also, he had to, get this one, he headed the CIA’s remote viewing program and he actually claimed to send his own mind into the surface of the planet Mercury. So you know if I want a scientist to back up my revolutionary claims, I’ll just say that I would not pick Dr. Hal Puthoff okay. So according to Cook, Boeing has not only confessed to researching antigravity, but claimed… I really I couldn’t corroborate that at all. I found denial from Boeing, but that was from 2002. I couldn’t find anything recent; so I can’t find anything saying that they’ve actually been looking into it. And even if they were, so what? Does that mean that it’s a real science? He also claims that they have a project. He actually has the name of a project that they’re working on called Grasp, Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. And the aim of the project, apparently, is three holed. They want to enter a collaborative relationship with their Russian scientist who’s behind this new revolutionary device that can project a thousand Gs of energy towards anything. His name is Dr. Eugene Podkletnov. They want to determine the validity of his work; and finally they wanted to examine the uses for such a technology. Clearly, there’d be amazing uses for it; but the thing is, how feasible is it and what’s the evidence like? So, now I looked into Eugene and he’s got some red flags as well, of course. He’s a material scientist, he’s not a physicist like I assumed. He was about to publish his research… I looked into his early years and he was about to publish his research on gravity negation way back in ’96 and scientists criticized his conclusion; and then he withdrew his article. And then somehow this was followed by the University evicting him. Then he disappeared for a while, he went off the grid for a while. So for me, you know if you’re unable to handle criticism, that’s classic pseudoscientist right there. I mean that’s what…that’s an integral part of science. If you can’t handle it then um…that’s just a major red flag I think that you are an actual pseudoscientist. Clearly this guy is bright, but you know how that goes. Just because you’re a smart guy doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get swayed by woo. Also, I’ve been reading about some of the problems with his published research. Typical things I’m hearing are that he doesn’t give out enough information so that you can actually replicate any of his experiments. People mentioned anomalies that seemed to have never been described or analyzed so. Those are red flags as well. And then I tried to look into the, what’s the science have to say about shielding gravity or even gravity weapons? It doesn’t look good. You know you typically can’t say it’s impossible, but it doesn’t look good for some of this. I got some good quotes, George Smoot (he’s a professor of physics at UC Berkley) he said, “If gravity shielding is going to be consistent with Einstein’s general theory, you would need tremendous amounts of mass and energy. It’s far beyond the technology we have today.” Yeah, that kind of makes sense. You wanna mess with gravity, you need a lot of mass to generate it. But then Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine, he said “There’s nothing impossible about gravity shielding, it just requires a field theory that we don’t have yet.” That’s all, a new field theory. That alone would garner this guy a Nobel Prize, that would be an amazing thing. But just saying this guy that all he needs is a new field theory, I mean that seems like quite a bit. So also there’s another final point I wanted to make about this, I think – it just seems reasonable- that if he had a working device, that he demonstrated, that was dramatic as what they’re saying… I just think that the Russian government would clamp down on this guy and not let him out of their sight. I mean that’s an amazing development and I think it’d be obvious that they would pour billions of dollars into anything like that. Especially, if this guy has got a working device. The benefits are just not to be believed, you have amazing weapons that would literally put Russia’s military in a league all its own, if they had things like this. They’d have gravity shielding to protect them missile and light saber attacks and all sorts of things. Flying cars with no conventional food and space ships that literally seem to pop right out of science fiction movies. I mean it’s almost unending what they would have. And they would take quite seriously if he was actually able to demonstrate it. So I was reading Wired article about him and the guy’s looking for funding you know; and that just totally reminds me of the free energy and perpetual motion devices that we have seen in the past

S: Yeah

B: The only thing perpetual about them is the need for your money and just a little bit more time. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. The fact that Boeing, if they didn’t even research it, whatever. I mean companies like that do all sorts of whacky stuff trying to make a revolutionary leap in just one bound. And hey, you know, it’s not impossible, that would be an amazing thing. But I wouldn’t be sinking lots of money into this. Not unless I actually saw his device.

S: I think that’s a very common feature of technological pseudoscience is that it’s like five to ten steps ahead of where we are ya know. And it’s where companies might get in trouble. They’re always looking for the next thing right, the next technological breakthrough; because they want to invest in it and be and own it. But I guess you need some science background to know when that breakthrough is the next iterative step in our development of technology versus someone claiming to have let decades of research ahead of where we are. To the point where you can’t of course predict

B: Right

S: What’s gonna happen. And, with no paper trail to show for it, you know.

=== Photo Lineups (31:56) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Alright one last news item. Uh Rebecca, you’re gonna tell us about the science of photo lineups.

R: Sure. Or the lack of science about photo lineups. Steve sent me a very interesting article that talks about the fact that more and more United States police departments are using a new method of doing photo lineups; something called double-blind sequential lineups. Or instead of lineups sometimes they say arrays, because that’s a bit more specific. To have crime witnesses identify perpetrators. So most people probably know the traditional lineups that you see in films and the usual suspects where a witness looks over a group of people all at once to see which one is the criminal, while there’s a police lieutenant or someone looking on. Or maybe you’ve seen a Law & Order episode where a witness is looking over a bunch of photos while the detective looks over the shoulder; it’s ya know same idea. But there are a lot of problems with that method. There are decades of research that show that when witnesses are presented with a group of people, they won’t necessarily pick out the perpetrator, they’ll just pick out the person they think looks most like the perpetrator. Which is obviously a huge problem. That can lead to false convictions, false arrests, and false convictions. There’s also the problem of having a police officer standing nearby who knows who the quote un quote correct suspect is. Uh the article Steve sent me, I thought kind of naively stated that uh police officers can unconsciously influence witnesses. But of course they can and have, in the past, very consciously influenced witnesses, as well as unconsciously influencing witnesses to get what they need to make an arrest. So with this new method, or at least newer than that method, the lineup is overseen by an officer who has no idea who the actual suspect is – which is what makes it blinded. And instead of the witness seeing all of the suspects, or all of the photos of the suspects at once, they view each one individually so that they can compare that person to their actual memory and decide if it matches up. As opposed to comparing all of the suspects to one another. Despite the preponderance of research suggesting that this method is superior, most police departments actually, in the United States at least, still go by the old method. Some of that might be due to you know just general slow changing just you know, sometimes making a change like that can be difficult for something that’s imbedded in their procedures. Some of the inability to change is due to the fact that the research also shows that not only does sequential presentation of the suspects lead to fewer incorrect identifications, but it also leads to fewer identifications overall. Just to be clear, the reduction in incorrect identifications is much greater than the reduction in all identifications. But, unfortunately there are many police departments that are happy to accept a certain number of false identifications if it means more identifications overall, which is kind of depressing. And the other depressing news is that even if the majority of departments started using the scientifically proven to be better method of showing a sequential array, there are still a host of systemic problems regarding witness uh eyewitness identification in police work. Eyewitness misidentification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. It accounts for about seventy-five percent of overturned convictions according to the Innocence Project, which is a great nonprofit that focuses on providing resources and representation to people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. So, how a lineup is conducted is just one of what they call system variables that can impact uh accuracy of identifications. Other system variables include who is chosen by the police to participate in the lineup and what instructions are given to the witness before they make an identification, and what they witness is told after an identification. And then in addition to system variables, there are what’s known as estimator variables, which are uncontrollable circumstances that can hamper an identification. Like maybe the crime took place at night, or far away from the witness, or maybe the criminal is a different race than the witness – which studies show make a witness less able to distinguish certain characteristics and less likely to be able to choose the correct suspects. Or maybe the witness, at the time of the crime, was under a great deal of stress, which happens quite often and can negatively influence whether or not they can correctly identify the perpetrator. So fixing the lineup issue isn’t going to account for any of that. So even if police departments do start paying attention to the science on lineups, our court systems need to do a better job of paying attention to the science that tells us eyewitness identifications are extremely unreliable, and in many cases we have to use other methods like DNA testing in order to make a case for criminal convictions.
S: Yeah I mean there’s actually a pretty broad literature on eyewitness identification. And you’re right Rebecca, pretty much all the variables that you think would influence people’s choice do influence it. At the very least, you have to have a rigorous, almost pristine process. No bias instructions, nobody present who knows what the quote un quote correct answer is, no forced choices and no post identification feedback.

R: Yeah

S: That all effects their confidence. There’s also… did you come across the term choice blindness in your reading about this?

R: I think so

S: Yeah so people don’t even know why they make the choices that they do and don’t even remember the choices they made when like they’re asked to reproduce them.

E: Wow

S: They basically, we know this from all the psychological experiments and other contexts, but people can be manipulated in pretty much every way you can think of, and these all apply. And the bottom line is yeah these kind of eyewitness testimonies is the weakest form of evidence.

R: Yeah

S: It’s the most biased, easily manipulated etcetera etcetera, and yet juries emotionally tend to invest the most weight on eyewitness testimony.

R: Right. And it’s not to say that eyewitness testimony doesn’t have a place in trials and in the investigation, it’s just that you’re right, we need to… There are so many factors that we can’t control. These so called estimator variables, that the very least we can do, the very least we should do, is absolutely everything we can to make the system variables in line with scientific accuracy. So yeah. And so instituting something like this as a law, for instance, making it against the law to do simultaneous lineups…you know that’s just one small step, but it is still probably an important step on the road towards cleaning up how we think about eyewitness testimonies and how we treat eyewitnesses in crimes. And hopefully that can lead to fewer false convictions.

S: Yeah it’s a minimum, at the minimum we should at least be having blinded examiners, you know.

R: yeah

S: Space and stuff like that, you’re right.

=== Quickie with Bob - Fusion Beats Unity (39:55) ===
* http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html
S: Hey you know what we haven’t had in a while?

R: Uh, a quickie with Bob?

S: A quickie with Bob

R: Yeah it has been a while.

B: Well thank you Steve, I appreciate your offer. Um, this is your quickie with Bob. This is pretty cool guys. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have broken unity.

E: There’s a National Ignition Society?

B: Facility

E: Facility?

B: Where you been boy? So this internal confinement system focuses five hundred terawatt lasers, one hundred ninety-two of them, onto a pellet with the hopes of heating and compressing to such a degree that they achieve ignition creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction to power our ya know Delorean time machines of course. Um, well maybe that was cold fusion. But still, this is a major milestone guys. For the first time ever they’ve created more energy from the fuel than actually did the fuel. I worded that very carefully, that’s a key distinction. Because, the lasers actually produced a hundred times the amount than the fuel actually used. But still, I mean fusion actually happened. Some of the alpha particles that were created actually heated other parts of the fuel to create more alpha particles and so on and so on. The bootstrapping process, um it’s an order of magnitude more efficient than previously. So uh this is clearly, this is a process that’s working that’s creating more and more energy. Now the caveats, of course we got some caveats, this is not ignition. This achievement does not mean even that this process is the one that will get us to ignition. But still, um it’s the best fusion news that we’ve had in a really long time and uh I think this is really good news. It really shows that the money, you know the millions and billions of dollars that we’re investing in this, is really worth it. They are making some really good gains. For years now they, you know the news items are coming fairly quickly, and this uh this is the biggest one. I mean we actually, fusion actually happened. This hasn’t really happened in any facility like this ever. So uh, so that’s fantastic and hopefully the process that they’re working on now is the one that really gonna, that’s really gonna show us a way to achieve ignition.

S: What do ya think, five years? We’ll have ignition?

B: *laughs* yeah

S: Five to ten years.

B: Yeah so keep your eye on this one. Uh fusion is one of those huge technologies that it, once we have it ya know it would just be one of the inventions of history. This has been your quickie with Bob, and I hope it was good for you too. Discuss

S: Ya see this is the kind of paper trail that I was talking about. When you’re developing something as big as fusion, then there are these incremental advances. I mean the research is there, it’s happening. Ya know it’s not like somebody just says hey I created fusion, ya know.

E: Let’s have a press release

S: I leaped ahead twenty steps and thirty years of research all in fell swoop.

B: It’s not one lone scientist, I mean those days are long gone. Sure you could have ya know a breakthrough, a theoretical breakthrough, in lots of different areas by one person. But typically now, it’s teams and teams and countries. How many times have we had discussions of news items and it’s completely international? Two, three, four five different countries are all working together.

E: Makes sense.

S: It does

R: Did you notice that the uh researcher quoted on NPR was called Omar Hurricane?

B: Yes

R: So the researcher named Omar Hurricane used a giant laser to produce nuclear fusion. That is definitely a superman plot.

S: He’s a super villain!

R: Yeah

B,E: *Laugh

R: Right?

S: Absolutely

J: Is his last name Hiruken? From Street Fighter, is that what you’re saying?

B: *laughs

R: No, it’s actually hurricane

S: Hurricane

R: But that would also be great. Yeah

== Who's That Noisy (44:55) ==
* Answer to last week: Alan Shephard
S: Alright Evan, light us up with some Who’s That Noisy

E: Light it up, baby. Let’s play for you last week’s Who’s That Noisy. A very popular one, lots of correct answers; but here it is again. *Plays last week’s noisy* Helium atmosphere

S: Where was he, on Saturn or something?

E: Yeah where was he? Well why don’t I read you the e-mail we received from the person who was the winner this week. Uh Abigail Drum, she writes to us and says, “Hi there! The sound clip for Who’s That Noisy was taken from a phone call from the 1960’s between President Linden B Johnson and Scott Carpenter, a former astronaut. Carpenter had spent the last thirty days 200 feet underwater in the Navy’s SEALAB 2 project. However, at the time of the call, Carpenter was in a decompression chamber which has helium instead of nitrogen in the air, hence why Carpenter’s voice is so high it’s barely comprehensible. Interesting fact, Sea Lab 2 was apparently much nicer than the previous Sea Lab 1. It had hot showers, but it was also not completely flat on the sea floor. So they called it the Tiltin’ Hilton.

J: Evan, that makes me feel kind of like, isn’t that dangerous? Like there was enough helium in that guy, in the atmosphere in there, his voice sounded like that.

S: Well I’m sure that was enough oxygen too. There’s oxygen and helium instead of oxygen and nitrogen.

J: No, I know that, Steve. I just didn’t know that you could, I know that helium is inert, I just didn’t know that you could it could be mixed with oxygen like that and you could breathe it like an atmosphere.

S: Well now you do.

B: *laughs*

S: Yeah Jay there’s a whole field of helium diving; divers, deep divers who use helium oxygen mixtures instead of nitrogen oxygen mixtures and they really claim that it’s a lot better. Apparently you can breathe in helium for months without there being any tissue damage, and there’s much lesser a risk of narcosis then there is from nitrogen. So yeah, it’s perfectly safe to breathe helium oxygen mixtures.

E: Now Scott, a little bit about Scott Carpenter right? One of the original seven, bright stuff from NASA’s project Mercury. He was the second American after John Glenn to orbit the Earth, and the fourth American in space following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn. And he died on October 10th 2013. So only recently departed the Earth. So, very sad but lots of correct answers. A lot of people, very happy to have that one correctly recognized. But congratulations, Abby, you were chosen this week as this week’s winner.

S: Thanks Evan. And what have you got for this week?

E: For this week I got something that I think Bob will enjoy.

B: Ooo

E: Here we go, brand new Who’s That Noisy. *plays noisy* Could you hear that scratching kind of sound?

R: Mhmm, that was Skrillex, the early years.

B,E: *laughs

B: Nice

E: Uh this one is well, like I said, a little hint – Bob would find this one fascinating. Do what they did last week with the Scott Carpenter clip and send us it via e-mail wtn@theskepticsguide.org or several answers were posted to our forums sgu.com, feel free to post there as well. And as I always say, and I mean it from the bottom of Jay’s heart, good luck everyone.

S: You can also send that to ttfn@theskepticsguide.org that would work also

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Net Neutrality (48:43) ===
<blockquote>Follow up discussion on net neutrality</blockquote>
S: Got a couple of e-mails this week. Uh we had a lot of feedback about our net neutrality discussion from the special episode that we had that came out early this week on Monday. So, big caveat, this was a live show, meaning that we were taking questions live without prep. We got asked about net neutrality and we talked about it off the cuff without really being able to investigate the details. Which, I allowed because I figured we’d come back and actually do a more meaty discussion of it on the next episode; so that’s what I want to do. We’re not gonna ready any one specific email, because there was a ton of people who gave us feedback about it. So I wanted to do a follow up to go into a little bit more detail. The issue is the recent decision by a circuit appeals court, I think in the district of Washington DC.

E: Mhmm, yes

S: That ruled that the FCC’s regulation of establishing what is called net neutrality were not legitimate, that the FCC can’t do that. So there was lots of speculation about why they made that decision, what the implications of that decisions is. In short, what net neutrality is, is the notion that service providers cannot discriminate different kinds of traffic on the networks. They can’t give premium bandwidth or throughput to people who pay for their premium access and throttle back throughput for everybody else or give preference to their own services or even keep competitors from providing competing services on their own networks. Proponents of net neutrality say that ya know the internet is a vital resource and we need to protect it and it’s a level playing field for everybody and that if you give a service providers the ability to discriminate against different websites, different content originators etcetera, that they will exploit this to ya know make the internet experience much worse and charge a lot more money for stuff basically. Opponents of net neutrality say, essentially the free market should sort itself out and the government doesn’t need to impose these artificial rules inhibiting the free market. So that’s the debate. But I read a lot of dissections of this recent decision and they all basically are saying the same thing. But actually the best summary was by one of our forum members who goes by Vince Gamer, and this is how they broke it down, they wrote this is now quoting from him “FCC, under Bush, said essentially the internet is not a common carrier regulated under Section 2, but is an information service regulated under the much more lenient Section 1. The FCC under Obama, this is a 2010 rule now, said that we can impose a net neutrality regime on the internet. Verizon sued the FCC, saying that you can’t do that because you don’t have the authority to regulate the internet at all. The court ruling essentially said the FCC absolutely does have the authority to regulate the internet. If they decide to call it a common carrier, under Section 2 they can do what they did. But since they called it an information service, they went beyond Section 1 authority.” Does that make sense? So the court decision actually said the FCC does have the authority to regulate the internet. But the FCC has said that the internet is not a common carrier, but is an information service. And therefor under the FCC’s own rules they can’t impose net neutrality. The court’s basically saying yes you have the authority, FCC, to regulate the internet but you’re trying to have it both ways and you can’t do that, you gotta choose one or the other. Either it’s a common carrier or you can’t impose these net neutrality rules. So the FCC hasn’t decided yet, I think it’s going to appeal. Some people speculate it may go all the way to the Supreme Court, of course this whole thing could be rendered moot if congress just passes a law clarifying everything, they could basically do whatever they want in this respect. There aren’t really any constitutional issues here, this is all just what does the FCC, what authority does congress give the FCC in terms of regulating the internet? If congress clarifies that then there’s no legal issue.

E: So are we saying the FCC can’t change the determination, it has to come through congress? The FCC’s not allowed to go ahead and redefine it?

S: Agencies can’t decide what power they have, they are given power by congress. Like the FDA, you know the Food and Drug Administration, they can’t decide what authority they have to do stuff; all they could do is act with the authority that congress gives them. Uh the FCC is the same thing, congress gives them authority to regulate you know it’s the Federal Communications Commission so they regulate communication services in the country. So they’re you know the law gives them certain powers so it’s only a matter of interpreting that law, does that law five the authority to the FCC to do what the FCC is now doing. That’s what the judges were deciding, not whether or not net neutrality is a good idea. The judges were not deciding on the bigger issue of net neutrality it was just does the law give the FCC this authority. And so since this is granted by congress, congress can clarify or change or do whatever they want to give the FCC greater or less regulatory power to clarify this. Of course the bigger discussion is again between is net neutrality a good idea or not and it’s actually an interesting idea. A lot it comes from predicting what will happen you know, sort of predicting the future. Opponents say that if you free up ISPs, internet service providers, they could make more interesting and varied packages or deals with their consumers; they can provide new and innovative services to their customers.

J: I think that’s complete b.s.

S: Now the proponents of net neutrality, like Jay apparently, believe that they’re just going to exploit it to wreck the internet basically.

E: Of course

R: I agree with Jay.

E: I’m not convinced

J: Guys most of these corporations don’t sit around and go what’s a great product that we can offer people and how can we make as much money as possible

E: yeah but they still need a market Jay

S: They can do both

E: It’s not black or white

J: I’m all for net neutrality, I don’t want the ISP to have any say in what I do online whatsoever. They can’t slice and dice up services or anything. Just give me my bandwidth and go away.

S: My fear, without net neutrality, is that big companies are going to get into these complicated arrangements where iTunes/Apple will make a deal with Verizon to give preference to downloads from iTunes over competitors. You know, that sort of thing.

E: Lock out the little guy?

S: Yeah so it will basically make it impossible for little guys to compete on the internet because they won’t have the money and the power to get the premium special deals. A lot of people, a lot of internet commentators are writing that essentially this will result in there being two internets – the fast lane for the big players that can pay premium prices and the slow lane for everybody else. And that’s what proponents of net neutrality fear the most. But again, it’s always hard to say with these regulations what might happen in the future, because everybody can sort of project their own biases into the future. I do personally find the net neutrality arguments more persuasive; I do recognize it’s actually a complicated area.

=== Question #2: Placebo Medicine (56:25) ===
<blockquote>This is a question perhaps specifically focused at Steve, but I would be interested in hearing everyone else's opinions as well. I am a fourth year medical student about to graduate and enter an internal medicine primary care program with the goal of becoming a future primary care doctor. As such, I will be many patients' first and/or only contact with the health system. I know that I will encounter a lot of pseudoscience in this role, and I already have seen my fair share during my clinical rotations thus far. I am unsure of how to stay true to my skeptical nature while still supporting my patients therapeutically. For example, I recently had a patient with failed back surgery syndrome – essentially, lower back pain status post surgery, now with worse pain dependent on opioids to treat. It's a bad situation – the pain is keeping him out of work, opioids are causing problems of their own (and are ineffectual and inappropriate for chronic pain), and he has exhausted the limits of our medical knowledge – he is on NSAIDs, has done physical therapy, has has had all the imaging and even the surgery without relief. So he comes in and tells me he recently started acupuncture and 'it's working wonders'. I have seen this similar story frequently – patients with fibromyalgia or arthritis, or itching, finding relief from acupuncture, or herbal medications, or homeopathy. Frankly, these particular cases have minimal 'harm' – even though alt med can have harm on a large scale when patients avoid conventional medical treatment or engage in dangerous practices, in these particular cases the patients have tried everything medicine has to offer and are still following up with their physicians. While I feel strongly that it is unethical to prescribe a placebo and would not thus go out of my way to recommend non-proven alternative medicine, if a patient takes a placebo on their own and finds relief, it would only be harmful to their health (both mental and physical) and the therapeutic doctor-patient relationship to disabuse them of the notion that the alt med is helping them. A few things could happen if I did: they stop the therapy and are in worse pain taking meds with more side effects, or they don't stop the therapy but stop seeing me because they don't trust my opinion anymore since the therapy has worked and I don't believe it. So when a patient comes to me, being helped by alternative medicine, and asks what I think, I nod and smile and say 'some patients do report relief from that'. Is that wrong? Should I be more firm to my skeptical roots? What if they ask for my opinion before starting the alternative medicine? It may legitimately be helpful through a placebo effect (which would only be minimized by my telling them the truth), they would be taking it under physician supervision, and honestly, there are a lot of medications that we DO prescribe with actual serious side effects that, on balance, are likely only minimally superior to placebo (SSRIs being a good example). These patients are taking alt med for pain or depression or other more subjective complaints, not for cancer or heart disease or something that could kill them without proper therapy. As you can see, I'm ethically conflicted, sorry for the rather rambling question. I could really use your advice!PS – all the usual: love the show, been listening for years, huge fan :)JaimePhiladelphia</blockquote>
S: Alright let’s do one more email; this one comes from Jamie, from Philadelphia, and Jamie writes: I’m not gonna read the rest of Jamie’s email because it’s very long. But essentially he’s asking this question: what if my patients tell me that they are using some alternative modality (like acupuncture, homeopathy or whatever) but they say it works for their symptoms; it’s working for them. Should I just go along with it and say okay it’s fine that it’s working for you or should I say no that doesn’t work you shouldn’t use it, even though the patient is telling him that it is providing them relief.

R: You can’t just tell somebody it doesn’t work when they say this works for me. Like a response of well it doesn’t work is not going to convince anyone.

E: You’re not gonna influence them, right?

R: Yeah and like Steve will have the ultimate say on this obviously as a working skeptical physician; but from a patient standpoint, I think the best goal is to say well I’m glad that that’s working for you, let’s talk about the

E: But here’s the data

R: Well, yeah, like you know or let’s talk about the ways that we can help you out using modern medicine and make sure that you’re not using anything that could actually hamper your treatment. To me the most important thing that a physician can do is make sure that they’re not actively harming themselves by forgoing real medical treatment or taking something that could be actively harming their health.

B: Yeah but besides that, what else can you do? You have to try to explain ya know the intricacies of the placebo effect

E: Yeah

B: and that’s not

R: It’s a tough conversation to have when someone’s

B: It is it is

R: has like a little paper robe on in front of you

E: And I tell you what, he’s becoming a future primary care doctor, you’re not gonna have you’re not gonna be sitting down with people twenty minutes to discuss these things; you’re gonna be in and out, time is precious when it comes to these doctor’s appointments and they’re becoming more and more so, probably less time to see patients than you have today.

S: So let me tell you what I do, because this happens to me almost every day. Jamie also asks about what if patients ask you should I try acupuncture, I think that’s an even easier question. Let me start there. If patients ask if they should try something, and again I get this question pretty much every day – what about this? What about that? Should I try this? – Acupuncture I think is pretty much the most popular one these days, because I treat migraines and neuropathic pain so for pain it’s almost guaranteed to come up. So there I tell the patients, well I’ve actually explored the research, the literature of that question and what the literature shows is that acupuncture is not effective for migraines so I therefor do not recommend it. That’s easy, that’s an easy one in my opinion. I don’t believe in placebo medicine, I think it’s unethical to prescribe placebos for patients or to allow them passively to with your lack of objection to use placebos to treat their symptoms. Even if they report that they feel better, don’t confuse that with them actually having higher quality of life because those two things don’t correlate, the reporting bias may be all that you’re getting. It may make your life as the practitioner easier, but it’s not necessarily helping the patient; don’t confuse those two things. And I also think it’s very harmful to instill in patients, to allow them to believe that nonsense is effective. Now stuff like homeopathy? If they get a placebo effect from their homeopathic remedy for their elbow pain, then they’re gonna rely upon it when they have an infection or they have something that’s not self-limiting or more serious. And that’s on you, their physician for allowing that to happen. The trickier situation, absolutely, is when a patient tells you hey you know I’ve had this symptom for a long time, nothing helped and then I got acupuncture and it feels much better. What do you tell them? The answer is, it depends, it depends on the patient. There isn’t a one size fits all approach, you really have to titrate your response to first of all is the patient asking me a question or are they just informing me about something? What’s my therapeutic relationship with that patient? And what do I think is their level of sophistication in terms of are they interested in me explaining to them what the scientific literature shows.

E: And do you intend to hug the patient?

R: *laughs* Well you know in my physician’s defense, he spends a lot of time with me and he put me on a drug and I came back and I said I’m having this side effect and I looked it up and a lot of other people have this side effect. And he laughed and he was like that’s a side effect that literally everyone has for every medicine. And then he pulled out his iPhone and brought up like a list of side effects and then showed me and then we talked about very openly with what the research shows. So

S: That’s good

R: I quite like him because of that, because of that openness and because he doesn’t mince words; if he thinks something doesn’t work he does tell me. But I don’t know if that’s his approach to somebody who is not quite as openly skeptical.

S: Yeah so but I have told patients who have told me I tried this and it helped me, I have told them well let me tell you what I think about that. So I tell them the research shows that that treatment overall is not effective for what you’re using it for, so then therefor I don’t recommend it. I understand that you feel better after taking the treatment, but I have lots of reasons why that might be the case. And I want to make sure that we are using treatments that are actually helping you. You can tailor it in a way that patients will accept it and they won’t feel threatened. Of course if they do start to feel threatened by that, then I don’t pursue it. I did my job, I told them what I think, I do redirect the conversation to something that I think is constructive. You know I’m not gonna sit there and berate, I never get negative with a patient, I never berate, I never tell them they’re wrong or you never make them feel like they’ve done something wrong. You have to be very careful, you’re always completely nonjudgmental about the patient. But you know I just bring it to this is my reading of the scientific evidence. They can accept that or not, but I’m doing my job and telling them what it shows. Right they’re sitting in my office, they’re seeing a science-based practitioner, I’m gonna tell them what the science shows. But I’m not going to patronize them and be paternalistic and say you know oh some people feel better with that treatment when I don’t believe it for a second. I’m never going to say something to patients that I don’t honestly believe. So it is… I’ve done fine with that, I haven’t had trouble with that. You know patients are actually thankful for my opinion. But you don’t confront the… I guess the bottom line is I tell the patient what the science shows, I don’t confront their beliefs, ever. That’s the distinction, that’s just not appropriate within a doctor patient relationship.

R: I think that’s a good distinction

S: Yeah. Alright well thanks Jamie that was a good question.

== Science or Fiction (1:05:23) ==
[http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2014/02/americas-only-clovis-skeleton-had-its-genome-mapped/ Item #1]: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants.
[http://www.herpetologynotes.seh-herpetology.org/Volume7_PDFs/Dinets_HerpetologyNotes_volume7_pages3-7.pdf Item #2]: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically.
[http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/10/australian-astronomers-discover-oldest-known-star-in-universe Item #3]: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts; two genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys all ready for this week?

E: I lost last week

J: Yes sir

S: We have an interesting one this week. Don’t take it personally.

E: Well, you know.

S: Item #1: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants. Item #2: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically. Item #3: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe. Evan, go first.

E: Oh, what’s the theme?

S: *laughs* no theme

E: Randomness is clumpy

R: Two benign things and one terrifying thing.

E: *laughs* Okay, alright let’s go with this in order: mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton. *sigh* I’m having trouble with this one. Okay but the Indian populations came from Siberia, didn’t they? Or most of them did and there’s not necessarily part of Clovis population? I’m tryin to piece this together ugh. So that one’s a guessing game, basically. Uh ok, crocodiles are able to climb trees…okay, I’ll buy that. Maybe they use their tail uh in order to give themselves you know the extra leverage or strength in order to do it. The rate of ascension might be extremely slow; you know we’re not talking about a bear scurrying up a tree or something. But I don’t see a problem with a crocodile being able to climb the tree. They probably use their tail like other creatures in trees have been known to do. Uh, the last one, the Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, 14.5 billion years old – 800 million years older than the age of the universe. Okay, so what’s going on here? Seems ridiculous on the surface. I’m inclined to think this one is actually science because there’s a piece here that’s missing. I wonder if this astronomer is claiming we have to recalculate what we know of the age of the universe because we do now have the evidence of this star and it’s been confirmed. Therefore, time to push the old cosmic calendar back a bit and say the age of the universe is probably a little maybe, perhaps a little older than thought. Well, I’m having a problem with the Clovis one the most; I guess I’m gonna go with that one as fiction but, ya know I’m not…I’m not at all confident in my pick this week.

S: Okay. Bob you seem to have a pretty strong opinion, why don’t you go next.

B: I’ve got no problem with the Clovis skeleton. They were here before Native Americans, okay they’re related, no biggie. Sure it could have gone the other way, but um nothing crazy… nothing crazy like two two and three. Crocodiles climbing trees… what the hell? I mean, I can’t imagine, their tails are meant to go back and forth that’s all. They really don’t move well up and down cuz that’s not how they swim.

S: You don’t think they could use it like a spring like Tigger?

B,J,E: *laugh

R: The second Tigger reference of the evening? Too many

E: Second?

B: I mean depending on the tree, they could grip it properly; I can kinda see that maybe. But that’s the weirdest thing, but not as weird as… Well I noticed that you saved for the one about the star that they date 14.5 billion years. I mean they could have made a mistake, maybe some weird anomaly with the red shift that is giving them an unusual date, therefor I’ll say the alligator crocodile.

E: *laughs*

R: You don’t even know what the animal is! Oh my god

E: I was gonna say the first one to say it’s an alligator automatically loses.

S: Alright, Jay

J: A new study about crocodiles are able to climb trees, I totally believe that one; that’s the end of that.

E: And that’s that

J: Australian astronomers discovered the oldest known star which puts the date to be older than the universe. I’m just assuming that they’re either modifying the name of the universe or they made a there’s a factual error. Are they saying that that is now the age of the universe?

R: Just say a number

J: I’ll go with one.

S: The Clovis?

E: The Clovis

S: Alright so we’ve got Jay and Evan with the Clovis and Bob with the crocodiles. Alright, Rebecca

R: I’m going rogue! I’m goin with the star!

E: You’re going with the star?

R: Yeah because the Clovis is the one that makes the most sense. Like

J: Why?

E: That’s what makes it the fiction

R: Because that’s what, I think that’s the direction things were heading

B: I agree

J: That’s the only one that doesn’t have a tricky thing in it though, there’s nothing tricky about that. And Steve won’t be like it’s 70%

R: Steve would never do that. I don’t know, that seems really obvious to me. That one is true, I don’t know. The crocodiles climbing trees, I just want it to be true. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years, they’re like a perfect killing machine. Surely in all that time they would have learned to kill something in a tree. So, yeah, they’re just they’re reptiles like reptiles climb trees all the time. Why not? But pushing back the age of the universe by eight-hundred million years? I feel like I would have heard of that. Yes I know we lose on that argument all the time; but, I feel like that would have shown up in my RSS feeds…age of the universe pushed back. So I think that one’s the fiction. Done. Go

S: Okay a nice spread, nice spread. Um I guess we’ll take these in order. Number one: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants. Jay and Evan you think this one is the fiction and this one is SCIENCE. This one is science.

R: In your faces!

J: Son of a!

E: Now the crocodile one’s gonna be the fiction.

S: Okay so, this is cool. This is really cool.

B: It better be.

S: I’ve been following this Clovis story because I love it. I find it fascinating. Now the Clovis people are known primarily from their, the Clovis culture are known for their points.

J: They’re called Clovis!

S: And you know the Clovis have a certain feature to it. And these were big game hunters, they were hunting

E: Big game

J: *laughs

S: Mammoths, mastodons, giant bison… They had big spears with these big points. The Clovis people, they lived in the Americas about 13,000 years ago and then they all died out.

J: Why? What happened to them?

S: That’s a good question, but nobody knows why the Clovis died out. There are multiple theories, which we’ve talked about before on the show; but
that’s not important for this item. Um

E: Clovis, what is it?

S: The other question is where did the Clovis people come from, what’s their relationship with modern-day Native Americans? Did they Clovis people die out and get replaced by the Paleo Indians who eventually became modern Native Americans? Or did they, are they the same people? Did the Clovis people, just their culture change but they actually became Native Americans? Well this Clovis skeleton, a boy actually a young boy, they were able to map the genome and compare it to Native American populations; and they found that it the uh family in which this boy came is the ancestor to 80% of present-day Native American populations. Mainly the ones from South America and Mexico.

E: So not the ones to cross the Bering Strait.

S: No no they are. The Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait and they divided pretty much into two populations – those that stayed in the north in Canada and those that went south to where the US’s Mexico and South America. They just haven’t examined American Native American populations, so we just don’t know their relationships. But, the ones from South America are definitely related to the Clovis people. So it’s probable that the Clovis culture died out, the people – at least enough of them to survive to become or interbreed with or whatever the Paleo Indians that are ya know the ancestors of the Native Americans. So that’s very interesting. So obviously this was a controversy, this was a huge piece of information that helps us clarify that. Cuz there are still people that are saying maybe the Clovis people came from Europe or whatever. There was a separate migration that wasn’t the same migration that ultimately led to the Native Americans. It does bring up the whole issue of who owns these skeletons; and a lot of Native Americans are saying that well they’re their ancestors therefor they should have the right to choose what happens to them. And others counter like, you know well the Clovis people were not necessarily ancestors of your tribe, so you don’t have control over them. So this in away also throws that argument towards the Native Americans that are saying they should be able to determine what happens with these remains. For example, this Clovis skeleton was reburied after it was examined. Lots of interesting implications for that. Alright let’s move on to number two: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically. Bob, you just cannot believe this one, everyone else thinks this one is true.

J: I mean seriously Bob.

B: I said I could imagine it.

S: Alright so you could imagine a crocodile sitting in a tree, would you believe

R: k.i.s.s.i.n.g.

J: Two crocodiles

S: Would you believe four meters up? Could you believe that a crocodile could get four meters up a tree?

J: That’s what is that thirty feet?

R: twelve feet

E: thirty feet

R: what’s that like a million feet?
*all laughing*

E: metric system wins!

R: It’s like four farthings right?

S: There have been sightings, people claiming to see crocodiles in trees before but never any scientific description.

B: Until now

S: Until now

R: Ahahaha Eat it!

S: Yeah so there’s a picture and everything. So it’s very interesting. It seems that their tree-climbing behavior is probably not to hunt things in the tree, but to bask. Because you know their reptiles, they’re cold-blooded, they need to bask in the sun and in some places that’s the best place they climb

R: I bet they’ve murdered things though.

S: Eh they might have. They also they tend to like for those some crocodiles tend to climb trees around the waters’ edge, they like will climb out onto branches and then when anything comes by they drop in to the water, to hide.

R: Oh I thought you meant to murder.

S: No they tend to be very skittish

R: Like death from above

S: I guess they feel vulnerable while they’re out basking in the sun on the edge of a tree limb; so they will tend to drop into the water if they if anybody comes by. The researchers also said that the smaller crocodiles are more likely to climb trees and climb higher. The really big crocodiles tend to get to big to climb trees. So yeah the biggest ones aren’t doing this. But it’s not just the babies, some moderately big ones will still climb trees. And yeah they can use their claws to climb even vertical surfaces. So even though they don’t look to be adapted to be arboreal, they can still manage to climb trees. And this is a ya know the researchers made a very interesting observation that when we’re trying to interpret the ecology of fossil species, you know we base it on their claws their bones their teeth etcetera, but animals will make use of their anatomies in lots of different and interesting ways. It’s like even though the crocodiles’ claws may have evolved quote un quote for one particular purpose, they will still use them in other ways. That’s an important concept to evolution. One, that I find, creationists consistently miss. There isn’t this simplistic interpretation that one anatomical structure is for one thing, or evolved for only one purpose. Most structures can be put to multiple use, and that maybe some population of crocodiles might eventually evolve into an arboreal species. And then they’ll say well how did that happen. Well because they can climb trees now even though they’re not specifically adapted for it. Ya know? All of this means that Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe is fictions. Congratulations, Rebecca.

R: Thank you

S: Now this is, this in fact was the state of affairs about ten years ago or fifteen ago. Do you guys remember this? Where the oldest stars were older than the estimated age of the universe.

B: Oh yeah it was a big problem

S: Yeah it was a big problem. I remember a creationist threw that up in my face. I was like well we’ll sort it out. I’m sure that one or the other or both of the dating is off. Either the age or whatever method they’re using to estimate the age of the star, or whatever method we’re using to estimate the age of the universe, one or both of those must be off obviously. It’s so plausible it actually was the case not too long ago. But, eventually we discovered that the universe was older than we thought and that everything came into alignment. These stars were like twelve billion and a half billion years old, the age of the universe was pushed back to 13.4 and everybody was happy (or 13.7). Now Australian astronomers did discover the oldest known star, but it’s about point one billion years after the formation of the universe. So it’s 13. Yeah 13.6

E: A hundred million years?

R: And it’s nearby right?

E: Was that like a protostar? I mean were there really

S: Yeah it was a star

E: I thought that was too soon for stars to form

S: It’s probably getting close to just about as soon as it could form. Yeah the astronomer, Kellar, said it was like finding a needle in a haystack; they got lucky. They were using a wide-field telescope to search for ancient stars as part of a research project specifically designed to do this and they found one; 13.6 billion year-old star. So this will help us study what the first first stars to form in the universe were like. Were they any different than the stars that we see today? Alright, you guys really struggled this week.

J: Oh man

R: I didn’t

J: That was really bad, Steve.

E: I’m very sad, I’m very sad.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:21:09) ==
<blockquote>“The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” - Otto Pfleiderer, 1902</blockquote>
S: Alright, Jay, you got a quote for us?

J: I do. Very strange, I’m not 100% sure who the author is, so I’m going to read um who I think the author is. But I challenge anybody out there to correct it. Um this is an old one. The quote was sent in by a listener named Nathan Dickey and the quote is, “The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” And that quote is thought to be from Otto Pfleiderer

S: Otto? Otto Pfleiderer?

J: That’s close enough. German he was a German Protestant theologian, but I am not sure that’s the author so please send in the correction if you can find one.

R: Hey I’m gonna be at SkepTech in April at University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, April 4-6. Find out more at skep-tech.com.

J: Hey I’m gonna be at NECSS

S: Yeah we have NECSS coming up

R: Mhmm, I’m gonna be there too!

S: April 11-13 in New York City. And the dates for The Amazing Meeting 2014 were announced; Las Vegas South Point hotel, July 10-13th. Well guys thank you for joining me this week.

R: Thank you, Steve

J: Thank you Doctor Steve

B: Yeeeah

E: No crocodile tears here

J: Dr. Huggy to his personal patients

R: Dr. Hugs.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-25T04:09:36Z

Lmwood: /* Science or Fiction (1:05:23) */

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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 Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 12th 2014, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Ello guvna

S: Happy Darwin Day everyone!

B: Yay!

R: Happy Darwin Day! I’m wearin my little Darwin t-shirt, available at skepticalrobot.com.

B: I’m sitting here all evolved and everything.

E: What exactly is Darwin Day?

R: It’s the day Darwin was born.

S: Otherwise known as his birthday, yeah. Did you guys know, here’s my Darwin Day factoid for the day, a scientist named a new species of beetle after Darwin? The beetle was discovered by Dr. Stylianos Chatzimanolis from the University of Tennessee

B: Wait wait wait, say that again.

S: NO. This is a uh a rove beetle. There are fifty-seven thousand described species, but apparently Darwin collected this specimen when he was on the beetle. And then it sat lost in a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London; and was rediscovered in London in 2008. And then somebody realized hey this was actually collected by Darwin

B: Oh!

S: So it was just described and it was named Darwinilus sedarisi

B: Oh sweet

E: very nice

J: what’s this bug called luv?

B: I would have put that on EBay

E: Imagine if someone would have opened the drawer and said, “Ew there’s a dead bug in here. Let’s dump it out and get rid of it ew!”

R: There are tons of Darwin specimens that are just sitting in drawers underneath the uh London Museum of Natural Science. My friend, Karen James, used to work there and she gave me the behind the scenes tour and it was amazing! There was all of…they have so much incredible stuff. They keep Darwin’s own samples in a basement somewhere. Ya know, not even open to the public.

E: Have you guys seen the show on HBO called Questioning Darwin?

R: Nope

E: HBO’s ran that, I think, starting last week. And I didn’t watch all of it; I watched parts of it. And it had some very parts. Apparently, something I didn’t know about Darwin before, is that during his seminal time in which he was writing the Origin of Species – that he spent twenty years accumulating – all of his notes and everything in doing this… He basically cloistered himself inside of his house and his wife kind of made, ya know brought everything to him. He had his family all around him and the varied species and all the animals and things and plant life and his his green house was immense and everything. But he basically stayed there for twenty years and worked like eighteen hour days like every day for twenty years just in pursuit of this… of of of learning more about the origin of species. And that is dedication

B: How many wives would put up with that crap? Like yeah this is gonna be a revolutionary theory, I need eighteen hours a day for the next two decades.

E: Apparently she was entirely on board

B: Wow

E: and made it possible for him to do the work that was necessary for him to get that book published.

B: Glad she did, but what a hard sale that must have been…

== This Day in Skepticism (03:20) ==
* February 15: Happy Decimal Day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day
R: Hey, speaking of…England uh Happy Decimal Day everyone! Uh the day we record this is Darwin Day, but the day this episode comes out is February 15th. And February 15th, 1971 was Decimal Day. Which, personally I think they should celebrate every year; just because it’s a wonderfully dorky sounding holiday. But, in 1971 that was the date when the UK and Ireland switched their currency to using decimals instead of, you know, the ridiculously confusing system that they used to use.

E: Don’t you like having a pocket full of farthings and three pence and…

R: I wrote this down just so I could get it all right. They were two farthings in a hay penny, two hay pennies in a penny (obviously), twelve pence in a shilling, two and a half shillings in a half crown, twenty shillings in a pound, twenty-one shillings in a guinea

B: OH! Twenty-one!

R: And sixty-seven guineas in a pandapiddle(?)

B: You made that last part up

E: Did you make up that last one?

R: I did. I did. It took you guys a minute. So, in 1824 decimalization was proposed based upon the fact that the French did it. So…

B: Wait, I think that’s the first time I have ever heard that word.

R: Decimalization?

B: I like it!

R: It’s a word!

B: I believe it!

R: But yeah, even though it was proposed in 1824, it took almost a century and a half for it to actually happen. Which, you know, should make all of us in the US feel a bit better about our metric system concerns. When it did finally happen, the government broke the pound into a hundred pennies. And they started, actually, in 1968 when they issued 5p and 10p coins. And in 1969 they issued the 50p coins. And then finally, on Decimal Day, they introduced the last three coins which were a half penny, one penny and two pence coins. And yeah, they eventually… they started by marking all prices in stores in stuff with both the old currency and the new currency; and they eventually dropped off the old currency. They also had two full years of educational PSAs and stuff teaching people how to use the new currency system. So that when Decimal Day finally rolled around it was pretty easy, not many complaints about it.

E: Because they realized, hey this actually makes sense.

R: Yeah

B: I don’t have much hope. We’re… There’s only three countries on the planet that aren’t metric, and we’re one of them.

E: Yay…

S: Well we’re semi-metric. I mean we buy two liter bottles of soda at the store…

E: Yeah, we’re hybrid sort of…

B: We’re hybrid. Lame hybrid

E: We are. Look at your speedometer. It’s got both miles per hour and kilometers per hour.

B: How often do you even look at that?

R: Every time I go to Canada

E: For every furlong I drive.

S: Alright, Rebecca I have to point out that we got an e-mail last week by a listener calling themselves Sharon. Who said that they were disgusted and dismayed, that you had turned This Day in Skepticism into this day in feminism…talking about all of your female scientists and everything.

R: Right. And like, pennies are girls so… this one too.

S: Which, yeah I immediately recognize this nonsense. But I did a tally of the last years’ worth of This Day in Skepticism; and it turns out that there were twenty-one males mentioned, seven females, and twenty-eight not mentioning a specific person… Like Decimal Day, they were not about a specific person.

R: Right

S: Right. So you talked about female scientists about 13.5% of the time over the last year.

R: And that is

S: Clearly saying

J: That’s too much

E: Stop shoving it in our faces

R: It’s ridiculous

S: And one third as often as male scientists

R: So yeah, Steve, I really appreciate your response…so much so that I published it on SkepChick. Which inspired another response that I found quite funny. It was actually from, you guys wouldn’t have known this but I recognized the name as somebody who has harassed me in the past on Twitter and Facebook and such and I’ve got him blocked pretty much everywhere. His response was, “If you think about it, men have contributed a lot more to the sciences that women. So really, when you’re talking about This Day in Science, you should talk about men, the preponderates of time. And that proves that I was talking about women way too often.

S: Right

B: Wooooooow

R: Which I just love. This demand that, without evidence, well I believe that man have contributed approximately ninety-nine percent of our scientific knowledge and therefore, you highlighting things people haven’t necessarily heard of that they might find interesting and educational, should also adhere to this ninety-nine percent/ one percent split. It’s

S: a totally made up split. Yeah it’s also saying that we have to perpetuate past inequities.

R: Yeah

S: And also, I pointed out, when I responded to the original e-mail, that part of the purpose – our mission of the SGU – is to promote science…is to create enthusiasm for science. And evidence clearly shows, that women are not as encouraged as much as men to go into the sciences, or to any stem field. And, that when they are encouraged, they go in greater numbers. So, we are getting the message out to the people who need it. That’s part of our mission. It’s just ridiculous

B: I’d argue that we’re not; not at thirteen point five percent.

S: We’re not doing it enough!

R: Yeah

S: I ended it by saying that now that we’re actually running the numbers, we’re actually not doing it enough. Thanks for pointing out the deficiency for us.

B: Hahaha

R: And like, you know even as an aside, I really do…what I try to do when I’m choosing an item, is to pick something people probably haven’t heard of before, something they could learn a bit from. So, today for instance, is also Galileo’s birthday; which is quite notable. I’m pretty sure most people in the audience have heard of Galileo. And it’s also Richard Feynman’s death day. I try to avoid death days, because they’re depressing. And it’s also the anniversary the meteor exploding over Russia last year. You know, these are all things we’ve talked about, you know we’ve gone over them a million times…why not talk about something a little weird and you know…different.

B: That was a year ago? Geez

R: Yeah

J: Ten years ago, Chappelle’s Show Rick James skit appeared.

B: Oh my god, that’s what we should have talked about

J: It’s a celebration bitches!

R: Ten years ago today, I’m Rick James, bitch.

J: It was actually yesterday, but still…ten years ago.

== News Items ==
=== Organic Molecules on the Moon (10:15) ===
* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2556947/Could-creatures-one-day-live-MOON-Ice-pockets-lunar-surface-hiding-building-blocks-simple-life.html
S: Alright let’s move on to some news items. Jay, you’re gonna tell us about why there might be, but not really, life on the moon.

J: Yeah, let’s not jump to conclusions. I mean when we say life, people tend to think of

S: Or life-like molecules

J: Ya know creatures. Yeah we’re talking about molecules here. So let me give you the background. So back in 2009, the lunar crater observation and sensing satellite was sent to the moon; and part of the mission was to crash a used part of the launch vehicle that was still attached to the ship into the moon to help us understand if the moon is actually made of cheese or if it’s a dessert pasty. But it actually also analyzed a plume of debris that the ship that they crashed into the moon’s surface kicked up by the impact. And what we ended up with, after observing the plume of debris that came up, is that there are organic molecules trapped in the moon’s ice. Organic molecules are, simply put, molecules that contain carbon; but these could be solid, liquid, gas or solid chemical compounds. So the organic compounds are often called the building blocks of life. So how strange is it to find them on the moon, right? Which is just a really big ball of marzipan, after all. Thank you Rebecca. So how did those organic molecules get to the moon? Some believe that they came from comets that crashed into the moon’s surface. So these comets, which have been traveling through space for unknown amount of time either picked them up or whatever. But ya know somehow those organic molecules got on the comets and the comets brought them to the moon’s surface. But recently, the University of Hawaii’s Sarah Crites said that cosmic rays are powerful enough to create a reaction that could actually create organic compounds. Cosmic rays you say, huh? Bob, what’s a cosmic ray?
B: Cosmic rays are particles, they’re not rays…it’s a funny misnomer. But they’re particles. Alpha particles and protons that come from outside of our solar system and they’re very energetic and can be nasty.

J: Yeah, high energy particles that are mostly protons; and they come from outside the solar system and they exist pretty much everywhere in the universe. So Sarah and her team believe that up to six percent of the moon’s simpler molecules, found in the polar ice, could be converted into organic compounds over a billion years of being hit by cosmic rays. And to put that time scale into perspective, that is approximately one quarter of the moo’s age. And the funny thing is that cosmic rays also break down complex molecules. So once these organic molecules are finally created, they could be damaged by the same rays.

S: mhmm

J: So the first thing to think about, in my opinion, is if this is happening...if cosmic rays are hitting inorganic molecules and creating organic molecules, then this is happing possibly anywhere that there’s ice or water in the entire universe. That was a little…that puts a different twist on the idea of billions and billions. You know what I mean? Like, wow! That blew my mind.

S: Yeah but ya know, I think it’s pretty well established that organic molecules are pretty common out there in space.

J: Well the thing is, Steve, have we really observed or have any information on things that are outside our solar system?

S: Outside the solar system, not that I know of, no.

J: Right, but that’s the point though.

S: Yeah
J: So now if by observing this stuff on the moon we can…I’m not saying we’re certain or anything, it’s still something to think about. That’s a pretty profound thought.

S: Yeah. I mean although there is a general principle of, that we’re not unique. Ya know that whatever we see here is probably typical of the rest of the universe

J: So pretty much all over the universe, like movies are really just eye candy now with not much real content? That’s happening everywhere now?

S: Is that a question?

E: *laughs* a rhetorical one

R: Steve, have you ever given a patient a hug?

B: *laughs

S: Why do you ask?

J: I want to hear the answer to that question.

E: Like an inappropriate hug?

R: Cuz my doctor today gave me a hug, and it was fine at the moment. Then when he left the room, I was like that was weird! Why did he give me a hug?

B: How well do ya know him?

R: Uh this is like my third of fourth visit.

J: Rebecca, maybe he surmised that you’re gonna die and he felt bad.

R: Yeah that’s, he wasn’t giving me bad news or anything. It was just like a physical, and then

B: And then he got physical

E: Very physical

J: Have you ever hugged a patient?

S: I have never initiated a hug; but if patients initiate a hug with me I allow it.

R: And it’s always like when you’ve just told them something horrible right?

S: No no! I just…ya know I just have some like older female patients that are very huggy

R: Oook

S: and feel

E: cultural

S: they feel comfortable doing that.

R: He’s an older man who looks like Richard Dreyfuss and sounds like Richard Dreyfuss.

S: Interesting. Doctors have different personalities with their patients. But there are lines that we try to be cognizant of.

R: Yeah

=== Astrology Belief (15:14) ===
* http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/public-opinion-astrology-dumb
S: Um Alright, Evan, you’re gonna tell us about public opinion regarding an oldie, but a goodie…astrology.

E: Oh boy, oh boy. Yeah Chris Mooney, author, long-time friend of the SGU and the New England Skeptical Society; he wrote an article at motherjones.com the other day. A very revealing piece in which he showcases the latest analysis of how well Americans understand science. Or, rather, how terribly Americans misunderstand science. Chris reports that, according to a new survey by the national science foundation, nearly half of all Americans say astrology – which is the study of celestial bodies’ reported influence on human behavior, worldly events and other human centered notions – astrology is either very scientific or sort of scientific. Nearly half of Americans.

S: Mhmm

R: Wow

E: And this was part of a larger comprehensive analysis contained within the 2014 science and engineering indicator study; which has revealed that American attitudes about science are moving in the wrong direction. Skepticism of astrology had hit an all-time high in 2004, when sixty-six percent of Americans believed that astrology was total nonsense. But since then, each year fewer and fewer respondents have dismissed connections between star alignment and personality as bunk.

S: So basically you’re saying right when the SGU started, it was all downhill from there.

E: I hate to have to say that, but that’s correlation and causation, by the way folks.

S: Yeah

E: We can actually not ascribe anything really meaningful to that. But you’re right, Steve, that is an interesting little tidbit. But here’s how it went, they first took this poll in 1979. And at the point fifty percent of Americans were skeptical of astrology as a science, fifty percent were skeptical. And then the skepticism, it crept up it rose and kept rising until 2004 sixty-six percent had skepticism of astrology. But since then, 2012 were the latest numbers, and it’s dropped down to fifty-five percent skepticism, which is the lowest number since 1983. And young people are especially inclined to offer astrology scientific legitimacy. A majority of Americans aged 18 to 24 considering the practice at least sort of scientific. And the 25 to 34 age group was not far behind them. This is extremely disconcerting

S: Mhmm

E: Um remember when Carl Sagan famously wrote in his book, The Demon Haunted World, he wrote that if pseudoscience is embraced it might be argued in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. I don’t think there’s ever been a more succinct way of putting it. And what he’s basically saying is the understanding of science is in decline; as result, the embrace of pseudoscience is on the rise.

S: Yeah actually the data shows that there’s not a linear relationship, there’s more of a curve there that actually…People who know a little bit of, as you know more and more science you get more interested in pseudoscience and the paranormal. And it’s only as you start to get to the higher levels of science education that it starts to drop off. Isn’t that interesting?

E: That is very interesting.

S: So I think it makes people more curious and open minded and they start to think about interesting things. But you got to get to a pretty high level of science understanding, or you need critical thinking skills. And that, I think it hasn’t really been tracked separately with that same data. But before you can start to deconstruct and understand why the pseudoscience is more pseudoscientific. But there is separate data, just looking at the ability to think critically; and that definitely correlates with rejection of pseudoscience.

E: Right. Very unfortunate. Um

S: Yeah

E: What can we do? What aren’t we doing?

S: Let’s start a podcast.

E: Yeah, let’s do that. What can our society…and we’re talking about Americans. And they did do some research with other places in the world. And surprisingly a place like China, they’re acceptance of astrology as science is low, very low. Only about ten percent in China compared to the numbers over here. Again it’s called the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicator Study. A lot of good information and data collected there from lots of different sources; not only the National Science Foundation but others. And they kind of put it all together there for you in one nice package. So we’ll recommend that folks go there and check it out for themselves.

S: Yeah so we still got a lot of work to do.

E: A lot.

=== New Burgess Shale Find (19:53) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-burgess-shale-find/
S: Hey well let’s move to a really cool science news item. Uh have you guys ever heard of the Burgess Shale?

B: Yes

R: Yeah

E: Uh, yes

R: He was in a Twilight Zone episode with (?)

B,S,E: *laugh

S: Uh Charles Walcott discovered what is now called the Walcott Quarry about a hundred years ago; right after the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. And this is a uh excellent bed of soft-bodied fossils from the Cambrian Explosion, from the Cambrian era. 570 to 530 million years ago, this was soon after the first proliferation of multicellular plants and animals. Tons of really weird and bizarre species, you know, were pulled out of the Burgess Shale. If you’re interested in this, I think probably still probably the best book that describes the Burgess Shale is Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. Well, recently scientists reported that a discovery of another find – the Kootenay National Park find. It’s in the Burgess Shale, it’s only forty kilometers Southeast of Walcott Quarry; so it’s in the general geographic area. And this is a fossil bed from slightly later in the Cambrian than the Walcott Quarry; so creatures are a little bit more developed. And the early reports are that it could be an even bigger fossil find than the original Walcott Quarry. I mean they’re pulling tons of specimens out of this. And the shale is like these plates; so when you find the fossils you pull the plates apart so you have basically two images of the fossil. You have the negative and the positive image of the fossil. Because of the way the fossils were preserved, it preserves the soft parts. So it’s not just the bones, cuz they’re because early multicellular life didn’t have a lot of hard parts to fossilize. That’s why you need to have these optimal conditions.

E: So when you can see the soft parts you can actually get a sense of what the creature really looked like from the outside.

S: Yeah

B: What kind of preservation are we talking about? These soft parts, what are we talking about here?

S: Well essentially you can reconstruct three dimensional images of these specimens from the two plates ya know. Ya know you may have to get multiple specimens, they do get flattened out. So you have to kind of infer their three dimensional structure. So it takes a lot of work to really reconstruct these fossils, but you can do it. So far they have yielded three thousand and fifty-three specimens, representing at least fifty-two taxa. Of these, half of are known from the Walcott Quarry.

B: And fifteen of them are new right?

S: Yeah, totally new.

R: Wow

B: Amazing

S: And they’re learning new details about previously known species from the Walcott Quarry. So this find, it’s something we’re going to be hearing about for decades I would think.

B: Oh, sure

=== Boeing Anti-Gravity (23:06) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Bob, you’re gonna tell us about another interesting item. This one, I think this is probably more towards the pseudoscience end of the spectrum. You let us know what you think.

B: Oh yeah!

S: Apparently Boeing has been researching antigravity.

B: Yeah…

J: What?!

B: Jay I mean, how extraordinary is that? If that’s even true. Didn’t NASA, I mean how many government agencies have done like ESP and stuff like that? There are no bastion of skeptics in these corporations and in the government. I wasn’t terribly surprised. So basically, a prominent aero researcher named Nick Cook claimed Boeing is working on antigravity projects. He claims that Boeing is kind of trying to get in on some Russian research that has claimed to produce a gravity-like energy beam that can produce, get this, a force of about a thousand Gs on an object, vaporizing it. That’s pretty heavy stuff, this is I think what you can safely call a game changer, if it’s true. Not only for the military offense and defense but for physics itself. I mean is it any surprise though that my skeptical and physics alarm bells are totally going off on this one. So I wanted to take a look at just some of the players behind this. Nick Cook has an interesting resume; he’s a British aerospace researcher and writer, he’s considered an expert on military black projects, and he’s also the current aerospace consultant and was for fourteen years the aviation editor for Janes Defence Weekly. Have you guys heard of that?

E: Oh absolutely, it’s considered like one of the standards of aeronautics.

B: Well it’s an important, it’s an international defense journal. Which basically covers and analyzes military defense activity around the world. If you want to know what’s going on around the world in those realms, this is one of the most prominent journals to look through. Now Nick of course has some red flags in his resume. He’s been on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast a number of times – DING DING DING!

R: Who hasn’t?

B: Yeah, well

E: Phil Plait’s been on there.

B: But not everyone is espousing their beliefs in zero point and ant gravitation devices, among other things. Regarding the zero point energy, he says that it has a potential and limitless power source that pervades all of science. And, I quote, he says it’s rooted in science. Now we’ve covered that before, on zero point energy. But um, there’s another good quote from him, “some theories say if you spin the zero point energy field that exists all around you, some weird and magical things start popping out, one of which is an ant gravitational effect.” So okay, whatever. He admits though that he’s not a scientist, very good’; but he has enlisted some help. So who do you think he asked for some help? None other than Dr. Hal Puthoff. Puthoff was an, he helped pioneer this whole dubious zero point energy field idea in the first place. And he’s also famous for endorsing Uri Geller, enough said about that. And he also, he had to, get this one, he headed the CIA’s remote viewing program and he actually claimed to send his own mind into the surface of the planet Mercury. So you know if I want a scientist to back up my revolutionary claims, I’ll just say that I would not pick Dr. Hal Puthoff okay. So according to Cook, Boeing has not only confessed to researching antigravity, but claimed… I really I couldn’t corroborate that at all. I found denial from Boeing, but that was from 2002. I couldn’t find anything recent; so I can’t find anything saying that they’ve actually been looking into it. And even if they were, so what? Does that mean that it’s a real science? He also claims that they have a project. He actually has the name of a project that they’re working on called Grasp, Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. And the aim of the project, apparently, is three holed. They want to enter a collaborative relationship with their Russian scientist who’s behind this new revolutionary device that can project a thousand Gs of energy towards anything. His name is Dr. Eugene Podkletnov. They want to determine the validity of his work; and finally they wanted to examine the uses for such a technology. Clearly, there’d be amazing uses for it; but the thing is, how feasible is it and what’s the evidence like? So, now I looked into Eugene and he’s got some red flags as well, of course. He’s a material scientist, he’s not a physicist like I assumed. He was about to publish his research… I looked into his early years and he was about to publish his research on gravity negation way back in ’96 and scientists criticized his conclusion; and then he withdrew his article. And then somehow this was followed by the University evicting him. Then he disappeared for a while, he went off the grid for a while. So for me, you know if you’re unable to handle criticism, that’s classic pseudoscientist right there. I mean that’s what…that’s an integral part of science. If you can’t handle it then um…that’s just a major red flag I think that you are an actual pseudoscientist. Clearly this guy is bright, but you know how that goes. Just because you’re a smart guy doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get swayed by woo. Also, I’ve been reading about some of the problems with his published research. Typical things I’m hearing are that he doesn’t give out enough information so that you can actually replicate any of his experiments. People mentioned anomalies that seemed to have never been described or analyzed so. Those are red flags as well. And then I tried to look into the, what’s the science have to say about shielding gravity or even gravity weapons? It doesn’t look good. You know you typically can’t say it’s impossible, but it doesn’t look good for some of this. I got some good quotes, George Smoot (he’s a professor of physics at UC Berkley) he said, “If gravity shielding is going to be consistent with Einstein’s general theory, you would need tremendous amounts of mass and energy. It’s far beyond the technology we have today.” Yeah, that kind of makes sense. You wanna mess with gravity, you need a lot of mass to generate it. But then Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine, he said “There’s nothing impossible about gravity shielding, it just requires a field theory that we don’t have yet.” That’s all, a new field theory. That alone would garner this guy a Nobel Prize, that would be an amazing thing. But just saying this guy that all he needs is a new field theory, I mean that seems like quite a bit. So also there’s another final point I wanted to make about this, I think – it just seems reasonable- that if he had a working device, that he demonstrated, that was dramatic as what they’re saying… I just think that the Russian government would clamp down on this guy and not let him out of their sight. I mean that’s an amazing development and I think it’d be obvious that they would pour billions of dollars into anything like that. Especially, if this guy has got a working device. The benefits are just not to be believed, you have amazing weapons that would literally put Russia’s military in a league all its own, if they had things like this. They’d have gravity shielding to protect them missile and light saber attacks and all sorts of things. Flying cars with no conventional food and space ships that literally seem to pop right out of science fiction movies. I mean it’s almost unending what they would have. And they would take quite seriously if he was actually able to demonstrate it. So I was reading Wired article about him and the guy’s looking for funding you know; and that just totally reminds me of the free energy and perpetual motion devices that we have seen in the past

S: Yeah

B: The only thing perpetual about them is the need for your money and just a little bit more time. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. The fact that Boeing, if they didn’t even research it, whatever. I mean companies like that do all sorts of whacky stuff trying to make a revolutionary leap in just one bound. And hey, you know, it’s not impossible, that would be an amazing thing. But I wouldn’t be sinking lots of money into this. Not unless I actually saw his device.

S: I think that’s a very common feature of technological pseudoscience is that it’s like five to ten steps ahead of where we are ya know. And it’s where companies might get in trouble. They’re always looking for the next thing right, the next technological breakthrough; because they want to invest in it and be and own it. But I guess you need some science background to know when that breakthrough is the next iterative step in our development of technology versus someone claiming to have let decades of research ahead of where we are. To the point where you can’t of course predict

B: Right

S: What’s gonna happen. And, with no paper trail to show for it, you know.

=== Photo Lineups (31:56) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Alright one last news item. Uh Rebecca, you’re gonna tell us about the science of photo lineups.

R: Sure. Or the lack of science about photo lineups. Steve sent me a very interesting article that talks about the fact that more and more United States police departments are using a new method of doing photo lineups; something called double-blind sequential lineups. Or instead of lineups sometimes they say arrays, because that’s a bit more specific. To have crime witnesses identify perpetrators. So most people probably know the traditional lineups that you see in films and the usual suspects where a witness looks over a group of people all at once to see which one is the criminal, while there’s a police lieutenant or someone looking on. Or maybe you’ve seen a Law & Order episode where a witness is looking over a bunch of photos while the detective looks over the shoulder; it’s ya know same idea. But there are a lot of problems with that method. There are decades of research that show that when witnesses are presented with a group of people, they won’t necessarily pick out the perpetrator, they’ll just pick out the person they think looks most like the perpetrator. Which is obviously a huge problem. That can lead to false convictions, false arrests, and false convictions. There’s also the problem of having a police officer standing nearby who knows who the quote un quote correct suspect is. Uh the article Steve sent me, I thought kind of naively stated that uh police officers can unconsciously influence witnesses. But of course they can and have, in the past, very consciously influenced witnesses, as well as unconsciously influencing witnesses to get what they need to make an arrest. So with this new method, or at least newer than that method, the lineup is overseen by an officer who has no idea who the actual suspect is – which is what makes it blinded. And instead of the witness seeing all of the suspects, or all of the photos of the suspects at once, they view each one individually so that they can compare that person to their actual memory and decide if it matches up. As opposed to comparing all of the suspects to one another. Despite the preponderance of research suggesting that this method is superior, most police departments actually, in the United States at least, still go by the old method. Some of that might be due to you know just general slow changing just you know, sometimes making a change like that can be difficult for something that’s imbedded in their procedures. Some of the inability to change is due to the fact that the research also shows that not only does sequential presentation of the suspects lead to fewer incorrect identifications, but it also leads to fewer identifications overall. Just to be clear, the reduction in incorrect identifications is much greater than the reduction in all identifications. But, unfortunately there are many police departments that are happy to accept a certain number of false identifications if it means more identifications overall, which is kind of depressing. And the other depressing news is that even if the majority of departments started using the scientifically proven to be better method of showing a sequential array, there are still a host of systemic problems regarding witness uh eyewitness identification in police work. Eyewitness misidentification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. It accounts for about seventy-five percent of overturned convictions according to the Innocence Project, which is a great nonprofit that focuses on providing resources and representation to people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. So, how a lineup is conducted is just one of what they call system variables that can impact uh accuracy of identifications. Other system variables include who is chosen by the police to participate in the lineup and what instructions are given to the witness before they make an identification, and what they witness is told after an identification. And then in addition to system variables, there are what’s known as estimator variables, which are uncontrollable circumstances that can hamper an identification. Like maybe the crime took place at night, or far away from the witness, or maybe the criminal is a different race than the witness – which studies show make a witness less able to distinguish certain characteristics and less likely to be able to choose the correct suspects. Or maybe the witness, at the time of the crime, was under a great deal of stress, which happens quite often and can negatively influence whether or not they can correctly identify the perpetrator. So fixing the lineup issue isn’t going to account for any of that. So even if police departments do start paying attention to the science on lineups, our court systems need to do a better job of paying attention to the science that tells us eyewitness identifications are extremely unreliable, and in many cases we have to use other methods like DNA testing in order to make a case for criminal convictions.
S: Yeah I mean there’s actually a pretty broad literature on eyewitness identification. And you’re right Rebecca, pretty much all the variables that you think would influence people’s choice do influence it. At the very least, you have to have a rigorous, almost pristine process. No bias instructions, nobody present who knows what the quote un quote correct answer is, no forced choices and no post identification feedback.

R: Yeah

S: That all effects their confidence. There’s also… did you come across the term choice blindness in your reading about this?

R: I think so

S: Yeah so people don’t even know why they make the choices that they do and don’t even remember the choices they made when like they’re asked to reproduce them.

E: Wow

S: They basically, we know this from all the psychological experiments and other contexts, but people can be manipulated in pretty much every way you can think of, and these all apply. And the bottom line is yeah these kind of eyewitness testimonies is the weakest form of evidence.

R: Yeah

S: It’s the most biased, easily manipulated etcetera etcetera, and yet juries emotionally tend to invest the most weight on eyewitness testimony.

R: Right. And it’s not to say that eyewitness testimony doesn’t have a place in trials and in the investigation, it’s just that you’re right, we need to… There are so many factors that we can’t control. These so called estimator variables, that the very least we can do, the very least we should do, is absolutely everything we can to make the system variables in line with scientific accuracy. So yeah. And so instituting something like this as a law, for instance, making it against the law to do simultaneous lineups…you know that’s just one small step, but it is still probably an important step on the road towards cleaning up how we think about eyewitness testimonies and how we treat eyewitnesses in crimes. And hopefully that can lead to fewer false convictions.

S: Yeah it’s a minimum, at the minimum we should at least be having blinded examiners, you know.

R: yeah

S: Space and stuff like that, you’re right.

=== Quickie with Bob - Fusion Beats Unity (39:55) ===
* http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html
S: Hey you know what we haven’t had in a while?

R: Uh, a quickie with Bob?

S: A quickie with Bob

R: Yeah it has been a while.

B: Well thank you Steve, I appreciate your offer. Um, this is your quickie with Bob. This is pretty cool guys. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have broken unity.

E: There’s a National Ignition Society?

B: Facility

E: Facility?

B: Where you been boy? So this internal confinement system focuses five hundred terawatt lasers, one hundred ninety-two of them, onto a pellet with the hopes of heating and compressing to such a degree that they achieve ignition creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction to power our ya know Delorean time machines of course. Um, well maybe that was cold fusion. But still, this is a major milestone guys. For the first time ever they’ve created more energy from the fuel than actually did the fuel. I worded that very carefully, that’s a key distinction. Because, the lasers actually produced a hundred times the amount than the fuel actually used. But still, I mean fusion actually happened. Some of the alpha particles that were created actually heated other parts of the fuel to create more alpha particles and so on and so on. The bootstrapping process, um it’s an order of magnitude more efficient than previously. So uh this is clearly, this is a process that’s working that’s creating more and more energy. Now the caveats, of course we got some caveats, this is not ignition. This achievement does not mean even that this process is the one that will get us to ignition. But still, um it’s the best fusion news that we’ve had in a really long time and uh I think this is really good news. It really shows that the money, you know the millions and billions of dollars that we’re investing in this, is really worth it. They are making some really good gains. For years now they, you know the news items are coming fairly quickly, and this uh this is the biggest one. I mean we actually, fusion actually happened. This hasn’t really happened in any facility like this ever. So uh, so that’s fantastic and hopefully the process that they’re working on now is the one that really gonna, that’s really gonna show us a way to achieve ignition.

S: What do ya think, five years? We’ll have ignition?

B: *laughs* yeah

S: Five to ten years.

B: Yeah so keep your eye on this one. Uh fusion is one of those huge technologies that it, once we have it ya know it would just be one of the inventions of history. This has been your quickie with Bob, and I hope it was good for you too. Discuss

S: Ya see this is the kind of paper trail that I was talking about. When you’re developing something as big as fusion, then there are these incremental advances. I mean the research is there, it’s happening. Ya know it’s not like somebody just says hey I created fusion, ya know.

E: Let’s have a press release

S: I leaped ahead twenty steps and thirty years of research all in fell swoop.

B: It’s not one lone scientist, I mean those days are long gone. Sure you could have ya know a breakthrough, a theoretical breakthrough, in lots of different areas by one person. But typically now, it’s teams and teams and countries. How many times have we had discussions of news items and it’s completely international? Two, three, four five different countries are all working together.

E: Makes sense.

S: It does

R: Did you notice that the uh researcher quoted on NPR was called Omar Hurricane?

B: Yes

R: So the researcher named Omar Hurricane used a giant laser to produce nuclear fusion. That is definitely a superman plot.

S: He’s a super villain!

R: Yeah

B,E: *Laugh

R: Right?

S: Absolutely

J: Is his last name Hiruken? From Street Fighter, is that what you’re saying?

B: *laughs

R: No, it’s actually hurricane

S: Hurricane

R: But that would also be great. Yeah

== Who's That Noisy (44:55) ==
* Answer to last week: Alan Shephard
S: Alright Evan, light us up with some Who’s That Noisy

E: Light it up, baby. Let’s play for you last week’s Who’s That Noisy. A very popular one, lots of correct answers; but here it is again. *Plays last week’s noisy* Helium atmosphere

S: Where was he, on Saturn or something?

E: Yeah where was he? Well why don’t I read you the e-mail we received from the person who was the winner this week. Uh Abigail Drum, she writes to us and says, “Hi there! The sound clip for Who’s That Noisy was taken from a phone call from the 1960’s between President Linden B Johnson and Scott Carpenter, a former astronaut. Carpenter had spent the last thirty days 200 feet underwater in the Navy’s SEALAB 2 project. However, at the time of the call, Carpenter was in a decompression chamber which has helium instead of nitrogen in the air, hence why Carpenter’s voice is so high it’s barely comprehensible. Interesting fact, Sea Lab 2 was apparently much nicer than the previous Sea Lab 1. It had hot showers, but it was also not completely flat on the sea floor. So they called it the Tiltin’ Hilton.

J: Evan, that makes me feel kind of like, isn’t that dangerous? Like there was enough helium in that guy, in the atmosphere in there, his voice sounded like that.

S: Well I’m sure that was enough oxygen too. There’s oxygen and helium instead of oxygen and nitrogen.

J: No, I know that, Steve. I just didn’t know that you could, I know that helium is inert, I just didn’t know that you could it could be mixed with oxygen like that and you could breathe it like an atmosphere.

S: Well now you do.

B: *laughs*

S: Yeah Jay there’s a whole field of helium diving; divers, deep divers who use helium oxygen mixtures instead of nitrogen oxygen mixtures and they really claim that it’s a lot better. Apparently you can breathe in helium for months without there being any tissue damage, and there’s much lesser a risk of narcosis then there is from nitrogen. So yeah, it’s perfectly safe to breathe helium oxygen mixtures.

E: Now Scott, a little bit about Scott Carpenter right? One of the original seven, bright stuff from NASA’s project Mercury. He was the second American after John Glenn to orbit the Earth, and the fourth American in space following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn. And he died on October 10th 2013. So only recently departed the Earth. So, very sad but lots of correct answers. A lot of people, very happy to have that one correctly recognized. But congratulations, Abby, you were chosen this week as this week’s winner.

S: Thanks Evan. And what have you got for this week?

E: For this week I got something that I think Bob will enjoy.

B: Ooo

E: Here we go, brand new Who’s That Noisy. *plays noisy* Could you hear that scratching kind of sound?

R: Mhmm, that was Skrillex, the early years.

B,E: *laughs

B: Nice

E: Uh this one is well, like I said, a little hint – Bob would find this one fascinating. Do what they did last week with the Scott Carpenter clip and send us it via e-mail wtn@theskepticsguide.org or several answers were posted to our forums sgu.com, feel free to post there as well. And as I always say, and I mean it from the bottom of Jay’s heart, good luck everyone.

S: You can also send that to ttfn@theskepticsguide.org that would work also

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Net Neutrality (48:43) ===
<blockquote>Follow up discussion on net neutrality</blockquote>
S: Got a couple of e-mails this week. Uh we had a lot of feedback about our net neutrality discussion from the special episode that we had that came out early this week on Monday. So, big caveat, this was a live show, meaning that we were taking questions live without prep. We got asked about net neutrality and we talked about it off the cuff without really being able to investigate the details. Which, I allowed because I figured we’d come back and actually do a more meaty discussion of it on the next episode; so that’s what I want to do. We’re not gonna ready any one specific email, because there was a ton of people who gave us feedback about it. So I wanted to do a follow up to go into a little bit more detail. The issue is the recent decision by a circuit appeals court, I think in the district of Washington DC.

E: Mhmm, yes

S: That ruled that the FCC’s regulation of establishing what is called net neutrality were not legitimate, that the FCC can’t do that. So there was lots of speculation about why they made that decision, what the implications of that decisions is. In short, what net neutrality is, is the notion that service providers cannot discriminate different kinds of traffic on the networks. They can’t give premium bandwidth or throughput to people who pay for their premium access and throttle back throughput for everybody else or give preference to their own services or even keep competitors from providing competing services on their own networks. Proponents of net neutrality say that ya know the internet is a vital resource and we need to protect it and it’s a level playing field for everybody and that if you give a service providers the ability to discriminate against different websites, different content originators etcetera, that they will exploit this to ya know make the internet experience much worse and charge a lot more money for stuff basically. Opponents of net neutrality say, essentially the free market should sort itself out and the government doesn’t need to impose these artificial rules inhibiting the free market. So that’s the debate. But I read a lot of dissections of this recent decision and they all basically are saying the same thing. But actually the best summary was by one of our forum members who goes by Vince Gamer, and this is how they broke it down, they wrote this is now quoting from him “FCC, under Bush, said essentially the internet is not a common carrier regulated under Section 2, but is an information service regulated under the much more lenient Section 1. The FCC under Obama, this is a 2010 rule now, said that we can impose a net neutrality regime on the internet. Verizon sued the FCC, saying that you can’t do that because you don’t have the authority to regulate the internet at all. The court ruling essentially said the FCC absolutely does have the authority to regulate the internet. If they decide to call it a common carrier, under Section 2 they can do what they did. But since they called it an information service, they went beyond Section 1 authority.” Does that make sense? So the court decision actually said the FCC does have the authority to regulate the internet. But the FCC has said that the internet is not a common carrier, but is an information service. And therefor under the FCC’s own rules they can’t impose net neutrality. The court’s basically saying yes you have the authority, FCC, to regulate the internet but you’re trying to have it both ways and you can’t do that, you gotta choose one or the other. Either it’s a common carrier or you can’t impose these net neutrality rules. So the FCC hasn’t decided yet, I think it’s going to appeal. Some people speculate it may go all the way to the Supreme Court, of course this whole thing could be rendered moot if congress just passes a law clarifying everything, they could basically do whatever they want in this respect. There aren’t really any constitutional issues here, this is all just what does the FCC, what authority does congress give the FCC in terms of regulating the internet? If congress clarifies that then there’s no legal issue.

E: So are we saying the FCC can’t change the determination, it has to come through congress? The FCC’s not allowed to go ahead and redefine it?

S: Agencies can’t decide what power they have, they are given power by congress. Like the FDA, you know the Food and Drug Administration, they can’t decide what authority they have to do stuff; all they could do is act with the authority that congress gives them. Uh the FCC is the same thing, congress gives them authority to regulate you know it’s the Federal Communications Commission so they regulate communication services in the country. So they’re you know the law gives them certain powers so it’s only a matter of interpreting that law, does that law five the authority to the FCC to do what the FCC is now doing. That’s what the judges were deciding, not whether or not net neutrality is a good idea. The judges were not deciding on the bigger issue of net neutrality it was just does the law give the FCC this authority. And so since this is granted by congress, congress can clarify or change or do whatever they want to give the FCC greater or less regulatory power to clarify this. Of course the bigger discussion is again between is net neutrality a good idea or not and it’s actually an interesting idea. A lot it comes from predicting what will happen you know, sort of predicting the future. Opponents say that if you free up ISPs, internet service providers, they could make more interesting and varied packages or deals with their consumers; they can provide new and innovative services to their customers.

J: I think that’s complete b.s.

S: Now the proponents of net neutrality, like Jay apparently, believe that they’re just going to exploit it to wreck the internet basically.

E: Of course

R: I agree with Jay.

E: I’m not convinced

J: Guys most of these corporations don’t sit around and go what’s a great product that we can offer people and how can we make as much money as possible

E: yeah but they still need a market Jay

S: They can do both

E: It’s not black or white

J: I’m all for net neutrality, I don’t want the ISP to have any say in what I do online whatsoever. They can’t slice and dice up services or anything. Just give me my bandwidth and go away.

S: My fear, without net neutrality, is that big companies are going to get into these complicated arrangements where iTunes/Apple will make a deal with Verizon to give preference to downloads from iTunes over competitors. You know, that sort of thing.

E: Lock out the little guy?

S: Yeah so it will basically make it impossible for little guys to compete on the internet because they won’t have the money and the power to get the premium special deals. A lot of people, a lot of internet commentators are writing that essentially this will result in there being two internets – the fast lane for the big players that can pay premium prices and the slow lane for everybody else. And that’s what proponents of net neutrality fear the most. But again, it’s always hard to say with these regulations what might happen in the future, because everybody can sort of project their own biases into the future. I do personally find the net neutrality arguments more persuasive; I do recognize it’s actually a complicated area.

=== Question #2: Placebo Medicine (56:25) ===
<blockquote>This is a question perhaps specifically focused at Steve, but I would be interested in hearing everyone else's opinions as well. I am a fourth year medical student about to graduate and enter an internal medicine primary care program with the goal of becoming a future primary care doctor. As such, I will be many patients' first and/or only contact with the health system. I know that I will encounter a lot of pseudoscience in this role, and I already have seen my fair share during my clinical rotations thus far. I am unsure of how to stay true to my skeptical nature while still supporting my patients therapeutically. For example, I recently had a patient with failed back surgery syndrome – essentially, lower back pain status post surgery, now with worse pain dependent on opioids to treat. It's a bad situation – the pain is keeping him out of work, opioids are causing problems of their own (and are ineffectual and inappropriate for chronic pain), and he has exhausted the limits of our medical knowledge – he is on NSAIDs, has done physical therapy, has has had all the imaging and even the surgery without relief. So he comes in and tells me he recently started acupuncture and 'it's working wonders'. I have seen this similar story frequently – patients with fibromyalgia or arthritis, or itching, finding relief from acupuncture, or herbal medications, or homeopathy. Frankly, these particular cases have minimal 'harm' – even though alt med can have harm on a large scale when patients avoid conventional medical treatment or engage in dangerous practices, in these particular cases the patients have tried everything medicine has to offer and are still following up with their physicians. While I feel strongly that it is unethical to prescribe a placebo and would not thus go out of my way to recommend non-proven alternative medicine, if a patient takes a placebo on their own and finds relief, it would only be harmful to their health (both mental and physical) and the therapeutic doctor-patient relationship to disabuse them of the notion that the alt med is helping them. A few things could happen if I did: they stop the therapy and are in worse pain taking meds with more side effects, or they don't stop the therapy but stop seeing me because they don't trust my opinion anymore since the therapy has worked and I don't believe it. So when a patient comes to me, being helped by alternative medicine, and asks what I think, I nod and smile and say 'some patients do report relief from that'. Is that wrong? Should I be more firm to my skeptical roots? What if they ask for my opinion before starting the alternative medicine? It may legitimately be helpful through a placebo effect (which would only be minimized by my telling them the truth), they would be taking it under physician supervision, and honestly, there are a lot of medications that we DO prescribe with actual serious side effects that, on balance, are likely only minimally superior to placebo (SSRIs being a good example). These patients are taking alt med for pain or depression or other more subjective complaints, not for cancer or heart disease or something that could kill them without proper therapy. As you can see, I'm ethically conflicted, sorry for the rather rambling question. I could really use your advice!PS – all the usual: love the show, been listening for years, huge fan :)JaimePhiladelphia</blockquote>
S: Alright let’s do one more email; this one comes from Jamie, from Philadelphia, and Jamie writes: I’m not gonna read the rest of Jamie’s email because it’s very long. But essentially he’s asking this question: what if my patients tell me that they are using some alternative modality (like acupuncture, homeopathy or whatever) but they say it works for their symptoms; it’s working for them. Should I just go along with it and say okay it’s fine that it’s working for you or should I say no that doesn’t work you shouldn’t use it, even though the patient is telling him that it is providing them relief.

R: You can’t just tell somebody it doesn’t work when they say this works for me. Like a response of well it doesn’t work is not going to convince anyone.

E: You’re not gonna influence them, right?

R: Yeah and like Steve will have the ultimate say on this obviously as a working skeptical physician; but from a patient standpoint, I think the best goal is to say well I’m glad that that’s working for you, let’s talk about the

E: But here’s the data

R: Well, yeah, like you know or let’s talk about the ways that we can help you out using modern medicine and make sure that you’re not using anything that could actually hamper your treatment. To me the most important thing that a physician can do is make sure that they’re not actively harming themselves by forgoing real medical treatment or taking something that could be actively harming their health.

B: Yeah but besides that, what else can you do? You have to try to explain ya know the intricacies of the placebo effect

E: Yeah

B: and that’s not

R: It’s a tough conversation to have when someone’s

B: It is it is

R: has like a little paper robe on in front of you

E: And I tell you what, he’s becoming a future primary care doctor, you’re not gonna have you’re not gonna be sitting down with people twenty minutes to discuss these things; you’re gonna be in and out, time is precious when it comes to these doctor’s appointments and they’re becoming more and more so, probably less time to see patients than you have today.

S: So let me tell you what I do, because this happens to me almost every day. Jamie also asks about what if patients ask you should I try acupuncture, I think that’s an even easier question. Let me start there. If patients ask if they should try something, and again I get this question pretty much every day – what about this? What about that? Should I try this? – Acupuncture I think is pretty much the most popular one these days, because I treat migraines and neuropathic pain so for pain it’s almost guaranteed to come up. So there I tell the patients, well I’ve actually explored the research, the literature of that question and what the literature shows is that acupuncture is not effective for migraines so I therefor do not recommend it. That’s easy, that’s an easy one in my opinion. I don’t believe in placebo medicine, I think it’s unethical to prescribe placebos for patients or to allow them passively to with your lack of objection to use placebos to treat their symptoms. Even if they report that they feel better, don’t confuse that with them actually having higher quality of life because those two things don’t correlate, the reporting bias may be all that you’re getting. It may make your life as the practitioner easier, but it’s not necessarily helping the patient; don’t confuse those two things. And I also think it’s very harmful to instill in patients, to allow them to believe that nonsense is effective. Now stuff like homeopathy? If they get a placebo effect from their homeopathic remedy for their elbow pain, then they’re gonna rely upon it when they have an infection or they have something that’s not self-limiting or more serious. And that’s on you, their physician for allowing that to happen. The trickier situation, absolutely, is when a patient tells you hey you know I’ve had this symptom for a long time, nothing helped and then I got acupuncture and it feels much better. What do you tell them? The answer is, it depends, it depends on the patient. There isn’t a one size fits all approach, you really have to titrate your response to first of all is the patient asking me a question or are they just informing me about something? What’s my therapeutic relationship with that patient? And what do I think is their level of sophistication in terms of are they interested in me explaining to them what the scientific literature shows.

E: And do you intend to hug the patient?

R: *laughs* Well you know in my physician’s defense, he spends a lot of time with me and he put me on a drug and I came back and I said I’m having this side effect and I looked it up and a lot of other people have this side effect. And he laughed and he was like that’s a side effect that literally everyone has for every medicine. And then he pulled out his iPhone and brought up like a list of side effects and then showed me and then we talked about very openly with what the research shows. So

S: That’s good

R: I quite like him because of that, because of that openness and because he doesn’t mince words; if he thinks something doesn’t work he does tell me. But I don’t know if that’s his approach to somebody who is not quite as openly skeptical.

S: Yeah so but I have told patients who have told me I tried this and it helped me, I have told them well let me tell you what I think about that. So I tell them the research shows that that treatment overall is not effective for what you’re using it for, so then therefor I don’t recommend it. I understand that you feel better after taking the treatment, but I have lots of reasons why that might be the case. And I want to make sure that we are using treatments that are actually helping you. You can tailor it in a way that patients will accept it and they won’t feel threatened. Of course if they do start to feel threatened by that, then I don’t pursue it. I did my job, I told them what I think, I do redirect the conversation to something that I think is constructive. You know I’m not gonna sit there and berate, I never get negative with a patient, I never berate, I never tell them they’re wrong or you never make them feel like they’ve done something wrong. You have to be very careful, you’re always completely nonjudgmental about the patient. But you know I just bring it to this is my reading of the scientific evidence. They can accept that or not, but I’m doing my job and telling them what it shows. Right they’re sitting in my office, they’re seeing a science-based practitioner, I’m gonna tell them what the science shows. But I’m not going to patronize them and be paternalistic and say you know oh some people feel better with that treatment when I don’t believe it for a second. I’m never going to say something to patients that I don’t honestly believe. So it is… I’ve done fine with that, I haven’t had trouble with that. You know patients are actually thankful for my opinion. But you don’t confront the… I guess the bottom line is I tell the patient what the science shows, I don’t confront their beliefs, ever. That’s the distinction, that’s just not appropriate within a doctor patient relationship.

R: I think that’s a good distinction

S: Yeah. Alright well thanks Jamie that was a good question.

== Science or Fiction (1:05:23) ==
[http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2014/02/americas-only-clovis-skeleton-had-its-genome-mapped/ Item #1]: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants.
[http://www.herpetologynotes.seh-herpetology.org/Volume7_PDFs/Dinets_HerpetologyNotes_volume7_pages3-7.pdf Item #2]: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically.
[http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/10/australian-astronomers-discover-oldest-known-star-in-universe Item #3]: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts; two genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys all ready for this week?

E: I lost last week

J: Yes sir

S: We have an interesting one this week. Don’t take it personally.

E: Well, you know.

S: Item #1: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants. Item #2: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically. Item #3: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe. Evan, go first.

E: Oh, what’s the theme?

S: *laughs* no theme

E: Randomness is clumpy

R: Two benign things and one terrifying thing.

E: *laughs* Okay, alright let’s go with this in order: mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton. *sigh* I’m having trouble with this one. Okay but the Indian populations came from Siberia, didn’t they? Or most of them did and there’s not necessarily part of Clovis population? I’m tryin to piece this together ugh. So that one’s a guessing game, basically. Uh ok, crocodiles are able to climb trees…okay, I’ll buy that. Maybe they use their tail uh in order to give themselves you know the extra leverage or strength in order to do it. The rate of ascension might be extremely slow; you know we’re not talking about a bear scurrying up a tree or something. But I don’t see a problem with a crocodile being able to climb the tree. They probably use their tail like other creatures in trees have been known to do. Uh, the last one, the Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, 14.5 billion years old – 800 million years older than the age of the universe. Okay, so what’s going on here? Seems ridiculous on the surface. I’m inclined to think this one is actually science because there’s a piece here that’s missing. I wonder if this astronomer is claiming we have to recalculate what we know of the age of the universe because we do now have the evidence of this star and it’s been confirmed. Therefore, time to push the old cosmic calendar back a bit and say the age of the universe is probably a little maybe, perhaps a little older than thought. Well, I’m having a problem with the Clovis one the most; I guess I’m gonna go with that one as fiction but, ya know I’m not…I’m not at all confident in my pick this week.

S: Okay. Bob you seem to have a pretty strong opinion, why don’t you go next.

B: I’ve got no problem with the Clovis skeleton. They were here before Native Americans, okay they’re related, no biggie. Sure it could have gone the other way, but um nothing crazy… nothing crazy like two two and three. Crocodiles climbing trees… what the hell? I mean, I can’t imagine, their tails are meant to go back and forth that’s all. They really don’t move well up and down cuz that’s not how they swim.

S: You don’t think they could use it like a spring like Tigger?

B,J,E: *laugh

R: The second Tigger reference of the evening? Too many

E: Second?

B: I mean depending on the tree, they could grip it properly; I can kinda see that maybe. But that’s the weirdest thing, but not as weird as… Well I noticed that you saved for the one about the star that they date 14.5 billion years. I mean they could have made a mistake, maybe some weird anomaly with the red shift that is giving them an unusual date, therefor I’ll say the alligator crocodile.

E: *laughs*

R: You don’t even know what the animal is! Oh my god

E: I was gonna say the first one to say it’s an alligator automatically loses.

S: Alright, Jay

J: A new study about crocodiles are able to climb trees, I totally believe that one; that’s the end of that.

E: And that’s that

J: Australian astronomers discovered the oldest known star which puts the date to be older than the universe. I’m just assuming that they’re either modifying the name of the universe or they made a there’s a factual error. Are they saying that that is now the age of the universe?

R: Just say a number

J: I’ll go with one.

S: The Clovis?

E: The Clovis

S: Alright so we’ve got Jay and Evan with the Clovis and Bob with the crocodiles. Alright, Rebecca

R: I’m going rogue! I’m goin with the star!

E: You’re going with the star?

R: Yeah because the Clovis is the one that makes the most sense. Like

J: Why?

E: That’s what makes it the fiction

R: Because that’s what, I think that’s the direction things were heading

B: I agree

J: That’s the only one that doesn’t have a tricky thing in it though, there’s nothing tricky about that. And Steve won’t be like it’s 70%

R: Steve would never do that. I don’t know, that seems really obvious to me. That one is true, I don’t know. The crocodiles climbing trees, I just want it to be true. They’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years, they’re like a perfect killing machine. Surely in all that time they would have learned to kill something in a tree. So, yeah, they’re just they’re reptiles like reptiles climb trees all the time. Why not? But pushing back the age of the universe by eight-hundred million years? I feel like I would have heard of that. Yes I know we lose on that argument all the time; but, I feel like that would have shown up in my RSS feeds…age of the universe pushed back. So I think that one’s the fiction. Done. Go

S: Okay a nice spread, nice spread. Um I guess we’ll take these in order. Number one: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants. Jay and Evan you think this one is the fiction and this one is SCIENCE. This one is science.

R: In your faces!

J: Son of a!

E: Now the crocodile one’s gonna be the fiction.

S: Okay so, this is cool. This is really cool.

B: It better be.

S: I’ve been following this Clovis story because I love it. I find it fascinating. Now the Clovis people are known primarily from their, the Clovis culture are known for their points.

J: They’re called Clovis!

S: And you know the Clovis have a certain feature to it. And these were big game hunters, they were hunting

E: Big game

J: *laughs

S: Mammoths, mastodons, giant bison… They had big spears with these big points. The Clovis people, they lived in the Americas about 13,000 years ago and then they all died out.

J: Why? What happened to them?

S: That’s a good question, but nobody knows why the Clovis died out. There are multiple theories, which we’ve talked about before on the show; but
that’s not important for this item. Um

E: Clovis, what is it?

S: The other question is where did the Clovis people come from, what’s their relationship with modern-day Native Americans? Did they Clovis people die out and get replaced by the Paleo Indians who eventually became modern Native Americans? Or did they, are they the same people? Did the Clovis people, just their culture change but they actually became Native Americans? Well this Clovis skeleton, a boy actually a young boy, they were able to map the genome and compare it to Native American populations; and they found that it the uh family in which this boy came is the ancestor to 80% of present-day Native American populations. Mainly the ones from South America and Mexico.

E: So not the ones to cross the Bering Strait.

S: No no they are. The Native Americans crossed the Bering Strait and they divided pretty much into two populations – those that stayed in the north in Canada and those that went south to where the US’s Mexico and South America. They just haven’t examined American Native American populations, so we just don’t know their relationships. But, the ones from South America are definitely related to the Clovis people. So it’s probable that the Clovis culture died out, the people – at least enough of them to survive to become or interbreed with or whatever the Paleo Indians that are ya know the ancestors of the Native Americans. So that’s very interesting. So obviously this was a controversy, this was a huge piece of information that helps us clarify that. Cuz there are still people that are saying maybe the Clovis people came from Europe or whatever. There was a separate migration that wasn’t the same migration that ultimately led to the Native Americans. It does bring up the whole issue of who owns these skeletons; and a lot of Native Americans are saying that well they’re their ancestors therefor they should have the right to choose what happens to them. And others counter like, you know well the Clovis people were not necessarily ancestors of your tribe, so you don’t have control over them. So this in away also throws that argument towards the Native Americans that are saying they should be able to determine what happens with these remains. For example, this Clovis skeleton was reburied after it was examined. Lots of interesting implications for that. Alright let’s move on to number two: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically. Bob, you just cannot believe this one, everyone else thinks this one is true.

J: I mean seriously Bob.

B: I said I could imagine it.

S: Alright so you could imagine a crocodile sitting in a tree, would you believe

R: k.i.s.s.i.n.g.

J: Two crocodiles

S: Would you believe four meters up? Could you believe that a crocodile could get four meters up a tree?

J: That’s what is that thirty feet?

R: twelve feet

E: thirty feet

R: what’s that like a million feet?
*all laughing*

E: metric system wins!

R: It’s like four farthings right?

S: There have been sightings, people claiming to see crocodiles in trees before but never any scientific description.

B: Until now

S: Until now

R: Ahahaha Eat it!

S: Yeah so there’s a picture and everything. So it’s very interesting. It seems that their tree-climbing behavior is probably not to hunt things in the tree, but to bask. Because you know their reptiles, they’re cold-blooded, they need to bask in the sun and in some places that’s the best place they climb

R: I bet they’ve murdered things though.

S: Eh they might have. They also they tend to like for those some crocodiles tend to climb trees around the waters’ edge, they like will climb out onto branches and then when anything comes by they drop in to the water, to hide.

R: Oh I thought you meant to murder.

S: No they tend to be very skittish

R: Like death from above

S: I guess they feel vulnerable while they’re out basking in the sun on the edge of a tree limb; so they will tend to drop into the water if they if anybody comes by. The researchers also said that the smaller crocodiles are more likely to climb trees and climb higher. The really big crocodiles tend to get to big to climb trees. So yeah the biggest ones aren’t doing this. But it’s not just the babies, some moderately big ones will still climb trees. And yeah they can use their claws to climb even vertical surfaces. So even though they don’t look to be adapted to be arboreal, they can still manage to climb trees. And this is a ya know the researchers made a very interesting observation that when we’re trying to interpret the ecology of fossil species, you know we base it on their claws their bones their teeth etcetera, but animals will make use of their anatomies in lots of different and interesting ways. It’s like even though the crocodiles’ claws may have evolved quote un quote for one particular purpose, they will still use them in other ways. That’s an important concept to evolution. One, that I find, creationists consistently miss. There isn’t this simplistic interpretation that one anatomical structure is for one thing, or evolved for only one purpose. Most structures can be put to multiple use, and that maybe some population of crocodiles might eventually evolve into an arboreal species. And then they’ll say well how did that happen. Well because they can climb trees now even though they’re not specifically adapted for it. Ya know? All of this means that Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe is fictions. Congratulations, Rebecca.

R: Thank you

S: Now this is, this in fact was the state of affairs about ten years ago or fifteen ago. Do you guys remember this? Where the oldest stars were older than the estimated age of the universe.

B: Oh yeah it was a big problem

S: Yeah it was a big problem. I remember a creationist threw that up in my face. I was like well we’ll sort it out. I’m sure that one or the other or both of the dating is off. Either the age or whatever method they’re using to estimate the age of the star, or whatever method we’re using to estimate the age of the universe, one or both of those must be off obviously. It’s so plausible it actually was the case not too long ago. But, eventually we discovered that the universe was older than we thought and that everything came into alignment. These stars were like twelve billion and a half billion years old, the age of the universe was pushed back to 13.4 and everybody was happy (or 13.7). Now Australian astronomers did discover the oldest known star, but it’s about point one billion years after the formation of the universe. So it’s 13. Yeah 13.6

E: A hundred million years?

R: And it’s nearby right?

E: Was that like a protostar? I mean were there really

S: Yeah it was a star

E: I thought that was too soon for stars to form

S: It’s probably getting close to just about as soon as it could form. Yeah the astronomer, Kellar, said it was like finding a needle in a haystack; they got lucky. They were using a wide-field telescope to search for ancient stars as part of a research project specifically designed to do this and they found one; 13.6 billion year-old star. So this will help us study what the first first stars to form in the universe were like. Were they any different than the stars that we see today? Alright, you guys really struggled this week.

J: Oh man

R: I didn’t

J: That was really bad, Steve.

E: I’m very sad, I’m very sad.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>“The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” - Otto Pfleiderer, 1902</blockquote>

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
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SGU Episode 449

2014-03-17T03:40:47Z

Lmwood: /* Question #2: Placebo Medicine (56:25) */

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|guest2 = 
|guest3 = 
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2014-02-15.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=48798.0.html
|qowText = The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it. 
|qowAuthor = {{w|Otto Pfleiderer}}, 1902 
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 12th 2014, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Ello guvna

S: Happy Darwin Day everyone!

B: Yay!

R: Happy Darwin Day! I’m wearin my little Darwin t-shirt, available at skepticalrobot.com.

B: I’m sitting here all evolved and everything.

E: What exactly is Darwin Day?

R: It’s the day Darwin was born.

S: Otherwise known as his birthday, yeah. Did you guys know, here’s my Darwin Day factoid for the day, a scientist named a new species of beetle after Darwin? The beetle was discovered by Dr. Stylianos Chatzimanolis from the University of Tennessee

B: Wait wait wait, say that again.

S: NO. This is a uh a rove beetle. There are fifty-seven thousand described species, but apparently Darwin collected this specimen when he was on the beetle. And then it sat lost in a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London; and was rediscovered in London in 2008. And then somebody realized hey this was actually collected by Darwin

B: Oh!

S: So it was just described and it was named Darwinilus sedarisi

B: Oh sweet

E: very nice

J: what’s this bug called luv?

B: I would have put that on EBay

E: Imagine if someone would have opened the drawer and said, “Ew there’s a dead bug in here. Let’s dump it out and get rid of it ew!”

R: There are tons of Darwin specimens that are just sitting in drawers underneath the uh London Museum of Natural Science. My friend, Karen James, used to work there and she gave me the behind the scenes tour and it was amazing! There was all of…they have so much incredible stuff. They keep Darwin’s own samples in a basement somewhere. Ya know, not even open to the public.

E: Have you guys seen the show on HBO called Questioning Darwin?

R: Nope

E: HBO’s ran that, I think, starting last week. And I didn’t watch all of it; I watched parts of it. And it had some very parts. Apparently, something I didn’t know about Darwin before, is that during his seminal time in which he was writing the Origin of Species – that he spent twenty years accumulating – all of his notes and everything in doing this… He basically cloistered himself inside of his house and his wife kind of made, ya know brought everything to him. He had his family all around him and the varied species and all the animals and things and plant life and his his green house was immense and everything. But he basically stayed there for twenty years and worked like eighteen hour days like every day for twenty years just in pursuit of this… of of of learning more about the origin of species. And that is dedication

B: How many wives would put up with that crap? Like yeah this is gonna be a revolutionary theory, I need eighteen hours a day for the next two decades.

E: Apparently she was entirely on board

B: Wow

E: and made it possible for him to do the work that was necessary for him to get that book published.

B: Glad she did, but what a hard sale that must have been…

== This Day in Skepticism (03:20) ==
* February 15: Happy Decimal Day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day
R: Hey, speaking of…England uh Happy Decimal Day everyone! Uh the day we record this is Darwin Day, but the day this episode comes out is February 15th. And February 15th, 1971 was Decimal Day. Which, personally I think they should celebrate every year; just because it’s a wonderfully dorky sounding holiday. But, in 1971 that was the date when the UK and Ireland switched their currency to using decimals instead of, you know, the ridiculously confusing system that they used to use.

E: Don’t you like having a pocket full of farthings and three pence and…

R: I wrote this down just so I could get it all right. They were two farthings in a hay penny, two hay pennies in a penny (obviously), twelve pence in a shilling, two and a half shillings in a half crown, twenty shillings in a pound, twenty-one shillings in a guinea

B: OH! Twenty-one!

R: And sixty-seven guineas in a pandapiddle(?)

B: You made that last part up

E: Did you make up that last one?

R: I did. I did. It took you guys a minute. So, in 1824 decimalization was proposed based upon the fact that the French did it. So…

B: Wait, I think that’s the first time I have ever heard that word.

R: Decimalization?

B: I like it!

R: It’s a word!

B: I believe it!

R: But yeah, even though it was proposed in 1824, it took almost a century and a half for it to actually happen. Which, you know, should make all of us in the US feel a bit better about our metric system concerns. When it did finally happen, the government broke the pound into a hundred pennies. And they started, actually, in 1968 when they issued 5p and 10p coins. And in 1969 they issued the 50p coins. And then finally, on Decimal Day, they introduced the last three coins which were a half penny, one penny and two pence coins. And yeah, they eventually… they started by marking all prices in stores in stuff with both the old currency and the new currency; and they eventually dropped off the old currency. They also had two full years of educational PSAs and stuff teaching people how to use the new currency system. So that when Decimal Day finally rolled around it was pretty easy, not many complaints about it.

E: Because they realized, hey this actually makes sense.

R: Yeah

B: I don’t have much hope. We’re… There’s only three countries on the planet that aren’t metric, and we’re one of them.

E: Yay…

S: Well we’re semi-metric. I mean we buy two liter bottles of soda at the store…

E: Yeah, we’re hybrid sort of…

B: We’re hybrid. Lame hybrid

E: We are. Look at your speedometer. It’s got both miles per hour and kilometers per hour.

B: How often do you even look at that?

R: Every time I go to Canada

E: For every furlong I drive.

S: Alright, Rebecca I have to point out that we got an e-mail last week by a listener calling themselves Sharon. Who said that they were disgusted and dismayed, that you had turned This Day in Skepticism into this day in feminism…talking about all of your female scientists and everything.

R: Right. And like, pennies are girls so… this one too.

S: Which, yeah I immediately recognize this nonsense. But I did a tally of the last years’ worth of This Day in Skepticism; and it turns out that there were twenty-one males mentioned, seven females, and twenty-eight not mentioning a specific person… Like Decimal Day, they were not about a specific person.

R: Right

S: Right. So you talked about female scientists about 13.5% of the time over the last year.

R: And that is

S: Clearly saying

J: That’s too much

E: Stop shoving it in our faces

R: It’s ridiculous

S: And one third as often as male scientists

R: So yeah, Steve, I really appreciate your response…so much so that I published it on SkepChick. Which inspired another response that I found quite funny. It was actually from, you guys wouldn’t have known this but I recognized the name as somebody who has harassed me in the past on Twitter and Facebook and such and I’ve got him blocked pretty much everywhere. His response was, “If you think about it, men have contributed a lot more to the sciences that women. So really, when you’re talking about This Day in Science, you should talk about men, the preponderates of time. And that proves that I was talking about women way too often.

S: Right

B: Wooooooow

R: Which I just love. This demand that, without evidence, well I believe that man have contributed approximately ninety-nine percent of our scientific knowledge and therefore, you highlighting things people haven’t necessarily heard of that they might find interesting and educational, should also adhere to this ninety-nine percent/ one percent split. It’s

S: a totally made up split. Yeah it’s also saying that we have to perpetuate past inequities.

R: Yeah

S: And also, I pointed out, when I responded to the original e-mail, that part of the purpose – our mission of the SGU – is to promote science…is to create enthusiasm for science. And evidence clearly shows, that women are not as encouraged as much as men to go into the sciences, or to any stem field. And, that when they are encouraged, they go in greater numbers. So, we are getting the message out to the people who need it. That’s part of our mission. It’s just ridiculous

B: I’d argue that we’re not; not at thirteen point five percent.

S: We’re not doing it enough!

R: Yeah

S: I ended it by saying that now that we’re actually running the numbers, we’re actually not doing it enough. Thanks for pointing out the deficiency for us.

B: Hahaha

R: And like, you know even as an aside, I really do…what I try to do when I’m choosing an item, is to pick something people probably haven’t heard of before, something they could learn a bit from. So, today for instance, is also Galileo’s birthday; which is quite notable. I’m pretty sure most people in the audience have heard of Galileo. And it’s also Richard Feynman’s death day. I try to avoid death days, because they’re depressing. And it’s also the anniversary the meteor exploding over Russia last year. You know, these are all things we’ve talked about, you know we’ve gone over them a million times…why not talk about something a little weird and you know…different.

B: That was a year ago? Geez

R: Yeah

J: Ten years ago, Chappelle’s Show Rick James skit appeared.

B: Oh my god, that’s what we should have talked about

J: It’s a celebration bitches!

R: Ten years ago today, I’m Rick James, bitch.

J: It was actually yesterday, but still…ten years ago.

== News Items ==
=== Organic Molecules on the Moon (10:15) ===
* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2556947/Could-creatures-one-day-live-MOON-Ice-pockets-lunar-surface-hiding-building-blocks-simple-life.html
S: Alright let’s move on to some news items. Jay, you’re gonna tell us about why there might be, but not really, life on the moon.

J: Yeah, let’s not jump to conclusions. I mean when we say life, people tend to think of

S: Or life-like molecules

J: Ya know creatures. Yeah we’re talking about molecules here. So let me give you the background. So back in 2009, the lunar crater observation and sensing satellite was sent to the moon; and part of the mission was to crash a used part of the launch vehicle that was still attached to the ship into the moon to help us understand if the moon is actually made of cheese or if it’s a dessert pasty. But it actually also analyzed a plume of debris that the ship that they crashed into the moon’s surface kicked up by the impact. And what we ended up with, after observing the plume of debris that came up, is that there are organic molecules trapped in the moon’s ice. Organic molecules are, simply put, molecules that contain carbon; but these could be solid, liquid, gas or solid chemical compounds. So the organic compounds are often called the building blocks of life. So how strange is it to find them on the moon, right? Which is just a really big ball of marzipan, after all. Thank you Rebecca. So how did those organic molecules get to the moon? Some believe that they came from comets that crashed into the moon’s surface. So these comets, which have been traveling through space for unknown amount of time either picked them up or whatever. But ya know somehow those organic molecules got on the comets and the comets brought them to the moon’s surface. But recently, the University of Hawaii’s Sarah Crites said that cosmic rays are powerful enough to create a reaction that could actually create organic compounds. Cosmic rays you say, huh? Bob, what’s a cosmic ray?
B: Cosmic rays are particles, they’re not rays…it’s a funny misnomer. But they’re particles. Alpha particles and protons that come from outside of our solar system and they’re very energetic and can be nasty.

J: Yeah, high energy particles that are mostly protons; and they come from outside the solar system and they exist pretty much everywhere in the universe. So Sarah and her team believe that up to six percent of the moon’s simpler molecules, found in the polar ice, could be converted into organic compounds over a billion years of being hit by cosmic rays. And to put that time scale into perspective, that is approximately one quarter of the moo’s age. And the funny thing is that cosmic rays also break down complex molecules. So once these organic molecules are finally created, they could be damaged by the same rays.

S: mhmm

J: So the first thing to think about, in my opinion, is if this is happening...if cosmic rays are hitting inorganic molecules and creating organic molecules, then this is happing possibly anywhere that there’s ice or water in the entire universe. That was a little…that puts a different twist on the idea of billions and billions. You know what I mean? Like, wow! That blew my mind.

S: Yeah but ya know, I think it’s pretty well established that organic molecules are pretty common out there in space.

J: Well the thing is, Steve, have we really observed or have any information on things that are outside our solar system?

S: Outside the solar system, not that I know of, no.

J: Right, but that’s the point though.

S: Yeah
J: So now if by observing this stuff on the moon we can…I’m not saying we’re certain or anything, it’s still something to think about. That’s a pretty profound thought.

S: Yeah. I mean although there is a general principle of, that we’re not unique. Ya know that whatever we see here is probably typical of the rest of the universe

J: So pretty much all over the universe, like movies are really just eye candy now with not much real content? That’s happening everywhere now?

S: Is that a question?

E: *laughs* a rhetorical one

R: Steve, have you ever given a patient a hug?

B: *laughs

S: Why do you ask?

J: I want to hear the answer to that question.

E: Like an inappropriate hug?

R: Cuz my doctor today gave me a hug, and it was fine at the moment. Then when he left the room, I was like that was weird! Why did he give me a hug?

B: How well do ya know him?

R: Uh this is like my third of fourth visit.

J: Rebecca, maybe he surmised that you’re gonna die and he felt bad.

R: Yeah that’s, he wasn’t giving me bad news or anything. It was just like a physical, and then

B: And then he got physical

E: Very physical

J: Have you ever hugged a patient?

S: I have never initiated a hug; but if patients initiate a hug with me I allow it.

R: And it’s always like when you’ve just told them something horrible right?

S: No no! I just…ya know I just have some like older female patients that are very huggy

R: Oook

S: and feel

E: cultural

S: they feel comfortable doing that.

R: He’s an older man who looks like Richard Dreyfuss and sounds like Richard Dreyfuss.

S: Interesting. Doctors have different personalities with their patients. But there are lines that we try to be cognizant of.

R: Yeah

=== Astrology Belief (15:14) ===
* http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/public-opinion-astrology-dumb
S: Um Alright, Evan, you’re gonna tell us about public opinion regarding an oldie, but a goodie…astrology.

E: Oh boy, oh boy. Yeah Chris Mooney, author, long-time friend of the SGU and the New England Skeptical Society; he wrote an article at motherjones.com the other day. A very revealing piece in which he showcases the latest analysis of how well Americans understand science. Or, rather, how terribly Americans misunderstand science. Chris reports that, according to a new survey by the national science foundation, nearly half of all Americans say astrology – which is the study of celestial bodies’ reported influence on human behavior, worldly events and other human centered notions – astrology is either very scientific or sort of scientific. Nearly half of Americans.

S: Mhmm

R: Wow

E: And this was part of a larger comprehensive analysis contained within the 2014 science and engineering indicator study; which has revealed that American attitudes about science are moving in the wrong direction. Skepticism of astrology had hit an all-time high in 2004, when sixty-six percent of Americans believed that astrology was total nonsense. But since then, each year fewer and fewer respondents have dismissed connections between star alignment and personality as bunk.

S: So basically you’re saying right when the SGU started, it was all downhill from there.

E: I hate to have to say that, but that’s correlation and causation, by the way folks.

S: Yeah

E: We can actually not ascribe anything really meaningful to that. But you’re right, Steve, that is an interesting little tidbit. But here’s how it went, they first took this poll in 1979. And at the point fifty percent of Americans were skeptical of astrology as a science, fifty percent were skeptical. And then the skepticism, it crept up it rose and kept rising until 2004 sixty-six percent had skepticism of astrology. But since then, 2012 were the latest numbers, and it’s dropped down to fifty-five percent skepticism, which is the lowest number since 1983. And young people are especially inclined to offer astrology scientific legitimacy. A majority of Americans aged 18 to 24 considering the practice at least sort of scientific. And the 25 to 34 age group was not far behind them. This is extremely disconcerting

S: Mhmm

E: Um remember when Carl Sagan famously wrote in his book, The Demon Haunted World, he wrote that if pseudoscience is embraced it might be argued in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. I don’t think there’s ever been a more succinct way of putting it. And what he’s basically saying is the understanding of science is in decline; as result, the embrace of pseudoscience is on the rise.

S: Yeah actually the data shows that there’s not a linear relationship, there’s more of a curve there that actually…People who know a little bit of, as you know more and more science you get more interested in pseudoscience and the paranormal. And it’s only as you start to get to the higher levels of science education that it starts to drop off. Isn’t that interesting?

E: That is very interesting.

S: So I think it makes people more curious and open minded and they start to think about interesting things. But you got to get to a pretty high level of science understanding, or you need critical thinking skills. And that, I think it hasn’t really been tracked separately with that same data. But before you can start to deconstruct and understand why the pseudoscience is more pseudoscientific. But there is separate data, just looking at the ability to think critically; and that definitely correlates with rejection of pseudoscience.

E: Right. Very unfortunate. Um

S: Yeah

E: What can we do? What aren’t we doing?

S: Let’s start a podcast.

E: Yeah, let’s do that. What can our society…and we’re talking about Americans. And they did do some research with other places in the world. And surprisingly a place like China, they’re acceptance of astrology as science is low, very low. Only about ten percent in China compared to the numbers over here. Again it’s called the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicator Study. A lot of good information and data collected there from lots of different sources; not only the National Science Foundation but others. And they kind of put it all together there for you in one nice package. So we’ll recommend that folks go there and check it out for themselves.

S: Yeah so we still got a lot of work to do.

E: A lot.

=== New Burgess Shale Find (19:53) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-burgess-shale-find/
S: Hey well let’s move to a really cool science news item. Uh have you guys ever heard of the Burgess Shale?

B: Yes

R: Yeah

E: Uh, yes

R: He was in a Twilight Zone episode with (?)

B,S,E: *laugh

S: Uh Charles Walcott discovered what is now called the Walcott Quarry about a hundred years ago; right after the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. And this is a uh excellent bed of soft-bodied fossils from the Cambrian Explosion, from the Cambrian era. 570 to 530 million years ago, this was soon after the first proliferation of multicellular plants and animals. Tons of really weird and bizarre species, you know, were pulled out of the Burgess Shale. If you’re interested in this, I think probably still probably the best book that describes the Burgess Shale is Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. Well, recently scientists reported that a discovery of another find – the Kootenay National Park find. It’s in the Burgess Shale, it’s only forty kilometers Southeast of Walcott Quarry; so it’s in the general geographic area. And this is a fossil bed from slightly later in the Cambrian than the Walcott Quarry; so creatures are a little bit more developed. And the early reports are that it could be an even bigger fossil find than the original Walcott Quarry. I mean they’re pulling tons of specimens out of this. And the shale is like these plates; so when you find the fossils you pull the plates apart so you have basically two images of the fossil. You have the negative and the positive image of the fossil. Because of the way the fossils were preserved, it preserves the soft parts. So it’s not just the bones, cuz they’re because early multicellular life didn’t have a lot of hard parts to fossilize. That’s why you need to have these optimal conditions.

E: So when you can see the soft parts you can actually get a sense of what the creature really looked like from the outside.

S: Yeah

B: What kind of preservation are we talking about? These soft parts, what are we talking about here?

S: Well essentially you can reconstruct three dimensional images of these specimens from the two plates ya know. Ya know you may have to get multiple specimens, they do get flattened out. So you have to kind of infer their three dimensional structure. So it takes a lot of work to really reconstruct these fossils, but you can do it. So far they have yielded three thousand and fifty-three specimens, representing at least fifty-two taxa. Of these, half of are known from the Walcott Quarry.

B: And fifteen of them are new right?

S: Yeah, totally new.

R: Wow

B: Amazing

S: And they’re learning new details about previously known species from the Walcott Quarry. So this find, it’s something we’re going to be hearing about for decades I would think.

B: Oh, sure

=== Boeing Anti-Gravity (23:06) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Bob, you’re gonna tell us about another interesting item. This one, I think this is probably more towards the pseudoscience end of the spectrum. You let us know what you think.

B: Oh yeah!

S: Apparently Boeing has been researching antigravity.

B: Yeah…

J: What?!

B: Jay I mean, how extraordinary is that? If that’s even true. Didn’t NASA, I mean how many government agencies have done like ESP and stuff like that? There are no bastion of skeptics in these corporations and in the government. I wasn’t terribly surprised. So basically, a prominent aero researcher named Nick Cook claimed Boeing is working on antigravity projects. He claims that Boeing is kind of trying to get in on some Russian research that has claimed to produce a gravity-like energy beam that can produce, get this, a force of about a thousand Gs on an object, vaporizing it. That’s pretty heavy stuff, this is I think what you can safely call a game changer, if it’s true. Not only for the military offense and defense but for physics itself. I mean is it any surprise though that my skeptical and physics alarm bells are totally going off on this one. So I wanted to take a look at just some of the players behind this. Nick Cook has an interesting resume; he’s a British aerospace researcher and writer, he’s considered an expert on military black projects, and he’s also the current aerospace consultant and was for fourteen years the aviation editor for Janes Defence Weekly. Have you guys heard of that?

E: Oh absolutely, it’s considered like one of the standards of aeronautics.

B: Well it’s an important, it’s an international defense journal. Which basically covers and analyzes military defense activity around the world. If you want to know what’s going on around the world in those realms, this is one of the most prominent journals to look through. Now Nick of course has some red flags in his resume. He’s been on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast a number of times – DING DING DING!

R: Who hasn’t?

B: Yeah, well

E: Phil Plait’s been on there.

B: But not everyone is espousing their beliefs in zero point and ant gravitation devices, among other things. Regarding the zero point energy, he says that it has a potential and limitless power source that pervades all of science. And, I quote, he says it’s rooted in science. Now we’ve covered that before, on zero point energy. But um, there’s another good quote from him, “some theories say if you spin the zero point energy field that exists all around you, some weird and magical things start popping out, one of which is an ant gravitational effect.” So okay, whatever. He admits though that he’s not a scientist, very good’; but he has enlisted some help. So who do you think he asked for some help? None other than Dr. Hal Puthoff. Puthoff was an, he helped pioneer this whole dubious zero point energy field idea in the first place. And he’s also famous for endorsing Uri Geller, enough said about that. And he also, he had to, get this one, he headed the CIA’s remote viewing program and he actually claimed to send his own mind into the surface of the planet Mercury. So you know if I want a scientist to back up my revolutionary claims, I’ll just say that I would not pick Dr. Hal Puthoff okay. So according to Cook, Boeing has not only confessed to researching antigravity, but claimed… I really I couldn’t corroborate that at all. I found denial from Boeing, but that was from 2002. I couldn’t find anything recent; so I can’t find anything saying that they’ve actually been looking into it. And even if they were, so what? Does that mean that it’s a real science? He also claims that they have a project. He actually has the name of a project that they’re working on called Grasp, Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. And the aim of the project, apparently, is three holed. They want to enter a collaborative relationship with their Russian scientist who’s behind this new revolutionary device that can project a thousand Gs of energy towards anything. His name is Dr. Eugene Podkletnov. They want to determine the validity of his work; and finally they wanted to examine the uses for such a technology. Clearly, there’d be amazing uses for it; but the thing is, how feasible is it and what’s the evidence like? So, now I looked into Eugene and he’s got some red flags as well, of course. He’s a material scientist, he’s not a physicist like I assumed. He was about to publish his research… I looked into his early years and he was about to publish his research on gravity negation way back in ’96 and scientists criticized his conclusion; and then he withdrew his article. And then somehow this was followed by the University evicting him. Then he disappeared for a while, he went off the grid for a while. So for me, you know if you’re unable to handle criticism, that’s classic pseudoscientist right there. I mean that’s what…that’s an integral part of science. If you can’t handle it then um…that’s just a major red flag I think that you are an actual pseudoscientist. Clearly this guy is bright, but you know how that goes. Just because you’re a smart guy doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get swayed by woo. Also, I’ve been reading about some of the problems with his published research. Typical things I’m hearing are that he doesn’t give out enough information so that you can actually replicate any of his experiments. People mentioned anomalies that seemed to have never been described or analyzed so. Those are red flags as well. And then I tried to look into the, what’s the science have to say about shielding gravity or even gravity weapons? It doesn’t look good. You know you typically can’t say it’s impossible, but it doesn’t look good for some of this. I got some good quotes, George Smoot (he’s a professor of physics at UC Berkley) he said, “If gravity shielding is going to be consistent with Einstein’s general theory, you would need tremendous amounts of mass and energy. It’s far beyond the technology we have today.” Yeah, that kind of makes sense. You wanna mess with gravity, you need a lot of mass to generate it. But then Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine, he said “There’s nothing impossible about gravity shielding, it just requires a field theory that we don’t have yet.” That’s all, a new field theory. That alone would garner this guy a Nobel Prize, that would be an amazing thing. But just saying this guy that all he needs is a new field theory, I mean that seems like quite a bit. So also there’s another final point I wanted to make about this, I think – it just seems reasonable- that if he had a working device, that he demonstrated, that was dramatic as what they’re saying… I just think that the Russian government would clamp down on this guy and not let him out of their sight. I mean that’s an amazing development and I think it’d be obvious that they would pour billions of dollars into anything like that. Especially, if this guy has got a working device. The benefits are just not to be believed, you have amazing weapons that would literally put Russia’s military in a league all its own, if they had things like this. They’d have gravity shielding to protect them missile and light saber attacks and all sorts of things. Flying cars with no conventional food and space ships that literally seem to pop right out of science fiction movies. I mean it’s almost unending what they would have. And they would take quite seriously if he was actually able to demonstrate it. So I was reading Wired article about him and the guy’s looking for funding you know; and that just totally reminds me of the free energy and perpetual motion devices that we have seen in the past

S: Yeah

B: The only thing perpetual about them is the need for your money and just a little bit more time. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. The fact that Boeing, if they didn’t even research it, whatever. I mean companies like that do all sorts of whacky stuff trying to make a revolutionary leap in just one bound. And hey, you know, it’s not impossible, that would be an amazing thing. But I wouldn’t be sinking lots of money into this. Not unless I actually saw his device.

S: I think that’s a very common feature of technological pseudoscience is that it’s like five to ten steps ahead of where we are ya know. And it’s where companies might get in trouble. They’re always looking for the next thing right, the next technological breakthrough; because they want to invest in it and be and own it. But I guess you need some science background to know when that breakthrough is the next iterative step in our development of technology versus someone claiming to have let decades of research ahead of where we are. To the point where you can’t of course predict

B: Right

S: What’s gonna happen. And, with no paper trail to show for it, you know.

=== Photo Lineups (31:56) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Alright one last news item. Uh Rebecca, you’re gonna tell us about the science of photo lineups.

R: Sure. Or the lack of science about photo lineups. Steve sent me a very interesting article that talks about the fact that more and more United States police departments are using a new method of doing photo lineups; something called double-blind sequential lineups. Or instead of lineups sometimes they say arrays, because that’s a bit more specific. To have crime witnesses identify perpetrators. So most people probably know the traditional lineups that you see in films and the usual suspects where a witness looks over a group of people all at once to see which one is the criminal, while there’s a police lieutenant or someone looking on. Or maybe you’ve seen a Law & Order episode where a witness is looking over a bunch of photos while the detective looks over the shoulder; it’s ya know same idea. But there are a lot of problems with that method. There are decades of research that show that when witnesses are presented with a group of people, they won’t necessarily pick out the perpetrator, they’ll just pick out the person they think looks most like the perpetrator. Which is obviously a huge problem. That can lead to false convictions, false arrests, and false convictions. There’s also the problem of having a police officer standing nearby who knows who the quote un quote correct suspect is. Uh the article Steve sent me, I thought kind of naively stated that uh police officers can unconsciously influence witnesses. But of course they can and have, in the past, very consciously influenced witnesses, as well as unconsciously influencing witnesses to get what they need to make an arrest. So with this new method, or at least newer than that method, the lineup is overseen by an officer who has no idea who the actual suspect is – which is what makes it blinded. And instead of the witness seeing all of the suspects, or all of the photos of the suspects at once, they view each one individually so that they can compare that person to their actual memory and decide if it matches up. As opposed to comparing all of the suspects to one another. Despite the preponderance of research suggesting that this method is superior, most police departments actually, in the United States at least, still go by the old method. Some of that might be due to you know just general slow changing just you know, sometimes making a change like that can be difficult for something that’s imbedded in their procedures. Some of the inability to change is due to the fact that the research also shows that not only does sequential presentation of the suspects lead to fewer incorrect identifications, but it also leads to fewer identifications overall. Just to be clear, the reduction in incorrect identifications is much greater than the reduction in all identifications. But, unfortunately there are many police departments that are happy to accept a certain number of false identifications if it means more identifications overall, which is kind of depressing. And the other depressing news is that even if the majority of departments started using the scientifically proven to be better method of showing a sequential array, there are still a host of systemic problems regarding witness uh eyewitness identification in police work. Eyewitness misidentification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. It accounts for about seventy-five percent of overturned convictions according to the Innocence Project, which is a great nonprofit that focuses on providing resources and representation to people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. So, how a lineup is conducted is just one of what they call system variables that can impact uh accuracy of identifications. Other system variables include who is chosen by the police to participate in the lineup and what instructions are given to the witness before they make an identification, and what they witness is told after an identification. And then in addition to system variables, there are what’s known as estimator variables, which are uncontrollable circumstances that can hamper an identification. Like maybe the crime took place at night, or far away from the witness, or maybe the criminal is a different race than the witness – which studies show make a witness less able to distinguish certain characteristics and less likely to be able to choose the correct suspects. Or maybe the witness, at the time of the crime, was under a great deal of stress, which happens quite often and can negatively influence whether or not they can correctly identify the perpetrator. So fixing the lineup issue isn’t going to account for any of that. So even if police departments do start paying attention to the science on lineups, our court systems need to do a better job of paying attention to the science that tells us eyewitness identifications are extremely unreliable, and in many cases we have to use other methods like DNA testing in order to make a case for criminal convictions.
S: Yeah I mean there’s actually a pretty broad literature on eyewitness identification. And you’re right Rebecca, pretty much all the variables that you think would influence people’s choice do influence it. At the very least, you have to have a rigorous, almost pristine process. No bias instructions, nobody present who knows what the quote un quote correct answer is, no forced choices and no post identification feedback.

R: Yeah

S: That all effects their confidence. There’s also… did you come across the term choice blindness in your reading about this?

R: I think so

S: Yeah so people don’t even know why they make the choices that they do and don’t even remember the choices they made when like they’re asked to reproduce them.

E: Wow

S: They basically, we know this from all the psychological experiments and other contexts, but people can be manipulated in pretty much every way you can think of, and these all apply. And the bottom line is yeah these kind of eyewitness testimonies is the weakest form of evidence.

R: Yeah

S: It’s the most biased, easily manipulated etcetera etcetera, and yet juries emotionally tend to invest the most weight on eyewitness testimony.

R: Right. And it’s not to say that eyewitness testimony doesn’t have a place in trials and in the investigation, it’s just that you’re right, we need to… There are so many factors that we can’t control. These so called estimator variables, that the very least we can do, the very least we should do, is absolutely everything we can to make the system variables in line with scientific accuracy. So yeah. And so instituting something like this as a law, for instance, making it against the law to do simultaneous lineups…you know that’s just one small step, but it is still probably an important step on the road towards cleaning up how we think about eyewitness testimonies and how we treat eyewitnesses in crimes. And hopefully that can lead to fewer false convictions.

S: Yeah it’s a minimum, at the minimum we should at least be having blinded examiners, you know.

R: yeah

S: Space and stuff like that, you’re right.

=== Quickie with Bob - Fusion Beats Unity (39:55) ===
* http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html
S: Hey you know what we haven’t had in a while?

R: Uh, a quickie with Bob?

S: A quickie with Bob

R: Yeah it has been a while.

B: Well thank you Steve, I appreciate your offer. Um, this is your quickie with Bob. This is pretty cool guys. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have broken unity.

E: There’s a National Ignition Society?

B: Facility

E: Facility?

B: Where you been boy? So this internal confinement system focuses five hundred terawatt lasers, one hundred ninety-two of them, onto a pellet with the hopes of heating and compressing to such a degree that they achieve ignition creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction to power our ya know Delorean time machines of course. Um, well maybe that was cold fusion. But still, this is a major milestone guys. For the first time ever they’ve created more energy from the fuel than actually did the fuel. I worded that very carefully, that’s a key distinction. Because, the lasers actually produced a hundred times the amount than the fuel actually used. But still, I mean fusion actually happened. Some of the alpha particles that were created actually heated other parts of the fuel to create more alpha particles and so on and so on. The bootstrapping process, um it’s an order of magnitude more efficient than previously. So uh this is clearly, this is a process that’s working that’s creating more and more energy. Now the caveats, of course we got some caveats, this is not ignition. This achievement does not mean even that this process is the one that will get us to ignition. But still, um it’s the best fusion news that we’ve had in a really long time and uh I think this is really good news. It really shows that the money, you know the millions and billions of dollars that we’re investing in this, is really worth it. They are making some really good gains. For years now they, you know the news items are coming fairly quickly, and this uh this is the biggest one. I mean we actually, fusion actually happened. This hasn’t really happened in any facility like this ever. So uh, so that’s fantastic and hopefully the process that they’re working on now is the one that really gonna, that’s really gonna show us a way to achieve ignition.

S: What do ya think, five years? We’ll have ignition?

B: *laughs* yeah

S: Five to ten years.

B: Yeah so keep your eye on this one. Uh fusion is one of those huge technologies that it, once we have it ya know it would just be one of the inventions of history. This has been your quickie with Bob, and I hope it was good for you too. Discuss

S: Ya see this is the kind of paper trail that I was talking about. When you’re developing something as big as fusion, then there are these incremental advances. I mean the research is there, it’s happening. Ya know it’s not like somebody just says hey I created fusion, ya know.

E: Let’s have a press release

S: I leaped ahead twenty steps and thirty years of research all in fell swoop.

B: It’s not one lone scientist, I mean those days are long gone. Sure you could have ya know a breakthrough, a theoretical breakthrough, in lots of different areas by one person. But typically now, it’s teams and teams and countries. How many times have we had discussions of news items and it’s completely international? Two, three, four five different countries are all working together.

E: Makes sense.

S: It does

R: Did you notice that the uh researcher quoted on NPR was called Omar Hurricane?

B: Yes

R: So the researcher named Omar Hurricane used a giant laser to produce nuclear fusion. That is definitely a superman plot.

S: He’s a super villain!

R: Yeah

B,E: *Laugh

R: Right?

S: Absolutely

J: Is his last name Hiruken? From Street Fighter, is that what you’re saying?

B: *laughs

R: No, it’s actually hurricane

S: Hurricane

R: But that would also be great. Yeah

== Who's That Noisy (44:55) ==
* Answer to last week: Alan Shephard
S: Alright Evan, light us up with some Who’s That Noisy

E: Light it up, baby. Let’s play for you last week’s Who’s That Noisy. A very popular one, lots of correct answers; but here it is again. *Plays last week’s noisy* Helium atmosphere

S: Where was he, on Saturn or something?

E: Yeah where was he? Well why don’t I read you the e-mail we received from the person who was the winner this week. Uh Abigail Drum, she writes to us and says, “Hi there! The sound clip for Who’s That Noisy was taken from a phone call from the 1960’s between President Linden B Johnson and Scott Carpenter, a former astronaut. Carpenter had spent the last thirty days 200 feet underwater in the Navy’s SEALAB 2 project. However, at the time of the call, Carpenter was in a decompression chamber which has helium instead of nitrogen in the air, hence why Carpenter’s voice is so high it’s barely comprehensible. Interesting fact, Sea Lab 2 was apparently much nicer than the previous Sea Lab 1. It had hot showers, but it was also not completely flat on the sea floor. So they called it the Tiltin’ Hilton.

J: Evan, that makes me feel kind of like, isn’t that dangerous? Like there was enough helium in that guy, in the atmosphere in there, his voice sounded like that.

S: Well I’m sure that was enough oxygen too. There’s oxygen and helium instead of oxygen and nitrogen.

J: No, I know that, Steve. I just didn’t know that you could, I know that helium is inert, I just didn’t know that you could it could be mixed with oxygen like that and you could breathe it like an atmosphere.

S: Well now you do.

B: *laughs*

S: Yeah Jay there’s a whole field of helium diving; divers, deep divers who use helium oxygen mixtures instead of nitrogen oxygen mixtures and they really claim that it’s a lot better. Apparently you can breathe in helium for months without there being any tissue damage, and there’s much lesser a risk of narcosis then there is from nitrogen. So yeah, it’s perfectly safe to breathe helium oxygen mixtures.

E: Now Scott, a little bit about Scott Carpenter right? One of the original seven, bright stuff from NASA’s project Mercury. He was the second American after John Glenn to orbit the Earth, and the fourth American in space following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn. And he died on October 10th 2013. So only recently departed the Earth. So, very sad but lots of correct answers. A lot of people, very happy to have that one correctly recognized. But congratulations, Abby, you were chosen this week as this week’s winner.

S: Thanks Evan. And what have you got for this week?

E: For this week I got something that I think Bob will enjoy.

B: Ooo

E: Here we go, brand new Who’s That Noisy. *plays noisy* Could you hear that scratching kind of sound?

R: Mhmm, that was Skrillex, the early years.

B,E: *laughs

B: Nice

E: Uh this one is well, like I said, a little hint – Bob would find this one fascinating. Do what they did last week with the Scott Carpenter clip and send us it via e-mail wtn@theskepticsguide.org or several answers were posted to our forums sgu.com, feel free to post there as well. And as I always say, and I mean it from the bottom of Jay’s heart, good luck everyone.

S: You can also send that to ttfn@theskepticsguide.org that would work also

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Net Neutrality (48:43) ===
<blockquote>Follow up discussion on net neutrality</blockquote>
S: Got a couple of e-mails this week. Uh we had a lot of feedback about our net neutrality discussion from the special episode that we had that came out early this week on Monday. So, big caveat, this was a live show, meaning that we were taking questions live without prep. We got asked about net neutrality and we talked about it off the cuff without really being able to investigate the details. Which, I allowed because I figured we’d come back and actually do a more meaty discussion of it on the next episode; so that’s what I want to do. We’re not gonna ready any one specific email, because there was a ton of people who gave us feedback about it. So I wanted to do a follow up to go into a little bit more detail. The issue is the recent decision by a circuit appeals court, I think in the district of Washington DC.

E: Mhmm, yes

S: That ruled that the FCC’s regulation of establishing what is called net neutrality were not legitimate, that the FCC can’t do that. So there was lots of speculation about why they made that decision, what the implications of that decisions is. In short, what net neutrality is, is the notion that service providers cannot discriminate different kinds of traffic on the networks. They can’t give premium bandwidth or throughput to people who pay for their premium access and throttle back throughput for everybody else or give preference to their own services or even keep competitors from providing competing services on their own networks. Proponents of net neutrality say that ya know the internet is a vital resource and we need to protect it and it’s a level playing field for everybody and that if you give a service providers the ability to discriminate against different websites, different content originators etcetera, that they will exploit this to ya know make the internet experience much worse and charge a lot more money for stuff basically. Opponents of net neutrality say, essentially the free market should sort itself out and the government doesn’t need to impose these artificial rules inhibiting the free market. So that’s the debate. But I read a lot of dissections of this recent decision and they all basically are saying the same thing. But actually the best summary was by one of our forum members who goes by Vince Gamer, and this is how they broke it down, they wrote this is now quoting from him “FCC, under Bush, said essentially the internet is not a common carrier regulated under Section 2, but is an information service regulated under the much more lenient Section 1. The FCC under Obama, this is a 2010 rule now, said that we can impose a net neutrality regime on the internet. Verizon sued the FCC, saying that you can’t do that because you don’t have the authority to regulate the internet at all. The court ruling essentially said the FCC absolutely does have the authority to regulate the internet. If they decide to call it a common carrier, under Section 2 they can do what they did. But since they called it an information service, they went beyond Section 1 authority.” Does that make sense? So the court decision actually said the FCC does have the authority to regulate the internet. But the FCC has said that the internet is not a common carrier, but is an information service. And therefor under the FCC’s own rules they can’t impose net neutrality. The court’s basically saying yes you have the authority, FCC, to regulate the internet but you’re trying to have it both ways and you can’t do that, you gotta choose one or the other. Either it’s a common carrier or you can’t impose these net neutrality rules. So the FCC hasn’t decided yet, I think it’s going to appeal. Some people speculate it may go all the way to the Supreme Court, of course this whole thing could be rendered moot if congress just passes a law clarifying everything, they could basically do whatever they want in this respect. There aren’t really any constitutional issues here, this is all just what does the FCC, what authority does congress give the FCC in terms of regulating the internet? If congress clarifies that then there’s no legal issue.

E: So are we saying the FCC can’t change the determination, it has to come through congress? The FCC’s not allowed to go ahead and redefine it?

S: Agencies can’t decide what power they have, they are given power by congress. Like the FDA, you know the Food and Drug Administration, they can’t decide what authority they have to do stuff; all they could do is act with the authority that congress gives them. Uh the FCC is the same thing, congress gives them authority to regulate you know it’s the Federal Communications Commission so they regulate communication services in the country. So they’re you know the law gives them certain powers so it’s only a matter of interpreting that law, does that law five the authority to the FCC to do what the FCC is now doing. That’s what the judges were deciding, not whether or not net neutrality is a good idea. The judges were not deciding on the bigger issue of net neutrality it was just does the law give the FCC this authority. And so since this is granted by congress, congress can clarify or change or do whatever they want to give the FCC greater or less regulatory power to clarify this. Of course the bigger discussion is again between is net neutrality a good idea or not and it’s actually an interesting idea. A lot it comes from predicting what will happen you know, sort of predicting the future. Opponents say that if you free up ISPs, internet service providers, they could make more interesting and varied packages or deals with their consumers; they can provide new and innovative services to their customers.

J: I think that’s complete b.s.

S: Now the proponents of net neutrality, like Jay apparently, believe that they’re just going to exploit it to wreck the internet basically.

E: Of course

R: I agree with Jay.

E: I’m not convinced

J: Guys most of these corporations don’t sit around and go what’s a great product that we can offer people and how can we make as much money as possible

E: yeah but they still need a market Jay

S: They can do both

E: It’s not black or white

J: I’m all for net neutrality, I don’t want the ISP to have any say in what I do online whatsoever. They can’t slice and dice up services or anything. Just give me my bandwidth and go away.

S: My fear, without net neutrality, is that big companies are going to get into these complicated arrangements where iTunes/Apple will make a deal with Verizon to give preference to downloads from iTunes over competitors. You know, that sort of thing.

E: Lock out the little guy?

S: Yeah so it will basically make it impossible for little guys to compete on the internet because they won’t have the money and the power to get the premium special deals. A lot of people, a lot of internet commentators are writing that essentially this will result in there being two internets – the fast lane for the big players that can pay premium prices and the slow lane for everybody else. And that’s what proponents of net neutrality fear the most. But again, it’s always hard to say with these regulations what might happen in the future, because everybody can sort of project their own biases into the future. I do personally find the net neutrality arguments more persuasive; I do recognize it’s actually a complicated area.

=== Question #2: Placebo Medicine (56:25) ===
<blockquote>This is a question perhaps specifically focused at Steve, but I would be interested in hearing everyone else's opinions as well. I am a fourth year medical student about to graduate and enter an internal medicine primary care program with the goal of becoming a future primary care doctor. As such, I will be many patients' first and/or only contact with the health system. I know that I will encounter a lot of pseudoscience in this role, and I already have seen my fair share during my clinical rotations thus far. I am unsure of how to stay true to my skeptical nature while still supporting my patients therapeutically. For example, I recently had a patient with failed back surgery syndrome – essentially, lower back pain status post surgery, now with worse pain dependent on opioids to treat. It's a bad situation – the pain is keeping him out of work, opioids are causing problems of their own (and are ineffectual and inappropriate for chronic pain), and he has exhausted the limits of our medical knowledge – he is on NSAIDs, has done physical therapy, has has had all the imaging and even the surgery without relief. So he comes in and tells me he recently started acupuncture and 'it's working wonders'. I have seen this similar story frequently – patients with fibromyalgia or arthritis, or itching, finding relief from acupuncture, or herbal medications, or homeopathy. Frankly, these particular cases have minimal 'harm' – even though alt med can have harm on a large scale when patients avoid conventional medical treatment or engage in dangerous practices, in these particular cases the patients have tried everything medicine has to offer and are still following up with their physicians. While I feel strongly that it is unethical to prescribe a placebo and would not thus go out of my way to recommend non-proven alternative medicine, if a patient takes a placebo on their own and finds relief, it would only be harmful to their health (both mental and physical) and the therapeutic doctor-patient relationship to disabuse them of the notion that the alt med is helping them. A few things could happen if I did: they stop the therapy and are in worse pain taking meds with more side effects, or they don't stop the therapy but stop seeing me because they don't trust my opinion anymore since the therapy has worked and I don't believe it. So when a patient comes to me, being helped by alternative medicine, and asks what I think, I nod and smile and say 'some patients do report relief from that'. Is that wrong? Should I be more firm to my skeptical roots? What if they ask for my opinion before starting the alternative medicine? It may legitimately be helpful through a placebo effect (which would only be minimized by my telling them the truth), they would be taking it under physician supervision, and honestly, there are a lot of medications that we DO prescribe with actual serious side effects that, on balance, are likely only minimally superior to placebo (SSRIs being a good example). These patients are taking alt med for pain or depression or other more subjective complaints, not for cancer or heart disease or something that could kill them without proper therapy. As you can see, I'm ethically conflicted, sorry for the rather rambling question. I could really use your advice!PS – all the usual: love the show, been listening for years, huge fan :)JaimePhiladelphia</blockquote>
S: Alright let’s do one more email; this one comes from Jamie, from Philadelphia, and Jamie writes: I’m not gonna read the rest of Jamie’s email because it’s very long. But essentially he’s asking this question: what if my patients tell me that they are using some alternative modality (like acupuncture, homeopathy or whatever) but they say it works for their symptoms; it’s working for them. Should I just go along with it and say okay it’s fine that it’s working for you or should I say no that doesn’t work you shouldn’t use it, even though the patient is telling him that it is providing them relief.

R: You can’t just tell somebody it doesn’t work when they say this works for me. Like a response of well it doesn’t work is not going to convince anyone.

E: You’re not gonna influence them, right?

R: Yeah and like Steve will have the ultimate say on this obviously as a working skeptical physician; but from a patient standpoint, I think the best goal is to say well I’m glad that that’s working for you, let’s talk about the

E: But here’s the data

R: Well, yeah, like you know or let’s talk about the ways that we can help you out using modern medicine and make sure that you’re not using anything that could actually hamper your treatment. To me the most important thing that a physician can do is make sure that they’re not actively harming themselves by forgoing real medical treatment or taking something that could be actively harming their health.

B: Yeah but besides that, what else can you do? You have to try to explain ya know the intricacies of the placebo effect

E: Yeah

B: and that’s not

R: It’s a tough conversation to have when someone’s

B: It is it is

R: has like a little paper robe on in front of you

E: And I tell you what, he’s becoming a future primary care doctor, you’re not gonna have you’re not gonna be sitting down with people twenty minutes to discuss these things; you’re gonna be in and out, time is precious when it comes to these doctor’s appointments and they’re becoming more and more so, probably less time to see patients than you have today.

S: So let me tell you what I do, because this happens to me almost every day. Jamie also asks about what if patients ask you should I try acupuncture, I think that’s an even easier question. Let me start there. If patients ask if they should try something, and again I get this question pretty much every day – what about this? What about that? Should I try this? – Acupuncture I think is pretty much the most popular one these days, because I treat migraines and neuropathic pain so for pain it’s almost guaranteed to come up. So there I tell the patients, well I’ve actually explored the research, the literature of that question and what the literature shows is that acupuncture is not effective for migraines so I therefor do not recommend it. That’s easy, that’s an easy one in my opinion. I don’t believe in placebo medicine, I think it’s unethical to prescribe placebos for patients or to allow them passively to with your lack of objection to use placebos to treat their symptoms. Even if they report that they feel better, don’t confuse that with them actually having higher quality of life because those two things don’t correlate, the reporting bias may be all that you’re getting. It may make your life as the practitioner easier, but it’s not necessarily helping the patient; don’t confuse those two things. And I also think it’s very harmful to instill in patients, to allow them to believe that nonsense is effective. Now stuff like homeopathy? If they get a placebo effect from their homeopathic remedy for their elbow pain, then they’re gonna rely upon it when they have an infection or they have something that’s not self-limiting or more serious. And that’s on you, their physician for allowing that to happen. The trickier situation, absolutely, is when a patient tells you hey you know I’ve had this symptom for a long time, nothing helped and then I got acupuncture and it feels much better. What do you tell them? The answer is, it depends, it depends on the patient. There isn’t a one size fits all approach, you really have to titrate your response to first of all is the patient asking me a question or are they just informing me about something? What’s my therapeutic relationship with that patient? And what do I think is their level of sophistication in terms of are they interested in me explaining to them what the scientific literature shows.

E: And do you intend to hug the patient?

R: *laughs* Well you know in my physician’s defense, he spends a lot of time with me and he put me on a drug and I came back and I said I’m having this side effect and I looked it up and a lot of other people have this side effect. And he laughed and he was like that’s a side effect that literally everyone has for every medicine. And then he pulled out his iPhone and brought up like a list of side effects and then showed me and then we talked about very openly with what the research shows. So

S: That’s good

R: I quite like him because of that, because of that openness and because he doesn’t mince words; if he thinks something doesn’t work he does tell me. But I don’t know if that’s his approach to somebody who is not quite as openly skeptical.

S: Yeah so but I have told patients who have told me I tried this and it helped me, I have told them well let me tell you what I think about that. So I tell them the research shows that that treatment overall is not effective for what you’re using it for, so then therefor I don’t recommend it. I understand that you feel better after taking the treatment, but I have lots of reasons why that might be the case. And I want to make sure that we are using treatments that are actually helping you. You can tailor it in a way that patients will accept it and they won’t feel threatened. Of course if they do start to feel threatened by that, then I don’t pursue it. I did my job, I told them what I think, I do redirect the conversation to something that I think is constructive. You know I’m not gonna sit there and berate, I never get negative with a patient, I never berate, I never tell them they’re wrong or you never make them feel like they’ve done something wrong. You have to be very careful, you’re always completely nonjudgmental about the patient. But you know I just bring it to this is my reading of the scientific evidence. They can accept that or not, but I’m doing my job and telling them what it shows. Right they’re sitting in my office, they’re seeing a science-based practitioner, I’m gonna tell them what the science shows. But I’m not going to patronize them and be paternalistic and say you know oh some people feel better with that treatment when I don’t believe it for a second. I’m never going to say something to patients that I don’t honestly believe. So it is… I’ve done fine with that, I haven’t had trouble with that. You know patients are actually thankful for my opinion. But you don’t confront the… I guess the bottom line is I tell the patient what the science shows, I don’t confront their beliefs, ever. That’s the distinction, that’s just not appropriate within a doctor patient relationship.

R: I think that’s a good distinction

S: Yeah. Alright well thanks Jamie that was a good question.

== Science or Fiction () ==
[http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2014/02/americas-only-clovis-skeleton-had-its-genome-mapped/ Item #1]: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants.
[http://www.herpetologynotes.seh-herpetology.org/Volume7_PDFs/Dinets_HerpetologyNotes_volume7_pages3-7.pdf Item #2]: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically.
[http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/10/australian-astronomers-discover-oldest-known-star-in-universe Item #3]: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>“The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” - Otto Pfleiderer, 1902</blockquote>

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-16T03:58:50Z

Lmwood: /* Question #1: Net Neutrality (48:43) */

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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 Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday February 12th 2014, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella

B: Hey everybody

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Ello guvna

S: Happy Darwin Day everyone!

B: Yay!

R: Happy Darwin Day! I’m wearin my little Darwin t-shirt, available at skepticalrobot.com.

B: I’m sitting here all evolved and everything.

E: What exactly is Darwin Day?

R: It’s the day Darwin was born.

S: Otherwise known as his birthday, yeah. Did you guys know, here’s my Darwin Day factoid for the day, a scientist named a new species of beetle after Darwin? The beetle was discovered by Dr. Stylianos Chatzimanolis from the University of Tennessee

B: Wait wait wait, say that again.

S: NO. This is a uh a rove beetle. There are fifty-seven thousand described species, but apparently Darwin collected this specimen when he was on the beetle. And then it sat lost in a drawer at the Natural History Museum in London; and was rediscovered in London in 2008. And then somebody realized hey this was actually collected by Darwin

B: Oh!

S: So it was just described and it was named Darwinilus sedarisi

B: Oh sweet

E: very nice

J: what’s this bug called luv?

B: I would have put that on EBay

E: Imagine if someone would have opened the drawer and said, “Ew there’s a dead bug in here. Let’s dump it out and get rid of it ew!”

R: There are tons of Darwin specimens that are just sitting in drawers underneath the uh London Museum of Natural Science. My friend, Karen James, used to work there and she gave me the behind the scenes tour and it was amazing! There was all of…they have so much incredible stuff. They keep Darwin’s own samples in a basement somewhere. Ya know, not even open to the public.

E: Have you guys seen the show on HBO called Questioning Darwin?

R: Nope

E: HBO’s ran that, I think, starting last week. And I didn’t watch all of it; I watched parts of it. And it had some very parts. Apparently, something I didn’t know about Darwin before, is that during his seminal time in which he was writing the Origin of Species – that he spent twenty years accumulating – all of his notes and everything in doing this… He basically cloistered himself inside of his house and his wife kind of made, ya know brought everything to him. He had his family all around him and the varied species and all the animals and things and plant life and his his green house was immense and everything. But he basically stayed there for twenty years and worked like eighteen hour days like every day for twenty years just in pursuit of this… of of of learning more about the origin of species. And that is dedication

B: How many wives would put up with that crap? Like yeah this is gonna be a revolutionary theory, I need eighteen hours a day for the next two decades.

E: Apparently she was entirely on board

B: Wow

E: and made it possible for him to do the work that was necessary for him to get that book published.

B: Glad she did, but what a hard sale that must have been…

== This Day in Skepticism (03:20) ==
* February 15: Happy Decimal Day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day
R: Hey, speaking of…England uh Happy Decimal Day everyone! Uh the day we record this is Darwin Day, but the day this episode comes out is February 15th. And February 15th, 1971 was Decimal Day. Which, personally I think they should celebrate every year; just because it’s a wonderfully dorky sounding holiday. But, in 1971 that was the date when the UK and Ireland switched their currency to using decimals instead of, you know, the ridiculously confusing system that they used to use.

E: Don’t you like having a pocket full of farthings and three pence and…

R: I wrote this down just so I could get it all right. They were two farthings in a hay penny, two hay pennies in a penny (obviously), twelve pence in a shilling, two and a half shillings in a half crown, twenty shillings in a pound, twenty-one shillings in a guinea

B: OH! Twenty-one!

R: And sixty-seven guineas in a pandapiddle(?)

B: You made that last part up

E: Did you make up that last one?

R: I did. I did. It took you guys a minute. So, in 1824 decimalization was proposed based upon the fact that the French did it. So…

B: Wait, I think that’s the first time I have ever heard that word.

R: Decimalization?

B: I like it!

R: It’s a word!

B: I believe it!

R: But yeah, even though it was proposed in 1824, it took almost a century and a half for it to actually happen. Which, you know, should make all of us in the US feel a bit better about our metric system concerns. When it did finally happen, the government broke the pound into a hundred pennies. And they started, actually, in 1968 when they issued 5p and 10p coins. And in 1969 they issued the 50p coins. And then finally, on Decimal Day, they introduced the last three coins which were a half penny, one penny and two pence coins. And yeah, they eventually… they started by marking all prices in stores in stuff with both the old currency and the new currency; and they eventually dropped off the old currency. They also had two full years of educational PSAs and stuff teaching people how to use the new currency system. So that when Decimal Day finally rolled around it was pretty easy, not many complaints about it.

E: Because they realized, hey this actually makes sense.

R: Yeah

B: I don’t have much hope. We’re… There’s only three countries on the planet that aren’t metric, and we’re one of them.

E: Yay…

S: Well we’re semi-metric. I mean we buy two liter bottles of soda at the store…

E: Yeah, we’re hybrid sort of…

B: We’re hybrid. Lame hybrid

E: We are. Look at your speedometer. It’s got both miles per hour and kilometers per hour.

B: How often do you even look at that?

R: Every time I go to Canada

E: For every furlong I drive.

S: Alright, Rebecca I have to point out that we got an e-mail last week by a listener calling themselves Sharon. Who said that they were disgusted and dismayed, that you had turned This Day in Skepticism into this day in feminism…talking about all of your female scientists and everything.

R: Right. And like, pennies are girls so… this one too.

S: Which, yeah I immediately recognize this nonsense. But I did a tally of the last years’ worth of This Day in Skepticism; and it turns out that there were twenty-one males mentioned, seven females, and twenty-eight not mentioning a specific person… Like Decimal Day, they were not about a specific person.

R: Right

S: Right. So you talked about female scientists about 13.5% of the time over the last year.

R: And that is

S: Clearly saying

J: That’s too much

E: Stop shoving it in our faces

R: It’s ridiculous

S: And one third as often as male scientists

R: So yeah, Steve, I really appreciate your response…so much so that I published it on SkepChick. Which inspired another response that I found quite funny. It was actually from, you guys wouldn’t have known this but I recognized the name as somebody who has harassed me in the past on Twitter and Facebook and such and I’ve got him blocked pretty much everywhere. His response was, “If you think about it, men have contributed a lot more to the sciences that women. So really, when you’re talking about This Day in Science, you should talk about men, the preponderates of time. And that proves that I was talking about women way too often.

S: Right

B: Wooooooow

R: Which I just love. This demand that, without evidence, well I believe that man have contributed approximately ninety-nine percent of our scientific knowledge and therefore, you highlighting things people haven’t necessarily heard of that they might find interesting and educational, should also adhere to this ninety-nine percent/ one percent split. It’s

S: a totally made up split. Yeah it’s also saying that we have to perpetuate past inequities.

R: Yeah

S: And also, I pointed out, when I responded to the original e-mail, that part of the purpose – our mission of the SGU – is to promote science…is to create enthusiasm for science. And evidence clearly shows, that women are not as encouraged as much as men to go into the sciences, or to any stem field. And, that when they are encouraged, they go in greater numbers. So, we are getting the message out to the people who need it. That’s part of our mission. It’s just ridiculous

B: I’d argue that we’re not; not at thirteen point five percent.

S: We’re not doing it enough!

R: Yeah

S: I ended it by saying that now that we’re actually running the numbers, we’re actually not doing it enough. Thanks for pointing out the deficiency for us.

B: Hahaha

R: And like, you know even as an aside, I really do…what I try to do when I’m choosing an item, is to pick something people probably haven’t heard of before, something they could learn a bit from. So, today for instance, is also Galileo’s birthday; which is quite notable. I’m pretty sure most people in the audience have heard of Galileo. And it’s also Richard Feynman’s death day. I try to avoid death days, because they’re depressing. And it’s also the anniversary the meteor exploding over Russia last year. You know, these are all things we’ve talked about, you know we’ve gone over them a million times…why not talk about something a little weird and you know…different.

B: That was a year ago? Geez

R: Yeah

J: Ten years ago, Chappelle’s Show Rick James skit appeared.

B: Oh my god, that’s what we should have talked about

J: It’s a celebration bitches!

R: Ten years ago today, I’m Rick James, bitch.

J: It was actually yesterday, but still…ten years ago.

== News Items ==
=== Organic Molecules on the Moon (10:15) ===
* http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2556947/Could-creatures-one-day-live-MOON-Ice-pockets-lunar-surface-hiding-building-blocks-simple-life.html
S: Alright let’s move on to some news items. Jay, you’re gonna tell us about why there might be, but not really, life on the moon.

J: Yeah, let’s not jump to conclusions. I mean when we say life, people tend to think of

S: Or life-like molecules

J: Ya know creatures. Yeah we’re talking about molecules here. So let me give you the background. So back in 2009, the lunar crater observation and sensing satellite was sent to the moon; and part of the mission was to crash a used part of the launch vehicle that was still attached to the ship into the moon to help us understand if the moon is actually made of cheese or if it’s a dessert pasty. But it actually also analyzed a plume of debris that the ship that they crashed into the moon’s surface kicked up by the impact. And what we ended up with, after observing the plume of debris that came up, is that there are organic molecules trapped in the moon’s ice. Organic molecules are, simply put, molecules that contain carbon; but these could be solid, liquid, gas or solid chemical compounds. So the organic compounds are often called the building blocks of life. So how strange is it to find them on the moon, right? Which is just a really big ball of marzipan, after all. Thank you Rebecca. So how did those organic molecules get to the moon? Some believe that they came from comets that crashed into the moon’s surface. So these comets, which have been traveling through space for unknown amount of time either picked them up or whatever. But ya know somehow those organic molecules got on the comets and the comets brought them to the moon’s surface. But recently, the University of Hawaii’s Sarah Crites said that cosmic rays are powerful enough to create a reaction that could actually create organic compounds. Cosmic rays you say, huh? Bob, what’s a cosmic ray?
B: Cosmic rays are particles, they’re not rays…it’s a funny misnomer. But they’re particles. Alpha particles and protons that come from outside of our solar system and they’re very energetic and can be nasty.

J: Yeah, high energy particles that are mostly protons; and they come from outside the solar system and they exist pretty much everywhere in the universe. So Sarah and her team believe that up to six percent of the moon’s simpler molecules, found in the polar ice, could be converted into organic compounds over a billion years of being hit by cosmic rays. And to put that time scale into perspective, that is approximately one quarter of the moo’s age. And the funny thing is that cosmic rays also break down complex molecules. So once these organic molecules are finally created, they could be damaged by the same rays.

S: mhmm

J: So the first thing to think about, in my opinion, is if this is happening...if cosmic rays are hitting inorganic molecules and creating organic molecules, then this is happing possibly anywhere that there’s ice or water in the entire universe. That was a little…that puts a different twist on the idea of billions and billions. You know what I mean? Like, wow! That blew my mind.

S: Yeah but ya know, I think it’s pretty well established that organic molecules are pretty common out there in space.

J: Well the thing is, Steve, have we really observed or have any information on things that are outside our solar system?

S: Outside the solar system, not that I know of, no.

J: Right, but that’s the point though.

S: Yeah
J: So now if by observing this stuff on the moon we can…I’m not saying we’re certain or anything, it’s still something to think about. That’s a pretty profound thought.

S: Yeah. I mean although there is a general principle of, that we’re not unique. Ya know that whatever we see here is probably typical of the rest of the universe

J: So pretty much all over the universe, like movies are really just eye candy now with not much real content? That’s happening everywhere now?

S: Is that a question?

E: *laughs* a rhetorical one

R: Steve, have you ever given a patient a hug?

B: *laughs

S: Why do you ask?

J: I want to hear the answer to that question.

E: Like an inappropriate hug?

R: Cuz my doctor today gave me a hug, and it was fine at the moment. Then when he left the room, I was like that was weird! Why did he give me a hug?

B: How well do ya know him?

R: Uh this is like my third of fourth visit.

J: Rebecca, maybe he surmised that you’re gonna die and he felt bad.

R: Yeah that’s, he wasn’t giving me bad news or anything. It was just like a physical, and then

B: And then he got physical

E: Very physical

J: Have you ever hugged a patient?

S: I have never initiated a hug; but if patients initiate a hug with me I allow it.

R: And it’s always like when you’ve just told them something horrible right?

S: No no! I just…ya know I just have some like older female patients that are very huggy

R: Oook

S: and feel

E: cultural

S: they feel comfortable doing that.

R: He’s an older man who looks like Richard Dreyfuss and sounds like Richard Dreyfuss.

S: Interesting. Doctors have different personalities with their patients. But there are lines that we try to be cognizant of.

R: Yeah

=== Astrology Belief (15:14) ===
* http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/public-opinion-astrology-dumb
S: Um Alright, Evan, you’re gonna tell us about public opinion regarding an oldie, but a goodie…astrology.

E: Oh boy, oh boy. Yeah Chris Mooney, author, long-time friend of the SGU and the New England Skeptical Society; he wrote an article at motherjones.com the other day. A very revealing piece in which he showcases the latest analysis of how well Americans understand science. Or, rather, how terribly Americans misunderstand science. Chris reports that, according to a new survey by the national science foundation, nearly half of all Americans say astrology – which is the study of celestial bodies’ reported influence on human behavior, worldly events and other human centered notions – astrology is either very scientific or sort of scientific. Nearly half of Americans.

S: Mhmm

R: Wow

E: And this was part of a larger comprehensive analysis contained within the 2014 science and engineering indicator study; which has revealed that American attitudes about science are moving in the wrong direction. Skepticism of astrology had hit an all-time high in 2004, when sixty-six percent of Americans believed that astrology was total nonsense. But since then, each year fewer and fewer respondents have dismissed connections between star alignment and personality as bunk.

S: So basically you’re saying right when the SGU started, it was all downhill from there.

E: I hate to have to say that, but that’s correlation and causation, by the way folks.

S: Yeah

E: We can actually not ascribe anything really meaningful to that. But you’re right, Steve, that is an interesting little tidbit. But here’s how it went, they first took this poll in 1979. And at the point fifty percent of Americans were skeptical of astrology as a science, fifty percent were skeptical. And then the skepticism, it crept up it rose and kept rising until 2004 sixty-six percent had skepticism of astrology. But since then, 2012 were the latest numbers, and it’s dropped down to fifty-five percent skepticism, which is the lowest number since 1983. And young people are especially inclined to offer astrology scientific legitimacy. A majority of Americans aged 18 to 24 considering the practice at least sort of scientific. And the 25 to 34 age group was not far behind them. This is extremely disconcerting

S: Mhmm

E: Um remember when Carl Sagan famously wrote in his book, The Demon Haunted World, he wrote that if pseudoscience is embraced it might be argued in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. I don’t think there’s ever been a more succinct way of putting it. And what he’s basically saying is the understanding of science is in decline; as result, the embrace of pseudoscience is on the rise.

S: Yeah actually the data shows that there’s not a linear relationship, there’s more of a curve there that actually…People who know a little bit of, as you know more and more science you get more interested in pseudoscience and the paranormal. And it’s only as you start to get to the higher levels of science education that it starts to drop off. Isn’t that interesting?

E: That is very interesting.

S: So I think it makes people more curious and open minded and they start to think about interesting things. But you got to get to a pretty high level of science understanding, or you need critical thinking skills. And that, I think it hasn’t really been tracked separately with that same data. But before you can start to deconstruct and understand why the pseudoscience is more pseudoscientific. But there is separate data, just looking at the ability to think critically; and that definitely correlates with rejection of pseudoscience.

E: Right. Very unfortunate. Um

S: Yeah

E: What can we do? What aren’t we doing?

S: Let’s start a podcast.

E: Yeah, let’s do that. What can our society…and we’re talking about Americans. And they did do some research with other places in the world. And surprisingly a place like China, they’re acceptance of astrology as science is low, very low. Only about ten percent in China compared to the numbers over here. Again it’s called the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicator Study. A lot of good information and data collected there from lots of different sources; not only the National Science Foundation but others. And they kind of put it all together there for you in one nice package. So we’ll recommend that folks go there and check it out for themselves.

S: Yeah so we still got a lot of work to do.

E: A lot.

=== New Burgess Shale Find (19:53) ===
* http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/new-burgess-shale-find/
S: Hey well let’s move to a really cool science news item. Uh have you guys ever heard of the Burgess Shale?

B: Yes

R: Yeah

E: Uh, yes

R: He was in a Twilight Zone episode with (?)

B,S,E: *laugh

S: Uh Charles Walcott discovered what is now called the Walcott Quarry about a hundred years ago; right after the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. And this is a uh excellent bed of soft-bodied fossils from the Cambrian Explosion, from the Cambrian era. 570 to 530 million years ago, this was soon after the first proliferation of multicellular plants and animals. Tons of really weird and bizarre species, you know, were pulled out of the Burgess Shale. If you’re interested in this, I think probably still probably the best book that describes the Burgess Shale is Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend it. Well, recently scientists reported that a discovery of another find – the Kootenay National Park find. It’s in the Burgess Shale, it’s only forty kilometers Southeast of Walcott Quarry; so it’s in the general geographic area. And this is a fossil bed from slightly later in the Cambrian than the Walcott Quarry; so creatures are a little bit more developed. And the early reports are that it could be an even bigger fossil find than the original Walcott Quarry. I mean they’re pulling tons of specimens out of this. And the shale is like these plates; so when you find the fossils you pull the plates apart so you have basically two images of the fossil. You have the negative and the positive image of the fossil. Because of the way the fossils were preserved, it preserves the soft parts. So it’s not just the bones, cuz they’re because early multicellular life didn’t have a lot of hard parts to fossilize. That’s why you need to have these optimal conditions.

E: So when you can see the soft parts you can actually get a sense of what the creature really looked like from the outside.

S: Yeah

B: What kind of preservation are we talking about? These soft parts, what are we talking about here?

S: Well essentially you can reconstruct three dimensional images of these specimens from the two plates ya know. Ya know you may have to get multiple specimens, they do get flattened out. So you have to kind of infer their three dimensional structure. So it takes a lot of work to really reconstruct these fossils, but you can do it. So far they have yielded three thousand and fifty-three specimens, representing at least fifty-two taxa. Of these, half of are known from the Walcott Quarry.

B: And fifteen of them are new right?

S: Yeah, totally new.

R: Wow

B: Amazing

S: And they’re learning new details about previously known species from the Walcott Quarry. So this find, it’s something we’re going to be hearing about for decades I would think.

B: Oh, sure

=== Boeing Anti-Gravity (23:06) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Bob, you’re gonna tell us about another interesting item. This one, I think this is probably more towards the pseudoscience end of the spectrum. You let us know what you think.

B: Oh yeah!

S: Apparently Boeing has been researching antigravity.

B: Yeah…

J: What?!

B: Jay I mean, how extraordinary is that? If that’s even true. Didn’t NASA, I mean how many government agencies have done like ESP and stuff like that? There are no bastion of skeptics in these corporations and in the government. I wasn’t terribly surprised. So basically, a prominent aero researcher named Nick Cook claimed Boeing is working on antigravity projects. He claims that Boeing is kind of trying to get in on some Russian research that has claimed to produce a gravity-like energy beam that can produce, get this, a force of about a thousand Gs on an object, vaporizing it. That’s pretty heavy stuff, this is I think what you can safely call a game changer, if it’s true. Not only for the military offense and defense but for physics itself. I mean is it any surprise though that my skeptical and physics alarm bells are totally going off on this one. So I wanted to take a look at just some of the players behind this. Nick Cook has an interesting resume; he’s a British aerospace researcher and writer, he’s considered an expert on military black projects, and he’s also the current aerospace consultant and was for fourteen years the aviation editor for Janes Defence Weekly. Have you guys heard of that?

E: Oh absolutely, it’s considered like one of the standards of aeronautics.

B: Well it’s an important, it’s an international defense journal. Which basically covers and analyzes military defense activity around the world. If you want to know what’s going on around the world in those realms, this is one of the most prominent journals to look through. Now Nick of course has some red flags in his resume. He’s been on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast a number of times – DING DING DING!

R: Who hasn’t?

B: Yeah, well

E: Phil Plait’s been on there.

B: But not everyone is espousing their beliefs in zero point and ant gravitation devices, among other things. Regarding the zero point energy, he says that it has a potential and limitless power source that pervades all of science. And, I quote, he says it’s rooted in science. Now we’ve covered that before, on zero point energy. But um, there’s another good quote from him, “some theories say if you spin the zero point energy field that exists all around you, some weird and magical things start popping out, one of which is an ant gravitational effect.” So okay, whatever. He admits though that he’s not a scientist, very good’; but he has enlisted some help. So who do you think he asked for some help? None other than Dr. Hal Puthoff. Puthoff was an, he helped pioneer this whole dubious zero point energy field idea in the first place. And he’s also famous for endorsing Uri Geller, enough said about that. And he also, he had to, get this one, he headed the CIA’s remote viewing program and he actually claimed to send his own mind into the surface of the planet Mercury. So you know if I want a scientist to back up my revolutionary claims, I’ll just say that I would not pick Dr. Hal Puthoff okay. So according to Cook, Boeing has not only confessed to researching antigravity, but claimed… I really I couldn’t corroborate that at all. I found denial from Boeing, but that was from 2002. I couldn’t find anything recent; so I can’t find anything saying that they’ve actually been looking into it. And even if they were, so what? Does that mean that it’s a real science? He also claims that they have a project. He actually has the name of a project that they’re working on called Grasp, Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion. And the aim of the project, apparently, is three holed. They want to enter a collaborative relationship with their Russian scientist who’s behind this new revolutionary device that can project a thousand Gs of energy towards anything. His name is Dr. Eugene Podkletnov. They want to determine the validity of his work; and finally they wanted to examine the uses for such a technology. Clearly, there’d be amazing uses for it; but the thing is, how feasible is it and what’s the evidence like? So, now I looked into Eugene and he’s got some red flags as well, of course. He’s a material scientist, he’s not a physicist like I assumed. He was about to publish his research… I looked into his early years and he was about to publish his research on gravity negation way back in ’96 and scientists criticized his conclusion; and then he withdrew his article. And then somehow this was followed by the University evicting him. Then he disappeared for a while, he went off the grid for a while. So for me, you know if you’re unable to handle criticism, that’s classic pseudoscientist right there. I mean that’s what…that’s an integral part of science. If you can’t handle it then um…that’s just a major red flag I think that you are an actual pseudoscientist. Clearly this guy is bright, but you know how that goes. Just because you’re a smart guy doesn’t mean you’re not gonna get swayed by woo. Also, I’ve been reading about some of the problems with his published research. Typical things I’m hearing are that he doesn’t give out enough information so that you can actually replicate any of his experiments. People mentioned anomalies that seemed to have never been described or analyzed so. Those are red flags as well. And then I tried to look into the, what’s the science have to say about shielding gravity or even gravity weapons? It doesn’t look good. You know you typically can’t say it’s impossible, but it doesn’t look good for some of this. I got some good quotes, George Smoot (he’s a professor of physics at UC Berkley) he said, “If gravity shielding is going to be consistent with Einstein’s general theory, you would need tremendous amounts of mass and energy. It’s far beyond the technology we have today.” Yeah, that kind of makes sense. You wanna mess with gravity, you need a lot of mass to generate it. But then Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine, he said “There’s nothing impossible about gravity shielding, it just requires a field theory that we don’t have yet.” That’s all, a new field theory. That alone would garner this guy a Nobel Prize, that would be an amazing thing. But just saying this guy that all he needs is a new field theory, I mean that seems like quite a bit. So also there’s another final point I wanted to make about this, I think – it just seems reasonable- that if he had a working device, that he demonstrated, that was dramatic as what they’re saying… I just think that the Russian government would clamp down on this guy and not let him out of their sight. I mean that’s an amazing development and I think it’d be obvious that they would pour billions of dollars into anything like that. Especially, if this guy has got a working device. The benefits are just not to be believed, you have amazing weapons that would literally put Russia’s military in a league all its own, if they had things like this. They’d have gravity shielding to protect them missile and light saber attacks and all sorts of things. Flying cars with no conventional food and space ships that literally seem to pop right out of science fiction movies. I mean it’s almost unending what they would have. And they would take quite seriously if he was actually able to demonstrate it. So I was reading Wired article about him and the guy’s looking for funding you know; and that just totally reminds me of the free energy and perpetual motion devices that we have seen in the past

S: Yeah

B: The only thing perpetual about them is the need for your money and just a little bit more time. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. The fact that Boeing, if they didn’t even research it, whatever. I mean companies like that do all sorts of whacky stuff trying to make a revolutionary leap in just one bound. And hey, you know, it’s not impossible, that would be an amazing thing. But I wouldn’t be sinking lots of money into this. Not unless I actually saw his device.

S: I think that’s a very common feature of technological pseudoscience is that it’s like five to ten steps ahead of where we are ya know. And it’s where companies might get in trouble. They’re always looking for the next thing right, the next technological breakthrough; because they want to invest in it and be and own it. But I guess you need some science background to know when that breakthrough is the next iterative step in our development of technology versus someone claiming to have let decades of research ahead of where we are. To the point where you can’t of course predict

B: Right

S: What’s gonna happen. And, with no paper trail to show for it, you know.

=== Photo Lineups (31:56) ===
* http://gizadeathstar.com/2014/01/fringe-science-boeing-admits-anti-gravity-work/
S: Alright one last news item. Uh Rebecca, you’re gonna tell us about the science of photo lineups.

R: Sure. Or the lack of science about photo lineups. Steve sent me a very interesting article that talks about the fact that more and more United States police departments are using a new method of doing photo lineups; something called double-blind sequential lineups. Or instead of lineups sometimes they say arrays, because that’s a bit more specific. To have crime witnesses identify perpetrators. So most people probably know the traditional lineups that you see in films and the usual suspects where a witness looks over a group of people all at once to see which one is the criminal, while there’s a police lieutenant or someone looking on. Or maybe you’ve seen a Law & Order episode where a witness is looking over a bunch of photos while the detective looks over the shoulder; it’s ya know same idea. But there are a lot of problems with that method. There are decades of research that show that when witnesses are presented with a group of people, they won’t necessarily pick out the perpetrator, they’ll just pick out the person they think looks most like the perpetrator. Which is obviously a huge problem. That can lead to false convictions, false arrests, and false convictions. There’s also the problem of having a police officer standing nearby who knows who the quote un quote correct suspect is. Uh the article Steve sent me, I thought kind of naively stated that uh police officers can unconsciously influence witnesses. But of course they can and have, in the past, very consciously influenced witnesses, as well as unconsciously influencing witnesses to get what they need to make an arrest. So with this new method, or at least newer than that method, the lineup is overseen by an officer who has no idea who the actual suspect is – which is what makes it blinded. And instead of the witness seeing all of the suspects, or all of the photos of the suspects at once, they view each one individually so that they can compare that person to their actual memory and decide if it matches up. As opposed to comparing all of the suspects to one another. Despite the preponderance of research suggesting that this method is superior, most police departments actually, in the United States at least, still go by the old method. Some of that might be due to you know just general slow changing just you know, sometimes making a change like that can be difficult for something that’s imbedded in their procedures. Some of the inability to change is due to the fact that the research also shows that not only does sequential presentation of the suspects lead to fewer incorrect identifications, but it also leads to fewer identifications overall. Just to be clear, the reduction in incorrect identifications is much greater than the reduction in all identifications. But, unfortunately there are many police departments that are happy to accept a certain number of false identifications if it means more identifications overall, which is kind of depressing. And the other depressing news is that even if the majority of departments started using the scientifically proven to be better method of showing a sequential array, there are still a host of systemic problems regarding witness uh eyewitness identification in police work. Eyewitness misidentification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. It accounts for about seventy-five percent of overturned convictions according to the Innocence Project, which is a great nonprofit that focuses on providing resources and representation to people who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes. So, how a lineup is conducted is just one of what they call system variables that can impact uh accuracy of identifications. Other system variables include who is chosen by the police to participate in the lineup and what instructions are given to the witness before they make an identification, and what they witness is told after an identification. And then in addition to system variables, there are what’s known as estimator variables, which are uncontrollable circumstances that can hamper an identification. Like maybe the crime took place at night, or far away from the witness, or maybe the criminal is a different race than the witness – which studies show make a witness less able to distinguish certain characteristics and less likely to be able to choose the correct suspects. Or maybe the witness, at the time of the crime, was under a great deal of stress, which happens quite often and can negatively influence whether or not they can correctly identify the perpetrator. So fixing the lineup issue isn’t going to account for any of that. So even if police departments do start paying attention to the science on lineups, our court systems need to do a better job of paying attention to the science that tells us eyewitness identifications are extremely unreliable, and in many cases we have to use other methods like DNA testing in order to make a case for criminal convictions.
S: Yeah I mean there’s actually a pretty broad literature on eyewitness identification. And you’re right Rebecca, pretty much all the variables that you think would influence people’s choice do influence it. At the very least, you have to have a rigorous, almost pristine process. No bias instructions, nobody present who knows what the quote un quote correct answer is, no forced choices and no post identification feedback.

R: Yeah

S: That all effects their confidence. There’s also… did you come across the term choice blindness in your reading about this?

R: I think so

S: Yeah so people don’t even know why they make the choices that they do and don’t even remember the choices they made when like they’re asked to reproduce them.

E: Wow

S: They basically, we know this from all the psychological experiments and other contexts, but people can be manipulated in pretty much every way you can think of, and these all apply. And the bottom line is yeah these kind of eyewitness testimonies is the weakest form of evidence.

R: Yeah

S: It’s the most biased, easily manipulated etcetera etcetera, and yet juries emotionally tend to invest the most weight on eyewitness testimony.

R: Right. And it’s not to say that eyewitness testimony doesn’t have a place in trials and in the investigation, it’s just that you’re right, we need to… There are so many factors that we can’t control. These so called estimator variables, that the very least we can do, the very least we should do, is absolutely everything we can to make the system variables in line with scientific accuracy. So yeah. And so instituting something like this as a law, for instance, making it against the law to do simultaneous lineups…you know that’s just one small step, but it is still probably an important step on the road towards cleaning up how we think about eyewitness testimonies and how we treat eyewitnesses in crimes. And hopefully that can lead to fewer false convictions.

S: Yeah it’s a minimum, at the minimum we should at least be having blinded examiners, you know.

R: yeah

S: Space and stuff like that, you’re right.

=== Quickie with Bob - Fusion Beats Unity (39:55) ===
* http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13008.html
S: Hey you know what we haven’t had in a while?

R: Uh, a quickie with Bob?

S: A quickie with Bob

R: Yeah it has been a while.

B: Well thank you Steve, I appreciate your offer. Um, this is your quickie with Bob. This is pretty cool guys. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have broken unity.

E: There’s a National Ignition Society?

B: Facility

E: Facility?

B: Where you been boy? So this internal confinement system focuses five hundred terawatt lasers, one hundred ninety-two of them, onto a pellet with the hopes of heating and compressing to such a degree that they achieve ignition creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction to power our ya know Delorean time machines of course. Um, well maybe that was cold fusion. But still, this is a major milestone guys. For the first time ever they’ve created more energy from the fuel than actually did the fuel. I worded that very carefully, that’s a key distinction. Because, the lasers actually produced a hundred times the amount than the fuel actually used. But still, I mean fusion actually happened. Some of the alpha particles that were created actually heated other parts of the fuel to create more alpha particles and so on and so on. The bootstrapping process, um it’s an order of magnitude more efficient than previously. So uh this is clearly, this is a process that’s working that’s creating more and more energy. Now the caveats, of course we got some caveats, this is not ignition. This achievement does not mean even that this process is the one that will get us to ignition. But still, um it’s the best fusion news that we’ve had in a really long time and uh I think this is really good news. It really shows that the money, you know the millions and billions of dollars that we’re investing in this, is really worth it. They are making some really good gains. For years now they, you know the news items are coming fairly quickly, and this uh this is the biggest one. I mean we actually, fusion actually happened. This hasn’t really happened in any facility like this ever. So uh, so that’s fantastic and hopefully the process that they’re working on now is the one that really gonna, that’s really gonna show us a way to achieve ignition.

S: What do ya think, five years? We’ll have ignition?

B: *laughs* yeah

S: Five to ten years.

B: Yeah so keep your eye on this one. Uh fusion is one of those huge technologies that it, once we have it ya know it would just be one of the inventions of history. This has been your quickie with Bob, and I hope it was good for you too. Discuss

S: Ya see this is the kind of paper trail that I was talking about. When you’re developing something as big as fusion, then there are these incremental advances. I mean the research is there, it’s happening. Ya know it’s not like somebody just says hey I created fusion, ya know.

E: Let’s have a press release

S: I leaped ahead twenty steps and thirty years of research all in fell swoop.

B: It’s not one lone scientist, I mean those days are long gone. Sure you could have ya know a breakthrough, a theoretical breakthrough, in lots of different areas by one person. But typically now, it’s teams and teams and countries. How many times have we had discussions of news items and it’s completely international? Two, three, four five different countries are all working together.

E: Makes sense.

S: It does

R: Did you notice that the uh researcher quoted on NPR was called Omar Hurricane?

B: Yes

R: So the researcher named Omar Hurricane used a giant laser to produce nuclear fusion. That is definitely a superman plot.

S: He’s a super villain!

R: Yeah

B,E: *Laugh

R: Right?

S: Absolutely

J: Is his last name Hiruken? From Street Fighter, is that what you’re saying?

B: *laughs

R: No, it’s actually hurricane

S: Hurricane

R: But that would also be great. Yeah

== Who's That Noisy (44:55) ==
* Answer to last week: Alan Shephard
S: Alright Evan, light us up with some Who’s That Noisy

E: Light it up, baby. Let’s play for you last week’s Who’s That Noisy. A very popular one, lots of correct answers; but here it is again. *Plays last week’s noisy* Helium atmosphere

S: Where was he, on Saturn or something?

E: Yeah where was he? Well why don’t I read you the e-mail we received from the person who was the winner this week. Uh Abigail Drum, she writes to us and says, “Hi there! The sound clip for Who’s That Noisy was taken from a phone call from the 1960’s between President Linden B Johnson and Scott Carpenter, a former astronaut. Carpenter had spent the last thirty days 200 feet underwater in the Navy’s SEALAB 2 project. However, at the time of the call, Carpenter was in a decompression chamber which has helium instead of nitrogen in the air, hence why Carpenter’s voice is so high it’s barely comprehensible. Interesting fact, Sea Lab 2 was apparently much nicer than the previous Sea Lab 1. It had hot showers, but it was also not completely flat on the sea floor. So they called it the Tiltin’ Hilton.

J: Evan, that makes me feel kind of like, isn’t that dangerous? Like there was enough helium in that guy, in the atmosphere in there, his voice sounded like that.

S: Well I’m sure that was enough oxygen too. There’s oxygen and helium instead of oxygen and nitrogen.

J: No, I know that, Steve. I just didn’t know that you could, I know that helium is inert, I just didn’t know that you could it could be mixed with oxygen like that and you could breathe it like an atmosphere.

S: Well now you do.

B: *laughs*

S: Yeah Jay there’s a whole field of helium diving; divers, deep divers who use helium oxygen mixtures instead of nitrogen oxygen mixtures and they really claim that it’s a lot better. Apparently you can breathe in helium for months without there being any tissue damage, and there’s much lesser a risk of narcosis then there is from nitrogen. So yeah, it’s perfectly safe to breathe helium oxygen mixtures.

E: Now Scott, a little bit about Scott Carpenter right? One of the original seven, bright stuff from NASA’s project Mercury. He was the second American after John Glenn to orbit the Earth, and the fourth American in space following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn. And he died on October 10th 2013. So only recently departed the Earth. So, very sad but lots of correct answers. A lot of people, very happy to have that one correctly recognized. But congratulations, Abby, you were chosen this week as this week’s winner.

S: Thanks Evan. And what have you got for this week?

E: For this week I got something that I think Bob will enjoy.

B: Ooo

E: Here we go, brand new Who’s That Noisy. *plays noisy* Could you hear that scratching kind of sound?

R: Mhmm, that was Skrillex, the early years.

B,E: *laughs

B: Nice

E: Uh this one is well, like I said, a little hint – Bob would find this one fascinating. Do what they did last week with the Scott Carpenter clip and send us it via e-mail wtn@theskepticsguide.org or several answers were posted to our forums sgu.com, feel free to post there as well. And as I always say, and I mean it from the bottom of Jay’s heart, good luck everyone.

S: You can also send that to ttfn@theskepticsguide.org that would work also

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Question #1: Net Neutrality (48:43) ===
<blockquote>Follow up discussion on net neutrality</blockquote>
S: Got a couple of e-mails this week. Uh we had a lot of feedback about our net neutrality discussion from the special episode that we had that came out early this week on Monday. So, big caveat, this was a live show, meaning that we were taking questions live without prep. We got asked about net neutrality and we talked about it off the cuff without really being able to investigate the details. Which, I allowed because I figured we’d come back and actually do a more meaty discussion of it on the next episode; so that’s what I want to do. We’re not gonna ready any one specific email, because there was a ton of people who gave us feedback about it. So I wanted to do a follow up to go into a little bit more detail. The issue is the recent decision by a circuit appeals court, I think in the district of Washington DC.

E: Mhmm, yes

S: That ruled that the FCC’s regulation of establishing what is called net neutrality were not legitimate, that the FCC can’t do that. So there was lots of speculation about why they made that decision, what the implications of that decisions is. In short, what net neutrality is, is the notion that service providers cannot discriminate different kinds of traffic on the networks. They can’t give premium bandwidth or throughput to people who pay for their premium access and throttle back throughput for everybody else or give preference to their own services or even keep competitors from providing competing services on their own networks. Proponents of net neutrality say that ya know the internet is a vital resource and we need to protect it and it’s a level playing field for everybody and that if you give a service providers the ability to discriminate against different websites, different content originators etcetera, that they will exploit this to ya know make the internet experience much worse and charge a lot more money for stuff basically. Opponents of net neutrality say, essentially the free market should sort itself out and the government doesn’t need to impose these artificial rules inhibiting the free market. So that’s the debate. But I read a lot of dissections of this recent decision and they all basically are saying the same thing. But actually the best summary was by one of our forum members who goes by Vince Gamer, and this is how they broke it down, they wrote this is now quoting from him “FCC, under Bush, said essentially the internet is not a common carrier regulated under Section 2, but is an information service regulated under the much more lenient Section 1. The FCC under Obama, this is a 2010 rule now, said that we can impose a net neutrality regime on the internet. Verizon sued the FCC, saying that you can’t do that because you don’t have the authority to regulate the internet at all. The court ruling essentially said the FCC absolutely does have the authority to regulate the internet. If they decide to call it a common carrier, under Section 2 they can do what they did. But since they called it an information service, they went beyond Section 1 authority.” Does that make sense? So the court decision actually said the FCC does have the authority to regulate the internet. But the FCC has said that the internet is not a common carrier, but is an information service. And therefor under the FCC’s own rules they can’t impose net neutrality. The court’s basically saying yes you have the authority, FCC, to regulate the internet but you’re trying to have it both ways and you can’t do that, you gotta choose one or the other. Either it’s a common carrier or you can’t impose these net neutrality rules. So the FCC hasn’t decided yet, I think it’s going to appeal. Some people speculate it may go all the way to the Supreme Court, of course this whole thing could be rendered moot if congress just passes a law clarifying everything, they could basically do whatever they want in this respect. There aren’t really any constitutional issues here, this is all just what does the FCC, what authority does congress give the FCC in terms of regulating the internet? If congress clarifies that then there’s no legal issue.

E: So are we saying the FCC can’t change the determination, it has to come through congress? The FCC’s not allowed to go ahead and redefine it?

S: Agencies can’t decide what power they have, they are given power by congress. Like the FDA, you know the Food and Drug Administration, they can’t decide what authority they have to do stuff; all they could do is act with the authority that congress gives them. Uh the FCC is the same thing, congress gives them authority to regulate you know it’s the Federal Communications Commission so they regulate communication services in the country. So they’re you know the law gives them certain powers so it’s only a matter of interpreting that law, does that law five the authority to the FCC to do what the FCC is now doing. That’s what the judges were deciding, not whether or not net neutrality is a good idea. The judges were not deciding on the bigger issue of net neutrality it was just does the law give the FCC this authority. And so since this is granted by congress, congress can clarify or change or do whatever they want to give the FCC greater or less regulatory power to clarify this. Of course the bigger discussion is again between is net neutrality a good idea or not and it’s actually an interesting idea. A lot it comes from predicting what will happen you know, sort of predicting the future. Opponents say that if you free up ISPs, internet service providers, they could make more interesting and varied packages or deals with their consumers; they can provide new and innovative services to their customers.

J: I think that’s complete b.s.

S: Now the proponents of net neutrality, like Jay apparently, believe that they’re just going to exploit it to wreck the internet basically.

E: Of course

R: I agree with Jay.

E: I’m not convinced

J: Guys most of these corporations don’t sit around and go what’s a great product that we can offer people and how can we make as much money as possible

E: yeah but they still need a market Jay

S: They can do both

E: It’s not black or white

J: I’m all for net neutrality, I don’t want the ISP to have any say in what I do online whatsoever. They can’t slice and dice up services or anything. Just give me my bandwidth and go away.

S: My fear, without net neutrality, is that big companies are going to get into these complicated arrangements where iTunes/Apple will make a deal with Verizon to give preference to downloads from iTunes over competitors. You know, that sort of thing.

E: Lock out the little guy?

S: Yeah so it will basically make it impossible for little guys to compete on the internet because they won’t have the money and the power to get the premium special deals. A lot of people, a lot of internet commentators are writing that essentially this will result in there being two internets – the fast lane for the big players that can pay premium prices and the slow lane for everybody else. And that’s what proponents of net neutrality fear the most. But again, it’s always hard to say with these regulations what might happen in the future, because everybody can sort of project their own biases into the future. I do personally find the net neutrality arguments more persuasive; I do recognize it’s actually a complicated area.

=== Question #2: Placebo Medicine () ===
<blockquote>This is a question perhaps specifically focused at Steve, but I would be interested in hearing everyone else's opinions as well. I am a fourth year medical student about to graduate and enter an internal medicine primary care program with the goal of becoming a future primary care doctor. As such, I will be many patients' first and/or only contact with the health system. I know that I will encounter a lot of pseudoscience in this role, and I already have seen my fair share during my clinical rotations thus far. I am unsure of how to stay true to my skeptical nature while still supporting my patients therapeutically. For example, I recently had a patient with failed back surgery syndrome – essentially, lower back pain status post surgery, now with worse pain dependent on opioids to treat. It's a bad situation – the pain is keeping him out of work, opioids are causing problems of their own (and are ineffectual and inappropriate for chronic pain), and he has exhausted the limits of our medical knowledge – he is on NSAIDs, has done physical therapy, has has had all the imaging and even the surgery without relief. So he comes in and tells me he recently started acupuncture and 'it's working wonders'. I have seen this similar story frequently – patients with fibromyalgia or arthritis, or itching, finding relief from acupuncture, or herbal medications, or homeopathy. Frankly, these particular cases have minimal 'harm' – even though alt med can have harm on a large scale when patients avoid conventional medical treatment or engage in dangerous practices, in these particular cases the patients have tried everything medicine has to offer and are still following up with their physicians. While I feel strongly that it is unethical to prescribe a placebo and would not thus go out of my way to recommend non-proven alternative medicine, if a patient takes a placebo on their own and finds relief, it would only be harmful to their health (both mental and physical) and the therapeutic doctor-patient relationship to disabuse them of the notion that the alt med is helping them. A few things could happen if I did: they stop the therapy and are in worse pain taking meds with more side effects, or they don't stop the therapy but stop seeing me because they don't trust my opinion anymore since the therapy has worked and I don't believe it. So when a patient comes to me, being helped by alternative medicine, and asks what I think, I nod and smile and say 'some patients do report relief from that'. Is that wrong? Should I be more firm to my skeptical roots? What if they ask for my opinion before starting the alternative medicine? It may legitimately be helpful through a placebo effect (which would only be minimized by my telling them the truth), they would be taking it under physician supervision, and honestly, there are a lot of medications that we DO prescribe with actual serious side effects that, on balance, are likely only minimally superior to placebo (SSRIs being a good example). These patients are taking alt med for pain or depression or other more subjective complaints, not for cancer or heart disease or something that could kill them without proper therapy. As you can see, I'm ethically conflicted, sorry for the rather rambling question. I could really use your advice!PS – all the usual: love the show, been listening for years, huge fan :)JaimePhiladelphia</blockquote>

== Science or Fiction () ==
[http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2014/02/americas-only-clovis-skeleton-had-its-genome-mapped/ Item #1]: Scientists report the results of the first mapping of a genome of a Clovis skeleton, finding that 80% of present-day Native American populations are direct descendants.
[http://www.herpetologynotes.seh-herpetology.org/Volume7_PDFs/Dinets_HerpetologyNotes_volume7_pages3-7.pdf Item #2]: A new study finds that crocodiles are able to climb trees, some even vertically.
[http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/10/australian-astronomers-discover-oldest-known-star-in-universe Item #3]: Australian astronomers have discovered the oldest known star, which they date to 14.5 billion years old, 800 million years older than the age of universe.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>“The inclination to sink into the slumber of dogma is so natural to every generation that the most uncompromising critical intellect must without intermission stand upon the watch against it.” - Otto Pfleiderer, 1902</blockquote>

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-11T23:32:05Z

Lmwood: /* Who's That Noisy (44:55) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-08T03:31:52Z

Lmwood: /* Quickie with Bob - Fusion Beats Unity (39:55) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-07T05:12:28Z

Lmwood: /* Photo Lineups (31:56) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-06T05:49:50Z

Lmwood: /* Boeing Anti-Gravity (23:06) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-03T04:58:11Z

Lmwood: /* New Burgess Shale Find (19:53) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-03T03:37:32Z

Lmwood: /* Astrology Belief (15:14) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-03-03T02:54:48Z

Lmwood: /* Organic Molecules on the Moon (10:15) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-02-28T05:30:35Z

Lmwood: /* This Day in Skepticism (03:20) */

SGU Episode 449

2014-02-27T03:47:10Z

Lmwood: /* Introduction */

SGU Episode 415

2014-02-17T01:41:53Z

Lmwood: /* Announcements (1:17:30) */

{{Editing required
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{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 415
|episodeDate = 29th Jun 2013
|episodeIcon = File:Biosphere_2.jpg
|rebecca = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2013-06-29.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=46463.0
|qowText = Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth.
|qowAuthor = Robert Royar
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is June 29th 2013 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening everyone

R: Where the hell is Bob?

S: Bob, once again, is too busy to join us. Bob has a major thing happening at work

E: uh huh

S: that does keep him away.

== This Day in Skepticism (0:35) ==
June 29: Happy birthday to Dr. Roy Wolford, calorie restriction pioneer and Biosphere 2 inhabitant
R: Hey, happy birthday to Roy Wolford, Dr. Wolford.

E: Awesome! Is he a listener?

R: Well, uh no, he died in 2004. He was born June, 29 1924 and Dr. Roy Wolford is probably best known for being one of the inhabitants of Biosphere 2.

E: I love that movie

R: He was also though a pioneer of calory restriction as used for longevity. He wrote a book about living to 120. It was not, uh...

E: A life of perpetual hunger, that's what the title of the book was called.

J: Imagine what Perry would have said about that.

R: I think Perry would have said that he would gladly die at 20 than live on a restricted calorie diet.

J: Choking on a hamburger right?

R: Right

E: hahaha

R: Yeah, uh, Wolford lived on something like 1600 calories a day

E: Alright

S: It's not that bad.

R: Which is realy not that bad

J: That's not bad

R: That's slightly more than what I take in when I'm trying to cut back on my fats.

S: That's a weight loss diet, 1600 calories a day is a pretty reasonable weight loss plan

R: He died at the age of 79 uh, from comoplications from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease.

E: That's not, that's got nothing to do with his lifestyle

R: It's not, yeah it's not a fair, it's not really a fair judgement wether or not his calorie restriction were the... Although he claimed at the end of his life his calorie restriction helped extend his life further by a couple of years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's.

J: Unprovable

R: Yeah

E: That's a nice antecdote.

S: Honestly, ya know, again this is all antecdotal I have no idea about the individual case but, that's unlikely to be true.

R: Yeah

S: Calorie restriction actually hastens death in ALS. It often, the ability to get enough calories in and keep your calories up is a huge pragnostic factor in ALS. So if anything, ya know, ya can't, it's very hard to argue that calorie restriction prolonged his life once he developed ALS.

R. But yeah, he also thought that his ALS was possibly caused by his time in the Biosphere due to lack of oxygen and increased nitrous oxide. Exactly what causes ALS is not entirely settled and so he suspected that that might have had something to do with it.

S: That's wild speculation.

E: Nitrous Oxides builds up in these Biodomes? I didn't know that.

J: Well they were having trouble in there right?

R: They had a lot of trouble. Although, they did stay in there for two years. But, one of the problems they had was a severe lack of food and so it was helpful that their resident doctor happened to be this guy who believed in calorie restriction. So he convinced them all to go on this diet. Ya know, to join him in his diet.

S: Yeah since we have no food anyway.

R: Right. And so they did, but even so at some point many months in they finally broke down and opened up a container of food that was grown outside of the Biosphere in order to supplement their diets.

J: That would have made an awesome YouTube video

E: Watching the moment of breaking that chest open

S: So they just didn't...Did something go wrong with their food production or they didn't plan properly?

J: If you couldn't grow enough food in the Biodome, and ya know, it was never done before. They didn't have the data going in to it, it was all just engineered and it failed. Biodome experiments didn't last as long as they hoped

S: It wasn't self sustaining.

J: No

R: Yeah by all their models I guess it seemed like it could be done but one thing after another went wrong.

S: Now imagined if that happened on Mars.

R: Well that's why they do this stuff. Although I'm sad that they're not, they haven't continued trying that sort of thing. I would love to see that project continue.

S: Yeah

R: I don't know the details of why nobody has tried Biosphere 3

J: Ya know what I noticed?

E: Pauly Shore

J: I noticed, looking at pictures of Biodome, first its interesting if you look at it today, a weed infested back yard. I also noticed it looks a lot like Logan's Run, that's 1970s movie of the people that get put into a Biodome like thing because that was like a last ditch effort to sav humanity and people were in there so long that they forgot what happened. That was Biodome man. Ya ever see, like it looks like it.

S: Well, it was a lot bigger

R: There was apparently a Biosphere 3, maybe still is in Syberia and there's a Biosphere J in Japan. But one other thing, despite the potential pseudoscience with origins of disease and wether or not calorie restriction can actually work in humans to extend life, Walford seemed like a really awesome guy. At one point he would like take off for a time as part of his studies and measure the rectal temperatures of holy men in India.

E: uh huh

R: He traveresed the African continent on foot, according to his obituary in the New York Times. So he specifically wanted to go out and just have adventures. He said, " If you spend all your time in the laboratories, as most scientists do, you might spend 35 years in the lab and be very successful and win a Nobel Prize. But those 35 years will be just a blur. So I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities." He once broke his leg on a motorcycle.

E: That qualifies as dangerous.
R: Yeah he just seems like he was a fun guy.

== News Items ==
=== Podcasting Patent (06:42)===
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-05/company-sues-tech-giants-claiming-podcast-patent-breach/4735786
S: Alright well Jay, tell us why we're gonna be shut down. We can't do podcasting anymore.

R: Nooooo

E: We're done? This is it?

J: I'm not convinced that we're gonna get shut down as a podcast, but this story has to do with patent trolling. Patent trolling is the business du jour. And if you haven't heard about it, those of you who haven't, it's a pretty simple and amazingly lucrative idea. Here's how it works: Patent trolls, also known as non-practicing entities, or NPEs, are typically companies that buy defunct businesses or ya know any kind of organization or even individual patents. And they buy these companies for their patents specifically, and then they used those acquired patents to sue other companies for patent infringement. It's pretty basic and it goes a long way and they've made a ton of money. These organizations make all or most of their income through the lawsuits. Most of them, like I said, they don't have anything else going on. They become a patent troll and they don't actually have a product or sell anything or do any other type of commerce. It's not 100% fast and true but a large majority of them are just companies that revolve around these lawsuits. And this scam, or whatever you wanna call it, has worked on some of the worlds' most biggest and lucrative companies. The US patent office is widely known to issue patents for ideas that are already in use and common place. And these are ideas like, say online shopping or shopping cart system or a file sharing system or an in app purchase, as an example. And many of these lawsuits are about things that should never have been patented in the first place. Like I think that a shopping cart system should have never been patented. You really can't say, hey you owe me money because you're using this workflow process to sell products online to online customers; to me that's insane. In 2011, patent trolls cost the United States, or companies inside the Unites States, a total of twenty-nine billion dollars; and, they have increased their activity 400% since 2005. And they are 62% of all patent lawsuits in the United States. It's a phenomenal portion of patent lawsuits and they're really growing leaps and bounds year for year. I guess, instead of these companies finding new uses for their patents and expanding on the technology they already own, they're focusing on these lawsuits. You know these companies are, in my opinion, they're pretty transparent because they use similar procedures to get to the point where they can start hitting up the big companies and one of the things that they do is that they'll find a week company or a financially poor company, with no regard of winning anything other than just the lawsuit from this company to set a legal precedent. And then they take that legal precedent, and they take it to a bigger company, and they'll tell the next court, "Hey, we already won a lawsuit about this." And now ya know instead of them ya know just trying to win a lawsuit and maybe stopping that company, they're gonna ask for fifty million dollars. And they guise it as a licensing fee. Oh we're just sueing for licensing fees here. We want them to pay us for the use of the patent, and we want them to go back to this year, or whatever, and now and we're not gonna sue them in the future because they're actually going to be paying us for this licensing fee. Companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Ebay, just to name a few, are starting to turn and face these patent trolls and go for it. Really really get down and dirty in court, and let the years go by and spend the millions and millions of dollars to fight them. But they're putting they're um they're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "No, we're not going to pay any of these blackmail fees. We're actually gonna fight you and try to get you to go out of business." Very recently, June 4th of 2013, the White House enacted five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations to restrict the activities of patent trolls. And this is a huge step forward in helping companies protect themselves and make it much much more difficult for patent trolls to actually win against US based companies. A patent troll named Prsonal Audio LLC has sued three podcasters and sent demand letters to a number of others. Now this is the case that Steve was talking about. Recently this company filed suit against CBS and NBC, and has also sent additional demand letters to small podcasting operations. So an organization called EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting against Personal Audio LLC, which is the company that's sueing these podcasters. And what EFF is trying to do is help to save podcasting. Now the first thing that they did was they asked for donations so they can raise the thirty thousand dollars to begin the lawsuit process. And what they're trying to do, is they're trying to prove that the patent that Personal Audio LLC owns is actually not a legitimate patent at all. And what the, the reason that they're trying to do this is it's the quickest and most direct route to stop the lawsuit. And they way that they're doing it is that they're asking for people to help them find proof that the idea of podcasting, either in part or similar ideas or even the entire idea, if it was ever stated, written down or communicated online. Any way that they can prove before October 2nd of 1996, then they can take that proof to the patent office, go to court and say, "Look it, ya know this idea predates their patent. It was ya know on a public forum and this whole thing is illegitimate." The worst case scenario here is if this company gets a foothold and starts sueing the bigger organizations, ya know some of these organizations that can afford will probably pay; but I'd imagine some of them won't because as most people know podcasting is not really a lucrative venture. For those people that are running a lucrative podcasting venture, like Adam Corrola as an example, he's one of the people being, his company is being sued. Ya know Adam Corrola does a pretty damn good job on his podcast

E: Yeah

J: He's making some decent money over there, I mean this could put him right off the air. Of course, being a podcaster and being just a huge fan of the podcasting world, I stand very firmly against what this company is trying to do. Now, I did read some things that troubled me. That made me think that there might be some legitimacy to this lawsuit because it is possible that the person, the engineer the software engineer, is claiming that he did make these engines and that he does deserve some compensation.

S: So what though? What did he invent? RSS, ya know the really simple syndication, they didn't do that, that's open source. What, MP3 files?

J: No, I I I'm not 100% sure, Steve. I tried to find it, I was all over the web searching for facts and I think it's vague and it's deliberately vague. I think it boils down to the idea that you're distributing serialized episodes of something over the web. That's what I read. That's it. I didn't get to more detail than that.

E: So he's um

S: Yeah, that's still simply b.s.

E: patenting the concept, right? Just the concept of podcasts.

J: Yeah. But let me let me give you a

E: Sounds Week

J: It does sound weak. And let me give you an example of something that I saw on Shark Tank as an example. I really like that show for a lot of reasons, it is entertaining. There is a pretty good amount of stuff to learn if you want to watch it and one of the sharks on the show, it... Real quick, what the show is people come in and pitch their business to rich people, business men and women, and they uh they're asking for money like they wanna they want to be funded. So uh Mark Cuban, who is my favorite person on the show is really, first off we've mentioned him on The Skeptics' Guide before, he's he's the only person I think is really a critical thinker on the show. And he he's fought against pseudoscience when it comes on that show. But one guy came on with a, it was like a vest, and he had a patent where if you had like your iPhone in an internal pocket it runs a wire up to like your neck and you have your ear buds there. And the guy patented basically running a wire through clothing; and Mark Cuban went ape shit on him. Just saying this is b.s. Like, you know it's guys like you that are you know destroying innovation and and growth and and you know companies developing new technologies because ya know you're holding this ridiculous patent. It stops other people from using a similar technology. You can't patent a wire going through clothing. It's absurd. And I think when I watched it, at first I didn't understand why he was getting so upset. I did get his idea, but I didn't understand everything that we just discussed. I have learned a lot since I watched that episode; and now I fully understand it. I completely agree with Mark Cuban. This is the type of thing that squelches innovation, puts companies out of business and ya know all that money is just being syphoned out of these companies that are developing technology. These patent trolling companies are not technology developers. All they're doing is, they're in the business just to make money, that's it. They don't. There's no good side to it. Somebody is just getting rich.

S: They're like just, they're parasites.

J: So if you if you are interested ya know take a look online. Uh look up the company, the name of that company again is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're fighting a lot of other technology and digital based threats to the future of our technology. And I do believe in what they're trying to do and if you're interested, take a look and maybe even make a donation.

S: Obviously, patents are important. People need to be able to protect their intellectual property and benefit from their innovation. But yeah, but patenting like a really basic idea is is counterproductive, it's absurd. The kind of idea that like anybody can come up with "I'm the first person to submit a patent for it". In fact, you can patent ideas that can't even be implemented yet. In other words, if you see a technology coming on the horizon, you can patent a use of that not yet existing technology. And then when the technology does come online, you can then start sueing anybody that tries to use it in the way that you patented. And all you're doing is patenting an idea, a basic obvious idea. It just becomes a race to see who can patent it first. It is totally broken. That kind of system is completely counterproductive.

J: Yeah, it's, well the government is taking steps to heat and it's moving forward. There doesn't seem to be that much holding these decisions that they're making so. I think things are moving in the right direction.

S: Hopefully

=== Class System in Mice (17:21)===
* http://www.universityherald.com/articles/3575/20130617/mice-big-brother-setup-develop-social-structures.htm
17:21
S: Alright well, Rebecca tell us about how mice have their own class system.

R: I will. Uh, yeah, there's a really fun experiment that's been happening on mice; looking at their social strati. And what's interesting isn't the fact that mice set up class systems and different social statuses; but the way in which scientists are starting to study them, and study their social behavior... It's not necessarily...like studying the way animals are interacting with each other isn't necessarily as easy as studying, let's say studying what a particular drug is doing to a particular mouse system, uh it's much more complex. You've got mice interacting with each other, displaying different behaviors doing different things that you have to constantly watch and log in, you know, an objective a way as possible. This study, by Dr. Tali Kimchi, which I did not know was a last name, but I really like it, Kimchi

J: Kimchi

E: Kimchi

R: Yeah Kimchi is a delicious condiment uh, and also a last name. So Dr. Kimchi at the Wiseman's Institute's Neural Biology department is studying mice and their social interactions using a big brother house. So if you recall the tv show, which hasn't been around in the US for quite a long time. Big Brother is a show where they have cameras that are constantly watching the residences of the house. And the residents aren't allowed to leave the house, and the cameras are watching 24 hours. And in the UK, they were broadcast 24 hours in the most boring feed you can possibly imagine. Same sort of deal here, only slightly more complex, uh because the human big brother inhabitants were not microchipped. In this case, yes, the mice had microchips implanted in them.

S: RFIDs

R: RFIDs, yes. Yeah, exactly. The same sort of microchip you put in cats and dogs to keep track of them if they run away.

E: and credit cards.

R: yeah credit cards or tube cards, things like that. So in this case uh the microchips were used to track the mice movements. Mice?

S: Meece

E: Meeces. Meeces to pieces

R: Ok. To track the meeces movements. And they go around their little house so their ccd cameras all over this relatively large house, for a bunch of mice, I think. And a computer examining what those behaviors are.And it was extraordinarily effective at parcing the different movements, at figuring out what the mice were doing, when they were doing it how they were interacting. To the point where uh they could predict with over 90 percent accuracy who the mice were going to be mating with. For instance... uh and they were also able to differentiate between the different genetic strains of the mice, so different strains uh showed different behaviors that they were able to see in the computer analysis. So it was an interesting way of collecting a vast amount of information and parcing it in a way that could have important uses in the future when figuring out uh behavviors. Some of the other things they figured out, they found that within 24 hours uh one group of normal strain mice had already established a leader and like a caste system. So it took about 24 hours for them to figure that out. Uh they also did an experiment where they put, they filled the house with another strain that they labeled as autistic. These mice exhibited very little social engagement. And what they found with the autistic mice, is that

E: they were fascinated

R: Yeah, right. Uh what they found with the autistic mice was that no leader emerged at all, uh no social strati happened. Except like occasionally it would appear that a leader would emerge and then they would promptly be dethroned. So social mice like immediately organized themselves into like a caste system. While autistic mice did not. Part of the, the intersting thing about this system that they've developed of analyzing behavior, can in the future be used for things like identifying the different aspects of disorders like autism or schizophrenia.

S: Yeah, it sounds like a really great research paradigm.

R: Yeah, exactly. It's fun, you can go online and see uh, I'm sure if you google Dr. Kimshee you can find a video of the mice running around in their little house. And it's kind of cool, they're all color coded uh when you watch the videos and you can follow them around as they do different things. It made me want to get my own mouse set-up.

S: They should make it into a reality tv show.

E: They should.

R: People would watch it. I bet within like two weeks, whichever mouse established itself as king would be on the front page of Us magazine.

=== Anti-GMO Pseudoscience (22:50)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/ Once More: Bad Science in the Service of Anti-GMO Activism]
S: Alright, well let's move on. There's a study making the rounds. Another one of those studies reporting to show severe negative outcomes from uh feeding animals GM food, or genetically modified food. Uh so from the abstract of this study, let me read to you a part of the abstract and you can uh tell me what you think about it: Feed intake weight gain mortality and blood biochemistry were measured; organ weights and pathology were determined postmortem. There were no differences pigs fed the GM and non GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality and routine blood biochemistry measurements. The GM diet was associated with gastric and uterine differences in pigs. GM fed pigs had uteri that were 25% heavier than non GM fed pigs. And GM fed pigs had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation. With a rate of 32% of GM fed pigs compared to 12% of non GM fed pigs with a P value of .004. This severe stomach inflammation was worse in GM fed males compared to non GM fed males by a factor of 4. And the GM fed females compared to non GM fed females by a factor of 2.2. So that sounds like pretty impressive.

E: Bad news

S: Pretty impressive outcome, but does anything jump out at you guys that there might be some problems with this study?

R: Nope, seems legit.

E: Everything's great.

S: This is like our lessons on how to evaluate studies right? One thing you have to always ask is whenever they're comparing two different groups, is how many comparisons do they actually look at? Because if you look at enough different comparisons, then you can cherry pick, by random chance you know there's gonna be some correlation somewhere. And if you're cherry picking that out of many comparisons, that's one of the...Remember the researcher degrees of freedom? You know, researchers can manufacture positive results by manipulating the data. And one way of doing that, even if they're doing it honestly or inadvertantly, one way to do that is to make multiple comparisons. Now there's a statistical fix that you're supposed to do for each additional comparison that you do or you make. You have to adjust the statistics to see if it's truly statistically significant. So for example, if you set the P value at .05, then roughly speaking that means that one in twenty comparisons are going to be statistically significant and by chance alone. If you make twenty comparisons and one is .05, that's probably just random chance. But even if you just look at that one thing, if that were the only comparison you made, then the P value of .05 would be meaningful. So they tell you right here in the abstract that feed intake, weight gain or mortality, a whole panel of blood biochemistry were measured. Organ weight, apparently all the organs were weighed and pathologically examined; and now they're just telling us about the stomachs and the uterus. So, that's what we call a fishing expedition, right? David Gorski wrote about this on science-based medicine, so if you want you can... He goes into it in great detail. And I think he absolutely correctly characterizes this as a fishing expedition. You go looking for a whole bunch of things, you're gonna find correlations by random chance alone, right? Astrologers are famous for this. This is astrology with pigs and GM corn. But it's actually even far worse than what you might um, than what you might... Even from the abstract you can say this is B.S. They went fishing and they came up with these two randoms. Why would GM corn cause severe stomach inflammation? But it's actually much worse than that. Because what they did was, this is a good way to increase your probability of generating false positive results. They took inflammation of the stomach, and they broke it down into different, somewhat arbitrary categories. No inflammation, mild, moderate, severe, erosions pinput ulcers, frank ulcers and bleeding ulcers. Out of all of those categories, only severe inflammation was worse in the GM fed versus the regular pigs.

E: Ohh... That's not what they said in the abstract

S: You wouldn't know that from just reading the abstract. All they say is severe inflammation was worse in the pigs fed the GM feed. Yeah but, not all the other kinds of inflammation. And, in fact, if you look at all inflammation, regardless of how severe it is, there was a slight decrease in the GM fed group compared to the non GM fed group.

E: Wow

S: It was just if you cherry pick out the one category in the middle, there wasn't even a dose response curve. That's another question you ask yourself. How many comparisons are being made, is there a dose response to any effect that they're claiming exists? You also of course have to ask is it plausible, but we could put that aside. So this data... So this is an exercise in cherry picking data. They cherry picked the severe inflammation out of this arbitrary categorization of different levels of inflammation. Over all inflammation... ya know this is just a random scatter of data, this is random noise. But actually, the thing that they're claiming, it increases the risk of sever stomach inflammation, overall inflammation was actually decreased in that group. Contradicting what they're pointing out. So this is complete B.S., this is just utter B. S. And this is coming from researchers, Judy Carman for example, who have a history of doing anti GM research.

E: mmmhmmm

S: just seems to be someone with an agenda, basically.

E: Yeah, how does she account for her personal biases.

S: So yeah, there's a bias, misdirection, crappy data ya know just horrific methodology.Also, David pointed out that, which is a very legitimate point, you always wanna know also in studies was anything unusual happening? When you're studying a disease, did the disease behaved like it always does. When you're studying animals, were they animals otherwise normal and healthy other than the thing that you were manipulating. These pigs, did overall, did pretty poorly. They had a very high rate of infection and complications. It's almost as if they weren't well cared for. So that's like an outlyer and really calls into question just what was happening in this study. The final analysis, again you want to avoid nitpicking little details of a study and then claiming that the results are invalid; you have to put it into context. But these are fatal flaws that we're talking about. And taken together, they make the results of this study worthless and uninterpretable. But yet, this is being spread around the internet as a stunning ya know study showing that GM corn and GM feed causes this horrible stomach inflammation in pigs. As if there's something dangerous ya know about this particular type of GM feed. And it's all based upon the naturalistic phallacy. It's all just genetic modification ain't natural. It's really just nonsense.

J: Are people eating the same exact food as they feed the pigs.

S: Well this is , animal feed. So no. They're trying to make genetically modified food seem scary.

J: Yeah.

S: It's just fearmongering, at the end of the day, is what it is.

J: Now, are they gonna do a follow up, Steve? Because typically, when a study like this happens, some other group will do another one similar or exactly like they did just to see if their results match.

S: Yeah, I'd like to see this replicated. You know, I strongly predict this is not the kind of study that's gonna replicate. And replication, of course is in the final analysis, that's how you tell. When you do this kind of multiple analysis where you're just looking at... you're just throwing a whole bunch of crap up against the wall and seeing what sticks, that study is never conclusive. That is always an exploratory study. Then you say, okay, we have this correlation and we looked at twenty, thirty fourty comparisons. We found this correlation. Then you get a fresh set of data, you replicate the study and see if that correlation holds up. If it was all random statistical noise, it will go away. And you'll probably see some other random association. But if it's a real effect, it should replicate. And that's how you know. So this is an exploratory study at best, because of all the multiple comparisons. It's not the kind of thing that should be reported in the press as fear mongering about GM foods. The kind that, at best, inspire a folllow up study. Let me give you an analogy to help put this into perspective: Prayer, intercessory prayer research, you guys familiar with research? Where the number of studies that were done looking at people who were sick and they were getting prayed for by a third party, intercessory prayer and they often didn't even know that they were being prayed for. They knew that they were in the study, but they didn't know if they were in the prayed for group or the not prayed for group. Tons of problems with this research, but the bottom line is, that they did multiple comparisons. For example, they looked at patients in the cardiac ICU and they followed a number of complications, number of days in the ICU, number of days in the hospital, survival... They looked at multiple multiple different end points. And then in one study, again there weren't differences across the board. There was like this one outcome was a little bit better in the prayer group. Then they replicated the study, and a different outcome was a little bit better, but not overall. Like overall it's random noise. But again the same outcome wasn't better, it's like a different outcome every time. That's, that's not a replication, that's a failure to replicate. That is consistent with random noise, which is of course what you would expect when you're hypothesis is magic makes people better, ya know.

E: Hahaha that's true

S: This is when you're considering the multiple comparisons that are being disclosed in the study. You may not be aware that they may have made, the researchers may have made multiple comparisons and only published the ones that were positive, or just a small subset. So they might have done all kinds of comparisons bu that doesn't work that doesn't... just discarded it and never reported it. Which is why why you know no single study is ever that believable, especially if it's like one research group. Uh, or, still one off study. It's hard... We get confronted with this all the time. Oh here's a study on ESP, why don't you guys believe this? Cuz it's one study. Because you have no idea what these researchers really did behind the scenes.

R: It would be great if grade school science tearchers would, during a science fair, point out to their students that all of the things the students did to make their science fair project look better and get an A. It's exactly what scienctists still do once they're actual working scientists and, hey that's wrong. Make sure that you don't actually do that

J: Like fudge the numbers?

R: Yeah, like I did that when I was doing science fair projects I would have outlyers and be like, "Oh that one just didn't count like if I just this then I get, I got like a nice clean line here and uh I get an A. Because it looks like I knew my stuff. Yeah So

S: You're absolutely right. Teachers should emphasize that its the messiness that they wanna see.

R: Yes

S: If they get something that looks too clean, that should count down your grade should go down, not up. Yeah my daughter recently, my older daughter recently like last year had a science fair. And I made sure that there were no shenanigans with her data. But going, walking through the posters of all the other students studies ya know there were a lot of them. Of course ya know we were uber skeptic evaluating a twelve year old science fair project.

J: Could you imagine? Steve walking around like checking out all these like hey kid, you're all wrong over here.

S: I just did it, it was a good teaching opportunity for my daughter. I didn't like criticize the students and make them cry.

J: Sure you didn't

S: It was like to Julia, it was a good lesson. Hey let's look at this study. What do you think about this? What were the methods and what are they doing wrong here? Like are they not using control groups and not carefully defining terms. I mean every error that was possible to make was made. But it is, it was a good and awesome learning opportunity. To ruthlessly pick through those, you can do it in a constructive nurturing way. But that would be a great learning opportunity to show how hard it is to do good science. All the ways in which, even a simple science project can go awry.

R: And on that note, I just wanted to mention that, I think I might have mentioned this before, but you can, if you're interested you can volunteer to be a judge at the local science fair. They'll probably be happy to have you. I did it a couple of years ago at a local high school and I really enjoyed it. Just talking to the kids and finding out what they were interested in, it was pretty cool.

S: Awesome

E: That is cool. Very cool

=== Skunk Ape (36:31)===
* http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/06/14/man-claims-he-spotted-floridas-elusive-skunk-ape/
S: Alright, well Evan, you're gonna finish up the news segment of our show with a the latest stunning evidence of the Florida Skunk Ape.

J: Skunk Ape?

E: The Skunk Ape, of course. In Sarasota County Florida, a man claims he has spotted Florida's elusive Skunk Ape.

S: Very elusive

E: ...so the headlines read from CBS Miami. Alright, so what is a Skunk Ape? Well who better to ask than the folks at Floridaskunkape.com. Yes, there is such a website.

S: Anybody?

E: They claim, it's what Floridians call their big foot, as best known as sasquatch in most other places in North America, oh yeah. Evidence supporting the existence of the creature has been gathered over the years, and consists of hundreds of documented sitings, a few pictures, several foot casts and a few hair samples. Mmhmm. So they have actual evidence, apparently. It gets its name from the very fact that it lives in Florida it in itself emits an awful stench. Now that's their writing, I didn't write that, that's from their website. Lives in the state of Florida and emits an awful stench. People who've had the pleasure to experience the smell, it's described as that of an elephant's cage or a trash dump. And one person even said it was like the scent of a skunk that did battle with a dumpster.

J: *laughs*

E: I went to the gallery on that website to have a look at the photos and stuff and it said, "your search yielded no results." So much for that. But, forget that for now because we have new video evidence. This is smoking gun evidence, smoking gun so hot it must be shot evidence. Mike Falconer is the person who posted the video and still pictures on YouTube.

S: I wonder what his ancestors did for a living.

E: They probably made barrels or something. Uh he says that he captured this footage on March 2nd of this year 2013. That he and his son spotted a large hairy creature off in the, off, it was a field at the Myakka River State Park which is a place in which the Skunk Ape has been sited before, apparently. And there were other people in who um, in this footage you can hear them and they've also stopped their cars on the road to try to get a glimpse as well. Now I think that's um, well not important, but I think noteworthy in the case of this. Instead of having this, we're so used to having this you know there's someone out in the wilderness with a camera shooting ya know whatever they think is a big foot off in the distance. But this one is different it has a gathering, sort of a group of people who are all... They've all seen something; they've seen something off in the distance.

S: Yeah, but they were strolling around like nothing special was going on. Honestly, it didn't seem that impressive to me.

E: They were saying some things in the background like ya know "oh what is that over there" and "I'm trying to get a glimpse of it". At no point did anyone say they smelled something funny or were like ooo that's a skunk or like... I know that if a skunk gets hit by a car like a mile up my road from here I can smell it. That's a very powerful smell and if it's half what they're describing, according to the websites and stuff, I think you would ya know perhaps smell something. But, in any case. So what they did is uh a guy and his son started to pursue whatever it is that they saw out in the fields. So they've got their iPhones right? And they're recording video. And at one point you can kind of see something off in the far grassland. It looks like it has to be hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Something is kinda moving around back there, just some little brown dot or something and they're saying "Oh yeah can you see it? There it is! There it is! Let's go get a closer look".

S: It's pixelsquatch

J: *laughs*

E: Exactly. And that's when they decided, of course, what you do when that happens. Well you turn off your video camera and you start shooting photos instead. So when they started to take photos is when they supposedly captured the quote unquote evidence. And Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, they're brown blotches.

S: Yeah it's

E: Brown blotches off in the trees

S: It turns from pixelsquatch to blobsquatch, to the more classical blobsquatch. Absolutely. It's a completely unrecognizable amorphous brown blob.

R: Enhance!

S: Enhance! Enhance!

R: Zoom in, enhance

E: zoom zoom zoom

S: Evan, do you know what the difference is between the Myakka Skunk Ape and the Hamden Bald Eagle?

E: Oooo um, one really exists and the other doesn't.

S: Yes. I have close up, in focus, unambiguous photographs of the Hamden Bald Eagle

E: Exactly. And yet, once again, someone does not have such shots of the supposed Skunk Ape.

J: The freakin bald headed eagle, that thing could just fly away. You know talk about...it's not just stuck on the ground.

E: Apparently in the year 2000, there was some video footage shot of something that they deemed the Skunk Ape. And then around 2006 someone else came up with something that was more clearer, but to me it was clearly just a hoax, a guy in a suit walking around of some sort. And that's, and then there's this. And that's pretty much it; and a few other blurry photos out there which could have been anything shot by anyone at any time. That's it. That's the sum of evidence you have when it comes to this thing. For the folks who, the guys who, Falconer when he shot this video, when he posted it to YouTube he put up a description on the YouTube channel, YouTube page he has and here's what he wrote in regards to this, and I think this is a bit revealing. He says that: This is real footage my son and I took in Myakka March 2nd 2013. We had iPhones with us. You'll see actual still shots of the thing. Some have called it big foot or sasquatch. The only editing we did to these pictures was to lighten it up. Alright? So here we go. At one point, you hear us talk of two of them. It was a deer out there hiding in the tall grass; maybe that's what it was after. You can see it in the middle at the thin tan line of grass under the tree. You will also see the deer a little to the left and closer in. Hello, deer!

S: Okay

E: Ok, so what's more likely? You've got Skunk Ape legend, ya know, in which there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever. It's all a bunch of blurry photos and weak videos of. Or, the people actually shooting this stuff saying that was clearly deer there, running around. And um, hmmm gee. Skunk Ape or deer? I don't -know. What does Occam's Razor tell us to think in this situation?

S: Hey it's more likely to be a Florida panther than the Skunk Ape.

J: Yeah

R: It'd be more likely to be a zebra

S: Yeah

R: than a Skunk Ape. I mean, cuz the skunk ape doesn't exist.

E: Unimpressive, sorry. It is getting a lot of headlines

J: Alright, Ev, c'mon. This whole thing has been a little vague, ya know. What's your gut tellin ya?

E: My gut's telling me that there is a network of Skunk Apes living in those fields, all over Florida.

J: And once again, I want there to be a Skunk Ape. You know, somebody please find some real evidence and I'd be all over it. But these fuzzy pictures, I'm getting tired of it guys.

S: By the way, I am patenting the word pixelsquatch. Everytime you say it, you've got to give me a quarter.

J: Pixel squatch!

E: Alright, well you'll hear from my lawyers.

S: So have any of you guys heard about the GyroStim?

J: No

S: Probably not.

R: It's pronounced "Yeerow"

S: "yeerow?"

E: Is that a new sandwich they're serving at Subway or something?

R: Yeah it's a combination. It's like a regular gyro, but with Slim Jims

E: Haha cool

S: So this is a machine that was developed by an engineer whose daughter has cerebral palsy. And it's essentially a chair. You sit in the chair and you have a little joystick remote control and you can swing around in all three dimensions, you know.

E: XYZ?

S: Exactly. In every axis. He developed this because she was getting physical therapy in which she had to do exercises to essentially do the same thing. Rotate around in order to um improve her balance in her walking. And, it was a bit tedious. So he, being an engineer, was like I'm gonna help her out, automate this. So he built a chair, the GyroStim, you know he built this chair and it does what he wanted it to do. It rotates around in all three axes. Now unfortunately, some not science-based practioners got their hands on this machine and have ran with it. The engineer is Kevin Maher, and you guys remember Ted Carrick? He is a quote un quote chiropractic neurologist.

J: Yeah I remember that

S: So he is using the GyroStim, and claiming it can cure all kinds of things. So I wrote a review on Science-Based Medicine of the GyroStim. Which, you know, is just one of an endless sequence of devices with overblown claims without adequate evidence. The thing hasn't been studied. It's actually not an illegitimate concept, there is such a thing called vestibular therapy where you essentially do just that. You stimulate the vestibular system by you know putting by rotating and changing your head position over and over again. And it can treat...it's actually a very effective treatment for some kinds of vertigo.

J: What's the vestibular system, Steve?

S: The vestibular system, that's a very good question Jay, is the system in your brain that senses two things - your orientation with respect to gravity and acceleration. So, this is the three semi circular canals that are in your inner ear. They have fluid in them so when you rotate around you're oriented towards gravity the fluid flows through those semi circular canals, which there's three of them, one in each axis, and then that moves hair cells that sense the movement of that fluid. And that's the sensing organ, but then that vestibular information gets taken in by the brain and is process compared to your visual information and tactile information and that's how you get a sense of motion and stability and balance ya know.

J: So this is your internal accelerometer

S: Yeah, well exactly. When there's a disconnect between your visual input and your vestibular input, that results in dizziness and motion sickness. That's why you get motion sick. When your vestibular system is telling you that your rocking up and down and your visual system is not because it is locked to something in the foreground. It's also a very delicate system, and a lot of people have dizziness of vertigo and we can't really identify anything specific that's not working. There's no lesion anywhere and it looks normal. But that integration of misinformation is just a little bit off. Those are the people who do well with vestibular therapy or essentially just retraining the brain to integrate this information. Conceptually it's perfectly fine. But where we get into trouble is in two areas. One is, the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, so it's very expensive. There is no evidence to show that getting vestibular therapy with this 20 30 40 thousand dollar machine is superior to getting vestibular therapy manually with no machine; or just getting a twenty dollar swing and swinging back and forth on it as a way of stimulating your vestibular system. Which is something that physical therapists actually do. Investing in an expensive piece of equipment and paying a lot of money for expensive sessions is not justified until there's research showing this is not only as good as the far cheaper options, but is significantly superior to it. But there's no research, we don't even know if it works at all or that it's safe. All you have is the idea of using the machine. But of course that doesn't stop chiropractors, like Ted Carrick, from starting to use it. But in addition, the claims that are being propogated for this machine, especially by Ted Carrick and also by others now, is that it not only is a way of delivering vestibular therapy- which is the plausible component of the claim - but that it actually helps the brain recover from a traumatic injury.

J: Oh, yeah

S: In genaral, yeah. So I was reviewing a specific article written by a sports writer who wrote and article about the GyroStim, because it's being used to treat a lot of like hockey players who have had head injuries. And he did the typical journalist thing of antecdote miracles happening every day, then quicky, generic canned disclaimer. Well this scientist said it hasn't been tested yet and hasn't been approved by the FDA, now let me go back to these glowing antecdotes. Meanwhile he's talking, he's mentioning Autism and Asperger's. I mean it's ridiculous. So I wrote a typical blog post about it on Science-Based Medicine, and the author of the original article, Adrian Dater who is again a sports writer writing for the Denver Post, leaves a comment, like a really pissy comment - it didn't immediately get, because he was a first time poster it went to moderation and it didn't immediately get approved because we work for a living - in the middle of the day. Then he writes a blog post saying "I'm being censored over on Science-Based Medicine".

E: *laughs* He gave you all of 45 minutes. That's not...

S: He gave a full hour. So, but anyway, that's just a little aside. The thing is he like doubled down and completely defended his journalism. So then I of course, I had to write a follow up post on Neurologica, just about science journalism using him as an example of horrible science journalism.

J: Uh Oh!

E: Gee why would a sports writer be bad at science journalism?

S: Yeah I mean the thing is the guy's a sports writer, I don't expect him to be a good science journalist. But his problem was he wrote an article about science, and he got it all completely wrong. He fell for all the typical pit falls that non-experience trained science journalists fall for when they think that they can cover these complex topics. And he actually was defending his token skepticism. So in my follow up article I characterized different levels at which articles deal with science, especially when there's something contreversial. There's the false balance aproach in which you say oh experts over here say this, and this fringe lunatic over here says that; and you treat them like they're equal. Then there's the token skepticism where you actually give the bulk of the time to the fringe claim and you only have a quick skeptical blurb, which is what he fell into. And then there's the just complete abject gullibility without a hint of skepticism. So he was in the middle category of token skepticism, in which you don't get much credit for that. There's of course the fourth category which is the way it should be, which is appropriate skepticism. Right? But we didn't get that from him. So he was defending his token skepticism and also defending the GyroStim, completely ignoring all of my legitimate actual different criticisms. And in the end he was like criticizing David Goreski and the others on Science-Based Medicine about the positions that we were taking. We were like look, dude, you cover hockey. Go back to covering hockey. Seriously, you're arguing with a group of physicians who have spent a decade writng about these topics. You're telling us we don't know what we're talking about?

J: Did you say that to him?

S: Yes! How arrogant does this guy have to be?

E: Are you serious?

S: Like he had a fit that we disagreed with his journalism. He had a fit and it was horrible. It was horrible token skepticism and bad science writing. He didn't understand the issues at stake. And again, I wouldn't expect him to understand; but he had no sense of his own limitations. And of course he has no editor who would know, you know, that this is an innappropriate way to cover a medical science news story.

E: Yep

J: Steve, it also sounds like he's never engaged in any kind of legitimate discourse about things like that. You know?

S: No, he didn't engage, he got childish right out of the gate. Which, you know, always makes it worse of course.

J: Yeah, I mean I can understand from one perspective a guy like him never really entering that arena before. Not knowing what to expect, you know. And of course let's like, let's also achknowledge the idea here that you went up against Science-Based Medicine, you guys.

S: Yeah that's the thing. He had no idea what he was up against. So he started to back pedal a little bit. Like I wasn't endorsing it, I was just relaying the stories. Peple have a right to know about this; that whole coy bs. And one of our commentors dug up a twitter

E: *laughs*

S: A tweet that he did where he was like read about the device that cured you know this hockey player of his traumatic brain injury. Oh yeah, you're not endorsing it.

J: Uh oh! That sounds like an endorsement! He's just stating facts?

E: Yeah, he's just reporting what he heard

S: Yeah he was totally busted. He was totally busted.

J: How did it end, Steve? Did he just end up having to quit?

S: Yeah, he went away. It was a fun little exchange though.

J: Yeah it's something to learn... it's something for people like us to learn from and it sadly... Did that go back to his man cave and lick his wounds or did he actually say hey you know I screwed up here like what did I do wrong?

S: He did not give any evidence of any self awareness in this exchange.

E: mmmm

R: They rarely do though. You might have planted a seed

S: I might have planted a seed, you never know. But yeah, I don't expect most people to have the scales fall from their eyes and to say I was wrong, mea culpa. Very few people have I think the security and maturity to do that. Especially when you're in the middle of an internet fight. You know everyone has, as you like to call Jay, internet balls. You know?

J: Yeah

E: mmhmm

S: But, yeah you're right, you never know. Maybe he'll be a little bit more gun shy the next time he dips his toe into science journalism. Who knows?

E: Or he'll do some real research into what the hell he's talking about.

S: And we were, we got very polite and very proffesional. We were like listen, we want to help journalists write better. You know next time you want to cover a story like this, we're happy to provide you with some perspective and background information.

J: What?! That'll take hours!

S: *laughs*

J: I don't have time for that!

S: This is, this is what... I just told someone the other day you know in a similar context I'd much rather provide advice ahead of time rather than criticism after the fact. You know, run these things by somebody who knows what they're talking about ahead of time. We're here, we're a resource, ask us. We're, you know... What's the worst thing that could happen? We make your journalism better?

J: Yeah

S: You know? What's the worst thing that could come out of it?

J: It's basically you're like you're saying to them, I'll write your freakin essay paper for you pal just all you gotta do is pick up the phone.

S: Good journalists know how to do that. They know how to use resources well.

== Who's That Noisy? (55:54)==
55:54
S: Alright well, Evan, we're still falling behind on Who's That Noisy, but you're gonna give us a new one for this week.

E: Yeah I'll give you a new one for this week. We are going to catch up on all the correct answers and winners and everything in a couple more episodes. Bare with us while we get through this little stretch of podcasting. And uh I'm gonna play for you this week's brand new, fresh off the presses Who's That Noisy. It is an actual noisy, a classic as I like to say, and here we go...

R: mmm

S: hmmm

E: Okay

S: What do you want to know? Who that was speaking?

E: That's it. Send us your guess wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sgu forums.com. And that's about it; good luck everyone.

S: Thanks Evan

E: Thank you

== Questions and Emails (56:40) ==
=== Staticman (56:40)===
<blockquote>Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, 
Damian Tinkey 
Marlboro, NY</blockquote>
S: We're going to do one e-mail this week. This e-mail comes from Damian Tinkey from Marlboro, NY. He Writes: Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, Damian. So he links to an article

R: It does sound like a super power

S: Yeah, Static Man! They're actually are, there are cartoon super heroes who are basically static, that is their super power, static.

J: That's powerful stuff man

E: Lightning guy, electron boy

S: So, the article he links to is from Septemberf 2005, a little bit

E: Okay

S: But I don't think we ever talked about it. So we might as well deal with this. So what do you guys think? Static man. Let me read the article here, it's very short. I'll just read pieces of it. It's about a man, Frank Clewer, of the Western Victorian city of Warrnambool. It said he was wearing a synthetic nylon jacket and a woolen shirt when he went for a job interview. He walked into the building, the carpet ignited from the fourty thousand volt of static electricity that had built up. It sounded almost like a fire cracker, or something like that he said. Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt. The article goes on to say that his clothes were measured by a fireman as carrying an electrical charge of fourty thousand volts. The Reuters news agency quoted Mr. Barton as saying.

J: Yeah I don't think that fireman could determine that.

E: Fourty thousand volts? You could kill people with that!

S: It's saying... It depends on the current right?

J: Yeah what I'm saying, would firemen be able to make that assessment. I mean I know that they know a lot about things that cause fires and they might say hey in order for this type of thing to happen this is the kind of voltage you need. But it just seems...

S: No that's a physicist, Jay, not a fireman. But I think fourty thousand volts of static electricity is not enough to ignite carpet, first of all. I mean for the firemen to measure the voltage - remember there's no current here, it's static - then they would of had to discharge it. Right? They would have to build it up and discharge it and maybe they could measure the discharge. It's also, it's just too much static electricity. It's almost like, it sounds apocryphal. Oh he had a nylon jacket over a wool sweater and he built up so much static electricity that he ignited the carpet.

J: Yeah, what did the guy run a marathon right before he went in there?

S: Someone speculated that with that much static electricity, wouldn't his hair be standing on end as if he had his hand on one of those grass static electricity generators.

E: Yeah. A voltage meter could figure that out.

S: Yeah I don't know what the voltage you have to get to to have your hair stand on end. Yeah and also, like he got out of his car, why didn't he discharge upon exiting the car when he touched the metal of the door? Or when he walked in the building, how did he get in the building without a discharge?

J: How did he not die?

S: Yeah I don't know if it's possible to develop enough static charge that the discharge would be fatal. I mean there are reports of static discharges causing fires. But that's only when there's some kind of accelerant. This is actually a real risk at the gas station. Either there's gasoline dripping or vapors and you build up the static electricity on the seat of the car. And when you touch the frame of the car it discharges and could spark a fire. There are reported cases of that. I don't think that the static charge that a person can build up on themselves could set a carpet on fire without some kind of gasoline or accelerant. This (?) does give some interesting statistics. They say that the lethal dose of a static charge measured in millijoules is 1,350. Usually like shuffling across a carpet can generate from ten to twenty-five millijoules. So not very much compared to what a lethal dose would be. And they report, really the maximum you could get to would be something on the order of 300 millijoules, just from building up static on yourself. Measured in volts, they reference a study showing that getting in and out of a car can generagte - if you're dressed in nylon - could reach up to twenty-one thousand volts. That was sort of the maximum that was reported; so not quite the fourty thousand volts reported in this story. And for reference, a typical lightning bolt - which is static electric discharge - can contain five hundred megajoules, which is three hundred seventy million times the lethal dose.

E: How does someone end up earning the title of static man if this happened like one time in sort of this fluke thing. It doesn't... the sensationalism that it's worth I suppose.

S: Yeah, cuz it's the media. Some headline writer... I mean how did Super Man get his title? Some headline writer dubbed him Super Man. By the way, have you guys seen the new Super Man movie?

J: No, but I heard it wasn't so good.

S: So, I'm not going to review the movie but I have to say one thing: Krypton, it's moon, busted apart.

R: Oh yeah, someone tweeted me about that.

S: And even worse than all the other movies, it was like half and half almost. Just hanging right next to each other. Why? It's now officially a science fiction movie cliche. Every alien planet has to have a busted apart moon.

E: It's an homage to Thunder the Barbarian. Everyone was clearly very impressed with that horrible cartoon from 1981.

S: But how quickly did that become a cliche? I mean, it's ridiculous.

R: Yeah

S: Show some imagination and don't have scientifically implausible busted apart moon. I mean okay, it's pretty. But you're just doing it like every single other movie did it. Sorry, it loses its' appeal; do something different. A ringed moon, do something else!

J: Yeah I agree Steve. I think, I think what's happening is it's kind of seeping into collective unconscious.

S: Yeah. It's just alien worlds have busted moons, of course they do!

J: What's with these busted up moons?

== Science or Fiction (1:03:05) ==
[http://www.nature.com/news/light-flips-transistor-switch-1.13178 Item #1]: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. [http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/06/05/G34100.1 Item #2]: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617110929.htm Item #3]: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in 12 weeks.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts; two genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys all ready for this week?

J: Very ready

R: Oh yeah

E: Uh, sure

S: Item #1: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. Item #2: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move more towards North America. Item #3: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in twelve weeks. Rebecca, go first.

R: Alright, so a transistor that’s switched on by a single photon; that’s cool and that’s believable to me. Subduction zone… I can believe that there’s a new subduction zone forming. Although, I don’t know if that would mean that Europe is moving towards North America. Um I’m trying to think of, like subduction is I think where one plate is sliding under the other. I know that it’s the powerful, like it causes the most powerful earthquakes. But I don’t know how much it moves continents. Um, I can believe that though; because if it’s one plate sliding over the other one I guess that would bring Europe and North America closer. So then whole body vibration that produces significant weight loss, that’s tough to believe. Because I know that you know there’s those crazy things they sell on TV that you wrap the band around you and it just *mimics vibration sound* like giggles you.

J: *laughs*

E: *laughs*

R: *laughing* Yeah that’s what it sounds like. And I’m fairly certain that those don’t work, but they might be based on something that does work. So I can believe that, I don’t know… I think I’m gonna go with the transistor one just because I don’t really know much about it and the other two make sense, they seem reasonable. So, I’m gonna go with that one.

S: Alrighty, Jay

J: Okay, the one about the transistor that’s switched by the single photon, that is so cool. Yeah, I could see working. Geologists have found the one about the evidence of the subduction zone, I wanna know a lot more about this. That sounds really interesting. How big is this subduction zone, how long will it take to work. And this last one about the whole body vibration, wait, WHOLE BODY VIBRATION THERAPY! Um, that has got to be BS. So there you go.

S: Okay

E: *laughs* has got to be

S: Alright, Evan

E: Transistor switched by a single photon, I don’t see anything scientifically implausible about it certainly. Um, have we gotten to that level of precision yet? Possibly, yeah that one’s possible to me. Um the second one about a new subduction zone forming near Portugal, I have a feeling that is the one that’s going to trip me up. I’m not feeling good about this one. But the last one, the whole body vibration therapy, oh boy. But lost an average of ten of their body mass in twelve weeks, that’s not insignificant. Ten percent is pretty significant. And I think like when you use these things with moderate caloric intake restriction you wind up getting results and it’s hard to determine which one did it. The vibration or your limited on calories, your restricted calories?

J: Yeah, like

E: They should kind of go hand in hand

J: Yeah like use this thing for an hour a day and also you know cut your caloric intake in half and you’ll lose weight.

E: I think people who are using these things are being a little bit more conscious about what it is they’re putting into their bodies. So I think that’s gonna wind up being what’s really going on here. I’m going to say body vibration therapy, that one is the fiction.

S: Okay, so you all agree that geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. You all think this one is science, and this one is SCIENCE.

J: Awesome

R: Yay!

E: That’s what I like about this game, you always get one right.

S: *laughs* Yeah that’s true, way to look on the bright side.

E: Yep

S: They’re calling it an embryonic subduction zone or a new subduction zone. They knew that these two plates came together here. Uh they call this the Gibraltar Arc. But this, they have new evidence now that show that it is actually forming into a subduction zone. The technical implications for this are more about how these subduction zones form; and the fact that…just to read the conclusion in the abstract of the article – our work suggests that the formation of new subduction zones in Atlantic type oceans may not require the spontaneous foundering of its passive margins. Instead, subduction can be seen as an invasive process that propagates from ocean to ocean. So what they’re saying is that you know the way that the spread of subduction zones around the world may actually interact with each other, you know. And cuz it all has to average out, of course. Right? The Earth isn’t growing or shrinking despite what Neil Adams has to say. So any spreading of new ocean floor has to be exactly matched by subduction zones. So I guess what they’re saying that this, cuz it all has to balance out, that they behave as if they’re connected. And a subduction zone can literally propagate from ocean to ocean.

R: I read this

S: Yep

R: …a little while ago. But I didn’t read the thing about the continents moving closer together. But I did read, this thing that I had to read several times to make sure that I wasn’t misreading it – I still might be misreading it -, but it was something like this could eventually result in the Atlantic Ocean filtering down into the, like further into the Earth’s core. Like it could drain the Atlantic Ocean because of this subduction zone.

S: Yeah I haven’t read that in the context of this story but that certainly is, there is you know speculation among geologists about what happens to the ocean because of subduction zones. And is the water in the oceans getting dragged down you know toward deeper into the Earth and will this eventually drain away our oceans or if not than what is the… like what other factors are keeping it in equilibrium.

R: Scary.

S: In the articles about this story though, not in the technical paper but in the reporting about this story, it said that Pangaea type super continents that come together and they break apart and the continents will spread apart and then eventually the continents will come back together and reform a super continent. This has happened a few times over the life of the Earth. So what they’re saying is that if this new subduction zone could spell the transition from the continents drifting apart to coming back together again with the Atlantic Ocean closing up Europe and the United States coming back together. But what I don’t get though is how that happens when we have the Mid-Atlantic ridge with three spreading zones in the middle of the Atlantic. The conventional wisdom is that the Atlantic Ocean is getting bigger and the pacific ocean which is shrinking will this actually change the direction in which the continents alter the mid-Atlantic Spread? I could not find answers to those questions.

J: Does this happen incredibly slowly, Steve, or is this

S: Well yeah of course! It’s over hundreds of millions of years.

J: It’s not like the ocean is gonna sink like breach and sink into the core or something crazy like that right?

S: No no no, these are things that happen over millions of years, yeah.

R: But it could mean that we could be seeing powerful earthquakes coming out of that zone.

S: Yes, that’s true. Alright, well let’s go to number one. Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. Rebecca, you think this one is fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this one is science. And this one is SCIENCE.

J: AAAAAH!

E: Oohh

R: Ugh! Damn my crap knowledge of this stuff.

S: Yep this is a huge advance that, Bob would have got this. This is one of those huge advances that we were waiting for. “About time!” ya know that’s how Bob would have said it.

E: Yeah, “We’ve been waiting eight years for this”

S: We have been trying to develop light-based computers right? Rather than sending information around a computer and interacting with transistors with electricity with electrons with like a an optical computer would use light because light obviously goes as fast as anything can go. So researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, have reported building a transistor that is switched by a single photon. That’s huge, that’s a major building block of optical computers. They take advantage of a property called electromagnetically induced transparency, by sending a single ‘gate’ photon that could turn the switch on or off due to this electromagnetically induced transparency. So the injected photon excites the caesium atoms, rendering them reflective to light trying to cross the cloud. So it turns off the signal.

E: What kind of atoms were those, Steve?

S: Caesium

E: Caesium?

J: That is awesome

S: Yeah

J: I wonder how long it will take to get that into a usable shape.

S: Yeah you’re right though, that’s the thing. Will this actually translate into a usable computer that’s gonna sit on your desktop? Who knows? But it is, it’s huge. They are able to make a photon gated transistor, so.

E: That will be cool.

S: Let’s go on to number three. A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese patients, obese subjects, who lost on average ten percent of their body mass in twelve weeks; and of course this one is the fiction.

J: You made the whole thing up?

S: No, no no. Whole body vibration therapy is a thing, and there was an article based upon that. I did, Rebecca, calculate the percentage over time to make it plausible. You did exactly what I was hoping somebody would do and say oh that sounds plausible.

J: *laughs*

E: *laughs*

R: Thanks, thanks for that. You used my logics against me.

J: As soon as Rebecca went like *mimics vibration sound* I went no way! That went out in the twenties!

S: But what this is, this treatment, the study was looking at bone strength and muscle strength in cerebral palsy patients. And they found that it increased the bone density and muscle strength in the lower legs and the bone density also in the spine, but not elsewhere in the body. I don’t know why. This was a small study, thirteen adolescents with cerebral palsy received the treatment nine minutes per day for twenty weeks. So there doesn’t appear to be a control group, again it appears to be a bit of a fishing expedition with only some things being positive and some things not being positive. I couldn’t use this as a science, because they study isn’t robust enough for this to be a science item. So I made it into the fiction. But yeah so it’s using whole body vibrational therapy to increase bone density. The weight loss bit is the bit I made up. Speculative, I don’t know. I mean this is an exploratory study. You can’t draw conclusions from this, you can’t say that this therapy actually works but

E: Ted Carrick can

S: Right? He’ll start selling it for twenty thousand dollars.

E: That’s right, yeah.

S: Absolutely

R: Nice job you guys.

E: I hadn’t won one of those in a while so it feels good.

S: A rare solo loss for Rebecca, very rare.

R: Yeah

S: But you did well this year, you are kickin butt this year; I do have to say.

R: I think I have been

S: Yep

R: I’ll take it on the chin, like a champ

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:15:25) ==
<blockquote>Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth.</blockquote>
S: Alright Jay, do you have an impressive quote for us this week?

J: Yeah, so, a lot of people e-mailed me and I’m going to be continuing to yell the name.

S: You had a lot of positive feedback for the yelling. I had, I don’t recall seeing one negative one. No one said stop the yelling.

R: No

J: Stop with all that yellin

R: Now, of course we’re going to get the people

S: Too late. You had your chance, do not e-mail us telling Jay to stop yelling. You had your chance, the window is closed.

J: On top of that, people said oh and by the way what’s with the… you didn’t uh continue or finalize the dice rolling hubbub.

S: Yeah, Jay you have to do the calculations and we’ll give the results.

J: Yeah, so this is what I’m doing, because I’m so busy with Occ the Skeptical Caveman business, um could anybody that has the time be willing to go back and make the calculation for me? E-mail me info at theskepticsguide.org. I will mention your name on the show, I will thank you, and I will see who’s better – me or randomness.

S: Got it.

R: I’m gonna put my nickel down on randomness.

S: *laughs

E: *laughs

J: We shall see. Uh, ok this is a quote sent in from a listener called Magnus Husweit (?) from Oslo, Norway. And the quote is: Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth. And that is a quote from Robert Royar, paraphrasing Frank Zappa’s anadiplosis. It means, it’s the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause.

S: Ah

J: So the word is used at the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence.

S: It’s like that recent pop song by The Wanted, I’m glad you came. I don’t know anything

R: *laughing* what?

J: I don’t even know who they are. What is that?

R: What

E: Is that like a boy band or something?

R: They’re like the Backstreet Boys

J: ROBERT ROYAR. PARAPHRASING FRANK ZAPPA’S ANAPOLIS…DIPLOSIS…ANADIPLOSIS

S: I do like that quote, I like that quote a lot.

J: Thank you

S: It’s very profound

R: Yeah

S: Of course truth, is not profundity

R: Don’t start

== Announcements (1:17:30) ==
J: So in a couple of weeks we’re gonna be at TAM. Uh everyone’s going to be traveling out there except me and my wife early and then we’ll be there I think on Thursday afternoon. And you’re flying out when, Steve?

S: Well Evan and I are going to the Grand Canyon

E: Yep, we’ll have a Grand Canyon report.

S: earlier in the week. And if anyone has any ideas on stuff that we should do while there, then please let us know right away. Because we’ll be going out on Tuesday.
We’re taking a bus trip with the family to the Grand Canyon. Going to what, the South Rim?

E: Yes we’re going to the south end of the canyon. It takes longer to get there but I’m, we’re told it’s worth it.

S: It’s well worth it.

J: And if any of our listeners are going, definitely come up and say hi to us. And also consider joining us at the SGU dinner, it’s always a good time.

S: Alright well thank you all for joining me this week.

J: Thank you Steve

R: Thank you Steve

E: Good job sir, as always.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 415

2014-02-17T01:40:22Z

Lmwood: /* Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:15:25) */

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== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is June 29th 2013 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening everyone

R: Where the hell is Bob?

S: Bob, once again, is too busy to join us. Bob has a major thing happening at work

E: uh huh

S: that does keep him away.

== This Day in Skepticism (0:35) ==
June 29: Happy birthday to Dr. Roy Wolford, calorie restriction pioneer and Biosphere 2 inhabitant
R: Hey, happy birthday to Roy Wolford, Dr. Wolford.

E: Awesome! Is he a listener?

R: Well, uh no, he died in 2004. He was born June, 29 1924 and Dr. Roy Wolford is probably best known for being one of the inhabitants of Biosphere 2.

E: I love that movie

R: He was also though a pioneer of calory restriction as used for longevity. He wrote a book about living to 120. It was not, uh...

E: A life of perpetual hunger, that's what the title of the book was called.

J: Imagine what Perry would have said about that.

R: I think Perry would have said that he would gladly die at 20 than live on a restricted calorie diet.

J: Choking on a hamburger right?

R: Right

E: hahaha

R: Yeah, uh, Wolford lived on something like 1600 calories a day

E: Alright

S: It's not that bad.

R: Which is realy not that bad

J: That's not bad

R: That's slightly more than what I take in when I'm trying to cut back on my fats.

S: That's a weight loss diet, 1600 calories a day is a pretty reasonable weight loss plan

R: He died at the age of 79 uh, from comoplications from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease.

E: That's not, that's got nothing to do with his lifestyle

R: It's not, yeah it's not a fair, it's not really a fair judgement wether or not his calorie restriction were the... Although he claimed at the end of his life his calorie restriction helped extend his life further by a couple of years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's.

J: Unprovable

R: Yeah

E: That's a nice antecdote.

S: Honestly, ya know, again this is all antecdotal I have no idea about the individual case but, that's unlikely to be true.

R: Yeah

S: Calorie restriction actually hastens death in ALS. It often, the ability to get enough calories in and keep your calories up is a huge pragnostic factor in ALS. So if anything, ya know, ya can't, it's very hard to argue that calorie restriction prolonged his life once he developed ALS.

R. But yeah, he also thought that his ALS was possibly caused by his time in the Biosphere due to lack of oxygen and increased nitrous oxide. Exactly what causes ALS is not entirely settled and so he suspected that that might have had something to do with it.

S: That's wild speculation.

E: Nitrous Oxides builds up in these Biodomes? I didn't know that.

J: Well they were having trouble in there right?

R: They had a lot of trouble. Although, they did stay in there for two years. But, one of the problems they had was a severe lack of food and so it was helpful that their resident doctor happened to be this guy who believed in calorie restriction. So he convinced them all to go on this diet. Ya know, to join him in his diet.

S: Yeah since we have no food anyway.

R: Right. And so they did, but even so at some point many months in they finally broke down and opened up a container of food that was grown outside of the Biosphere in order to supplement their diets.

J: That would have made an awesome YouTube video

E: Watching the moment of breaking that chest open

S: So they just didn't...Did something go wrong with their food production or they didn't plan properly?

J: If you couldn't grow enough food in the Biodome, and ya know, it was never done before. They didn't have the data going in to it, it was all just engineered and it failed. Biodome experiments didn't last as long as they hoped

S: It wasn't self sustaining.

J: No

R: Yeah by all their models I guess it seemed like it could be done but one thing after another went wrong.

S: Now imagined if that happened on Mars.

R: Well that's why they do this stuff. Although I'm sad that they're not, they haven't continued trying that sort of thing. I would love to see that project continue.

S: Yeah

R: I don't know the details of why nobody has tried Biosphere 3

J: Ya know what I noticed?

E: Pauly Shore

J: I noticed, looking at pictures of Biodome, first its interesting if you look at it today, a weed infested back yard. I also noticed it looks a lot like Logan's Run, that's 1970s movie of the people that get put into a Biodome like thing because that was like a last ditch effort to sav humanity and people were in there so long that they forgot what happened. That was Biodome man. Ya ever see, like it looks like it.

S: Well, it was a lot bigger

R: There was apparently a Biosphere 3, maybe still is in Syberia and there's a Biosphere J in Japan. But one other thing, despite the potential pseudoscience with origins of disease and wether or not calorie restriction can actually work in humans to extend life, Walford seemed like a really awesome guy. At one point he would like take off for a time as part of his studies and measure the rectal temperatures of holy men in India.

E: uh huh

R: He traveresed the African continent on foot, according to his obituary in the New York Times. So he specifically wanted to go out and just have adventures. He said, " If you spend all your time in the laboratories, as most scientists do, you might spend 35 years in the lab and be very successful and win a Nobel Prize. But those 35 years will be just a blur. So I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities." He once broke his leg on a motorcycle.

E: That qualifies as dangerous.
R: Yeah he just seems like he was a fun guy.

== News Items ==
=== Podcasting Patent (06:42)===
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-05/company-sues-tech-giants-claiming-podcast-patent-breach/4735786
S: Alright well Jay, tell us why we're gonna be shut down. We can't do podcasting anymore.

R: Nooooo

E: We're done? This is it?

J: I'm not convinced that we're gonna get shut down as a podcast, but this story has to do with patent trolling. Patent trolling is the business du jour. And if you haven't heard about it, those of you who haven't, it's a pretty simple and amazingly lucrative idea. Here's how it works: Patent trolls, also known as non-practicing entities, or NPEs, are typically companies that buy defunct businesses or ya know any kind of organization or even individual patents. And they buy these companies for their patents specifically, and then they used those acquired patents to sue other companies for patent infringement. It's pretty basic and it goes a long way and they've made a ton of money. These organizations make all or most of their income through the lawsuits. Most of them, like I said, they don't have anything else going on. They become a patent troll and they don't actually have a product or sell anything or do any other type of commerce. It's not 100% fast and true but a large majority of them are just companies that revolve around these lawsuits. And this scam, or whatever you wanna call it, has worked on some of the worlds' most biggest and lucrative companies. The US patent office is widely known to issue patents for ideas that are already in use and common place. And these are ideas like, say online shopping or shopping cart system or a file sharing system or an in app purchase, as an example. And many of these lawsuits are about things that should never have been patented in the first place. Like I think that a shopping cart system should have never been patented. You really can't say, hey you owe me money because you're using this workflow process to sell products online to online customers; to me that's insane. In 2011, patent trolls cost the United States, or companies inside the Unites States, a total of twenty-nine billion dollars; and, they have increased their activity 400% since 2005. And they are 62% of all patent lawsuits in the United States. It's a phenomenal portion of patent lawsuits and they're really growing leaps and bounds year for year. I guess, instead of these companies finding new uses for their patents and expanding on the technology they already own, they're focusing on these lawsuits. You know these companies are, in my opinion, they're pretty transparent because they use similar procedures to get to the point where they can start hitting up the big companies and one of the things that they do is that they'll find a week company or a financially poor company, with no regard of winning anything other than just the lawsuit from this company to set a legal precedent. And then they take that legal precedent, and they take it to a bigger company, and they'll tell the next court, "Hey, we already won a lawsuit about this." And now ya know instead of them ya know just trying to win a lawsuit and maybe stopping that company, they're gonna ask for fifty million dollars. And they guise it as a licensing fee. Oh we're just sueing for licensing fees here. We want them to pay us for the use of the patent, and we want them to go back to this year, or whatever, and now and we're not gonna sue them in the future because they're actually going to be paying us for this licensing fee. Companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Ebay, just to name a few, are starting to turn and face these patent trolls and go for it. Really really get down and dirty in court, and let the years go by and spend the millions and millions of dollars to fight them. But they're putting they're um they're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "No, we're not going to pay any of these blackmail fees. We're actually gonna fight you and try to get you to go out of business." Very recently, June 4th of 2013, the White House enacted five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations to restrict the activities of patent trolls. And this is a huge step forward in helping companies protect themselves and make it much much more difficult for patent trolls to actually win against US based companies. A patent troll named Prsonal Audio LLC has sued three podcasters and sent demand letters to a number of others. Now this is the case that Steve was talking about. Recently this company filed suit against CBS and NBC, and has also sent additional demand letters to small podcasting operations. So an organization called EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting against Personal Audio LLC, which is the company that's sueing these podcasters. And what EFF is trying to do is help to save podcasting. Now the first thing that they did was they asked for donations so they can raise the thirty thousand dollars to begin the lawsuit process. And what they're trying to do, is they're trying to prove that the patent that Personal Audio LLC owns is actually not a legitimate patent at all. And what the, the reason that they're trying to do this is it's the quickest and most direct route to stop the lawsuit. And they way that they're doing it is that they're asking for people to help them find proof that the idea of podcasting, either in part or similar ideas or even the entire idea, if it was ever stated, written down or communicated online. Any way that they can prove before October 2nd of 1996, then they can take that proof to the patent office, go to court and say, "Look it, ya know this idea predates their patent. It was ya know on a public forum and this whole thing is illegitimate." The worst case scenario here is if this company gets a foothold and starts sueing the bigger organizations, ya know some of these organizations that can afford will probably pay; but I'd imagine some of them won't because as most people know podcasting is not really a lucrative venture. For those people that are running a lucrative podcasting venture, like Adam Corrola as an example, he's one of the people being, his company is being sued. Ya know Adam Corrola does a pretty damn good job on his podcast

E: Yeah

J: He's making some decent money over there, I mean this could put him right off the air. Of course, being a podcaster and being just a huge fan of the podcasting world, I stand very firmly against what this company is trying to do. Now, I did read some things that troubled me. That made me think that there might be some legitimacy to this lawsuit because it is possible that the person, the engineer the software engineer, is claiming that he did make these engines and that he does deserve some compensation.

S: So what though? What did he invent? RSS, ya know the really simple syndication, they didn't do that, that's open source. What, MP3 files?

J: No, I I I'm not 100% sure, Steve. I tried to find it, I was all over the web searching for facts and I think it's vague and it's deliberately vague. I think it boils down to the idea that you're distributing serialized episodes of something over the web. That's what I read. That's it. I didn't get to more detail than that.

E: So he's um

S: Yeah, that's still simply b.s.

E: patenting the concept, right? Just the concept of podcasts.

J: Yeah. But let me let me give you a

E: Sounds Week

J: It does sound weak. And let me give you an example of something that I saw on Shark Tank as an example. I really like that show for a lot of reasons, it is entertaining. There is a pretty good amount of stuff to learn if you want to watch it and one of the sharks on the show, it... Real quick, what the show is people come in and pitch their business to rich people, business men and women, and they uh they're asking for money like they wanna they want to be funded. So uh Mark Cuban, who is my favorite person on the show is really, first off we've mentioned him on The Skeptics' Guide before, he's he's the only person I think is really a critical thinker on the show. And he he's fought against pseudoscience when it comes on that show. But one guy came on with a, it was like a vest, and he had a patent where if you had like your iPhone in an internal pocket it runs a wire up to like your neck and you have your ear buds there. And the guy patented basically running a wire through clothing; and Mark Cuban went ape shit on him. Just saying this is b.s. Like, you know it's guys like you that are you know destroying innovation and and growth and and you know companies developing new technologies because ya know you're holding this ridiculous patent. It stops other people from using a similar technology. You can't patent a wire going through clothing. It's absurd. And I think when I watched it, at first I didn't understand why he was getting so upset. I did get his idea, but I didn't understand everything that we just discussed. I have learned a lot since I watched that episode; and now I fully understand it. I completely agree with Mark Cuban. This is the type of thing that squelches innovation, puts companies out of business and ya know all that money is just being syphoned out of these companies that are developing technology. These patent trolling companies are not technology developers. All they're doing is, they're in the business just to make money, that's it. They don't. There's no good side to it. Somebody is just getting rich.

S: They're like just, they're parasites.

J: So if you if you are interested ya know take a look online. Uh look up the company, the name of that company again is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're fighting a lot of other technology and digital based threats to the future of our technology. And I do believe in what they're trying to do and if you're interested, take a look and maybe even make a donation.

S: Obviously, patents are important. People need to be able to protect their intellectual property and benefit from their innovation. But yeah, but patenting like a really basic idea is is counterproductive, it's absurd. The kind of idea that like anybody can come up with "I'm the first person to submit a patent for it". In fact, you can patent ideas that can't even be implemented yet. In other words, if you see a technology coming on the horizon, you can patent a use of that not yet existing technology. And then when the technology does come online, you can then start sueing anybody that tries to use it in the way that you patented. And all you're doing is patenting an idea, a basic obvious idea. It just becomes a race to see who can patent it first. It is totally broken. That kind of system is completely counterproductive.

J: Yeah, it's, well the government is taking steps to heat and it's moving forward. There doesn't seem to be that much holding these decisions that they're making so. I think things are moving in the right direction.

S: Hopefully

=== Class System in Mice (17:21)===
* http://www.universityherald.com/articles/3575/20130617/mice-big-brother-setup-develop-social-structures.htm
17:21
S: Alright well, Rebecca tell us about how mice have their own class system.

R: I will. Uh, yeah, there's a really fun experiment that's been happening on mice; looking at their social strati. And what's interesting isn't the fact that mice set up class systems and different social statuses; but the way in which scientists are starting to study them, and study their social behavior... It's not necessarily...like studying the way animals are interacting with each other isn't necessarily as easy as studying, let's say studying what a particular drug is doing to a particular mouse system, uh it's much more complex. You've got mice interacting with each other, displaying different behaviors doing different things that you have to constantly watch and log in, you know, an objective a way as possible. This study, by Dr. Tali Kimchi, which I did not know was a last name, but I really like it, Kimchi

J: Kimchi

E: Kimchi

R: Yeah Kimchi is a delicious condiment uh, and also a last name. So Dr. Kimchi at the Wiseman's Institute's Neural Biology department is studying mice and their social interactions using a big brother house. So if you recall the tv show, which hasn't been around in the US for quite a long time. Big Brother is a show where they have cameras that are constantly watching the residences of the house. And the residents aren't allowed to leave the house, and the cameras are watching 24 hours. And in the UK, they were broadcast 24 hours in the most boring feed you can possibly imagine. Same sort of deal here, only slightly more complex, uh because the human big brother inhabitants were not microchipped. In this case, yes, the mice had microchips implanted in them.

S: RFIDs

R: RFIDs, yes. Yeah, exactly. The same sort of microchip you put in cats and dogs to keep track of them if they run away.

E: and credit cards.

R: yeah credit cards or tube cards, things like that. So in this case uh the microchips were used to track the mice movements. Mice?

S: Meece

E: Meeces. Meeces to pieces

R: Ok. To track the meeces movements. And they go around their little house so their ccd cameras all over this relatively large house, for a bunch of mice, I think. And a computer examining what those behaviors are.And it was extraordinarily effective at parcing the different movements, at figuring out what the mice were doing, when they were doing it how they were interacting. To the point where uh they could predict with over 90 percent accuracy who the mice were going to be mating with. For instance... uh and they were also able to differentiate between the different genetic strains of the mice, so different strains uh showed different behaviors that they were able to see in the computer analysis. So it was an interesting way of collecting a vast amount of information and parcing it in a way that could have important uses in the future when figuring out uh behavviors. Some of the other things they figured out, they found that within 24 hours uh one group of normal strain mice had already established a leader and like a caste system. So it took about 24 hours for them to figure that out. Uh they also did an experiment where they put, they filled the house with another strain that they labeled as autistic. These mice exhibited very little social engagement. And what they found with the autistic mice, is that

E: they were fascinated

R: Yeah, right. Uh what they found with the autistic mice was that no leader emerged at all, uh no social strati happened. Except like occasionally it would appear that a leader would emerge and then they would promptly be dethroned. So social mice like immediately organized themselves into like a caste system. While autistic mice did not. Part of the, the intersting thing about this system that they've developed of analyzing behavior, can in the future be used for things like identifying the different aspects of disorders like autism or schizophrenia.

S: Yeah, it sounds like a really great research paradigm.

R: Yeah, exactly. It's fun, you can go online and see uh, I'm sure if you google Dr. Kimshee you can find a video of the mice running around in their little house. And it's kind of cool, they're all color coded uh when you watch the videos and you can follow them around as they do different things. It made me want to get my own mouse set-up.

S: They should make it into a reality tv show.

E: They should.

R: People would watch it. I bet within like two weeks, whichever mouse established itself as king would be on the front page of Us magazine.

=== Anti-GMO Pseudoscience (22:50)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/ Once More: Bad Science in the Service of Anti-GMO Activism]
S: Alright, well let's move on. There's a study making the rounds. Another one of those studies reporting to show severe negative outcomes from uh feeding animals GM food, or genetically modified food. Uh so from the abstract of this study, let me read to you a part of the abstract and you can uh tell me what you think about it: Feed intake weight gain mortality and blood biochemistry were measured; organ weights and pathology were determined postmortem. There were no differences pigs fed the GM and non GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality and routine blood biochemistry measurements. The GM diet was associated with gastric and uterine differences in pigs. GM fed pigs had uteri that were 25% heavier than non GM fed pigs. And GM fed pigs had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation. With a rate of 32% of GM fed pigs compared to 12% of non GM fed pigs with a P value of .004. This severe stomach inflammation was worse in GM fed males compared to non GM fed males by a factor of 4. And the GM fed females compared to non GM fed females by a factor of 2.2. So that sounds like pretty impressive.

E: Bad news

S: Pretty impressive outcome, but does anything jump out at you guys that there might be some problems with this study?

R: Nope, seems legit.

E: Everything's great.

S: This is like our lessons on how to evaluate studies right? One thing you have to always ask is whenever they're comparing two different groups, is how many comparisons do they actually look at? Because if you look at enough different comparisons, then you can cherry pick, by random chance you know there's gonna be some correlation somewhere. And if you're cherry picking that out of many comparisons, that's one of the...Remember the researcher degrees of freedom? You know, researchers can manufacture positive results by manipulating the data. And one way of doing that, even if they're doing it honestly or inadvertantly, one way to do that is to make multiple comparisons. Now there's a statistical fix that you're supposed to do for each additional comparison that you do or you make. You have to adjust the statistics to see if it's truly statistically significant. So for example, if you set the P value at .05, then roughly speaking that means that one in twenty comparisons are going to be statistically significant and by chance alone. If you make twenty comparisons and one is .05, that's probably just random chance. But even if you just look at that one thing, if that were the only comparison you made, then the P value of .05 would be meaningful. So they tell you right here in the abstract that feed intake, weight gain or mortality, a whole panel of blood biochemistry were measured. Organ weight, apparently all the organs were weighed and pathologically examined; and now they're just telling us about the stomachs and the uterus. So, that's what we call a fishing expedition, right? David Gorski wrote about this on science-based medicine, so if you want you can... He goes into it in great detail. And I think he absolutely correctly characterizes this as a fishing expedition. You go looking for a whole bunch of things, you're gonna find correlations by random chance alone, right? Astrologers are famous for this. This is astrology with pigs and GM corn. But it's actually even far worse than what you might um, than what you might... Even from the abstract you can say this is B.S. They went fishing and they came up with these two randoms. Why would GM corn cause severe stomach inflammation? But it's actually much worse than that. Because what they did was, this is a good way to increase your probability of generating false positive results. They took inflammation of the stomach, and they broke it down into different, somewhat arbitrary categories. No inflammation, mild, moderate, severe, erosions pinput ulcers, frank ulcers and bleeding ulcers. Out of all of those categories, only severe inflammation was worse in the GM fed versus the regular pigs.

E: Ohh... That's not what they said in the abstract

S: You wouldn't know that from just reading the abstract. All they say is severe inflammation was worse in the pigs fed the GM feed. Yeah but, not all the other kinds of inflammation. And, in fact, if you look at all inflammation, regardless of how severe it is, there was a slight decrease in the GM fed group compared to the non GM fed group.

E: Wow

S: It was just if you cherry pick out the one category in the middle, there wasn't even a dose response curve. That's another question you ask yourself. How many comparisons are being made, is there a dose response to any effect that they're claiming exists? You also of course have to ask is it plausible, but we could put that aside. So this data... So this is an exercise in cherry picking data. They cherry picked the severe inflammation out of this arbitrary categorization of different levels of inflammation. Over all inflammation... ya know this is just a random scatter of data, this is random noise. But actually, the thing that they're claiming, it increases the risk of sever stomach inflammation, overall inflammation was actually decreased in that group. Contradicting what they're pointing out. So this is complete B.S., this is just utter B. S. And this is coming from researchers, Judy Carman for example, who have a history of doing anti GM research.

E: mmmhmmm

S: just seems to be someone with an agenda, basically.

E: Yeah, how does she account for her personal biases.

S: So yeah, there's a bias, misdirection, crappy data ya know just horrific methodology.Also, David pointed out that, which is a very legitimate point, you always wanna know also in studies was anything unusual happening? When you're studying a disease, did the disease behaved like it always does. When you're studying animals, were they animals otherwise normal and healthy other than the thing that you were manipulating. These pigs, did overall, did pretty poorly. They had a very high rate of infection and complications. It's almost as if they weren't well cared for. So that's like an outlyer and really calls into question just what was happening in this study. The final analysis, again you want to avoid nitpicking little details of a study and then claiming that the results are invalid; you have to put it into context. But these are fatal flaws that we're talking about. And taken together, they make the results of this study worthless and uninterpretable. But yet, this is being spread around the internet as a stunning ya know study showing that GM corn and GM feed causes this horrible stomach inflammation in pigs. As if there's something dangerous ya know about this particular type of GM feed. And it's all based upon the naturalistic phallacy. It's all just genetic modification ain't natural. It's really just nonsense.

J: Are people eating the same exact food as they feed the pigs.

S: Well this is , animal feed. So no. They're trying to make genetically modified food seem scary.

J: Yeah.

S: It's just fearmongering, at the end of the day, is what it is.

J: Now, are they gonna do a follow up, Steve? Because typically, when a study like this happens, some other group will do another one similar or exactly like they did just to see if their results match.

S: Yeah, I'd like to see this replicated. You know, I strongly predict this is not the kind of study that's gonna replicate. And replication, of course is in the final analysis, that's how you tell. When you do this kind of multiple analysis where you're just looking at... you're just throwing a whole bunch of crap up against the wall and seeing what sticks, that study is never conclusive. That is always an exploratory study. Then you say, okay, we have this correlation and we looked at twenty, thirty fourty comparisons. We found this correlation. Then you get a fresh set of data, you replicate the study and see if that correlation holds up. If it was all random statistical noise, it will go away. And you'll probably see some other random association. But if it's a real effect, it should replicate. And that's how you know. So this is an exploratory study at best, because of all the multiple comparisons. It's not the kind of thing that should be reported in the press as fear mongering about GM foods. The kind that, at best, inspire a folllow up study. Let me give you an analogy to help put this into perspective: Prayer, intercessory prayer research, you guys familiar with research? Where the number of studies that were done looking at people who were sick and they were getting prayed for by a third party, intercessory prayer and they often didn't even know that they were being prayed for. They knew that they were in the study, but they didn't know if they were in the prayed for group or the not prayed for group. Tons of problems with this research, but the bottom line is, that they did multiple comparisons. For example, they looked at patients in the cardiac ICU and they followed a number of complications, number of days in the ICU, number of days in the hospital, survival... They looked at multiple multiple different end points. And then in one study, again there weren't differences across the board. There was like this one outcome was a little bit better in the prayer group. Then they replicated the study, and a different outcome was a little bit better, but not overall. Like overall it's random noise. But again the same outcome wasn't better, it's like a different outcome every time. That's, that's not a replication, that's a failure to replicate. That is consistent with random noise, which is of course what you would expect when you're hypothesis is magic makes people better, ya know.

E: Hahaha that's true

S: This is when you're considering the multiple comparisons that are being disclosed in the study. You may not be aware that they may have made, the researchers may have made multiple comparisons and only published the ones that were positive, or just a small subset. So they might have done all kinds of comparisons bu that doesn't work that doesn't... just discarded it and never reported it. Which is why why you know no single study is ever that believable, especially if it's like one research group. Uh, or, still one off study. It's hard... We get confronted with this all the time. Oh here's a study on ESP, why don't you guys believe this? Cuz it's one study. Because you have no idea what these researchers really did behind the scenes.

R: It would be great if grade school science tearchers would, during a science fair, point out to their students that all of the things the students did to make their science fair project look better and get an A. It's exactly what scienctists still do once they're actual working scientists and, hey that's wrong. Make sure that you don't actually do that

J: Like fudge the numbers?

R: Yeah, like I did that when I was doing science fair projects I would have outlyers and be like, "Oh that one just didn't count like if I just this then I get, I got like a nice clean line here and uh I get an A. Because it looks like I knew my stuff. Yeah So

S: You're absolutely right. Teachers should emphasize that its the messiness that they wanna see.

R: Yes

S: If they get something that looks too clean, that should count down your grade should go down, not up. Yeah my daughter recently, my older daughter recently like last year had a science fair. And I made sure that there were no shenanigans with her data. But going, walking through the posters of all the other students studies ya know there were a lot of them. Of course ya know we were uber skeptic evaluating a twelve year old science fair project.

J: Could you imagine? Steve walking around like checking out all these like hey kid, you're all wrong over here.

S: I just did it, it was a good teaching opportunity for my daughter. I didn't like criticize the students and make them cry.

J: Sure you didn't

S: It was like to Julia, it was a good lesson. Hey let's look at this study. What do you think about this? What were the methods and what are they doing wrong here? Like are they not using control groups and not carefully defining terms. I mean every error that was possible to make was made. But it is, it was a good and awesome learning opportunity. To ruthlessly pick through those, you can do it in a constructive nurturing way. But that would be a great learning opportunity to show how hard it is to do good science. All the ways in which, even a simple science project can go awry.

R: And on that note, I just wanted to mention that, I think I might have mentioned this before, but you can, if you're interested you can volunteer to be a judge at the local science fair. They'll probably be happy to have you. I did it a couple of years ago at a local high school and I really enjoyed it. Just talking to the kids and finding out what they were interested in, it was pretty cool.

S: Awesome

E: That is cool. Very cool

=== Skunk Ape (36:31)===
* http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/06/14/man-claims-he-spotted-floridas-elusive-skunk-ape/
S: Alright, well Evan, you're gonna finish up the news segment of our show with a the latest stunning evidence of the Florida Skunk Ape.

J: Skunk Ape?

E: The Skunk Ape, of course. In Sarasota County Florida, a man claims he has spotted Florida's elusive Skunk Ape.

S: Very elusive

E: ...so the headlines read from CBS Miami. Alright, so what is a Skunk Ape? Well who better to ask than the folks at Floridaskunkape.com. Yes, there is such a website.

S: Anybody?

E: They claim, it's what Floridians call their big foot, as best known as sasquatch in most other places in North America, oh yeah. Evidence supporting the existence of the creature has been gathered over the years, and consists of hundreds of documented sitings, a few pictures, several foot casts and a few hair samples. Mmhmm. So they have actual evidence, apparently. It gets its name from the very fact that it lives in Florida it in itself emits an awful stench. Now that's their writing, I didn't write that, that's from their website. Lives in the state of Florida and emits an awful stench. People who've had the pleasure to experience the smell, it's described as that of an elephant's cage or a trash dump. And one person even said it was like the scent of a skunk that did battle with a dumpster.

J: *laughs*

E: I went to the gallery on that website to have a look at the photos and stuff and it said, "your search yielded no results." So much for that. But, forget that for now because we have new video evidence. This is smoking gun evidence, smoking gun so hot it must be shot evidence. Mike Falconer is the person who posted the video and still pictures on YouTube.

S: I wonder what his ancestors did for a living.

E: They probably made barrels or something. Uh he says that he captured this footage on March 2nd of this year 2013. That he and his son spotted a large hairy creature off in the, off, it was a field at the Myakka River State Park which is a place in which the Skunk Ape has been sited before, apparently. And there were other people in who um, in this footage you can hear them and they've also stopped their cars on the road to try to get a glimpse as well. Now I think that's um, well not important, but I think noteworthy in the case of this. Instead of having this, we're so used to having this you know there's someone out in the wilderness with a camera shooting ya know whatever they think is a big foot off in the distance. But this one is different it has a gathering, sort of a group of people who are all... They've all seen something; they've seen something off in the distance.

S: Yeah, but they were strolling around like nothing special was going on. Honestly, it didn't seem that impressive to me.

E: They were saying some things in the background like ya know "oh what is that over there" and "I'm trying to get a glimpse of it". At no point did anyone say they smelled something funny or were like ooo that's a skunk or like... I know that if a skunk gets hit by a car like a mile up my road from here I can smell it. That's a very powerful smell and if it's half what they're describing, according to the websites and stuff, I think you would ya know perhaps smell something. But, in any case. So what they did is uh a guy and his son started to pursue whatever it is that they saw out in the fields. So they've got their iPhones right? And they're recording video. And at one point you can kind of see something off in the far grassland. It looks like it has to be hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Something is kinda moving around back there, just some little brown dot or something and they're saying "Oh yeah can you see it? There it is! There it is! Let's go get a closer look".

S: It's pixelsquatch

J: *laughs*

E: Exactly. And that's when they decided, of course, what you do when that happens. Well you turn off your video camera and you start shooting photos instead. So when they started to take photos is when they supposedly captured the quote unquote evidence. And Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, they're brown blotches.

S: Yeah it's

E: Brown blotches off in the trees

S: It turns from pixelsquatch to blobsquatch, to the more classical blobsquatch. Absolutely. It's a completely unrecognizable amorphous brown blob.

R: Enhance!

S: Enhance! Enhance!

R: Zoom in, enhance

E: zoom zoom zoom

S: Evan, do you know what the difference is between the Myakka Skunk Ape and the Hamden Bald Eagle?

E: Oooo um, one really exists and the other doesn't.

S: Yes. I have close up, in focus, unambiguous photographs of the Hamden Bald Eagle

E: Exactly. And yet, once again, someone does not have such shots of the supposed Skunk Ape.

J: The freakin bald headed eagle, that thing could just fly away. You know talk about...it's not just stuck on the ground.

E: Apparently in the year 2000, there was some video footage shot of something that they deemed the Skunk Ape. And then around 2006 someone else came up with something that was more clearer, but to me it was clearly just a hoax, a guy in a suit walking around of some sort. And that's, and then there's this. And that's pretty much it; and a few other blurry photos out there which could have been anything shot by anyone at any time. That's it. That's the sum of evidence you have when it comes to this thing. For the folks who, the guys who, Falconer when he shot this video, when he posted it to YouTube he put up a description on the YouTube channel, YouTube page he has and here's what he wrote in regards to this, and I think this is a bit revealing. He says that: This is real footage my son and I took in Myakka March 2nd 2013. We had iPhones with us. You'll see actual still shots of the thing. Some have called it big foot or sasquatch. The only editing we did to these pictures was to lighten it up. Alright? So here we go. At one point, you hear us talk of two of them. It was a deer out there hiding in the tall grass; maybe that's what it was after. You can see it in the middle at the thin tan line of grass under the tree. You will also see the deer a little to the left and closer in. Hello, deer!

S: Okay

E: Ok, so what's more likely? You've got Skunk Ape legend, ya know, in which there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever. It's all a bunch of blurry photos and weak videos of. Or, the people actually shooting this stuff saying that was clearly deer there, running around. And um, hmmm gee. Skunk Ape or deer? I don't -know. What does Occam's Razor tell us to think in this situation?

S: Hey it's more likely to be a Florida panther than the Skunk Ape.

J: Yeah

R: It'd be more likely to be a zebra

S: Yeah

R: than a Skunk Ape. I mean, cuz the skunk ape doesn't exist.

E: Unimpressive, sorry. It is getting a lot of headlines

J: Alright, Ev, c'mon. This whole thing has been a little vague, ya know. What's your gut tellin ya?

E: My gut's telling me that there is a network of Skunk Apes living in those fields, all over Florida.

J: And once again, I want there to be a Skunk Ape. You know, somebody please find some real evidence and I'd be all over it. But these fuzzy pictures, I'm getting tired of it guys.

S: By the way, I am patenting the word pixelsquatch. Everytime you say it, you've got to give me a quarter.

J: Pixel squatch!

E: Alright, well you'll hear from my lawyers.

S: So have any of you guys heard about the GyroStim?

J: No

S: Probably not.

R: It's pronounced "Yeerow"

S: "yeerow?"

E: Is that a new sandwich they're serving at Subway or something?

R: Yeah it's a combination. It's like a regular gyro, but with Slim Jims

E: Haha cool

S: So this is a machine that was developed by an engineer whose daughter has cerebral palsy. And it's essentially a chair. You sit in the chair and you have a little joystick remote control and you can swing around in all three dimensions, you know.

E: XYZ?

S: Exactly. In every axis. He developed this because she was getting physical therapy in which she had to do exercises to essentially do the same thing. Rotate around in order to um improve her balance in her walking. And, it was a bit tedious. So he, being an engineer, was like I'm gonna help her out, automate this. So he built a chair, the GyroStim, you know he built this chair and it does what he wanted it to do. It rotates around in all three axes. Now unfortunately, some not science-based practioners got their hands on this machine and have ran with it. The engineer is Kevin Maher, and you guys remember Ted Carrick? He is a quote un quote chiropractic neurologist.

J: Yeah I remember that

S: So he is using the GyroStim, and claiming it can cure all kinds of things. So I wrote a review on Science-Based Medicine of the GyroStim. Which, you know, is just one of an endless sequence of devices with overblown claims without adequate evidence. The thing hasn't been studied. It's actually not an illegitimate concept, there is such a thing called vestibular therapy where you essentially do just that. You stimulate the vestibular system by you know putting by rotating and changing your head position over and over again. And it can treat...it's actually a very effective treatment for some kinds of vertigo.

J: What's the vestibular system, Steve?

S: The vestibular system, that's a very good question Jay, is the system in your brain that senses two things - your orientation with respect to gravity and acceleration. So, this is the three semi circular canals that are in your inner ear. They have fluid in them so when you rotate around you're oriented towards gravity the fluid flows through those semi circular canals, which there's three of them, one in each axis, and then that moves hair cells that sense the movement of that fluid. And that's the sensing organ, but then that vestibular information gets taken in by the brain and is process compared to your visual information and tactile information and that's how you get a sense of motion and stability and balance ya know.

J: So this is your internal accelerometer

S: Yeah, well exactly. When there's a disconnect between your visual input and your vestibular input, that results in dizziness and motion sickness. That's why you get motion sick. When your vestibular system is telling you that your rocking up and down and your visual system is not because it is locked to something in the foreground. It's also a very delicate system, and a lot of people have dizziness of vertigo and we can't really identify anything specific that's not working. There's no lesion anywhere and it looks normal. But that integration of misinformation is just a little bit off. Those are the people who do well with vestibular therapy or essentially just retraining the brain to integrate this information. Conceptually it's perfectly fine. But where we get into trouble is in two areas. One is, the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, so it's very expensive. There is no evidence to show that getting vestibular therapy with this 20 30 40 thousand dollar machine is superior to getting vestibular therapy manually with no machine; or just getting a twenty dollar swing and swinging back and forth on it as a way of stimulating your vestibular system. Which is something that physical therapists actually do. Investing in an expensive piece of equipment and paying a lot of money for expensive sessions is not justified until there's research showing this is not only as good as the far cheaper options, but is significantly superior to it. But there's no research, we don't even know if it works at all or that it's safe. All you have is the idea of using the machine. But of course that doesn't stop chiropractors, like Ted Carrick, from starting to use it. But in addition, the claims that are being propogated for this machine, especially by Ted Carrick and also by others now, is that it not only is a way of delivering vestibular therapy- which is the plausible component of the claim - but that it actually helps the brain recover from a traumatic injury.

J: Oh, yeah

S: In genaral, yeah. So I was reviewing a specific article written by a sports writer who wrote and article about the GyroStim, because it's being used to treat a lot of like hockey players who have had head injuries. And he did the typical journalist thing of antecdote miracles happening every day, then quicky, generic canned disclaimer. Well this scientist said it hasn't been tested yet and hasn't been approved by the FDA, now let me go back to these glowing antecdotes. Meanwhile he's talking, he's mentioning Autism and Asperger's. I mean it's ridiculous. So I wrote a typical blog post about it on Science-Based Medicine, and the author of the original article, Adrian Dater who is again a sports writer writing for the Denver Post, leaves a comment, like a really pissy comment - it didn't immediately get, because he was a first time poster it went to moderation and it didn't immediately get approved because we work for a living - in the middle of the day. Then he writes a blog post saying "I'm being censored over on Science-Based Medicine".

E: *laughs* He gave you all of 45 minutes. That's not...

S: He gave a full hour. So, but anyway, that's just a little aside. The thing is he like doubled down and completely defended his journalism. So then I of course, I had to write a follow up post on Neurologica, just about science journalism using him as an example of horrible science journalism.

J: Uh Oh!

E: Gee why would a sports writer be bad at science journalism?

S: Yeah I mean the thing is the guy's a sports writer, I don't expect him to be a good science journalist. But his problem was he wrote an article about science, and he got it all completely wrong. He fell for all the typical pit falls that non-experience trained science journalists fall for when they think that they can cover these complex topics. And he actually was defending his token skepticism. So in my follow up article I characterized different levels at which articles deal with science, especially when there's something contreversial. There's the false balance aproach in which you say oh experts over here say this, and this fringe lunatic over here says that; and you treat them like they're equal. Then there's the token skepticism where you actually give the bulk of the time to the fringe claim and you only have a quick skeptical blurb, which is what he fell into. And then there's the just complete abject gullibility without a hint of skepticism. So he was in the middle category of token skepticism, in which you don't get much credit for that. There's of course the fourth category which is the way it should be, which is appropriate skepticism. Right? But we didn't get that from him. So he was defending his token skepticism and also defending the GyroStim, completely ignoring all of my legitimate actual different criticisms. And in the end he was like criticizing David Goreski and the others on Science-Based Medicine about the positions that we were taking. We were like look, dude, you cover hockey. Go back to covering hockey. Seriously, you're arguing with a group of physicians who have spent a decade writng about these topics. You're telling us we don't know what we're talking about?

J: Did you say that to him?

S: Yes! How arrogant does this guy have to be?

E: Are you serious?

S: Like he had a fit that we disagreed with his journalism. He had a fit and it was horrible. It was horrible token skepticism and bad science writing. He didn't understand the issues at stake. And again, I wouldn't expect him to understand; but he had no sense of his own limitations. And of course he has no editor who would know, you know, that this is an innappropriate way to cover a medical science news story.

E: Yep

J: Steve, it also sounds like he's never engaged in any kind of legitimate discourse about things like that. You know?

S: No, he didn't engage, he got childish right out of the gate. Which, you know, always makes it worse of course.

J: Yeah, I mean I can understand from one perspective a guy like him never really entering that arena before. Not knowing what to expect, you know. And of course let's like, let's also achknowledge the idea here that you went up against Science-Based Medicine, you guys.

S: Yeah that's the thing. He had no idea what he was up against. So he started to back pedal a little bit. Like I wasn't endorsing it, I was just relaying the stories. Peple have a right to know about this; that whole coy bs. And one of our commentors dug up a twitter

E: *laughs*

S: A tweet that he did where he was like read about the device that cured you know this hockey player of his traumatic brain injury. Oh yeah, you're not endorsing it.

J: Uh oh! That sounds like an endorsement! He's just stating facts?

E: Yeah, he's just reporting what he heard

S: Yeah he was totally busted. He was totally busted.

J: How did it end, Steve? Did he just end up having to quit?

S: Yeah, he went away. It was a fun little exchange though.

J: Yeah it's something to learn... it's something for people like us to learn from and it sadly... Did that go back to his man cave and lick his wounds or did he actually say hey you know I screwed up here like what did I do wrong?

S: He did not give any evidence of any self awareness in this exchange.

E: mmmm

R: They rarely do though. You might have planted a seed

S: I might have planted a seed, you never know. But yeah, I don't expect most people to have the scales fall from their eyes and to say I was wrong, mea culpa. Very few people have I think the security and maturity to do that. Especially when you're in the middle of an internet fight. You know everyone has, as you like to call Jay, internet balls. You know?

J: Yeah

E: mmhmm

S: But, yeah you're right, you never know. Maybe he'll be a little bit more gun shy the next time he dips his toe into science journalism. Who knows?

E: Or he'll do some real research into what the hell he's talking about.

S: And we were, we got very polite and very proffesional. We were like listen, we want to help journalists write better. You know next time you want to cover a story like this, we're happy to provide you with some perspective and background information.

J: What?! That'll take hours!

S: *laughs*

J: I don't have time for that!

S: This is, this is what... I just told someone the other day you know in a similar context I'd much rather provide advice ahead of time rather than criticism after the fact. You know, run these things by somebody who knows what they're talking about ahead of time. We're here, we're a resource, ask us. We're, you know... What's the worst thing that could happen? We make your journalism better?

J: Yeah

S: You know? What's the worst thing that could come out of it?

J: It's basically you're like you're saying to them, I'll write your freakin essay paper for you pal just all you gotta do is pick up the phone.

S: Good journalists know how to do that. They know how to use resources well.

== Who's That Noisy? (55:54)==
55:54
S: Alright well, Evan, we're still falling behind on Who's That Noisy, but you're gonna give us a new one for this week.

E: Yeah I'll give you a new one for this week. We are going to catch up on all the correct answers and winners and everything in a couple more episodes. Bare with us while we get through this little stretch of podcasting. And uh I'm gonna play for you this week's brand new, fresh off the presses Who's That Noisy. It is an actual noisy, a classic as I like to say, and here we go...

R: mmm

S: hmmm

E: Okay

S: What do you want to know? Who that was speaking?

E: That's it. Send us your guess wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sgu forums.com. And that's about it; good luck everyone.

S: Thanks Evan

E: Thank you

== Questions and Emails (56:40) ==
=== Staticman (56:40)===
<blockquote>Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, 
Damian Tinkey 
Marlboro, NY</blockquote>
S: We're going to do one e-mail this week. This e-mail comes from Damian Tinkey from Marlboro, NY. He Writes: Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, Damian. So he links to an article

R: It does sound like a super power

S: Yeah, Static Man! They're actually are, there are cartoon super heroes who are basically static, that is their super power, static.

J: That's powerful stuff man

E: Lightning guy, electron boy

S: So, the article he links to is from Septemberf 2005, a little bit

E: Okay

S: But I don't think we ever talked about it. So we might as well deal with this. So what do you guys think? Static man. Let me read the article here, it's very short. I'll just read pieces of it. It's about a man, Frank Clewer, of the Western Victorian city of Warrnambool. It said he was wearing a synthetic nylon jacket and a woolen shirt when he went for a job interview. He walked into the building, the carpet ignited from the fourty thousand volt of static electricity that had built up. It sounded almost like a fire cracker, or something like that he said. Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt. The article goes on to say that his clothes were measured by a fireman as carrying an electrical charge of fourty thousand volts. The Reuters news agency quoted Mr. Barton as saying.

J: Yeah I don't think that fireman could determine that.

E: Fourty thousand volts? You could kill people with that!

S: It's saying... It depends on the current right?

J: Yeah what I'm saying, would firemen be able to make that assessment. I mean I know that they know a lot about things that cause fires and they might say hey in order for this type of thing to happen this is the kind of voltage you need. But it just seems...

S: No that's a physicist, Jay, not a fireman. But I think fourty thousand volts of static electricity is not enough to ignite carpet, first of all. I mean for the firemen to measure the voltage - remember there's no current here, it's static - then they would of had to discharge it. Right? They would have to build it up and discharge it and maybe they could measure the discharge. It's also, it's just too much static electricity. It's almost like, it sounds apocryphal. Oh he had a nylon jacket over a wool sweater and he built up so much static electricity that he ignited the carpet.

J: Yeah, what did the guy run a marathon right before he went in there?

S: Someone speculated that with that much static electricity, wouldn't his hair be standing on end as if he had his hand on one of those grass static electricity generators.

E: Yeah. A voltage meter could figure that out.

S: Yeah I don't know what the voltage you have to get to to have your hair stand on end. Yeah and also, like he got out of his car, why didn't he discharge upon exiting the car when he touched the metal of the door? Or when he walked in the building, how did he get in the building without a discharge?

J: How did he not die?

S: Yeah I don't know if it's possible to develop enough static charge that the discharge would be fatal. I mean there are reports of static discharges causing fires. But that's only when there's some kind of accelerant. This is actually a real risk at the gas station. Either there's gasoline dripping or vapors and you build up the static electricity on the seat of the car. And when you touch the frame of the car it discharges and could spark a fire. There are reported cases of that. I don't think that the static charge that a person can build up on themselves could set a carpet on fire without some kind of gasoline or accelerant. This (?) does give some interesting statistics. They say that the lethal dose of a static charge measured in millijoules is 1,350. Usually like shuffling across a carpet can generate from ten to twenty-five millijoules. So not very much compared to what a lethal dose would be. And they report, really the maximum you could get to would be something on the order of 300 millijoules, just from building up static on yourself. Measured in volts, they reference a study showing that getting in and out of a car can generagte - if you're dressed in nylon - could reach up to twenty-one thousand volts. That was sort of the maximum that was reported; so not quite the fourty thousand volts reported in this story. And for reference, a typical lightning bolt - which is static electric discharge - can contain five hundred megajoules, which is three hundred seventy million times the lethal dose.

E: How does someone end up earning the title of static man if this happened like one time in sort of this fluke thing. It doesn't... the sensationalism that it's worth I suppose.

S: Yeah, cuz it's the media. Some headline writer... I mean how did Super Man get his title? Some headline writer dubbed him Super Man. By the way, have you guys seen the new Super Man movie?

J: No, but I heard it wasn't so good.

S: So, I'm not going to review the movie but I have to say one thing: Krypton, it's moon, busted apart.

R: Oh yeah, someone tweeted me about that.

S: And even worse than all the other movies, it was like half and half almost. Just hanging right next to each other. Why? It's now officially a science fiction movie cliche. Every alien planet has to have a busted apart moon.

E: It's an homage to Thunder the Barbarian. Everyone was clearly very impressed with that horrible cartoon from 1981.

S: But how quickly did that become a cliche? I mean, it's ridiculous.

R: Yeah

S: Show some imagination and don't have scientifically implausible busted apart moon. I mean okay, it's pretty. But you're just doing it like every single other movie did it. Sorry, it loses its' appeal; do something different. A ringed moon, do something else!

J: Yeah I agree Steve. I think, I think what's happening is it's kind of seeping into collective unconscious.

S: Yeah. It's just alien worlds have busted moons, of course they do!

J: What's with these busted up moons?

== Science or Fiction (1:03:05) ==
[http://www.nature.com/news/light-flips-transistor-switch-1.13178 Item #1]: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. [http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/06/05/G34100.1 Item #2]: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617110929.htm Item #3]: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in 12 weeks.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts; two genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys all ready for this week?

J: Very ready

R: Oh yeah

E: Uh, sure

S: Item #1: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. Item #2: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move more towards North America. Item #3: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in twelve weeks. Rebecca, go first.

R: Alright, so a transistor that’s switched on by a single photon; that’s cool and that’s believable to me. Subduction zone… I can believe that there’s a new subduction zone forming. Although, I don’t know if that would mean that Europe is moving towards North America. Um I’m trying to think of, like subduction is I think where one plate is sliding under the other. I know that it’s the powerful, like it causes the most powerful earthquakes. But I don’t know how much it moves continents. Um, I can believe that though; because if it’s one plate sliding over the other one I guess that would bring Europe and North America closer. So then whole body vibration that produces significant weight loss, that’s tough to believe. Because I know that you know there’s those crazy things they sell on TV that you wrap the band around you and it just *mimics vibration sound* like giggles you.

J: *laughs*

E: *laughs*

R: *laughing* Yeah that’s what it sounds like. And I’m fairly certain that those don’t work, but they might be based on something that does work. So I can believe that, I don’t know… I think I’m gonna go with the transistor one just because I don’t really know much about it and the other two make sense, they seem reasonable. So, I’m gonna go with that one.

S: Alrighty, Jay

J: Okay, the one about the transistor that’s switched by the single photon, that is so cool. Yeah, I could see working. Geologists have found the one about the evidence of the subduction zone, I wanna know a lot more about this. That sounds really interesting. How big is this subduction zone, how long will it take to work. And this last one about the whole body vibration, wait, WHOLE BODY VIBRATION THERAPY! Um, that has got to be BS. So there you go.

S: Okay

E: *laughs* has got to be

S: Alright, Evan

E: Transistor switched by a single photon, I don’t see anything scientifically implausible about it certainly. Um, have we gotten to that level of precision yet? Possibly, yeah that one’s possible to me. Um the second one about a new subduction zone forming near Portugal, I have a feeling that is the one that’s going to trip me up. I’m not feeling good about this one. But the last one, the whole body vibration therapy, oh boy. But lost an average of ten of their body mass in twelve weeks, that’s not insignificant. Ten percent is pretty significant. And I think like when you use these things with moderate caloric intake restriction you wind up getting results and it’s hard to determine which one did it. The vibration or your limited on calories, your restricted calories?

J: Yeah, like

E: They should kind of go hand in hand

J: Yeah like use this thing for an hour a day and also you know cut your caloric intake in half and you’ll lose weight.

E: I think people who are using these things are being a little bit more conscious about what it is they’re putting into their bodies. So I think that’s gonna wind up being what’s really going on here. I’m going to say body vibration therapy, that one is the fiction.

S: Okay, so you all agree that geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. You all think this one is science, and this one is SCIENCE.

J: Awesome

R: Yay!

E: That’s what I like about this game, you always get one right.

S: *laughs* Yeah that’s true, way to look on the bright side.

E: Yep

S: They’re calling it an embryonic subduction zone or a new subduction zone. They knew that these two plates came together here. Uh they call this the Gibraltar Arc. But this, they have new evidence now that show that it is actually forming into a subduction zone. The technical implications for this are more about how these subduction zones form; and the fact that…just to read the conclusion in the abstract of the article – our work suggests that the formation of new subduction zones in Atlantic type oceans may not require the spontaneous foundering of its passive margins. Instead, subduction can be seen as an invasive process that propagates from ocean to ocean. So what they’re saying is that you know the way that the spread of subduction zones around the world may actually interact with each other, you know. And cuz it all has to average out, of course. Right? The Earth isn’t growing or shrinking despite what Neil Adams has to say. So any spreading of new ocean floor has to be exactly matched by subduction zones. So I guess what they’re saying that this, cuz it all has to balance out, that they behave as if they’re connected. And a subduction zone can literally propagate from ocean to ocean.

R: I read this

S: Yep

R: …a little while ago. But I didn’t read the thing about the continents moving closer together. But I did read, this thing that I had to read several times to make sure that I wasn’t misreading it – I still might be misreading it -, but it was something like this could eventually result in the Atlantic Ocean filtering down into the, like further into the Earth’s core. Like it could drain the Atlantic Ocean because of this subduction zone.

S: Yeah I haven’t read that in the context of this story but that certainly is, there is you know speculation among geologists about what happens to the ocean because of subduction zones. And is the water in the oceans getting dragged down you know toward deeper into the Earth and will this eventually drain away our oceans or if not than what is the… like what other factors are keeping it in equilibrium.

R: Scary.

S: In the articles about this story though, not in the technical paper but in the reporting about this story, it said that Pangaea type super continents that come together and they break apart and the continents will spread apart and then eventually the continents will come back together and reform a super continent. This has happened a few times over the life of the Earth. So what they’re saying is that if this new subduction zone could spell the transition from the continents drifting apart to coming back together again with the Atlantic Ocean closing up Europe and the United States coming back together. But what I don’t get though is how that happens when we have the Mid-Atlantic ridge with three spreading zones in the middle of the Atlantic. The conventional wisdom is that the Atlantic Ocean is getting bigger and the pacific ocean which is shrinking will this actually change the direction in which the continents alter the mid-Atlantic Spread? I could not find answers to those questions.

J: Does this happen incredibly slowly, Steve, or is this

S: Well yeah of course! It’s over hundreds of millions of years.

J: It’s not like the ocean is gonna sink like breach and sink into the core or something crazy like that right?

S: No no no, these are things that happen over millions of years, yeah.

R: But it could mean that we could be seeing powerful earthquakes coming out of that zone.

S: Yes, that’s true. Alright, well let’s go to number one. Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. Rebecca, you think this one is fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this one is science. And this one is SCIENCE.

J: AAAAAH!

E: Oohh

R: Ugh! Damn my crap knowledge of this stuff.

S: Yep this is a huge advance that, Bob would have got this. This is one of those huge advances that we were waiting for. “About time!” ya know that’s how Bob would have said it.

E: Yeah, “We’ve been waiting eight years for this”

S: We have been trying to develop light-based computers right? Rather than sending information around a computer and interacting with transistors with electricity with electrons with like a an optical computer would use light because light obviously goes as fast as anything can go. So researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, have reported building a transistor that is switched by a single photon. That’s huge, that’s a major building block of optical computers. They take advantage of a property called electromagnetically induced transparency, by sending a single ‘gate’ photon that could turn the switch on or off due to this electromagnetically induced transparency. So the injected photon excites the caesium atoms, rendering them reflective to light trying to cross the cloud. So it turns off the signal.

E: What kind of atoms were those, Steve?

S: Caesium

E: Caesium?

J: That is awesome

S: Yeah

J: I wonder how long it will take to get that into a usable shape.

S: Yeah you’re right though, that’s the thing. Will this actually translate into a usable computer that’s gonna sit on your desktop? Who knows? But it is, it’s huge. They are able to make a photon gated transistor, so.

E: That will be cool.

S: Let’s go on to number three. A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese patients, obese subjects, who lost on average ten percent of their body mass in twelve weeks; and of course this one is the fiction.

J: You made the whole thing up?

S: No, no no. Whole body vibration therapy is a thing, and there was an article based upon that. I did, Rebecca, calculate the percentage over time to make it plausible. You did exactly what I was hoping somebody would do and say oh that sounds plausible.

J: *laughs*

E: *laughs*

R: Thanks, thanks for that. You used my logics against me.

J: As soon as Rebecca went like *mimics vibration sound* I went no way! That went out in the twenties!

S: But what this is, this treatment, the study was looking at bone strength and muscle strength in cerebral palsy patients. And they found that it increased the bone density and muscle strength in the lower legs and the bone density also in the spine, but not elsewhere in the body. I don’t know why. This was a small study, thirteen adolescents with cerebral palsy received the treatment nine minutes per day for twenty weeks. So there doesn’t appear to be a control group, again it appears to be a bit of a fishing expedition with only some things being positive and some things not being positive. I couldn’t use this as a science, because they study isn’t robust enough for this to be a science item. So I made it into the fiction. But yeah so it’s using whole body vibrational therapy to increase bone density. The weight loss bit is the bit I made up. Speculative, I don’t know. I mean this is an exploratory study. You can’t draw conclusions from this, you can’t say that this therapy actually works but

E: Ted Carrick can

S: Right? He’ll start selling it for twenty thousand dollars.

E: That’s right, yeah.

S: Absolutely

R: Nice job you guys.

E: I hadn’t won one of those in a while so it feels good.

S: A rare solo loss for Rebecca, very rare.

R: Yeah

S: But you did well this year, you are kickin butt this year; I do have to say.

R: I think I have been

S: Yep

R: I’ll take it on the chin, like a champ

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:15:25) ==
<blockquote>Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth.</blockquote>
S: Alright Jay, do you have an impressive quote for us this week?

J: Yeah, so, a lot of people e-mailed me and I’m going to be continuing to yell the name.

S: You had a lot of positive feedback for the yelling. I had, I don’t recall seeing one negative one. No one said stop the yelling.

R: No

J: Stop with all that yellin

R: Now, of course we’re going to get the people

S: Too late. You had your chance, do not e-mail us telling Jay to stop yelling. You had your chance, the window is closed.

J: On top of that, people said oh and by the way what’s with the… you didn’t uh continue or finalize the dice rolling hubbub.

S: Yeah, Jay you have to do the calculations and we’ll give the results.

J: Yeah, so this is what I’m doing, because I’m so busy with Occ the Skeptical Caveman business, um could anybody that has the time be willing to go back and make the calculation for me? E-mail me info at theskepticsguide.org. I will mention your name on the show, I will thank you, and I will see who’s better – me or randomness.

S: Got it.

R: I’m gonna put my nickel down on randomness.

S: *laughs

E: *laughs

J: We shall see. Uh, ok this is a quote sent in from a listener called Magnus Husweit (?) from Oslo, Norway. And the quote is: Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth. And that is a quote from Robert Royar, paraphrasing Frank Zappa’s anadiplosis. It means, it’s the repetition of the last word of a preceding clause.

S: Ah

J: So the word is used at the end of a sentence and then used again at the beginning of the next sentence.

S: It’s like that recent pop song by The Wanted, I’m glad you came. I don’t know anything

R: *laughing* what?

J: I don’t even know who they are. What is that?

R: What

E: Is that like a boy band or something?

R: They’re like the Backstreet Boys

J: ROBERT ROYAR. PARAPHRASING FRANK ZAPPA’S ANAPOLIS…DIPLOSIS…ANADIPLOSIS

S: I do like that quote, I like that quote a lot.

J: Thank you

S: It’s very profound

R: Yeah

S: Of course truth, is not profundity

R: Don’t start

== Announcements () ==

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== References ==
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SGU Episode 415

2014-02-15T22:09:52Z

Lmwood: /* Science or Fiction (1:03:05) */

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== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is June 29th 2013 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening everyone

R: Where the hell is Bob?

S: Bob, once again, is too busy to join us. Bob has a major thing happening at work

E: uh huh

S: that does keep him away.

== This Day in Skepticism (0:35) ==
June 29: Happy birthday to Dr. Roy Wolford, calorie restriction pioneer and Biosphere 2 inhabitant
R: Hey, happy birthday to Roy Wolford, Dr. Wolford.

E: Awesome! Is he a listener?

R: Well, uh no, he died in 2004. He was born June, 29 1924 and Dr. Roy Wolford is probably best known for being one of the inhabitants of Biosphere 2.

E: I love that movie

R: He was also though a pioneer of calory restriction as used for longevity. He wrote a book about living to 120. It was not, uh...

E: A life of perpetual hunger, that's what the title of the book was called.

J: Imagine what Perry would have said about that.

R: I think Perry would have said that he would gladly die at 20 than live on a restricted calorie diet.

J: Choking on a hamburger right?

R: Right

E: hahaha

R: Yeah, uh, Wolford lived on something like 1600 calories a day

E: Alright

S: It's not that bad.

R: Which is realy not that bad

J: That's not bad

R: That's slightly more than what I take in when I'm trying to cut back on my fats.

S: That's a weight loss diet, 1600 calories a day is a pretty reasonable weight loss plan

R: He died at the age of 79 uh, from comoplications from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease.

E: That's not, that's got nothing to do with his lifestyle

R: It's not, yeah it's not a fair, it's not really a fair judgement wether or not his calorie restriction were the... Although he claimed at the end of his life his calorie restriction helped extend his life further by a couple of years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's.

J: Unprovable

R: Yeah

E: That's a nice antecdote.

S: Honestly, ya know, again this is all antecdotal I have no idea about the individual case but, that's unlikely to be true.

R: Yeah

S: Calorie restriction actually hastens death in ALS. It often, the ability to get enough calories in and keep your calories up is a huge pragnostic factor in ALS. So if anything, ya know, ya can't, it's very hard to argue that calorie restriction prolonged his life once he developed ALS.

R. But yeah, he also thought that his ALS was possibly caused by his time in the Biosphere due to lack of oxygen and increased nitrous oxide. Exactly what causes ALS is not entirely settled and so he suspected that that might have had something to do with it.

S: That's wild speculation.

E: Nitrous Oxides builds up in these Biodomes? I didn't know that.

J: Well they were having trouble in there right?

R: They had a lot of trouble. Although, they did stay in there for two years. But, one of the problems they had was a severe lack of food and so it was helpful that their resident doctor happened to be this guy who believed in calorie restriction. So he convinced them all to go on this diet. Ya know, to join him in his diet.

S: Yeah since we have no food anyway.

R: Right. And so they did, but even so at some point many months in they finally broke down and opened up a container of food that was grown outside of the Biosphere in order to supplement their diets.

J: That would have made an awesome YouTube video

E: Watching the moment of breaking that chest open

S: So they just didn't...Did something go wrong with their food production or they didn't plan properly?

J: If you couldn't grow enough food in the Biodome, and ya know, it was never done before. They didn't have the data going in to it, it was all just engineered and it failed. Biodome experiments didn't last as long as they hoped

S: It wasn't self sustaining.

J: No

R: Yeah by all their models I guess it seemed like it could be done but one thing after another went wrong.

S: Now imagined if that happened on Mars.

R: Well that's why they do this stuff. Although I'm sad that they're not, they haven't continued trying that sort of thing. I would love to see that project continue.

S: Yeah

R: I don't know the details of why nobody has tried Biosphere 3

J: Ya know what I noticed?

E: Pauly Shore

J: I noticed, looking at pictures of Biodome, first its interesting if you look at it today, a weed infested back yard. I also noticed it looks a lot like Logan's Run, that's 1970s movie of the people that get put into a Biodome like thing because that was like a last ditch effort to sav humanity and people were in there so long that they forgot what happened. That was Biodome man. Ya ever see, like it looks like it.

S: Well, it was a lot bigger

R: There was apparently a Biosphere 3, maybe still is in Syberia and there's a Biosphere J in Japan. But one other thing, despite the potential pseudoscience with origins of disease and wether or not calorie restriction can actually work in humans to extend life, Walford seemed like a really awesome guy. At one point he would like take off for a time as part of his studies and measure the rectal temperatures of holy men in India.

E: uh huh

R: He traveresed the African continent on foot, according to his obituary in the New York Times. So he specifically wanted to go out and just have adventures. He said, " If you spend all your time in the laboratories, as most scientists do, you might spend 35 years in the lab and be very successful and win a Nobel Prize. But those 35 years will be just a blur. So I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities." He once broke his leg on a motorcycle.

E: That qualifies as dangerous.
R: Yeah he just seems like he was a fun guy.

== News Items ==
=== Podcasting Patent (06:42)===
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-05/company-sues-tech-giants-claiming-podcast-patent-breach/4735786
S: Alright well Jay, tell us why we're gonna be shut down. We can't do podcasting anymore.

R: Nooooo

E: We're done? This is it?

J: I'm not convinced that we're gonna get shut down as a podcast, but this story has to do with patent trolling. Patent trolling is the business du jour. And if you haven't heard about it, those of you who haven't, it's a pretty simple and amazingly lucrative idea. Here's how it works: Patent trolls, also known as non-practicing entities, or NPEs, are typically companies that buy defunct businesses or ya know any kind of organization or even individual patents. And they buy these companies for their patents specifically, and then they used those acquired patents to sue other companies for patent infringement. It's pretty basic and it goes a long way and they've made a ton of money. These organizations make all or most of their income through the lawsuits. Most of them, like I said, they don't have anything else going on. They become a patent troll and they don't actually have a product or sell anything or do any other type of commerce. It's not 100% fast and true but a large majority of them are just companies that revolve around these lawsuits. And this scam, or whatever you wanna call it, has worked on some of the worlds' most biggest and lucrative companies. The US patent office is widely known to issue patents for ideas that are already in use and common place. And these are ideas like, say online shopping or shopping cart system or a file sharing system or an in app purchase, as an example. And many of these lawsuits are about things that should never have been patented in the first place. Like I think that a shopping cart system should have never been patented. You really can't say, hey you owe me money because you're using this workflow process to sell products online to online customers; to me that's insane. In 2011, patent trolls cost the United States, or companies inside the Unites States, a total of twenty-nine billion dollars; and, they have increased their activity 400% since 2005. And they are 62% of all patent lawsuits in the United States. It's a phenomenal portion of patent lawsuits and they're really growing leaps and bounds year for year. I guess, instead of these companies finding new uses for their patents and expanding on the technology they already own, they're focusing on these lawsuits. You know these companies are, in my opinion, they're pretty transparent because they use similar procedures to get to the point where they can start hitting up the big companies and one of the things that they do is that they'll find a week company or a financially poor company, with no regard of winning anything other than just the lawsuit from this company to set a legal precedent. And then they take that legal precedent, and they take it to a bigger company, and they'll tell the next court, "Hey, we already won a lawsuit about this." And now ya know instead of them ya know just trying to win a lawsuit and maybe stopping that company, they're gonna ask for fifty million dollars. And they guise it as a licensing fee. Oh we're just sueing for licensing fees here. We want them to pay us for the use of the patent, and we want them to go back to this year, or whatever, and now and we're not gonna sue them in the future because they're actually going to be paying us for this licensing fee. Companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Ebay, just to name a few, are starting to turn and face these patent trolls and go for it. Really really get down and dirty in court, and let the years go by and spend the millions and millions of dollars to fight them. But they're putting they're um they're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "No, we're not going to pay any of these blackmail fees. We're actually gonna fight you and try to get you to go out of business." Very recently, June 4th of 2013, the White House enacted five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations to restrict the activities of patent trolls. And this is a huge step forward in helping companies protect themselves and make it much much more difficult for patent trolls to actually win against US based companies. A patent troll named Prsonal Audio LLC has sued three podcasters and sent demand letters to a number of others. Now this is the case that Steve was talking about. Recently this company filed suit against CBS and NBC, and has also sent additional demand letters to small podcasting operations. So an organization called EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting against Personal Audio LLC, which is the company that's sueing these podcasters. And what EFF is trying to do is help to save podcasting. Now the first thing that they did was they asked for donations so they can raise the thirty thousand dollars to begin the lawsuit process. And what they're trying to do, is they're trying to prove that the patent that Personal Audio LLC owns is actually not a legitimate patent at all. And what the, the reason that they're trying to do this is it's the quickest and most direct route to stop the lawsuit. And they way that they're doing it is that they're asking for people to help them find proof that the idea of podcasting, either in part or similar ideas or even the entire idea, if it was ever stated, written down or communicated online. Any way that they can prove before October 2nd of 1996, then they can take that proof to the patent office, go to court and say, "Look it, ya know this idea predates their patent. It was ya know on a public forum and this whole thing is illegitimate." The worst case scenario here is if this company gets a foothold and starts sueing the bigger organizations, ya know some of these organizations that can afford will probably pay; but I'd imagine some of them won't because as most people know podcasting is not really a lucrative venture. For those people that are running a lucrative podcasting venture, like Adam Corrola as an example, he's one of the people being, his company is being sued. Ya know Adam Corrola does a pretty damn good job on his podcast

E: Yeah

J: He's making some decent money over there, I mean this could put him right off the air. Of course, being a podcaster and being just a huge fan of the podcasting world, I stand very firmly against what this company is trying to do. Now, I did read some things that troubled me. That made me think that there might be some legitimacy to this lawsuit because it is possible that the person, the engineer the software engineer, is claiming that he did make these engines and that he does deserve some compensation.

S: So what though? What did he invent? RSS, ya know the really simple syndication, they didn't do that, that's open source. What, MP3 files?

J: No, I I I'm not 100% sure, Steve. I tried to find it, I was all over the web searching for facts and I think it's vague and it's deliberately vague. I think it boils down to the idea that you're distributing serialized episodes of something over the web. That's what I read. That's it. I didn't get to more detail than that.

E: So he's um

S: Yeah, that's still simply b.s.

E: patenting the concept, right? Just the concept of podcasts.

J: Yeah. But let me let me give you a

E: Sounds Week

J: It does sound weak. And let me give you an example of something that I saw on Shark Tank as an example. I really like that show for a lot of reasons, it is entertaining. There is a pretty good amount of stuff to learn if you want to watch it and one of the sharks on the show, it... Real quick, what the show is people come in and pitch their business to rich people, business men and women, and they uh they're asking for money like they wanna they want to be funded. So uh Mark Cuban, who is my favorite person on the show is really, first off we've mentioned him on The Skeptics' Guide before, he's he's the only person I think is really a critical thinker on the show. And he he's fought against pseudoscience when it comes on that show. But one guy came on with a, it was like a vest, and he had a patent where if you had like your iPhone in an internal pocket it runs a wire up to like your neck and you have your ear buds there. And the guy patented basically running a wire through clothing; and Mark Cuban went ape shit on him. Just saying this is b.s. Like, you know it's guys like you that are you know destroying innovation and and growth and and you know companies developing new technologies because ya know you're holding this ridiculous patent. It stops other people from using a similar technology. You can't patent a wire going through clothing. It's absurd. And I think when I watched it, at first I didn't understand why he was getting so upset. I did get his idea, but I didn't understand everything that we just discussed. I have learned a lot since I watched that episode; and now I fully understand it. I completely agree with Mark Cuban. This is the type of thing that squelches innovation, puts companies out of business and ya know all that money is just being syphoned out of these companies that are developing technology. These patent trolling companies are not technology developers. All they're doing is, they're in the business just to make money, that's it. They don't. There's no good side to it. Somebody is just getting rich.

S: They're like just, they're parasites.

J: So if you if you are interested ya know take a look online. Uh look up the company, the name of that company again is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're fighting a lot of other technology and digital based threats to the future of our technology. And I do believe in what they're trying to do and if you're interested, take a look and maybe even make a donation.

S: Obviously, patents are important. People need to be able to protect their intellectual property and benefit from their innovation. But yeah, but patenting like a really basic idea is is counterproductive, it's absurd. The kind of idea that like anybody can come up with "I'm the first person to submit a patent for it". In fact, you can patent ideas that can't even be implemented yet. In other words, if you see a technology coming on the horizon, you can patent a use of that not yet existing technology. And then when the technology does come online, you can then start sueing anybody that tries to use it in the way that you patented. And all you're doing is patenting an idea, a basic obvious idea. It just becomes a race to see who can patent it first. It is totally broken. That kind of system is completely counterproductive.

J: Yeah, it's, well the government is taking steps to heat and it's moving forward. There doesn't seem to be that much holding these decisions that they're making so. I think things are moving in the right direction.

S: Hopefully

=== Class System in Mice (17:21)===
* http://www.universityherald.com/articles/3575/20130617/mice-big-brother-setup-develop-social-structures.htm
17:21
S: Alright well, Rebecca tell us about how mice have their own class system.

R: I will. Uh, yeah, there's a really fun experiment that's been happening on mice; looking at their social strati. And what's interesting isn't the fact that mice set up class systems and different social statuses; but the way in which scientists are starting to study them, and study their social behavior... It's not necessarily...like studying the way animals are interacting with each other isn't necessarily as easy as studying, let's say studying what a particular drug is doing to a particular mouse system, uh it's much more complex. You've got mice interacting with each other, displaying different behaviors doing different things that you have to constantly watch and log in, you know, an objective a way as possible. This study, by Dr. Tali Kimchi, which I did not know was a last name, but I really like it, Kimchi

J: Kimchi

E: Kimchi

R: Yeah Kimchi is a delicious condiment uh, and also a last name. So Dr. Kimchi at the Wiseman's Institute's Neural Biology department is studying mice and their social interactions using a big brother house. So if you recall the tv show, which hasn't been around in the US for quite a long time. Big Brother is a show where they have cameras that are constantly watching the residences of the house. And the residents aren't allowed to leave the house, and the cameras are watching 24 hours. And in the UK, they were broadcast 24 hours in the most boring feed you can possibly imagine. Same sort of deal here, only slightly more complex, uh because the human big brother inhabitants were not microchipped. In this case, yes, the mice had microchips implanted in them.

S: RFIDs

R: RFIDs, yes. Yeah, exactly. The same sort of microchip you put in cats and dogs to keep track of them if they run away.

E: and credit cards.

R: yeah credit cards or tube cards, things like that. So in this case uh the microchips were used to track the mice movements. Mice?

S: Meece

E: Meeces. Meeces to pieces

R: Ok. To track the meeces movements. And they go around their little house so their ccd cameras all over this relatively large house, for a bunch of mice, I think. And a computer examining what those behaviors are.And it was extraordinarily effective at parcing the different movements, at figuring out what the mice were doing, when they were doing it how they were interacting. To the point where uh they could predict with over 90 percent accuracy who the mice were going to be mating with. For instance... uh and they were also able to differentiate between the different genetic strains of the mice, so different strains uh showed different behaviors that they were able to see in the computer analysis. So it was an interesting way of collecting a vast amount of information and parcing it in a way that could have important uses in the future when figuring out uh behavviors. Some of the other things they figured out, they found that within 24 hours uh one group of normal strain mice had already established a leader and like a caste system. So it took about 24 hours for them to figure that out. Uh they also did an experiment where they put, they filled the house with another strain that they labeled as autistic. These mice exhibited very little social engagement. And what they found with the autistic mice, is that

E: they were fascinated

R: Yeah, right. Uh what they found with the autistic mice was that no leader emerged at all, uh no social strati happened. Except like occasionally it would appear that a leader would emerge and then they would promptly be dethroned. So social mice like immediately organized themselves into like a caste system. While autistic mice did not. Part of the, the intersting thing about this system that they've developed of analyzing behavior, can in the future be used for things like identifying the different aspects of disorders like autism or schizophrenia.

S: Yeah, it sounds like a really great research paradigm.

R: Yeah, exactly. It's fun, you can go online and see uh, I'm sure if you google Dr. Kimshee you can find a video of the mice running around in their little house. And it's kind of cool, they're all color coded uh when you watch the videos and you can follow them around as they do different things. It made me want to get my own mouse set-up.

S: They should make it into a reality tv show.

E: They should.

R: People would watch it. I bet within like two weeks, whichever mouse established itself as king would be on the front page of Us magazine.

=== Anti-GMO Pseudoscience (22:50)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/ Once More: Bad Science in the Service of Anti-GMO Activism]
S: Alright, well let's move on. There's a study making the rounds. Another one of those studies reporting to show severe negative outcomes from uh feeding animals GM food, or genetically modified food. Uh so from the abstract of this study, let me read to you a part of the abstract and you can uh tell me what you think about it: Feed intake weight gain mortality and blood biochemistry were measured; organ weights and pathology were determined postmortem. There were no differences pigs fed the GM and non GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality and routine blood biochemistry measurements. The GM diet was associated with gastric and uterine differences in pigs. GM fed pigs had uteri that were 25% heavier than non GM fed pigs. And GM fed pigs had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation. With a rate of 32% of GM fed pigs compared to 12% of non GM fed pigs with a P value of .004. This severe stomach inflammation was worse in GM fed males compared to non GM fed males by a factor of 4. And the GM fed females compared to non GM fed females by a factor of 2.2. So that sounds like pretty impressive.

E: Bad news

S: Pretty impressive outcome, but does anything jump out at you guys that there might be some problems with this study?

R: Nope, seems legit.

E: Everything's great.

S: This is like our lessons on how to evaluate studies right? One thing you have to always ask is whenever they're comparing two different groups, is how many comparisons do they actually look at? Because if you look at enough different comparisons, then you can cherry pick, by random chance you know there's gonna be some correlation somewhere. And if you're cherry picking that out of many comparisons, that's one of the...Remember the researcher degrees of freedom? You know, researchers can manufacture positive results by manipulating the data. And one way of doing that, even if they're doing it honestly or inadvertantly, one way to do that is to make multiple comparisons. Now there's a statistical fix that you're supposed to do for each additional comparison that you do or you make. You have to adjust the statistics to see if it's truly statistically significant. So for example, if you set the P value at .05, then roughly speaking that means that one in twenty comparisons are going to be statistically significant and by chance alone. If you make twenty comparisons and one is .05, that's probably just random chance. But even if you just look at that one thing, if that were the only comparison you made, then the P value of .05 would be meaningful. So they tell you right here in the abstract that feed intake, weight gain or mortality, a whole panel of blood biochemistry were measured. Organ weight, apparently all the organs were weighed and pathologically examined; and now they're just telling us about the stomachs and the uterus. So, that's what we call a fishing expedition, right? David Gorski wrote about this on science-based medicine, so if you want you can... He goes into it in great detail. And I think he absolutely correctly characterizes this as a fishing expedition. You go looking for a whole bunch of things, you're gonna find correlations by random chance alone, right? Astrologers are famous for this. This is astrology with pigs and GM corn. But it's actually even far worse than what you might um, than what you might... Even from the abstract you can say this is B.S. They went fishing and they came up with these two randoms. Why would GM corn cause severe stomach inflammation? But it's actually much worse than that. Because what they did was, this is a good way to increase your probability of generating false positive results. They took inflammation of the stomach, and they broke it down into different, somewhat arbitrary categories. No inflammation, mild, moderate, severe, erosions pinput ulcers, frank ulcers and bleeding ulcers. Out of all of those categories, only severe inflammation was worse in the GM fed versus the regular pigs.

E: Ohh... That's not what they said in the abstract

S: You wouldn't know that from just reading the abstract. All they say is severe inflammation was worse in the pigs fed the GM feed. Yeah but, not all the other kinds of inflammation. And, in fact, if you look at all inflammation, regardless of how severe it is, there was a slight decrease in the GM fed group compared to the non GM fed group.

E: Wow

S: It was just if you cherry pick out the one category in the middle, there wasn't even a dose response curve. That's another question you ask yourself. How many comparisons are being made, is there a dose response to any effect that they're claiming exists? You also of course have to ask is it plausible, but we could put that aside. So this data... So this is an exercise in cherry picking data. They cherry picked the severe inflammation out of this arbitrary categorization of different levels of inflammation. Over all inflammation... ya know this is just a random scatter of data, this is random noise. But actually, the thing that they're claiming, it increases the risk of sever stomach inflammation, overall inflammation was actually decreased in that group. Contradicting what they're pointing out. So this is complete B.S., this is just utter B. S. And this is coming from researchers, Judy Carman for example, who have a history of doing anti GM research.

E: mmmhmmm

S: just seems to be someone with an agenda, basically.

E: Yeah, how does she account for her personal biases.

S: So yeah, there's a bias, misdirection, crappy data ya know just horrific methodology.Also, David pointed out that, which is a very legitimate point, you always wanna know also in studies was anything unusual happening? When you're studying a disease, did the disease behaved like it always does. When you're studying animals, were they animals otherwise normal and healthy other than the thing that you were manipulating. These pigs, did overall, did pretty poorly. They had a very high rate of infection and complications. It's almost as if they weren't well cared for. So that's like an outlyer and really calls into question just what was happening in this study. The final analysis, again you want to avoid nitpicking little details of a study and then claiming that the results are invalid; you have to put it into context. But these are fatal flaws that we're talking about. And taken together, they make the results of this study worthless and uninterpretable. But yet, this is being spread around the internet as a stunning ya know study showing that GM corn and GM feed causes this horrible stomach inflammation in pigs. As if there's something dangerous ya know about this particular type of GM feed. And it's all based upon the naturalistic phallacy. It's all just genetic modification ain't natural. It's really just nonsense.

J: Are people eating the same exact food as they feed the pigs.

S: Well this is , animal feed. So no. They're trying to make genetically modified food seem scary.

J: Yeah.

S: It's just fearmongering, at the end of the day, is what it is.

J: Now, are they gonna do a follow up, Steve? Because typically, when a study like this happens, some other group will do another one similar or exactly like they did just to see if their results match.

S: Yeah, I'd like to see this replicated. You know, I strongly predict this is not the kind of study that's gonna replicate. And replication, of course is in the final analysis, that's how you tell. When you do this kind of multiple analysis where you're just looking at... you're just throwing a whole bunch of crap up against the wall and seeing what sticks, that study is never conclusive. That is always an exploratory study. Then you say, okay, we have this correlation and we looked at twenty, thirty fourty comparisons. We found this correlation. Then you get a fresh set of data, you replicate the study and see if that correlation holds up. If it was all random statistical noise, it will go away. And you'll probably see some other random association. But if it's a real effect, it should replicate. And that's how you know. So this is an exploratory study at best, because of all the multiple comparisons. It's not the kind of thing that should be reported in the press as fear mongering about GM foods. The kind that, at best, inspire a folllow up study. Let me give you an analogy to help put this into perspective: Prayer, intercessory prayer research, you guys familiar with research? Where the number of studies that were done looking at people who were sick and they were getting prayed for by a third party, intercessory prayer and they often didn't even know that they were being prayed for. They knew that they were in the study, but they didn't know if they were in the prayed for group or the not prayed for group. Tons of problems with this research, but the bottom line is, that they did multiple comparisons. For example, they looked at patients in the cardiac ICU and they followed a number of complications, number of days in the ICU, number of days in the hospital, survival... They looked at multiple multiple different end points. And then in one study, again there weren't differences across the board. There was like this one outcome was a little bit better in the prayer group. Then they replicated the study, and a different outcome was a little bit better, but not overall. Like overall it's random noise. But again the same outcome wasn't better, it's like a different outcome every time. That's, that's not a replication, that's a failure to replicate. That is consistent with random noise, which is of course what you would expect when you're hypothesis is magic makes people better, ya know.

E: Hahaha that's true

S: This is when you're considering the multiple comparisons that are being disclosed in the study. You may not be aware that they may have made, the researchers may have made multiple comparisons and only published the ones that were positive, or just a small subset. So they might have done all kinds of comparisons bu that doesn't work that doesn't... just discarded it and never reported it. Which is why why you know no single study is ever that believable, especially if it's like one research group. Uh, or, still one off study. It's hard... We get confronted with this all the time. Oh here's a study on ESP, why don't you guys believe this? Cuz it's one study. Because you have no idea what these researchers really did behind the scenes.

R: It would be great if grade school science tearchers would, during a science fair, point out to their students that all of the things the students did to make their science fair project look better and get an A. It's exactly what scienctists still do once they're actual working scientists and, hey that's wrong. Make sure that you don't actually do that

J: Like fudge the numbers?

R: Yeah, like I did that when I was doing science fair projects I would have outlyers and be like, "Oh that one just didn't count like if I just this then I get, I got like a nice clean line here and uh I get an A. Because it looks like I knew my stuff. Yeah So

S: You're absolutely right. Teachers should emphasize that its the messiness that they wanna see.

R: Yes

S: If they get something that looks too clean, that should count down your grade should go down, not up. Yeah my daughter recently, my older daughter recently like last year had a science fair. And I made sure that there were no shenanigans with her data. But going, walking through the posters of all the other students studies ya know there were a lot of them. Of course ya know we were uber skeptic evaluating a twelve year old science fair project.

J: Could you imagine? Steve walking around like checking out all these like hey kid, you're all wrong over here.

S: I just did it, it was a good teaching opportunity for my daughter. I didn't like criticize the students and make them cry.

J: Sure you didn't

S: It was like to Julia, it was a good lesson. Hey let's look at this study. What do you think about this? What were the methods and what are they doing wrong here? Like are they not using control groups and not carefully defining terms. I mean every error that was possible to make was made. But it is, it was a good and awesome learning opportunity. To ruthlessly pick through those, you can do it in a constructive nurturing way. But that would be a great learning opportunity to show how hard it is to do good science. All the ways in which, even a simple science project can go awry.

R: And on that note, I just wanted to mention that, I think I might have mentioned this before, but you can, if you're interested you can volunteer to be a judge at the local science fair. They'll probably be happy to have you. I did it a couple of years ago at a local high school and I really enjoyed it. Just talking to the kids and finding out what they were interested in, it was pretty cool.

S: Awesome

E: That is cool. Very cool

=== Skunk Ape (36:31)===
* http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/06/14/man-claims-he-spotted-floridas-elusive-skunk-ape/
S: Alright, well Evan, you're gonna finish up the news segment of our show with a the latest stunning evidence of the Florida Skunk Ape.

J: Skunk Ape?

E: The Skunk Ape, of course. In Sarasota County Florida, a man claims he has spotted Florida's elusive Skunk Ape.

S: Very elusive

E: ...so the headlines read from CBS Miami. Alright, so what is a Skunk Ape? Well who better to ask than the folks at Floridaskunkape.com. Yes, there is such a website.

S: Anybody?

E: They claim, it's what Floridians call their big foot, as best known as sasquatch in most other places in North America, oh yeah. Evidence supporting the existence of the creature has been gathered over the years, and consists of hundreds of documented sitings, a few pictures, several foot casts and a few hair samples. Mmhmm. So they have actual evidence, apparently. It gets its name from the very fact that it lives in Florida it in itself emits an awful stench. Now that's their writing, I didn't write that, that's from their website. Lives in the state of Florida and emits an awful stench. People who've had the pleasure to experience the smell, it's described as that of an elephant's cage or a trash dump. And one person even said it was like the scent of a skunk that did battle with a dumpster.

J: *laughs*

E: I went to the gallery on that website to have a look at the photos and stuff and it said, "your search yielded no results." So much for that. But, forget that for now because we have new video evidence. This is smoking gun evidence, smoking gun so hot it must be shot evidence. Mike Falconer is the person who posted the video and still pictures on YouTube.

S: I wonder what his ancestors did for a living.

E: They probably made barrels or something. Uh he says that he captured this footage on March 2nd of this year 2013. That he and his son spotted a large hairy creature off in the, off, it was a field at the Myakka River State Park which is a place in which the Skunk Ape has been sited before, apparently. And there were other people in who um, in this footage you can hear them and they've also stopped their cars on the road to try to get a glimpse as well. Now I think that's um, well not important, but I think noteworthy in the case of this. Instead of having this, we're so used to having this you know there's someone out in the wilderness with a camera shooting ya know whatever they think is a big foot off in the distance. But this one is different it has a gathering, sort of a group of people who are all... They've all seen something; they've seen something off in the distance.

S: Yeah, but they were strolling around like nothing special was going on. Honestly, it didn't seem that impressive to me.

E: They were saying some things in the background like ya know "oh what is that over there" and "I'm trying to get a glimpse of it". At no point did anyone say they smelled something funny or were like ooo that's a skunk or like... I know that if a skunk gets hit by a car like a mile up my road from here I can smell it. That's a very powerful smell and if it's half what they're describing, according to the websites and stuff, I think you would ya know perhaps smell something. But, in any case. So what they did is uh a guy and his son started to pursue whatever it is that they saw out in the fields. So they've got their iPhones right? And they're recording video. And at one point you can kind of see something off in the far grassland. It looks like it has to be hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Something is kinda moving around back there, just some little brown dot or something and they're saying "Oh yeah can you see it? There it is! There it is! Let's go get a closer look".

S: It's pixelsquatch

J: *laughs*

E: Exactly. And that's when they decided, of course, what you do when that happens. Well you turn off your video camera and you start shooting photos instead. So when they started to take photos is when they supposedly captured the quote unquote evidence. And Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, they're brown blotches.

S: Yeah it's

E: Brown blotches off in the trees

S: It turns from pixelsquatch to blobsquatch, to the more classical blobsquatch. Absolutely. It's a completely unrecognizable amorphous brown blob.

R: Enhance!

S: Enhance! Enhance!

R: Zoom in, enhance

E: zoom zoom zoom

S: Evan, do you know what the difference is between the Myakka Skunk Ape and the Hamden Bald Eagle?

E: Oooo um, one really exists and the other doesn't.

S: Yes. I have close up, in focus, unambiguous photographs of the Hamden Bald Eagle

E: Exactly. And yet, once again, someone does not have such shots of the supposed Skunk Ape.

J: The freakin bald headed eagle, that thing could just fly away. You know talk about...it's not just stuck on the ground.

E: Apparently in the year 2000, there was some video footage shot of something that they deemed the Skunk Ape. And then around 2006 someone else came up with something that was more clearer, but to me it was clearly just a hoax, a guy in a suit walking around of some sort. And that's, and then there's this. And that's pretty much it; and a few other blurry photos out there which could have been anything shot by anyone at any time. That's it. That's the sum of evidence you have when it comes to this thing. For the folks who, the guys who, Falconer when he shot this video, when he posted it to YouTube he put up a description on the YouTube channel, YouTube page he has and here's what he wrote in regards to this, and I think this is a bit revealing. He says that: This is real footage my son and I took in Myakka March 2nd 2013. We had iPhones with us. You'll see actual still shots of the thing. Some have called it big foot or sasquatch. The only editing we did to these pictures was to lighten it up. Alright? So here we go. At one point, you hear us talk of two of them. It was a deer out there hiding in the tall grass; maybe that's what it was after. You can see it in the middle at the thin tan line of grass under the tree. You will also see the deer a little to the left and closer in. Hello, deer!

S: Okay

E: Ok, so what's more likely? You've got Skunk Ape legend, ya know, in which there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever. It's all a bunch of blurry photos and weak videos of. Or, the people actually shooting this stuff saying that was clearly deer there, running around. And um, hmmm gee. Skunk Ape or deer? I don't -know. What does Occam's Razor tell us to think in this situation?

S: Hey it's more likely to be a Florida panther than the Skunk Ape.

J: Yeah

R: It'd be more likely to be a zebra

S: Yeah

R: than a Skunk Ape. I mean, cuz the skunk ape doesn't exist.

E: Unimpressive, sorry. It is getting a lot of headlines

J: Alright, Ev, c'mon. This whole thing has been a little vague, ya know. What's your gut tellin ya?

E: My gut's telling me that there is a network of Skunk Apes living in those fields, all over Florida.

J: And once again, I want there to be a Skunk Ape. You know, somebody please find some real evidence and I'd be all over it. But these fuzzy pictures, I'm getting tired of it guys.

S: By the way, I am patenting the word pixelsquatch. Everytime you say it, you've got to give me a quarter.

J: Pixel squatch!

E: Alright, well you'll hear from my lawyers.

S: So have any of you guys heard about the GyroStim?

J: No

S: Probably not.

R: It's pronounced "Yeerow"

S: "yeerow?"

E: Is that a new sandwich they're serving at Subway or something?

R: Yeah it's a combination. It's like a regular gyro, but with Slim Jims

E: Haha cool

S: So this is a machine that was developed by an engineer whose daughter has cerebral palsy. And it's essentially a chair. You sit in the chair and you have a little joystick remote control and you can swing around in all three dimensions, you know.

E: XYZ?

S: Exactly. In every axis. He developed this because she was getting physical therapy in which she had to do exercises to essentially do the same thing. Rotate around in order to um improve her balance in her walking. And, it was a bit tedious. So he, being an engineer, was like I'm gonna help her out, automate this. So he built a chair, the GyroStim, you know he built this chair and it does what he wanted it to do. It rotates around in all three axes. Now unfortunately, some not science-based practioners got their hands on this machine and have ran with it. The engineer is Kevin Maher, and you guys remember Ted Carrick? He is a quote un quote chiropractic neurologist.

J: Yeah I remember that

S: So he is using the GyroStim, and claiming it can cure all kinds of things. So I wrote a review on Science-Based Medicine of the GyroStim. Which, you know, is just one of an endless sequence of devices with overblown claims without adequate evidence. The thing hasn't been studied. It's actually not an illegitimate concept, there is such a thing called vestibular therapy where you essentially do just that. You stimulate the vestibular system by you know putting by rotating and changing your head position over and over again. And it can treat...it's actually a very effective treatment for some kinds of vertigo.

J: What's the vestibular system, Steve?

S: The vestibular system, that's a very good question Jay, is the system in your brain that senses two things - your orientation with respect to gravity and acceleration. So, this is the three semi circular canals that are in your inner ear. They have fluid in them so when you rotate around you're oriented towards gravity the fluid flows through those semi circular canals, which there's three of them, one in each axis, and then that moves hair cells that sense the movement of that fluid. And that's the sensing organ, but then that vestibular information gets taken in by the brain and is process compared to your visual information and tactile information and that's how you get a sense of motion and stability and balance ya know.

J: So this is your internal accelerometer

S: Yeah, well exactly. When there's a disconnect between your visual input and your vestibular input, that results in dizziness and motion sickness. That's why you get motion sick. When your vestibular system is telling you that your rocking up and down and your visual system is not because it is locked to something in the foreground. It's also a very delicate system, and a lot of people have dizziness of vertigo and we can't really identify anything specific that's not working. There's no lesion anywhere and it looks normal. But that integration of misinformation is just a little bit off. Those are the people who do well with vestibular therapy or essentially just retraining the brain to integrate this information. Conceptually it's perfectly fine. But where we get into trouble is in two areas. One is, the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, so it's very expensive. There is no evidence to show that getting vestibular therapy with this 20 30 40 thousand dollar machine is superior to getting vestibular therapy manually with no machine; or just getting a twenty dollar swing and swinging back and forth on it as a way of stimulating your vestibular system. Which is something that physical therapists actually do. Investing in an expensive piece of equipment and paying a lot of money for expensive sessions is not justified until there's research showing this is not only as good as the far cheaper options, but is significantly superior to it. But there's no research, we don't even know if it works at all or that it's safe. All you have is the idea of using the machine. But of course that doesn't stop chiropractors, like Ted Carrick, from starting to use it. But in addition, the claims that are being propogated for this machine, especially by Ted Carrick and also by others now, is that it not only is a way of delivering vestibular therapy- which is the plausible component of the claim - but that it actually helps the brain recover from a traumatic injury.

J: Oh, yeah

S: In genaral, yeah. So I was reviewing a specific article written by a sports writer who wrote and article about the GyroStim, because it's being used to treat a lot of like hockey players who have had head injuries. And he did the typical journalist thing of antecdote miracles happening every day, then quicky, generic canned disclaimer. Well this scientist said it hasn't been tested yet and hasn't been approved by the FDA, now let me go back to these glowing antecdotes. Meanwhile he's talking, he's mentioning Autism and Asperger's. I mean it's ridiculous. So I wrote a typical blog post about it on Science-Based Medicine, and the author of the original article, Adrian Dater who is again a sports writer writing for the Denver Post, leaves a comment, like a really pissy comment - it didn't immediately get, because he was a first time poster it went to moderation and it didn't immediately get approved because we work for a living - in the middle of the day. Then he writes a blog post saying "I'm being censored over on Science-Based Medicine".

E: *laughs* He gave you all of 45 minutes. That's not...

S: He gave a full hour. So, but anyway, that's just a little aside. The thing is he like doubled down and completely defended his journalism. So then I of course, I had to write a follow up post on Neurologica, just about science journalism using him as an example of horrible science journalism.

J: Uh Oh!

E: Gee why would a sports writer be bad at science journalism?

S: Yeah I mean the thing is the guy's a sports writer, I don't expect him to be a good science journalist. But his problem was he wrote an article about science, and he got it all completely wrong. He fell for all the typical pit falls that non-experience trained science journalists fall for when they think that they can cover these complex topics. And he actually was defending his token skepticism. So in my follow up article I characterized different levels at which articles deal with science, especially when there's something contreversial. There's the false balance aproach in which you say oh experts over here say this, and this fringe lunatic over here says that; and you treat them like they're equal. Then there's the token skepticism where you actually give the bulk of the time to the fringe claim and you only have a quick skeptical blurb, which is what he fell into. And then there's the just complete abject gullibility without a hint of skepticism. So he was in the middle category of token skepticism, in which you don't get much credit for that. There's of course the fourth category which is the way it should be, which is appropriate skepticism. Right? But we didn't get that from him. So he was defending his token skepticism and also defending the GyroStim, completely ignoring all of my legitimate actual different criticisms. And in the end he was like criticizing David Goreski and the others on Science-Based Medicine about the positions that we were taking. We were like look, dude, you cover hockey. Go back to covering hockey. Seriously, you're arguing with a group of physicians who have spent a decade writng about these topics. You're telling us we don't know what we're talking about?

J: Did you say that to him?

S: Yes! How arrogant does this guy have to be?

E: Are you serious?

S: Like he had a fit that we disagreed with his journalism. He had a fit and it was horrible. It was horrible token skepticism and bad science writing. He didn't understand the issues at stake. And again, I wouldn't expect him to understand; but he had no sense of his own limitations. And of course he has no editor who would know, you know, that this is an innappropriate way to cover a medical science news story.

E: Yep

J: Steve, it also sounds like he's never engaged in any kind of legitimate discourse about things like that. You know?

S: No, he didn't engage, he got childish right out of the gate. Which, you know, always makes it worse of course.

J: Yeah, I mean I can understand from one perspective a guy like him never really entering that arena before. Not knowing what to expect, you know. And of course let's like, let's also achknowledge the idea here that you went up against Science-Based Medicine, you guys.

S: Yeah that's the thing. He had no idea what he was up against. So he started to back pedal a little bit. Like I wasn't endorsing it, I was just relaying the stories. Peple have a right to know about this; that whole coy bs. And one of our commentors dug up a twitter

E: *laughs*

S: A tweet that he did where he was like read about the device that cured you know this hockey player of his traumatic brain injury. Oh yeah, you're not endorsing it.

J: Uh oh! That sounds like an endorsement! He's just stating facts?

E: Yeah, he's just reporting what he heard

S: Yeah he was totally busted. He was totally busted.

J: How did it end, Steve? Did he just end up having to quit?

S: Yeah, he went away. It was a fun little exchange though.

J: Yeah it's something to learn... it's something for people like us to learn from and it sadly... Did that go back to his man cave and lick his wounds or did he actually say hey you know I screwed up here like what did I do wrong?

S: He did not give any evidence of any self awareness in this exchange.

E: mmmm

R: They rarely do though. You might have planted a seed

S: I might have planted a seed, you never know. But yeah, I don't expect most people to have the scales fall from their eyes and to say I was wrong, mea culpa. Very few people have I think the security and maturity to do that. Especially when you're in the middle of an internet fight. You know everyone has, as you like to call Jay, internet balls. You know?

J: Yeah

E: mmhmm

S: But, yeah you're right, you never know. Maybe he'll be a little bit more gun shy the next time he dips his toe into science journalism. Who knows?

E: Or he'll do some real research into what the hell he's talking about.

S: And we were, we got very polite and very proffesional. We were like listen, we want to help journalists write better. You know next time you want to cover a story like this, we're happy to provide you with some perspective and background information.

J: What?! That'll take hours!

S: *laughs*

J: I don't have time for that!

S: This is, this is what... I just told someone the other day you know in a similar context I'd much rather provide advice ahead of time rather than criticism after the fact. You know, run these things by somebody who knows what they're talking about ahead of time. We're here, we're a resource, ask us. We're, you know... What's the worst thing that could happen? We make your journalism better?

J: Yeah

S: You know? What's the worst thing that could come out of it?

J: It's basically you're like you're saying to them, I'll write your freakin essay paper for you pal just all you gotta do is pick up the phone.

S: Good journalists know how to do that. They know how to use resources well.

== Who's That Noisy? (55:54)==
55:54
S: Alright well, Evan, we're still falling behind on Who's That Noisy, but you're gonna give us a new one for this week.

E: Yeah I'll give you a new one for this week. We are going to catch up on all the correct answers and winners and everything in a couple more episodes. Bare with us while we get through this little stretch of podcasting. And uh I'm gonna play for you this week's brand new, fresh off the presses Who's That Noisy. It is an actual noisy, a classic as I like to say, and here we go...

R: mmm

S: hmmm

E: Okay

S: What do you want to know? Who that was speaking?

E: That's it. Send us your guess wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sgu forums.com. And that's about it; good luck everyone.

S: Thanks Evan

E: Thank you

== Questions and Emails (56:40) ==
=== Staticman (56:40)===
<blockquote>Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, 
Damian Tinkey 
Marlboro, NY</blockquote>
S: We're going to do one e-mail this week. This e-mail comes from Damian Tinkey from Marlboro, NY. He Writes: Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, Damian. So he links to an article

R: It does sound like a super power

S: Yeah, Static Man! They're actually are, there are cartoon super heroes who are basically static, that is their super power, static.

J: That's powerful stuff man

E: Lightning guy, electron boy

S: So, the article he links to is from Septemberf 2005, a little bit

E: Okay

S: But I don't think we ever talked about it. So we might as well deal with this. So what do you guys think? Static man. Let me read the article here, it's very short. I'll just read pieces of it. It's about a man, Frank Clewer, of the Western Victorian city of Warrnambool. It said he was wearing a synthetic nylon jacket and a woolen shirt when he went for a job interview. He walked into the building, the carpet ignited from the fourty thousand volt of static electricity that had built up. It sounded almost like a fire cracker, or something like that he said. Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt. The article goes on to say that his clothes were measured by a fireman as carrying an electrical charge of fourty thousand volts. The Reuters news agency quoted Mr. Barton as saying.

J: Yeah I don't think that fireman could determine that.

E: Fourty thousand volts? You could kill people with that!

S: It's saying... It depends on the current right?

J: Yeah what I'm saying, would firemen be able to make that assessment. I mean I know that they know a lot about things that cause fires and they might say hey in order for this type of thing to happen this is the kind of voltage you need. But it just seems...

S: No that's a physicist, Jay, not a fireman. But I think fourty thousand volts of static electricity is not enough to ignite carpet, first of all. I mean for the firemen to measure the voltage - remember there's no current here, it's static - then they would of had to discharge it. Right? They would have to build it up and discharge it and maybe they could measure the discharge. It's also, it's just too much static electricity. It's almost like, it sounds apocryphal. Oh he had a nylon jacket over a wool sweater and he built up so much static electricity that he ignited the carpet.

J: Yeah, what did the guy run a marathon right before he went in there?

S: Someone speculated that with that much static electricity, wouldn't his hair be standing on end as if he had his hand on one of those grass static electricity generators.

E: Yeah. A voltage meter could figure that out.

S: Yeah I don't know what the voltage you have to get to to have your hair stand on end. Yeah and also, like he got out of his car, why didn't he discharge upon exiting the car when he touched the metal of the door? Or when he walked in the building, how did he get in the building without a discharge?

J: How did he not die?

S: Yeah I don't know if it's possible to develop enough static charge that the discharge would be fatal. I mean there are reports of static discharges causing fires. But that's only when there's some kind of accelerant. This is actually a real risk at the gas station. Either there's gasoline dripping or vapors and you build up the static electricity on the seat of the car. And when you touch the frame of the car it discharges and could spark a fire. There are reported cases of that. I don't think that the static charge that a person can build up on themselves could set a carpet on fire without some kind of gasoline or accelerant. This (?) does give some interesting statistics. They say that the lethal dose of a static charge measured in millijoules is 1,350. Usually like shuffling across a carpet can generate from ten to twenty-five millijoules. So not very much compared to what a lethal dose would be. And they report, really the maximum you could get to would be something on the order of 300 millijoules, just from building up static on yourself. Measured in volts, they reference a study showing that getting in and out of a car can generagte - if you're dressed in nylon - could reach up to twenty-one thousand volts. That was sort of the maximum that was reported; so not quite the fourty thousand volts reported in this story. And for reference, a typical lightning bolt - which is static electric discharge - can contain five hundred megajoules, which is three hundred seventy million times the lethal dose.

E: How does someone end up earning the title of static man if this happened like one time in sort of this fluke thing. It doesn't... the sensationalism that it's worth I suppose.

S: Yeah, cuz it's the media. Some headline writer... I mean how did Super Man get his title? Some headline writer dubbed him Super Man. By the way, have you guys seen the new Super Man movie?

J: No, but I heard it wasn't so good.

S: So, I'm not going to review the movie but I have to say one thing: Krypton, it's moon, busted apart.

R: Oh yeah, someone tweeted me about that.

S: And even worse than all the other movies, it was like half and half almost. Just hanging right next to each other. Why? It's now officially a science fiction movie cliche. Every alien planet has to have a busted apart moon.

E: It's an homage to Thunder the Barbarian. Everyone was clearly very impressed with that horrible cartoon from 1981.

S: But how quickly did that become a cliche? I mean, it's ridiculous.

R: Yeah

S: Show some imagination and don't have scientifically implausible busted apart moon. I mean okay, it's pretty. But you're just doing it like every single other movie did it. Sorry, it loses its' appeal; do something different. A ringed moon, do something else!

J: Yeah I agree Steve. I think, I think what's happening is it's kind of seeping into collective unconscious.

S: Yeah. It's just alien worlds have busted moons, of course they do!

J: What's with these busted up moons?

== Science or Fiction (1:03:05) ==
[http://www.nature.com/news/light-flips-transistor-switch-1.13178 Item #1]: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. [http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/06/05/G34100.1 Item #2]: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617110929.htm Item #3]: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in 12 weeks.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts; two genuine and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys all ready for this week?

J: Very ready

R: Oh yeah

E: Uh, sure

S: Item #1: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. Item #2: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move more towards North America. Item #3: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in twelve weeks. Rebecca, go first.

R: Alright, so a transistor that’s switched on by a single photon; that’s cool and that’s believable to me. Subduction zone… I can believe that there’s a new subduction zone forming. Although, I don’t know if that would mean that Europe is moving towards North America. Um I’m trying to think of, like subduction is I think where one plate is sliding under the other. I know that it’s the powerful, like it causes the most powerful earthquakes. But I don’t know how much it moves continents. Um, I can believe that though; because if it’s one plate sliding over the other one I guess that would bring Europe and North America closer. So then whole body vibration that produces significant weight loss, that’s tough to believe. Because I know that you know there’s those crazy things they sell on TV that you wrap the band around you and it just *mimics vibration sound* like giggles you.

J: *laughs*

E: *laughs*

R: *laughing* Yeah that’s what it sounds like. And I’m fairly certain that those don’t work, but they might be based on something that does work. So I can believe that, I don’t know… I think I’m gonna go with the transistor one just because I don’t really know much about it and the other two make sense, they seem reasonable. So, I’m gonna go with that one.

S: Alrighty, Jay

J: Okay, the one about the transistor that’s switched by the single photon, that is so cool. Yeah, I could see working. Geologists have found the one about the evidence of the subduction zone, I wanna know a lot more about this. That sounds really interesting. How big is this subduction zone, how long will it take to work. And this last one about the whole body vibration, wait, WHOLE BODY VIBRATION THERAPY! Um, that has got to be BS. So there you go.

S: Okay

E: *laughs* has got to be

S: Alright, Evan

E: Transistor switched by a single photon, I don’t see anything scientifically implausible about it certainly. Um, have we gotten to that level of precision yet? Possibly, yeah that one’s possible to me. Um the second one about a new subduction zone forming near Portugal, I have a feeling that is the one that’s going to trip me up. I’m not feeling good about this one. But the last one, the whole body vibration therapy, oh boy. But lost an average of ten of their body mass in twelve weeks, that’s not insignificant. Ten percent is pretty significant. And I think like when you use these things with moderate caloric intake restriction you wind up getting results and it’s hard to determine which one did it. The vibration or your limited on calories, your restricted calories?

J: Yeah, like

E: They should kind of go hand in hand

J: Yeah like use this thing for an hour a day and also you know cut your caloric intake in half and you’ll lose weight.

E: I think people who are using these things are being a little bit more conscious about what it is they’re putting into their bodies. So I think that’s gonna wind up being what’s really going on here. I’m going to say body vibration therapy, that one is the fiction.

S: Okay, so you all agree that geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. You all think this one is science, and this one is SCIENCE.

J: Awesome

R: Yay!

E: That’s what I like about this game, you always get one right.

S: *laughs* Yeah that’s true, way to look on the bright side.

E: Yep

S: They’re calling it an embryonic subduction zone or a new subduction zone. They knew that these two plates came together here. Uh they call this the Gibraltar Arc. But this, they have new evidence now that show that it is actually forming into a subduction zone. The technical implications for this are more about how these subduction zones form; and the fact that…just to read the conclusion in the abstract of the article – our work suggests that the formation of new subduction zones in Atlantic type oceans may not require the spontaneous foundering of its passive margins. Instead, subduction can be seen as an invasive process that propagates from ocean to ocean. So what they’re saying is that you know the way that the spread of subduction zones around the world may actually interact with each other, you know. And cuz it all has to average out, of course. Right? The Earth isn’t growing or shrinking despite what Neil Adams has to say. So any spreading of new ocean floor has to be exactly matched by subduction zones. So I guess what they’re saying that this, cuz it all has to balance out, that they behave as if they’re connected. And a subduction zone can literally propagate from ocean to ocean.

R: I read this

S: Yep

R: …a little while ago. But I didn’t read the thing about the continents moving closer together. But I did read, this thing that I had to read several times to make sure that I wasn’t misreading it – I still might be misreading it -, but it was something like this could eventually result in the Atlantic Ocean filtering down into the, like further into the Earth’s core. Like it could drain the Atlantic Ocean because of this subduction zone.

S: Yeah I haven’t read that in the context of this story but that certainly is, there is you know speculation among geologists about what happens to the ocean because of subduction zones. And is the water in the oceans getting dragged down you know toward deeper into the Earth and will this eventually drain away our oceans or if not than what is the… like what other factors are keeping it in equilibrium.

R: Scary.

S: In the articles about this story though, not in the technical paper but in the reporting about this story, it said that Pangaea type super continents that come together and they break apart and the continents will spread apart and then eventually the continents will come back together and reform a super continent. This has happened a few times over the life of the Earth. So what they’re saying is that if this new subduction zone could spell the transition from the continents drifting apart to coming back together again with the Atlantic Ocean closing up Europe and the United States coming back together. But what I don’t get though is how that happens when we have the Mid-Atlantic ridge with three spreading zones in the middle of the Atlantic. The conventional wisdom is that the Atlantic Ocean is getting bigger and the pacific ocean which is shrinking will this actually change the direction in which the continents alter the mid-Atlantic Spread? I could not find answers to those questions.

J: Does this happen incredibly slowly, Steve, or is this

S: Well yeah of course! It’s over hundreds of millions of years.

J: It’s not like the ocean is gonna sink like breach and sink into the core or something crazy like that right?

S: No no no, these are things that happen over millions of years, yeah.

R: But it could mean that we could be seeing powerful earthquakes coming out of that zone.

S: Yes, that’s true. Alright, well let’s go to number one. Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. Rebecca, you think this one is fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this one is science. And this one is SCIENCE.

J: AAAAAH!

E: Oohh

R: Ugh! Damn my crap knowledge of this stuff.

S: Yep this is a huge advance that, Bob would have got this. This is one of those huge advances that we were waiting for. “About time!” ya know that’s how Bob would have said it.

E: Yeah, “We’ve been waiting eight years for this”

S: We have been trying to develop light-based computers right? Rather than sending information around a computer and interacting with transistors with electricity with electrons with like a an optical computer would use light because light obviously goes as fast as anything can go. So researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, have reported building a transistor that is switched by a single photon. That’s huge, that’s a major building block of optical computers. They take advantage of a property called electromagnetically induced transparency, by sending a single ‘gate’ photon that could turn the switch on or off due to this electromagnetically induced transparency. So the injected photon excites the caesium atoms, rendering them reflective to light trying to cross the cloud. So it turns off the signal.

E: What kind of atoms were those, Steve?

S: Caesium

E: Caesium?

J: That is awesome

S: Yeah

J: I wonder how long it will take to get that into a usable shape.

S: Yeah you’re right though, that’s the thing. Will this actually translate into a usable computer that’s gonna sit on your desktop? Who knows? But it is, it’s huge. They are able to make a photon gated transistor, so.

E: That will be cool.

S: Let’s go on to number three. A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese patients, obese subjects, who lost on average ten percent of their body mass in twelve weeks; and of course this one is the fiction.

J: You made the whole thing up?

S: No, no no. Whole body vibration therapy is a thing, and there was an article based upon that. I did, Rebecca, calculate the percentage over time to make it plausible. You did exactly what I was hoping somebody would do and say oh that sounds plausible.

J: *laughs*

E: *laughs*

R: Thanks, thanks for that. You used my logics against me.

J: As soon as Rebecca went like *mimics vibration sound* I went no way! That went out in the twenties!

S: But what this is, this treatment, the study was looking at bone strength and muscle strength in cerebral palsy patients. And they found that it increased the bone density and muscle strength in the lower legs and the bone density also in the spine, but not elsewhere in the body. I don’t know why. This was a small study, thirteen adolescents with cerebral palsy received the treatment nine minutes per day for twenty weeks. So there doesn’t appear to be a control group, again it appears to be a bit of a fishing expedition with only some things being positive and some things not being positive. I couldn’t use this as a science, because they study isn’t robust enough for this to be a science item. So I made it into the fiction. But yeah so it’s using whole body vibrational therapy to increase bone density. The weight loss bit is the bit I made up. Speculative, I don’t know. I mean this is an exploratory study. You can’t draw conclusions from this, you can’t say that this therapy actually works but

E: Ted Carrick can

S: Right? He’ll start selling it for twenty thousand dollars.

E: That’s right, yeah.

S: Absolutely

R: Nice job you guys.

E: I hadn’t won one of those in a while so it feels good.

S: A rare solo loss for Rebecca, very rare.

R: Yeah

S: But you did well this year, you are kickin butt this year; I do have to say.

R: I think I have been

S: Yep

R: I’ll take it on the chin, like a champ

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth.</blockquote>

== Announcements () ==

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 415

2014-02-13T05:28:55Z

Lmwood: /* Questions and Emails (56:40) */

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== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is June 29th 2013 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening everyone

R: Where the hell is Bob?

S: Bob, once again, is too busy to join us. Bob has a major thing happening at work

E: uh huh

S: that does keep him away.

== This Day in Skepticism (0:35) ==
June 29: Happy birthday to Dr. Roy Wolford, calorie restriction pioneer and Biosphere 2 inhabitant
R: Hey, happy birthday to Roy Wolford, Dr. Wolford.

E: Awesome! Is he a listener?

R: Well, uh no, he died in 2004. He was born June, 29 1924 and Dr. Roy Wolford is probably best known for being one of the inhabitants of Biosphere 2.

E: I love that movie

R: He was also though a pioneer of calory restriction as used for longevity. He wrote a book about living to 120. It was not, uh...

E: A life of perpetual hunger, that's what the title of the book was called.

J: Imagine what Perry would have said about that.

R: I think Perry would have said that he would gladly die at 20 than live on a restricted calorie diet.

J: Choking on a hamburger right?

R: Right

E: hahaha

R: Yeah, uh, Wolford lived on something like 1600 calories a day

E: Alright

S: It's not that bad.

R: Which is realy not that bad

J: That's not bad

R: That's slightly more than what I take in when I'm trying to cut back on my fats.

S: That's a weight loss diet, 1600 calories a day is a pretty reasonable weight loss plan

R: He died at the age of 79 uh, from comoplications from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease.

E: That's not, that's got nothing to do with his lifestyle

R: It's not, yeah it's not a fair, it's not really a fair judgement wether or not his calorie restriction were the... Although he claimed at the end of his life his calorie restriction helped extend his life further by a couple of years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's.

J: Unprovable

R: Yeah

E: That's a nice antecdote.

S: Honestly, ya know, again this is all antecdotal I have no idea about the individual case but, that's unlikely to be true.

R: Yeah

S: Calorie restriction actually hastens death in ALS. It often, the ability to get enough calories in and keep your calories up is a huge pragnostic factor in ALS. So if anything, ya know, ya can't, it's very hard to argue that calorie restriction prolonged his life once he developed ALS.

R. But yeah, he also thought that his ALS was possibly caused by his time in the Biosphere due to lack of oxygen and increased nitrous oxide. Exactly what causes ALS is not entirely settled and so he suspected that that might have had something to do with it.

S: That's wild speculation.

E: Nitrous Oxides builds up in these Biodomes? I didn't know that.

J: Well they were having trouble in there right?

R: They had a lot of trouble. Although, they did stay in there for two years. But, one of the problems they had was a severe lack of food and so it was helpful that their resident doctor happened to be this guy who believed in calorie restriction. So he convinced them all to go on this diet. Ya know, to join him in his diet.

S: Yeah since we have no food anyway.

R: Right. And so they did, but even so at some point many months in they finally broke down and opened up a container of food that was grown outside of the Biosphere in order to supplement their diets.

J: That would have made an awesome YouTube video

E: Watching the moment of breaking that chest open

S: So they just didn't...Did something go wrong with their food production or they didn't plan properly?

J: If you couldn't grow enough food in the Biodome, and ya know, it was never done before. They didn't have the data going in to it, it was all just engineered and it failed. Biodome experiments didn't last as long as they hoped

S: It wasn't self sustaining.

J: No

R: Yeah by all their models I guess it seemed like it could be done but one thing after another went wrong.

S: Now imagined if that happened on Mars.

R: Well that's why they do this stuff. Although I'm sad that they're not, they haven't continued trying that sort of thing. I would love to see that project continue.

S: Yeah

R: I don't know the details of why nobody has tried Biosphere 3

J: Ya know what I noticed?

E: Pauly Shore

J: I noticed, looking at pictures of Biodome, first its interesting if you look at it today, a weed infested back yard. I also noticed it looks a lot like Logan's Run, that's 1970s movie of the people that get put into a Biodome like thing because that was like a last ditch effort to sav humanity and people were in there so long that they forgot what happened. That was Biodome man. Ya ever see, like it looks like it.

S: Well, it was a lot bigger

R: There was apparently a Biosphere 3, maybe still is in Syberia and there's a Biosphere J in Japan. But one other thing, despite the potential pseudoscience with origins of disease and wether or not calorie restriction can actually work in humans to extend life, Walford seemed like a really awesome guy. At one point he would like take off for a time as part of his studies and measure the rectal temperatures of holy men in India.

E: uh huh

R: He traveresed the African continent on foot, according to his obituary in the New York Times. So he specifically wanted to go out and just have adventures. He said, " If you spend all your time in the laboratories, as most scientists do, you might spend 35 years in the lab and be very successful and win a Nobel Prize. But those 35 years will be just a blur. So I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities." He once broke his leg on a motorcycle.

E: That qualifies as dangerous.
R: Yeah he just seems like he was a fun guy.

== News Items ==
=== Podcasting Patent (06:42)===
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-05/company-sues-tech-giants-claiming-podcast-patent-breach/4735786
S: Alright well Jay, tell us why we're gonna be shut down. We can't do podcasting anymore.

R: Nooooo

E: We're done? This is it?

J: I'm not convinced that we're gonna get shut down as a podcast, but this story has to do with patent trolling. Patent trolling is the business du jour. And if you haven't heard about it, those of you who haven't, it's a pretty simple and amazingly lucrative idea. Here's how it works: Patent trolls, also known as non-practicing entities, or NPEs, are typically companies that buy defunct businesses or ya know any kind of organization or even individual patents. And they buy these companies for their patents specifically, and then they used those acquired patents to sue other companies for patent infringement. It's pretty basic and it goes a long way and they've made a ton of money. These organizations make all or most of their income through the lawsuits. Most of them, like I said, they don't have anything else going on. They become a patent troll and they don't actually have a product or sell anything or do any other type of commerce. It's not 100% fast and true but a large majority of them are just companies that revolve around these lawsuits. And this scam, or whatever you wanna call it, has worked on some of the worlds' most biggest and lucrative companies. The US patent office is widely known to issue patents for ideas that are already in use and common place. And these are ideas like, say online shopping or shopping cart system or a file sharing system or an in app purchase, as an example. And many of these lawsuits are about things that should never have been patented in the first place. Like I think that a shopping cart system should have never been patented. You really can't say, hey you owe me money because you're using this workflow process to sell products online to online customers; to me that's insane. In 2011, patent trolls cost the United States, or companies inside the Unites States, a total of twenty-nine billion dollars; and, they have increased their activity 400% since 2005. And they are 62% of all patent lawsuits in the United States. It's a phenomenal portion of patent lawsuits and they're really growing leaps and bounds year for year. I guess, instead of these companies finding new uses for their patents and expanding on the technology they already own, they're focusing on these lawsuits. You know these companies are, in my opinion, they're pretty transparent because they use similar procedures to get to the point where they can start hitting up the big companies and one of the things that they do is that they'll find a week company or a financially poor company, with no regard of winning anything other than just the lawsuit from this company to set a legal precedent. And then they take that legal precedent, and they take it to a bigger company, and they'll tell the next court, "Hey, we already won a lawsuit about this." And now ya know instead of them ya know just trying to win a lawsuit and maybe stopping that company, they're gonna ask for fifty million dollars. And they guise it as a licensing fee. Oh we're just sueing for licensing fees here. We want them to pay us for the use of the patent, and we want them to go back to this year, or whatever, and now and we're not gonna sue them in the future because they're actually going to be paying us for this licensing fee. Companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Ebay, just to name a few, are starting to turn and face these patent trolls and go for it. Really really get down and dirty in court, and let the years go by and spend the millions and millions of dollars to fight them. But they're putting they're um they're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "No, we're not going to pay any of these blackmail fees. We're actually gonna fight you and try to get you to go out of business." Very recently, June 4th of 2013, the White House enacted five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations to restrict the activities of patent trolls. And this is a huge step forward in helping companies protect themselves and make it much much more difficult for patent trolls to actually win against US based companies. A patent troll named Prsonal Audio LLC has sued three podcasters and sent demand letters to a number of others. Now this is the case that Steve was talking about. Recently this company filed suit against CBS and NBC, and has also sent additional demand letters to small podcasting operations. So an organization called EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting against Personal Audio LLC, which is the company that's sueing these podcasters. And what EFF is trying to do is help to save podcasting. Now the first thing that they did was they asked for donations so they can raise the thirty thousand dollars to begin the lawsuit process. And what they're trying to do, is they're trying to prove that the patent that Personal Audio LLC owns is actually not a legitimate patent at all. And what the, the reason that they're trying to do this is it's the quickest and most direct route to stop the lawsuit. And they way that they're doing it is that they're asking for people to help them find proof that the idea of podcasting, either in part or similar ideas or even the entire idea, if it was ever stated, written down or communicated online. Any way that they can prove before October 2nd of 1996, then they can take that proof to the patent office, go to court and say, "Look it, ya know this idea predates their patent. It was ya know on a public forum and this whole thing is illegitimate." The worst case scenario here is if this company gets a foothold and starts sueing the bigger organizations, ya know some of these organizations that can afford will probably pay; but I'd imagine some of them won't because as most people know podcasting is not really a lucrative venture. For those people that are running a lucrative podcasting venture, like Adam Corrola as an example, he's one of the people being, his company is being sued. Ya know Adam Corrola does a pretty damn good job on his podcast

E: Yeah

J: He's making some decent money over there, I mean this could put him right off the air. Of course, being a podcaster and being just a huge fan of the podcasting world, I stand very firmly against what this company is trying to do. Now, I did read some things that troubled me. That made me think that there might be some legitimacy to this lawsuit because it is possible that the person, the engineer the software engineer, is claiming that he did make these engines and that he does deserve some compensation.

S: So what though? What did he invent? RSS, ya know the really simple syndication, they didn't do that, that's open source. What, MP3 files?

J: No, I I I'm not 100% sure, Steve. I tried to find it, I was all over the web searching for facts and I think it's vague and it's deliberately vague. I think it boils down to the idea that you're distributing serialized episodes of something over the web. That's what I read. That's it. I didn't get to more detail than that.

E: So he's um

S: Yeah, that's still simply b.s.

E: patenting the concept, right? Just the concept of podcasts.

J: Yeah. But let me let me give you a

E: Sounds Week

J: It does sound weak. And let me give you an example of something that I saw on Shark Tank as an example. I really like that show for a lot of reasons, it is entertaining. There is a pretty good amount of stuff to learn if you want to watch it and one of the sharks on the show, it... Real quick, what the show is people come in and pitch their business to rich people, business men and women, and they uh they're asking for money like they wanna they want to be funded. So uh Mark Cuban, who is my favorite person on the show is really, first off we've mentioned him on The Skeptics' Guide before, he's he's the only person I think is really a critical thinker on the show. And he he's fought against pseudoscience when it comes on that show. But one guy came on with a, it was like a vest, and he had a patent where if you had like your iPhone in an internal pocket it runs a wire up to like your neck and you have your ear buds there. And the guy patented basically running a wire through clothing; and Mark Cuban went ape shit on him. Just saying this is b.s. Like, you know it's guys like you that are you know destroying innovation and and growth and and you know companies developing new technologies because ya know you're holding this ridiculous patent. It stops other people from using a similar technology. You can't patent a wire going through clothing. It's absurd. And I think when I watched it, at first I didn't understand why he was getting so upset. I did get his idea, but I didn't understand everything that we just discussed. I have learned a lot since I watched that episode; and now I fully understand it. I completely agree with Mark Cuban. This is the type of thing that squelches innovation, puts companies out of business and ya know all that money is just being syphoned out of these companies that are developing technology. These patent trolling companies are not technology developers. All they're doing is, they're in the business just to make money, that's it. They don't. There's no good side to it. Somebody is just getting rich.

S: They're like just, they're parasites.

J: So if you if you are interested ya know take a look online. Uh look up the company, the name of that company again is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're fighting a lot of other technology and digital based threats to the future of our technology. And I do believe in what they're trying to do and if you're interested, take a look and maybe even make a donation.

S: Obviously, patents are important. People need to be able to protect their intellectual property and benefit from their innovation. But yeah, but patenting like a really basic idea is is counterproductive, it's absurd. The kind of idea that like anybody can come up with "I'm the first person to submit a patent for it". In fact, you can patent ideas that can't even be implemented yet. In other words, if you see a technology coming on the horizon, you can patent a use of that not yet existing technology. And then when the technology does come online, you can then start sueing anybody that tries to use it in the way that you patented. And all you're doing is patenting an idea, a basic obvious idea. It just becomes a race to see who can patent it first. It is totally broken. That kind of system is completely counterproductive.

J: Yeah, it's, well the government is taking steps to heat and it's moving forward. There doesn't seem to be that much holding these decisions that they're making so. I think things are moving in the right direction.

S: Hopefully

=== Class System in Mice (17:21)===
* http://www.universityherald.com/articles/3575/20130617/mice-big-brother-setup-develop-social-structures.htm
17:21
S: Alright well, Rebecca tell us about how mice have their own class system.

R: I will. Uh, yeah, there's a really fun experiment that's been happening on mice; looking at their social strati. And what's interesting isn't the fact that mice set up class systems and different social statuses; but the way in which scientists are starting to study them, and study their social behavior... It's not necessarily...like studying the way animals are interacting with each other isn't necessarily as easy as studying, let's say studying what a particular drug is doing to a particular mouse system, uh it's much more complex. You've got mice interacting with each other, displaying different behaviors doing different things that you have to constantly watch and log in, you know, an objective a way as possible. This study, by Dr. Tali Kimchi, which I did not know was a last name, but I really like it, Kimchi

J: Kimchi

E: Kimchi

R: Yeah Kimchi is a delicious condiment uh, and also a last name. So Dr. Kimchi at the Wiseman's Institute's Neural Biology department is studying mice and their social interactions using a big brother house. So if you recall the tv show, which hasn't been around in the US for quite a long time. Big Brother is a show where they have cameras that are constantly watching the residences of the house. And the residents aren't allowed to leave the house, and the cameras are watching 24 hours. And in the UK, they were broadcast 24 hours in the most boring feed you can possibly imagine. Same sort of deal here, only slightly more complex, uh because the human big brother inhabitants were not microchipped. In this case, yes, the mice had microchips implanted in them.

S: RFIDs

R: RFIDs, yes. Yeah, exactly. The same sort of microchip you put in cats and dogs to keep track of them if they run away.

E: and credit cards.

R: yeah credit cards or tube cards, things like that. So in this case uh the microchips were used to track the mice movements. Mice?

S: Meece

E: Meeces. Meeces to pieces

R: Ok. To track the meeces movements. And they go around their little house so their ccd cameras all over this relatively large house, for a bunch of mice, I think. And a computer examining what those behaviors are.And it was extraordinarily effective at parcing the different movements, at figuring out what the mice were doing, when they were doing it how they were interacting. To the point where uh they could predict with over 90 percent accuracy who the mice were going to be mating with. For instance... uh and they were also able to differentiate between the different genetic strains of the mice, so different strains uh showed different behaviors that they were able to see in the computer analysis. So it was an interesting way of collecting a vast amount of information and parcing it in a way that could have important uses in the future when figuring out uh behavviors. Some of the other things they figured out, they found that within 24 hours uh one group of normal strain mice had already established a leader and like a caste system. So it took about 24 hours for them to figure that out. Uh they also did an experiment where they put, they filled the house with another strain that they labeled as autistic. These mice exhibited very little social engagement. And what they found with the autistic mice, is that

E: they were fascinated

R: Yeah, right. Uh what they found with the autistic mice was that no leader emerged at all, uh no social strati happened. Except like occasionally it would appear that a leader would emerge and then they would promptly be dethroned. So social mice like immediately organized themselves into like a caste system. While autistic mice did not. Part of the, the intersting thing about this system that they've developed of analyzing behavior, can in the future be used for things like identifying the different aspects of disorders like autism or schizophrenia.

S: Yeah, it sounds like a really great research paradigm.

R: Yeah, exactly. It's fun, you can go online and see uh, I'm sure if you google Dr. Kimshee you can find a video of the mice running around in their little house. And it's kind of cool, they're all color coded uh when you watch the videos and you can follow them around as they do different things. It made me want to get my own mouse set-up.

S: They should make it into a reality tv show.

E: They should.

R: People would watch it. I bet within like two weeks, whichever mouse established itself as king would be on the front page of Us magazine.

=== Anti-GMO Pseudoscience (22:50)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/ Once More: Bad Science in the Service of Anti-GMO Activism]
S: Alright, well let's move on. There's a study making the rounds. Another one of those studies reporting to show severe negative outcomes from uh feeding animals GM food, or genetically modified food. Uh so from the abstract of this study, let me read to you a part of the abstract and you can uh tell me what you think about it: Feed intake weight gain mortality and blood biochemistry were measured; organ weights and pathology were determined postmortem. There were no differences pigs fed the GM and non GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality and routine blood biochemistry measurements. The GM diet was associated with gastric and uterine differences in pigs. GM fed pigs had uteri that were 25% heavier than non GM fed pigs. And GM fed pigs had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation. With a rate of 32% of GM fed pigs compared to 12% of non GM fed pigs with a P value of .004. This severe stomach inflammation was worse in GM fed males compared to non GM fed males by a factor of 4. And the GM fed females compared to non GM fed females by a factor of 2.2. So that sounds like pretty impressive.

E: Bad news

S: Pretty impressive outcome, but does anything jump out at you guys that there might be some problems with this study?

R: Nope, seems legit.

E: Everything's great.

S: This is like our lessons on how to evaluate studies right? One thing you have to always ask is whenever they're comparing two different groups, is how many comparisons do they actually look at? Because if you look at enough different comparisons, then you can cherry pick, by random chance you know there's gonna be some correlation somewhere. And if you're cherry picking that out of many comparisons, that's one of the...Remember the researcher degrees of freedom? You know, researchers can manufacture positive results by manipulating the data. And one way of doing that, even if they're doing it honestly or inadvertantly, one way to do that is to make multiple comparisons. Now there's a statistical fix that you're supposed to do for each additional comparison that you do or you make. You have to adjust the statistics to see if it's truly statistically significant. So for example, if you set the P value at .05, then roughly speaking that means that one in twenty comparisons are going to be statistically significant and by chance alone. If you make twenty comparisons and one is .05, that's probably just random chance. But even if you just look at that one thing, if that were the only comparison you made, then the P value of .05 would be meaningful. So they tell you right here in the abstract that feed intake, weight gain or mortality, a whole panel of blood biochemistry were measured. Organ weight, apparently all the organs were weighed and pathologically examined; and now they're just telling us about the stomachs and the uterus. So, that's what we call a fishing expedition, right? David Gorski wrote about this on science-based medicine, so if you want you can... He goes into it in great detail. And I think he absolutely correctly characterizes this as a fishing expedition. You go looking for a whole bunch of things, you're gonna find correlations by random chance alone, right? Astrologers are famous for this. This is astrology with pigs and GM corn. But it's actually even far worse than what you might um, than what you might... Even from the abstract you can say this is B.S. They went fishing and they came up with these two randoms. Why would GM corn cause severe stomach inflammation? But it's actually much worse than that. Because what they did was, this is a good way to increase your probability of generating false positive results. They took inflammation of the stomach, and they broke it down into different, somewhat arbitrary categories. No inflammation, mild, moderate, severe, erosions pinput ulcers, frank ulcers and bleeding ulcers. Out of all of those categories, only severe inflammation was worse in the GM fed versus the regular pigs.

E: Ohh... That's not what they said in the abstract

S: You wouldn't know that from just reading the abstract. All they say is severe inflammation was worse in the pigs fed the GM feed. Yeah but, not all the other kinds of inflammation. And, in fact, if you look at all inflammation, regardless of how severe it is, there was a slight decrease in the GM fed group compared to the non GM fed group.

E: Wow

S: It was just if you cherry pick out the one category in the middle, there wasn't even a dose response curve. That's another question you ask yourself. How many comparisons are being made, is there a dose response to any effect that they're claiming exists? You also of course have to ask is it plausible, but we could put that aside. So this data... So this is an exercise in cherry picking data. They cherry picked the severe inflammation out of this arbitrary categorization of different levels of inflammation. Over all inflammation... ya know this is just a random scatter of data, this is random noise. But actually, the thing that they're claiming, it increases the risk of sever stomach inflammation, overall inflammation was actually decreased in that group. Contradicting what they're pointing out. So this is complete B.S., this is just utter B. S. And this is coming from researchers, Judy Carman for example, who have a history of doing anti GM research.

E: mmmhmmm

S: just seems to be someone with an agenda, basically.

E: Yeah, how does she account for her personal biases.

S: So yeah, there's a bias, misdirection, crappy data ya know just horrific methodology.Also, David pointed out that, which is a very legitimate point, you always wanna know also in studies was anything unusual happening? When you're studying a disease, did the disease behaved like it always does. When you're studying animals, were they animals otherwise normal and healthy other than the thing that you were manipulating. These pigs, did overall, did pretty poorly. They had a very high rate of infection and complications. It's almost as if they weren't well cared for. So that's like an outlyer and really calls into question just what was happening in this study. The final analysis, again you want to avoid nitpicking little details of a study and then claiming that the results are invalid; you have to put it into context. But these are fatal flaws that we're talking about. And taken together, they make the results of this study worthless and uninterpretable. But yet, this is being spread around the internet as a stunning ya know study showing that GM corn and GM feed causes this horrible stomach inflammation in pigs. As if there's something dangerous ya know about this particular type of GM feed. And it's all based upon the naturalistic phallacy. It's all just genetic modification ain't natural. It's really just nonsense.

J: Are people eating the same exact food as they feed the pigs.

S: Well this is , animal feed. So no. They're trying to make genetically modified food seem scary.

J: Yeah.

S: It's just fearmongering, at the end of the day, is what it is.

J: Now, are they gonna do a follow up, Steve? Because typically, when a study like this happens, some other group will do another one similar or exactly like they did just to see if their results match.

S: Yeah, I'd like to see this replicated. You know, I strongly predict this is not the kind of study that's gonna replicate. And replication, of course is in the final analysis, that's how you tell. When you do this kind of multiple analysis where you're just looking at... you're just throwing a whole bunch of crap up against the wall and seeing what sticks, that study is never conclusive. That is always an exploratory study. Then you say, okay, we have this correlation and we looked at twenty, thirty fourty comparisons. We found this correlation. Then you get a fresh set of data, you replicate the study and see if that correlation holds up. If it was all random statistical noise, it will go away. And you'll probably see some other random association. But if it's a real effect, it should replicate. And that's how you know. So this is an exploratory study at best, because of all the multiple comparisons. It's not the kind of thing that should be reported in the press as fear mongering about GM foods. The kind that, at best, inspire a folllow up study. Let me give you an analogy to help put this into perspective: Prayer, intercessory prayer research, you guys familiar with research? Where the number of studies that were done looking at people who were sick and they were getting prayed for by a third party, intercessory prayer and they often didn't even know that they were being prayed for. They knew that they were in the study, but they didn't know if they were in the prayed for group or the not prayed for group. Tons of problems with this research, but the bottom line is, that they did multiple comparisons. For example, they looked at patients in the cardiac ICU and they followed a number of complications, number of days in the ICU, number of days in the hospital, survival... They looked at multiple multiple different end points. And then in one study, again there weren't differences across the board. There was like this one outcome was a little bit better in the prayer group. Then they replicated the study, and a different outcome was a little bit better, but not overall. Like overall it's random noise. But again the same outcome wasn't better, it's like a different outcome every time. That's, that's not a replication, that's a failure to replicate. That is consistent with random noise, which is of course what you would expect when you're hypothesis is magic makes people better, ya know.

E: Hahaha that's true

S: This is when you're considering the multiple comparisons that are being disclosed in the study. You may not be aware that they may have made, the researchers may have made multiple comparisons and only published the ones that were positive, or just a small subset. So they might have done all kinds of comparisons bu that doesn't work that doesn't... just discarded it and never reported it. Which is why why you know no single study is ever that believable, especially if it's like one research group. Uh, or, still one off study. It's hard... We get confronted with this all the time. Oh here's a study on ESP, why don't you guys believe this? Cuz it's one study. Because you have no idea what these researchers really did behind the scenes.

R: It would be great if grade school science tearchers would, during a science fair, point out to their students that all of the things the students did to make their science fair project look better and get an A. It's exactly what scienctists still do once they're actual working scientists and, hey that's wrong. Make sure that you don't actually do that

J: Like fudge the numbers?

R: Yeah, like I did that when I was doing science fair projects I would have outlyers and be like, "Oh that one just didn't count like if I just this then I get, I got like a nice clean line here and uh I get an A. Because it looks like I knew my stuff. Yeah So

S: You're absolutely right. Teachers should emphasize that its the messiness that they wanna see.

R: Yes

S: If they get something that looks too clean, that should count down your grade should go down, not up. Yeah my daughter recently, my older daughter recently like last year had a science fair. And I made sure that there were no shenanigans with her data. But going, walking through the posters of all the other students studies ya know there were a lot of them. Of course ya know we were uber skeptic evaluating a twelve year old science fair project.

J: Could you imagine? Steve walking around like checking out all these like hey kid, you're all wrong over here.

S: I just did it, it was a good teaching opportunity for my daughter. I didn't like criticize the students and make them cry.

J: Sure you didn't

S: It was like to Julia, it was a good lesson. Hey let's look at this study. What do you think about this? What were the methods and what are they doing wrong here? Like are they not using control groups and not carefully defining terms. I mean every error that was possible to make was made. But it is, it was a good and awesome learning opportunity. To ruthlessly pick through those, you can do it in a constructive nurturing way. But that would be a great learning opportunity to show how hard it is to do good science. All the ways in which, even a simple science project can go awry.

R: And on that note, I just wanted to mention that, I think I might have mentioned this before, but you can, if you're interested you can volunteer to be a judge at the local science fair. They'll probably be happy to have you. I did it a couple of years ago at a local high school and I really enjoyed it. Just talking to the kids and finding out what they were interested in, it was pretty cool.

S: Awesome

E: That is cool. Very cool

=== Skunk Ape (36:31)===
* http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/06/14/man-claims-he-spotted-floridas-elusive-skunk-ape/
S: Alright, well Evan, you're gonna finish up the news segment of our show with a the latest stunning evidence of the Florida Skunk Ape.

J: Skunk Ape?

E: The Skunk Ape, of course. In Sarasota County Florida, a man claims he has spotted Florida's elusive Skunk Ape.

S: Very elusive

E: ...so the headlines read from CBS Miami. Alright, so what is a Skunk Ape? Well who better to ask than the folks at Floridaskunkape.com. Yes, there is such a website.

S: Anybody?

E: They claim, it's what Floridians call their big foot, as best known as sasquatch in most other places in North America, oh yeah. Evidence supporting the existence of the creature has been gathered over the years, and consists of hundreds of documented sitings, a few pictures, several foot casts and a few hair samples. Mmhmm. So they have actual evidence, apparently. It gets its name from the very fact that it lives in Florida it in itself emits an awful stench. Now that's their writing, I didn't write that, that's from their website. Lives in the state of Florida and emits an awful stench. People who've had the pleasure to experience the smell, it's described as that of an elephant's cage or a trash dump. And one person even said it was like the scent of a skunk that did battle with a dumpster.

J: *laughs*

E: I went to the gallery on that website to have a look at the photos and stuff and it said, "your search yielded no results." So much for that. But, forget that for now because we have new video evidence. This is smoking gun evidence, smoking gun so hot it must be shot evidence. Mike Falconer is the person who posted the video and still pictures on YouTube.

S: I wonder what his ancestors did for a living.

E: They probably made barrels or something. Uh he says that he captured this footage on March 2nd of this year 2013. That he and his son spotted a large hairy creature off in the, off, it was a field at the Myakka River State Park which is a place in which the Skunk Ape has been sited before, apparently. And there were other people in who um, in this footage you can hear them and they've also stopped their cars on the road to try to get a glimpse as well. Now I think that's um, well not important, but I think noteworthy in the case of this. Instead of having this, we're so used to having this you know there's someone out in the wilderness with a camera shooting ya know whatever they think is a big foot off in the distance. But this one is different it has a gathering, sort of a group of people who are all... They've all seen something; they've seen something off in the distance.

S: Yeah, but they were strolling around like nothing special was going on. Honestly, it didn't seem that impressive to me.

E: They were saying some things in the background like ya know "oh what is that over there" and "I'm trying to get a glimpse of it". At no point did anyone say they smelled something funny or were like ooo that's a skunk or like... I know that if a skunk gets hit by a car like a mile up my road from here I can smell it. That's a very powerful smell and if it's half what they're describing, according to the websites and stuff, I think you would ya know perhaps smell something. But, in any case. So what they did is uh a guy and his son started to pursue whatever it is that they saw out in the fields. So they've got their iPhones right? And they're recording video. And at one point you can kind of see something off in the far grassland. It looks like it has to be hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Something is kinda moving around back there, just some little brown dot or something and they're saying "Oh yeah can you see it? There it is! There it is! Let's go get a closer look".

S: It's pixelsquatch

J: *laughs*

E: Exactly. And that's when they decided, of course, what you do when that happens. Well you turn off your video camera and you start shooting photos instead. So when they started to take photos is when they supposedly captured the quote unquote evidence. And Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, they're brown blotches.

S: Yeah it's

E: Brown blotches off in the trees

S: It turns from pixelsquatch to blobsquatch, to the more classical blobsquatch. Absolutely. It's a completely unrecognizable amorphous brown blob.

R: Enhance!

S: Enhance! Enhance!

R: Zoom in, enhance

E: zoom zoom zoom

S: Evan, do you know what the difference is between the Myakka Skunk Ape and the Hamden Bald Eagle?

E: Oooo um, one really exists and the other doesn't.

S: Yes. I have close up, in focus, unambiguous photographs of the Hamden Bald Eagle

E: Exactly. And yet, once again, someone does not have such shots of the supposed Skunk Ape.

J: The freakin bald headed eagle, that thing could just fly away. You know talk about...it's not just stuck on the ground.

E: Apparently in the year 2000, there was some video footage shot of something that they deemed the Skunk Ape. And then around 2006 someone else came up with something that was more clearer, but to me it was clearly just a hoax, a guy in a suit walking around of some sort. And that's, and then there's this. And that's pretty much it; and a few other blurry photos out there which could have been anything shot by anyone at any time. That's it. That's the sum of evidence you have when it comes to this thing. For the folks who, the guys who, Falconer when he shot this video, when he posted it to YouTube he put up a description on the YouTube channel, YouTube page he has and here's what he wrote in regards to this, and I think this is a bit revealing. He says that: This is real footage my son and I took in Myakka March 2nd 2013. We had iPhones with us. You'll see actual still shots of the thing. Some have called it big foot or sasquatch. The only editing we did to these pictures was to lighten it up. Alright? So here we go. At one point, you hear us talk of two of them. It was a deer out there hiding in the tall grass; maybe that's what it was after. You can see it in the middle at the thin tan line of grass under the tree. You will also see the deer a little to the left and closer in. Hello, deer!

S: Okay

E: Ok, so what's more likely? You've got Skunk Ape legend, ya know, in which there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever. It's all a bunch of blurry photos and weak videos of. Or, the people actually shooting this stuff saying that was clearly deer there, running around. And um, hmmm gee. Skunk Ape or deer? I don't -know. What does Occam's Razor tell us to think in this situation?

S: Hey it's more likely to be a Florida panther than the Skunk Ape.

J: Yeah

R: It'd be more likely to be a zebra

S: Yeah

R: than a Skunk Ape. I mean, cuz the skunk ape doesn't exist.

E: Unimpressive, sorry. It is getting a lot of headlines

J: Alright, Ev, c'mon. This whole thing has been a little vague, ya know. What's your gut tellin ya?

E: My gut's telling me that there is a network of Skunk Apes living in those fields, all over Florida.

J: And once again, I want there to be a Skunk Ape. You know, somebody please find some real evidence and I'd be all over it. But these fuzzy pictures, I'm getting tired of it guys.

S: By the way, I am patenting the word pixelsquatch. Everytime you say it, you've got to give me a quarter.

J: Pixel squatch!

E: Alright, well you'll hear from my lawyers.

S: So have any of you guys heard about the GyroStim?

J: No

S: Probably not.

R: It's pronounced "Yeerow"

S: "yeerow?"

E: Is that a new sandwich they're serving at Subway or something?

R: Yeah it's a combination. It's like a regular gyro, but with Slim Jims

E: Haha cool

S: So this is a machine that was developed by an engineer whose daughter has cerebral palsy. And it's essentially a chair. You sit in the chair and you have a little joystick remote control and you can swing around in all three dimensions, you know.

E: XYZ?

S: Exactly. In every axis. He developed this because she was getting physical therapy in which she had to do exercises to essentially do the same thing. Rotate around in order to um improve her balance in her walking. And, it was a bit tedious. So he, being an engineer, was like I'm gonna help her out, automate this. So he built a chair, the GyroStim, you know he built this chair and it does what he wanted it to do. It rotates around in all three axes. Now unfortunately, some not science-based practioners got their hands on this machine and have ran with it. The engineer is Kevin Maher, and you guys remember Ted Carrick? He is a quote un quote chiropractic neurologist.

J: Yeah I remember that

S: So he is using the GyroStim, and claiming it can cure all kinds of things. So I wrote a review on Science-Based Medicine of the GyroStim. Which, you know, is just one of an endless sequence of devices with overblown claims without adequate evidence. The thing hasn't been studied. It's actually not an illegitimate concept, there is such a thing called vestibular therapy where you essentially do just that. You stimulate the vestibular system by you know putting by rotating and changing your head position over and over again. And it can treat...it's actually a very effective treatment for some kinds of vertigo.

J: What's the vestibular system, Steve?

S: The vestibular system, that's a very good question Jay, is the system in your brain that senses two things - your orientation with respect to gravity and acceleration. So, this is the three semi circular canals that are in your inner ear. They have fluid in them so when you rotate around you're oriented towards gravity the fluid flows through those semi circular canals, which there's three of them, one in each axis, and then that moves hair cells that sense the movement of that fluid. And that's the sensing organ, but then that vestibular information gets taken in by the brain and is process compared to your visual information and tactile information and that's how you get a sense of motion and stability and balance ya know.

J: So this is your internal accelerometer

S: Yeah, well exactly. When there's a disconnect between your visual input and your vestibular input, that results in dizziness and motion sickness. That's why you get motion sick. When your vestibular system is telling you that your rocking up and down and your visual system is not because it is locked to something in the foreground. It's also a very delicate system, and a lot of people have dizziness of vertigo and we can't really identify anything specific that's not working. There's no lesion anywhere and it looks normal. But that integration of misinformation is just a little bit off. Those are the people who do well with vestibular therapy or essentially just retraining the brain to integrate this information. Conceptually it's perfectly fine. But where we get into trouble is in two areas. One is, the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, so it's very expensive. There is no evidence to show that getting vestibular therapy with this 20 30 40 thousand dollar machine is superior to getting vestibular therapy manually with no machine; or just getting a twenty dollar swing and swinging back and forth on it as a way of stimulating your vestibular system. Which is something that physical therapists actually do. Investing in an expensive piece of equipment and paying a lot of money for expensive sessions is not justified until there's research showing this is not only as good as the far cheaper options, but is significantly superior to it. But there's no research, we don't even know if it works at all or that it's safe. All you have is the idea of using the machine. But of course that doesn't stop chiropractors, like Ted Carrick, from starting to use it. But in addition, the claims that are being propogated for this machine, especially by Ted Carrick and also by others now, is that it not only is a way of delivering vestibular therapy- which is the plausible component of the claim - but that it actually helps the brain recover from a traumatic injury.

J: Oh, yeah

S: In genaral, yeah. So I was reviewing a specific article written by a sports writer who wrote and article about the GyroStim, because it's being used to treat a lot of like hockey players who have had head injuries. And he did the typical journalist thing of antecdote miracles happening every day, then quicky, generic canned disclaimer. Well this scientist said it hasn't been tested yet and hasn't been approved by the FDA, now let me go back to these glowing antecdotes. Meanwhile he's talking, he's mentioning Autism and Asperger's. I mean it's ridiculous. So I wrote a typical blog post about it on Science-Based Medicine, and the author of the original article, Adrian Dater who is again a sports writer writing for the Denver Post, leaves a comment, like a really pissy comment - it didn't immediately get, because he was a first time poster it went to moderation and it didn't immediately get approved because we work for a living - in the middle of the day. Then he writes a blog post saying "I'm being censored over on Science-Based Medicine".

E: *laughs* He gave you all of 45 minutes. That's not...

S: He gave a full hour. So, but anyway, that's just a little aside. The thing is he like doubled down and completely defended his journalism. So then I of course, I had to write a follow up post on Neurologica, just about science journalism using him as an example of horrible science journalism.

J: Uh Oh!

E: Gee why would a sports writer be bad at science journalism?

S: Yeah I mean the thing is the guy's a sports writer, I don't expect him to be a good science journalist. But his problem was he wrote an article about science, and he got it all completely wrong. He fell for all the typical pit falls that non-experience trained science journalists fall for when they think that they can cover these complex topics. And he actually was defending his token skepticism. So in my follow up article I characterized different levels at which articles deal with science, especially when there's something contreversial. There's the false balance aproach in which you say oh experts over here say this, and this fringe lunatic over here says that; and you treat them like they're equal. Then there's the token skepticism where you actually give the bulk of the time to the fringe claim and you only have a quick skeptical blurb, which is what he fell into. And then there's the just complete abject gullibility without a hint of skepticism. So he was in the middle category of token skepticism, in which you don't get much credit for that. There's of course the fourth category which is the way it should be, which is appropriate skepticism. Right? But we didn't get that from him. So he was defending his token skepticism and also defending the GyroStim, completely ignoring all of my legitimate actual different criticisms. And in the end he was like criticizing David Goreski and the others on Science-Based Medicine about the positions that we were taking. We were like look, dude, you cover hockey. Go back to covering hockey. Seriously, you're arguing with a group of physicians who have spent a decade writng about these topics. You're telling us we don't know what we're talking about?

J: Did you say that to him?

S: Yes! How arrogant does this guy have to be?

E: Are you serious?

S: Like he had a fit that we disagreed with his journalism. He had a fit and it was horrible. It was horrible token skepticism and bad science writing. He didn't understand the issues at stake. And again, I wouldn't expect him to understand; but he had no sense of his own limitations. And of course he has no editor who would know, you know, that this is an innappropriate way to cover a medical science news story.

E: Yep

J: Steve, it also sounds like he's never engaged in any kind of legitimate discourse about things like that. You know?

S: No, he didn't engage, he got childish right out of the gate. Which, you know, always makes it worse of course.

J: Yeah, I mean I can understand from one perspective a guy like him never really entering that arena before. Not knowing what to expect, you know. And of course let's like, let's also achknowledge the idea here that you went up against Science-Based Medicine, you guys.

S: Yeah that's the thing. He had no idea what he was up against. So he started to back pedal a little bit. Like I wasn't endorsing it, I was just relaying the stories. Peple have a right to know about this; that whole coy bs. And one of our commentors dug up a twitter

E: *laughs*

S: A tweet that he did where he was like read about the device that cured you know this hockey player of his traumatic brain injury. Oh yeah, you're not endorsing it.

J: Uh oh! That sounds like an endorsement! He's just stating facts?

E: Yeah, he's just reporting what he heard

S: Yeah he was totally busted. He was totally busted.

J: How did it end, Steve? Did he just end up having to quit?

S: Yeah, he went away. It was a fun little exchange though.

J: Yeah it's something to learn... it's something for people like us to learn from and it sadly... Did that go back to his man cave and lick his wounds or did he actually say hey you know I screwed up here like what did I do wrong?

S: He did not give any evidence of any self awareness in this exchange.

E: mmmm

R: They rarely do though. You might have planted a seed

S: I might have planted a seed, you never know. But yeah, I don't expect most people to have the scales fall from their eyes and to say I was wrong, mea culpa. Very few people have I think the security and maturity to do that. Especially when you're in the middle of an internet fight. You know everyone has, as you like to call Jay, internet balls. You know?

J: Yeah

E: mmhmm

S: But, yeah you're right, you never know. Maybe he'll be a little bit more gun shy the next time he dips his toe into science journalism. Who knows?

E: Or he'll do some real research into what the hell he's talking about.

S: And we were, we got very polite and very proffesional. We were like listen, we want to help journalists write better. You know next time you want to cover a story like this, we're happy to provide you with some perspective and background information.

J: What?! That'll take hours!

S: *laughs*

J: I don't have time for that!

S: This is, this is what... I just told someone the other day you know in a similar context I'd much rather provide advice ahead of time rather than criticism after the fact. You know, run these things by somebody who knows what they're talking about ahead of time. We're here, we're a resource, ask us. We're, you know... What's the worst thing that could happen? We make your journalism better?

J: Yeah

S: You know? What's the worst thing that could come out of it?

J: It's basically you're like you're saying to them, I'll write your freakin essay paper for you pal just all you gotta do is pick up the phone.

S: Good journalists know how to do that. They know how to use resources well.

== Who's That Noisy? (55:54)==
55:54
S: Alright well, Evan, we're still falling behind on Who's That Noisy, but you're gonna give us a new one for this week.

E: Yeah I'll give you a new one for this week. We are going to catch up on all the correct answers and winners and everything in a couple more episodes. Bare with us while we get through this little stretch of podcasting. And uh I'm gonna play for you this week's brand new, fresh off the presses Who's That Noisy. It is an actual noisy, a classic as I like to say, and here we go...

R: mmm

S: hmmm

E: Okay

S: What do you want to know? Who that was speaking?

E: That's it. Send us your guess wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sgu forums.com. And that's about it; good luck everyone.

S: Thanks Evan

E: Thank you

== Questions and Emails (56:40) ==
=== Staticman (56:40)===
<blockquote>Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, 
Damian Tinkey 
Marlboro, NY</blockquote>
S: We're going to do one e-mail this week. This e-mail comes from Damian Tinkey from Marlboro, NY. He Writes: Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, Damian. So he links to an article

R: It does sound like a super power

S: Yeah, Static Man! They're actually are, there are cartoon super heroes who are basically static, that is their super power, static.

J: That's powerful stuff man

E: Lightning guy, electron boy

S: So, the article he links to is from Septemberf 2005, a little bit

E: Okay

S: But I don't think we ever talked about it. So we might as well deal with this. So what do you guys think? Static man. Let me read the article here, it's very short. I'll just read pieces of it. It's about a man, Frank Clewer, of the Western Victorian city of Warrnambool. It said he was wearing a synthetic nylon jacket and a woolen shirt when he went for a job interview. He walked into the building, the carpet ignited from the fourty thousand volt of static electricity that had built up. It sounded almost like a fire cracker, or something like that he said. Within about five minutes, the carpet started to erupt. The article goes on to say that his clothes were measured by a fireman as carrying an electrical charge of fourty thousand volts. The Reuters news agency quoted Mr. Barton as saying.

J: Yeah I don't think that fireman could determine that.

E: Fourty thousand volts? You could kill people with that!

S: It's saying... It depends on the current right?

J: Yeah what I'm saying, would firemen be able to make that assessment. I mean I know that they know a lot about things that cause fires and they might say hey in order for this type of thing to happen this is the kind of voltage you need. But it just seems...

S: No that's a physicist, Jay, not a fireman. But I think fourty thousand volts of static electricity is not enough to ignite carpet, first of all. I mean for the firemen to measure the voltage - remember there's no current here, it's static - then they would of had to discharge it. Right? They would have to build it up and discharge it and maybe they could measure the discharge. It's also, it's just too much static electricity. It's almost like, it sounds apocryphal. Oh he had a nylon jacket over a wool sweater and he built up so much static electricity that he ignited the carpet.

J: Yeah, what did the guy run a marathon right before he went in there?

S: Someone speculated that with that much static electricity, wouldn't his hair be standing on end as if he had his hand on one of those grass static electricity generators.

E: Yeah. A voltage meter could figure that out.

S: Yeah I don't know what the voltage you have to get to to have your hair stand on end. Yeah and also, like he got out of his car, why didn't he discharge upon exiting the car when he touched the metal of the door? Or when he walked in the building, how did he get in the building without a discharge?

J: How did he not die?

S: Yeah I don't know if it's possible to develop enough static charge that the discharge would be fatal. I mean there are reports of static discharges causing fires. But that's only when there's some kind of accelerant. This is actually a real risk at the gas station. Either there's gasoline dripping or vapors and you build up the static electricity on the seat of the car. And when you touch the frame of the car it discharges and could spark a fire. There are reported cases of that. I don't think that the static charge that a person can build up on themselves could set a carpet on fire without some kind of gasoline or accelerant. This (?) does give some interesting statistics. They say that the lethal dose of a static charge measured in millijoules is 1,350. Usually like shuffling across a carpet can generate from ten to twenty-five millijoules. So not very much compared to what a lethal dose would be. And they report, really the maximum you could get to would be something on the order of 300 millijoules, just from building up static on yourself. Measured in volts, they reference a study showing that getting in and out of a car can generagte - if you're dressed in nylon - could reach up to twenty-one thousand volts. That was sort of the maximum that was reported; so not quite the fourty thousand volts reported in this story. And for reference, a typical lightning bolt - which is static electric discharge - can contain five hundred megajoules, which is three hundred seventy million times the lethal dose.

E: How does someone end up earning the title of static man if this happened like one time in sort of this fluke thing. It doesn't... the sensationalism that it's worth I suppose.

S: Yeah, cuz it's the media. Some headline writer... I mean how did Super Man get his title? Some headline writer dubbed him Super Man. By the way, have you guys seen the new Super Man movie?

J: No, but I heard it wasn't so good.

S: So, I'm not going to review the movie but I have to say one thing: Krypton, it's moon, busted apart.

R: Oh yeah, someone tweeted me about that.

S: And even worse than all the other movies, it was like half and half almost. Just hanging right next to each other. Why? It's now officially a science fiction movie cliche. Every alien planet has to have a busted apart moon.

E: It's an homage to Thunder the Barbarian. Everyone was clearly very impressed with that horrible cartoon from 1981.

S: But how quickly did that become a cliche? I mean, it's ridiculous.

R: Yeah

S: Show some imagination and don't have scientifically implausible busted apart moon. I mean okay, it's pretty. But you're just doing it like every single other movie did it. Sorry, it loses its' appeal; do something different. A ringed moon, do something else!

J: Yeah I agree Steve. I think, I think what's happening is it's kind of seeping into collective unconscious.

S: Yeah. It's just alien worlds have busted moons, of course they do!

J: What's with these busted up moons?

== Science or Fiction () ==
[http://www.nature.com/news/light-flips-transistor-switch-1.13178 Item #1]: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. [http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/06/05/G34100.1 Item #2]: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617110929.htm Item #3]: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in 12 weeks.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth.</blockquote>

== Announcements () ==

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 415

2014-02-13T04:31:43Z

Lmwood: /* Who's That Noisy? (55:54) */

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== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is June 29th 2013 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening everyone

R: Where the hell is Bob?

S: Bob, once again, is too busy to join us. Bob has a major thing happening at work

E: uh huh

S: that does keep him away.

== This Day in Skepticism (0:35) ==
June 29: Happy birthday to Dr. Roy Wolford, calorie restriction pioneer and Biosphere 2 inhabitant
R: Hey, happy birthday to Roy Wolford, Dr. Wolford.

E: Awesome! Is he a listener?

R: Well, uh no, he died in 2004. He was born June, 29 1924 and Dr. Roy Wolford is probably best known for being one of the inhabitants of Biosphere 2.

E: I love that movie

R: He was also though a pioneer of calory restriction as used for longevity. He wrote a book about living to 120. It was not, uh...

E: A life of perpetual hunger, that's what the title of the book was called.

J: Imagine what Perry would have said about that.

R: I think Perry would have said that he would gladly die at 20 than live on a restricted calorie diet.

J: Choking on a hamburger right?

R: Right

E: hahaha

R: Yeah, uh, Wolford lived on something like 1600 calories a day

E: Alright

S: It's not that bad.

R: Which is realy not that bad

J: That's not bad

R: That's slightly more than what I take in when I'm trying to cut back on my fats.

S: That's a weight loss diet, 1600 calories a day is a pretty reasonable weight loss plan

R: He died at the age of 79 uh, from comoplications from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease.

E: That's not, that's got nothing to do with his lifestyle

R: It's not, yeah it's not a fair, it's not really a fair judgement wether or not his calorie restriction were the... Although he claimed at the end of his life his calorie restriction helped extend his life further by a couple of years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's.

J: Unprovable

R: Yeah

E: That's a nice antecdote.

S: Honestly, ya know, again this is all antecdotal I have no idea about the individual case but, that's unlikely to be true.

R: Yeah

S: Calorie restriction actually hastens death in ALS. It often, the ability to get enough calories in and keep your calories up is a huge pragnostic factor in ALS. So if anything, ya know, ya can't, it's very hard to argue that calorie restriction prolonged his life once he developed ALS.

R. But yeah, he also thought that his ALS was possibly caused by his time in the Biosphere due to lack of oxygen and increased nitrous oxide. Exactly what causes ALS is not entirely settled and so he suspected that that might have had something to do with it.

S: That's wild speculation.

E: Nitrous Oxides builds up in these Biodomes? I didn't know that.

J: Well they were having trouble in there right?

R: They had a lot of trouble. Although, they did stay in there for two years. But, one of the problems they had was a severe lack of food and so it was helpful that their resident doctor happened to be this guy who believed in calorie restriction. So he convinced them all to go on this diet. Ya know, to join him in his diet.

S: Yeah since we have no food anyway.

R: Right. And so they did, but even so at some point many months in they finally broke down and opened up a container of food that was grown outside of the Biosphere in order to supplement their diets.

J: That would have made an awesome YouTube video

E: Watching the moment of breaking that chest open

S: So they just didn't...Did something go wrong with their food production or they didn't plan properly?

J: If you couldn't grow enough food in the Biodome, and ya know, it was never done before. They didn't have the data going in to it, it was all just engineered and it failed. Biodome experiments didn't last as long as they hoped

S: It wasn't self sustaining.

J: No

R: Yeah by all their models I guess it seemed like it could be done but one thing after another went wrong.

S: Now imagined if that happened on Mars.

R: Well that's why they do this stuff. Although I'm sad that they're not, they haven't continued trying that sort of thing. I would love to see that project continue.

S: Yeah

R: I don't know the details of why nobody has tried Biosphere 3

J: Ya know what I noticed?

E: Pauly Shore

J: I noticed, looking at pictures of Biodome, first its interesting if you look at it today, a weed infested back yard. I also noticed it looks a lot like Logan's Run, that's 1970s movie of the people that get put into a Biodome like thing because that was like a last ditch effort to sav humanity and people were in there so long that they forgot what happened. That was Biodome man. Ya ever see, like it looks like it.

S: Well, it was a lot bigger

R: There was apparently a Biosphere 3, maybe still is in Syberia and there's a Biosphere J in Japan. But one other thing, despite the potential pseudoscience with origins of disease and wether or not calorie restriction can actually work in humans to extend life, Walford seemed like a really awesome guy. At one point he would like take off for a time as part of his studies and measure the rectal temperatures of holy men in India.

E: uh huh

R: He traveresed the African continent on foot, according to his obituary in the New York Times. So he specifically wanted to go out and just have adventures. He said, " If you spend all your time in the laboratories, as most scientists do, you might spend 35 years in the lab and be very successful and win a Nobel Prize. But those 35 years will be just a blur. So I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities." He once broke his leg on a motorcycle.

E: That qualifies as dangerous.
R: Yeah he just seems like he was a fun guy.

== News Items ==
=== Podcasting Patent (06:42)===
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-05/company-sues-tech-giants-claiming-podcast-patent-breach/4735786
S: Alright well Jay, tell us why we're gonna be shut down. We can't do podcasting anymore.

R: Nooooo

E: We're done? This is it?

J: I'm not convinced that we're gonna get shut down as a podcast, but this story has to do with patent trolling. Patent trolling is the business du jour. And if you haven't heard about it, those of you who haven't, it's a pretty simple and amazingly lucrative idea. Here's how it works: Patent trolls, also known as non-practicing entities, or NPEs, are typically companies that buy defunct businesses or ya know any kind of organization or even individual patents. And they buy these companies for their patents specifically, and then they used those acquired patents to sue other companies for patent infringement. It's pretty basic and it goes a long way and they've made a ton of money. These organizations make all or most of their income through the lawsuits. Most of them, like I said, they don't have anything else going on. They become a patent troll and they don't actually have a product or sell anything or do any other type of commerce. It's not 100% fast and true but a large majority of them are just companies that revolve around these lawsuits. And this scam, or whatever you wanna call it, has worked on some of the worlds' most biggest and lucrative companies. The US patent office is widely known to issue patents for ideas that are already in use and common place. And these are ideas like, say online shopping or shopping cart system or a file sharing system or an in app purchase, as an example. And many of these lawsuits are about things that should never have been patented in the first place. Like I think that a shopping cart system should have never been patented. You really can't say, hey you owe me money because you're using this workflow process to sell products online to online customers; to me that's insane. In 2011, patent trolls cost the United States, or companies inside the Unites States, a total of twenty-nine billion dollars; and, they have increased their activity 400% since 2005. And they are 62% of all patent lawsuits in the United States. It's a phenomenal portion of patent lawsuits and they're really growing leaps and bounds year for year. I guess, instead of these companies finding new uses for their patents and expanding on the technology they already own, they're focusing on these lawsuits. You know these companies are, in my opinion, they're pretty transparent because they use similar procedures to get to the point where they can start hitting up the big companies and one of the things that they do is that they'll find a week company or a financially poor company, with no regard of winning anything other than just the lawsuit from this company to set a legal precedent. And then they take that legal precedent, and they take it to a bigger company, and they'll tell the next court, "Hey, we already won a lawsuit about this." And now ya know instead of them ya know just trying to win a lawsuit and maybe stopping that company, they're gonna ask for fifty million dollars. And they guise it as a licensing fee. Oh we're just sueing for licensing fees here. We want them to pay us for the use of the patent, and we want them to go back to this year, or whatever, and now and we're not gonna sue them in the future because they're actually going to be paying us for this licensing fee. Companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Ebay, just to name a few, are starting to turn and face these patent trolls and go for it. Really really get down and dirty in court, and let the years go by and spend the millions and millions of dollars to fight them. But they're putting they're um they're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "No, we're not going to pay any of these blackmail fees. We're actually gonna fight you and try to get you to go out of business." Very recently, June 4th of 2013, the White House enacted five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations to restrict the activities of patent trolls. And this is a huge step forward in helping companies protect themselves and make it much much more difficult for patent trolls to actually win against US based companies. A patent troll named Prsonal Audio LLC has sued three podcasters and sent demand letters to a number of others. Now this is the case that Steve was talking about. Recently this company filed suit against CBS and NBC, and has also sent additional demand letters to small podcasting operations. So an organization called EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting against Personal Audio LLC, which is the company that's sueing these podcasters. And what EFF is trying to do is help to save podcasting. Now the first thing that they did was they asked for donations so they can raise the thirty thousand dollars to begin the lawsuit process. And what they're trying to do, is they're trying to prove that the patent that Personal Audio LLC owns is actually not a legitimate patent at all. And what the, the reason that they're trying to do this is it's the quickest and most direct route to stop the lawsuit. And they way that they're doing it is that they're asking for people to help them find proof that the idea of podcasting, either in part or similar ideas or even the entire idea, if it was ever stated, written down or communicated online. Any way that they can prove before October 2nd of 1996, then they can take that proof to the patent office, go to court and say, "Look it, ya know this idea predates their patent. It was ya know on a public forum and this whole thing is illegitimate." The worst case scenario here is if this company gets a foothold and starts sueing the bigger organizations, ya know some of these organizations that can afford will probably pay; but I'd imagine some of them won't because as most people know podcasting is not really a lucrative venture. For those people that are running a lucrative podcasting venture, like Adam Corrola as an example, he's one of the people being, his company is being sued. Ya know Adam Corrola does a pretty damn good job on his podcast

E: Yeah

J: He's making some decent money over there, I mean this could put him right off the air. Of course, being a podcaster and being just a huge fan of the podcasting world, I stand very firmly against what this company is trying to do. Now, I did read some things that troubled me. That made me think that there might be some legitimacy to this lawsuit because it is possible that the person, the engineer the software engineer, is claiming that he did make these engines and that he does deserve some compensation.

S: So what though? What did he invent? RSS, ya know the really simple syndication, they didn't do that, that's open source. What, MP3 files?

J: No, I I I'm not 100% sure, Steve. I tried to find it, I was all over the web searching for facts and I think it's vague and it's deliberately vague. I think it boils down to the idea that you're distributing serialized episodes of something over the web. That's what I read. That's it. I didn't get to more detail than that.

E: So he's um

S: Yeah, that's still simply b.s.

E: patenting the concept, right? Just the concept of podcasts.

J: Yeah. But let me let me give you a

E: Sounds Week

J: It does sound weak. And let me give you an example of something that I saw on Shark Tank as an example. I really like that show for a lot of reasons, it is entertaining. There is a pretty good amount of stuff to learn if you want to watch it and one of the sharks on the show, it... Real quick, what the show is people come in and pitch their business to rich people, business men and women, and they uh they're asking for money like they wanna they want to be funded. So uh Mark Cuban, who is my favorite person on the show is really, first off we've mentioned him on The Skeptics' Guide before, he's he's the only person I think is really a critical thinker on the show. And he he's fought against pseudoscience when it comes on that show. But one guy came on with a, it was like a vest, and he had a patent where if you had like your iPhone in an internal pocket it runs a wire up to like your neck and you have your ear buds there. And the guy patented basically running a wire through clothing; and Mark Cuban went ape shit on him. Just saying this is b.s. Like, you know it's guys like you that are you know destroying innovation and and growth and and you know companies developing new technologies because ya know you're holding this ridiculous patent. It stops other people from using a similar technology. You can't patent a wire going through clothing. It's absurd. And I think when I watched it, at first I didn't understand why he was getting so upset. I did get his idea, but I didn't understand everything that we just discussed. I have learned a lot since I watched that episode; and now I fully understand it. I completely agree with Mark Cuban. This is the type of thing that squelches innovation, puts companies out of business and ya know all that money is just being syphoned out of these companies that are developing technology. These patent trolling companies are not technology developers. All they're doing is, they're in the business just to make money, that's it. They don't. There's no good side to it. Somebody is just getting rich.

S: They're like just, they're parasites.

J: So if you if you are interested ya know take a look online. Uh look up the company, the name of that company again is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're fighting a lot of other technology and digital based threats to the future of our technology. And I do believe in what they're trying to do and if you're interested, take a look and maybe even make a donation.

S: Obviously, patents are important. People need to be able to protect their intellectual property and benefit from their innovation. But yeah, but patenting like a really basic idea is is counterproductive, it's absurd. The kind of idea that like anybody can come up with "I'm the first person to submit a patent for it". In fact, you can patent ideas that can't even be implemented yet. In other words, if you see a technology coming on the horizon, you can patent a use of that not yet existing technology. And then when the technology does come online, you can then start sueing anybody that tries to use it in the way that you patented. And all you're doing is patenting an idea, a basic obvious idea. It just becomes a race to see who can patent it first. It is totally broken. That kind of system is completely counterproductive.

J: Yeah, it's, well the government is taking steps to heat and it's moving forward. There doesn't seem to be that much holding these decisions that they're making so. I think things are moving in the right direction.

S: Hopefully

=== Class System in Mice (17:21)===
* http://www.universityherald.com/articles/3575/20130617/mice-big-brother-setup-develop-social-structures.htm
17:21
S: Alright well, Rebecca tell us about how mice have their own class system.

R: I will. Uh, yeah, there's a really fun experiment that's been happening on mice; looking at their social strati. And what's interesting isn't the fact that mice set up class systems and different social statuses; but the way in which scientists are starting to study them, and study their social behavior... It's not necessarily...like studying the way animals are interacting with each other isn't necessarily as easy as studying, let's say studying what a particular drug is doing to a particular mouse system, uh it's much more complex. You've got mice interacting with each other, displaying different behaviors doing different things that you have to constantly watch and log in, you know, an objective a way as possible. This study, by Dr. Tali Kimchi, which I did not know was a last name, but I really like it, Kimchi

J: Kimchi

E: Kimchi

R: Yeah Kimchi is a delicious condiment uh, and also a last name. So Dr. Kimchi at the Wiseman's Institute's Neural Biology department is studying mice and their social interactions using a big brother house. So if you recall the tv show, which hasn't been around in the US for quite a long time. Big Brother is a show where they have cameras that are constantly watching the residences of the house. And the residents aren't allowed to leave the house, and the cameras are watching 24 hours. And in the UK, they were broadcast 24 hours in the most boring feed you can possibly imagine. Same sort of deal here, only slightly more complex, uh because the human big brother inhabitants were not microchipped. In this case, yes, the mice had microchips implanted in them.

S: RFIDs

R: RFIDs, yes. Yeah, exactly. The same sort of microchip you put in cats and dogs to keep track of them if they run away.

E: and credit cards.

R: yeah credit cards or tube cards, things like that. So in this case uh the microchips were used to track the mice movements. Mice?

S: Meece

E: Meeces. Meeces to pieces

R: Ok. To track the meeces movements. And they go around their little house so their ccd cameras all over this relatively large house, for a bunch of mice, I think. And a computer examining what those behaviors are.And it was extraordinarily effective at parcing the different movements, at figuring out what the mice were doing, when they were doing it how they were interacting. To the point where uh they could predict with over 90 percent accuracy who the mice were going to be mating with. For instance... uh and they were also able to differentiate between the different genetic strains of the mice, so different strains uh showed different behaviors that they were able to see in the computer analysis. So it was an interesting way of collecting a vast amount of information and parcing it in a way that could have important uses in the future when figuring out uh behavviors. Some of the other things they figured out, they found that within 24 hours uh one group of normal strain mice had already established a leader and like a caste system. So it took about 24 hours for them to figure that out. Uh they also did an experiment where they put, they filled the house with another strain that they labeled as autistic. These mice exhibited very little social engagement. And what they found with the autistic mice, is that

E: they were fascinated

R: Yeah, right. Uh what they found with the autistic mice was that no leader emerged at all, uh no social strati happened. Except like occasionally it would appear that a leader would emerge and then they would promptly be dethroned. So social mice like immediately organized themselves into like a caste system. While autistic mice did not. Part of the, the intersting thing about this system that they've developed of analyzing behavior, can in the future be used for things like identifying the different aspects of disorders like autism or schizophrenia.

S: Yeah, it sounds like a really great research paradigm.

R: Yeah, exactly. It's fun, you can go online and see uh, I'm sure if you google Dr. Kimshee you can find a video of the mice running around in their little house. And it's kind of cool, they're all color coded uh when you watch the videos and you can follow them around as they do different things. It made me want to get my own mouse set-up.

S: They should make it into a reality tv show.

E: They should.

R: People would watch it. I bet within like two weeks, whichever mouse established itself as king would be on the front page of Us magazine.

=== Anti-GMO Pseudoscience (22:50)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/ Once More: Bad Science in the Service of Anti-GMO Activism]
S: Alright, well let's move on. There's a study making the rounds. Another one of those studies reporting to show severe negative outcomes from uh feeding animals GM food, or genetically modified food. Uh so from the abstract of this study, let me read to you a part of the abstract and you can uh tell me what you think about it: Feed intake weight gain mortality and blood biochemistry were measured; organ weights and pathology were determined postmortem. There were no differences pigs fed the GM and non GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality and routine blood biochemistry measurements. The GM diet was associated with gastric and uterine differences in pigs. GM fed pigs had uteri that were 25% heavier than non GM fed pigs. And GM fed pigs had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation. With a rate of 32% of GM fed pigs compared to 12% of non GM fed pigs with a P value of .004. This severe stomach inflammation was worse in GM fed males compared to non GM fed males by a factor of 4. And the GM fed females compared to non GM fed females by a factor of 2.2. So that sounds like pretty impressive.

E: Bad news

S: Pretty impressive outcome, but does anything jump out at you guys that there might be some problems with this study?

R: Nope, seems legit.

E: Everything's great.

S: This is like our lessons on how to evaluate studies right? One thing you have to always ask is whenever they're comparing two different groups, is how many comparisons do they actually look at? Because if you look at enough different comparisons, then you can cherry pick, by random chance you know there's gonna be some correlation somewhere. And if you're cherry picking that out of many comparisons, that's one of the...Remember the researcher degrees of freedom? You know, researchers can manufacture positive results by manipulating the data. And one way of doing that, even if they're doing it honestly or inadvertantly, one way to do that is to make multiple comparisons. Now there's a statistical fix that you're supposed to do for each additional comparison that you do or you make. You have to adjust the statistics to see if it's truly statistically significant. So for example, if you set the P value at .05, then roughly speaking that means that one in twenty comparisons are going to be statistically significant and by chance alone. If you make twenty comparisons and one is .05, that's probably just random chance. But even if you just look at that one thing, if that were the only comparison you made, then the P value of .05 would be meaningful. So they tell you right here in the abstract that feed intake, weight gain or mortality, a whole panel of blood biochemistry were measured. Organ weight, apparently all the organs were weighed and pathologically examined; and now they're just telling us about the stomachs and the uterus. So, that's what we call a fishing expedition, right? David Gorski wrote about this on science-based medicine, so if you want you can... He goes into it in great detail. And I think he absolutely correctly characterizes this as a fishing expedition. You go looking for a whole bunch of things, you're gonna find correlations by random chance alone, right? Astrologers are famous for this. This is astrology with pigs and GM corn. But it's actually even far worse than what you might um, than what you might... Even from the abstract you can say this is B.S. They went fishing and they came up with these two randoms. Why would GM corn cause severe stomach inflammation? But it's actually much worse than that. Because what they did was, this is a good way to increase your probability of generating false positive results. They took inflammation of the stomach, and they broke it down into different, somewhat arbitrary categories. No inflammation, mild, moderate, severe, erosions pinput ulcers, frank ulcers and bleeding ulcers. Out of all of those categories, only severe inflammation was worse in the GM fed versus the regular pigs.

E: Ohh... That's not what they said in the abstract

S: You wouldn't know that from just reading the abstract. All they say is severe inflammation was worse in the pigs fed the GM feed. Yeah but, not all the other kinds of inflammation. And, in fact, if you look at all inflammation, regardless of how severe it is, there was a slight decrease in the GM fed group compared to the non GM fed group.

E: Wow

S: It was just if you cherry pick out the one category in the middle, there wasn't even a dose response curve. That's another question you ask yourself. How many comparisons are being made, is there a dose response to any effect that they're claiming exists? You also of course have to ask is it plausible, but we could put that aside. So this data... So this is an exercise in cherry picking data. They cherry picked the severe inflammation out of this arbitrary categorization of different levels of inflammation. Over all inflammation... ya know this is just a random scatter of data, this is random noise. But actually, the thing that they're claiming, it increases the risk of sever stomach inflammation, overall inflammation was actually decreased in that group. Contradicting what they're pointing out. So this is complete B.S., this is just utter B. S. And this is coming from researchers, Judy Carman for example, who have a history of doing anti GM research.

E: mmmhmmm

S: just seems to be someone with an agenda, basically.

E: Yeah, how does she account for her personal biases.

S: So yeah, there's a bias, misdirection, crappy data ya know just horrific methodology.Also, David pointed out that, which is a very legitimate point, you always wanna know also in studies was anything unusual happening? When you're studying a disease, did the disease behaved like it always does. When you're studying animals, were they animals otherwise normal and healthy other than the thing that you were manipulating. These pigs, did overall, did pretty poorly. They had a very high rate of infection and complications. It's almost as if they weren't well cared for. So that's like an outlyer and really calls into question just what was happening in this study. The final analysis, again you want to avoid nitpicking little details of a study and then claiming that the results are invalid; you have to put it into context. But these are fatal flaws that we're talking about. And taken together, they make the results of this study worthless and uninterpretable. But yet, this is being spread around the internet as a stunning ya know study showing that GM corn and GM feed causes this horrible stomach inflammation in pigs. As if there's something dangerous ya know about this particular type of GM feed. And it's all based upon the naturalistic phallacy. It's all just genetic modification ain't natural. It's really just nonsense.

J: Are people eating the same exact food as they feed the pigs.

S: Well this is , animal feed. So no. They're trying to make genetically modified food seem scary.

J: Yeah.

S: It's just fearmongering, at the end of the day, is what it is.

J: Now, are they gonna do a follow up, Steve? Because typically, when a study like this happens, some other group will do another one similar or exactly like they did just to see if their results match.

S: Yeah, I'd like to see this replicated. You know, I strongly predict this is not the kind of study that's gonna replicate. And replication, of course is in the final analysis, that's how you tell. When you do this kind of multiple analysis where you're just looking at... you're just throwing a whole bunch of crap up against the wall and seeing what sticks, that study is never conclusive. That is always an exploratory study. Then you say, okay, we have this correlation and we looked at twenty, thirty fourty comparisons. We found this correlation. Then you get a fresh set of data, you replicate the study and see if that correlation holds up. If it was all random statistical noise, it will go away. And you'll probably see some other random association. But if it's a real effect, it should replicate. And that's how you know. So this is an exploratory study at best, because of all the multiple comparisons. It's not the kind of thing that should be reported in the press as fear mongering about GM foods. The kind that, at best, inspire a folllow up study. Let me give you an analogy to help put this into perspective: Prayer, intercessory prayer research, you guys familiar with research? Where the number of studies that were done looking at people who were sick and they were getting prayed for by a third party, intercessory prayer and they often didn't even know that they were being prayed for. They knew that they were in the study, but they didn't know if they were in the prayed for group or the not prayed for group. Tons of problems with this research, but the bottom line is, that they did multiple comparisons. For example, they looked at patients in the cardiac ICU and they followed a number of complications, number of days in the ICU, number of days in the hospital, survival... They looked at multiple multiple different end points. And then in one study, again there weren't differences across the board. There was like this one outcome was a little bit better in the prayer group. Then they replicated the study, and a different outcome was a little bit better, but not overall. Like overall it's random noise. But again the same outcome wasn't better, it's like a different outcome every time. That's, that's not a replication, that's a failure to replicate. That is consistent with random noise, which is of course what you would expect when you're hypothesis is magic makes people better, ya know.

E: Hahaha that's true

S: This is when you're considering the multiple comparisons that are being disclosed in the study. You may not be aware that they may have made, the researchers may have made multiple comparisons and only published the ones that were positive, or just a small subset. So they might have done all kinds of comparisons bu that doesn't work that doesn't... just discarded it and never reported it. Which is why why you know no single study is ever that believable, especially if it's like one research group. Uh, or, still one off study. It's hard... We get confronted with this all the time. Oh here's a study on ESP, why don't you guys believe this? Cuz it's one study. Because you have no idea what these researchers really did behind the scenes.

R: It would be great if grade school science tearchers would, during a science fair, point out to their students that all of the things the students did to make their science fair project look better and get an A. It's exactly what scienctists still do once they're actual working scientists and, hey that's wrong. Make sure that you don't actually do that

J: Like fudge the numbers?

R: Yeah, like I did that when I was doing science fair projects I would have outlyers and be like, "Oh that one just didn't count like if I just this then I get, I got like a nice clean line here and uh I get an A. Because it looks like I knew my stuff. Yeah So

S: You're absolutely right. Teachers should emphasize that its the messiness that they wanna see.

R: Yes

S: If they get something that looks too clean, that should count down your grade should go down, not up. Yeah my daughter recently, my older daughter recently like last year had a science fair. And I made sure that there were no shenanigans with her data. But going, walking through the posters of all the other students studies ya know there were a lot of them. Of course ya know we were uber skeptic evaluating a twelve year old science fair project.

J: Could you imagine? Steve walking around like checking out all these like hey kid, you're all wrong over here.

S: I just did it, it was a good teaching opportunity for my daughter. I didn't like criticize the students and make them cry.

J: Sure you didn't

S: It was like to Julia, it was a good lesson. Hey let's look at this study. What do you think about this? What were the methods and what are they doing wrong here? Like are they not using control groups and not carefully defining terms. I mean every error that was possible to make was made. But it is, it was a good and awesome learning opportunity. To ruthlessly pick through those, you can do it in a constructive nurturing way. But that would be a great learning opportunity to show how hard it is to do good science. All the ways in which, even a simple science project can go awry.

R: And on that note, I just wanted to mention that, I think I might have mentioned this before, but you can, if you're interested you can volunteer to be a judge at the local science fair. They'll probably be happy to have you. I did it a couple of years ago at a local high school and I really enjoyed it. Just talking to the kids and finding out what they were interested in, it was pretty cool.

S: Awesome

E: That is cool. Very cool

=== Skunk Ape (36:31)===
* http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/06/14/man-claims-he-spotted-floridas-elusive-skunk-ape/
S: Alright, well Evan, you're gonna finish up the news segment of our show with a the latest stunning evidence of the Florida Skunk Ape.

J: Skunk Ape?

E: The Skunk Ape, of course. In Sarasota County Florida, a man claims he has spotted Florida's elusive Skunk Ape.

S: Very elusive

E: ...so the headlines read from CBS Miami. Alright, so what is a Skunk Ape? Well who better to ask than the folks at Floridaskunkape.com. Yes, there is such a website.

S: Anybody?

E: They claim, it's what Floridians call their big foot, as best known as sasquatch in most other places in North America, oh yeah. Evidence supporting the existence of the creature has been gathered over the years, and consists of hundreds of documented sitings, a few pictures, several foot casts and a few hair samples. Mmhmm. So they have actual evidence, apparently. It gets its name from the very fact that it lives in Florida it in itself emits an awful stench. Now that's their writing, I didn't write that, that's from their website. Lives in the state of Florida and emits an awful stench. People who've had the pleasure to experience the smell, it's described as that of an elephant's cage or a trash dump. And one person even said it was like the scent of a skunk that did battle with a dumpster.

J: *laughs*

E: I went to the gallery on that website to have a look at the photos and stuff and it said, "your search yielded no results." So much for that. But, forget that for now because we have new video evidence. This is smoking gun evidence, smoking gun so hot it must be shot evidence. Mike Falconer is the person who posted the video and still pictures on YouTube.

S: I wonder what his ancestors did for a living.

E: They probably made barrels or something. Uh he says that he captured this footage on March 2nd of this year 2013. That he and his son spotted a large hairy creature off in the, off, it was a field at the Myakka River State Park which is a place in which the Skunk Ape has been sited before, apparently. And there were other people in who um, in this footage you can hear them and they've also stopped their cars on the road to try to get a glimpse as well. Now I think that's um, well not important, but I think noteworthy in the case of this. Instead of having this, we're so used to having this you know there's someone out in the wilderness with a camera shooting ya know whatever they think is a big foot off in the distance. But this one is different it has a gathering, sort of a group of people who are all... They've all seen something; they've seen something off in the distance.

S: Yeah, but they were strolling around like nothing special was going on. Honestly, it didn't seem that impressive to me.

E: They were saying some things in the background like ya know "oh what is that over there" and "I'm trying to get a glimpse of it". At no point did anyone say they smelled something funny or were like ooo that's a skunk or like... I know that if a skunk gets hit by a car like a mile up my road from here I can smell it. That's a very powerful smell and if it's half what they're describing, according to the websites and stuff, I think you would ya know perhaps smell something. But, in any case. So what they did is uh a guy and his son started to pursue whatever it is that they saw out in the fields. So they've got their iPhones right? And they're recording video. And at one point you can kind of see something off in the far grassland. It looks like it has to be hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Something is kinda moving around back there, just some little brown dot or something and they're saying "Oh yeah can you see it? There it is! There it is! Let's go get a closer look".

S: It's pixelsquatch

J: *laughs*

E: Exactly. And that's when they decided, of course, what you do when that happens. Well you turn off your video camera and you start shooting photos instead. So when they started to take photos is when they supposedly captured the quote unquote evidence. And Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, they're brown blotches.

S: Yeah it's

E: Brown blotches off in the trees

S: It turns from pixelsquatch to blobsquatch, to the more classical blobsquatch. Absolutely. It's a completely unrecognizable amorphous brown blob.

R: Enhance!

S: Enhance! Enhance!

R: Zoom in, enhance

E: zoom zoom zoom

S: Evan, do you know what the difference is between the Myakka Skunk Ape and the Hamden Bald Eagle?

E: Oooo um, one really exists and the other doesn't.

S: Yes. I have close up, in focus, unambiguous photographs of the Hamden Bald Eagle

E: Exactly. And yet, once again, someone does not have such shots of the supposed Skunk Ape.

J: The freakin bald headed eagle, that thing could just fly away. You know talk about...it's not just stuck on the ground.

E: Apparently in the year 2000, there was some video footage shot of something that they deemed the Skunk Ape. And then around 2006 someone else came up with something that was more clearer, but to me it was clearly just a hoax, a guy in a suit walking around of some sort. And that's, and then there's this. And that's pretty much it; and a few other blurry photos out there which could have been anything shot by anyone at any time. That's it. That's the sum of evidence you have when it comes to this thing. For the folks who, the guys who, Falconer when he shot this video, when he posted it to YouTube he put up a description on the YouTube channel, YouTube page he has and here's what he wrote in regards to this, and I think this is a bit revealing. He says that: This is real footage my son and I took in Myakka March 2nd 2013. We had iPhones with us. You'll see actual still shots of the thing. Some have called it big foot or sasquatch. The only editing we did to these pictures was to lighten it up. Alright? So here we go. At one point, you hear us talk of two of them. It was a deer out there hiding in the tall grass; maybe that's what it was after. You can see it in the middle at the thin tan line of grass under the tree. You will also see the deer a little to the left and closer in. Hello, deer!

S: Okay

E: Ok, so what's more likely? You've got Skunk Ape legend, ya know, in which there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever. It's all a bunch of blurry photos and weak videos of. Or, the people actually shooting this stuff saying that was clearly deer there, running around. And um, hmmm gee. Skunk Ape or deer? I don't -know. What does Occam's Razor tell us to think in this situation?

S: Hey it's more likely to be a Florida panther than the Skunk Ape.

J: Yeah

R: It'd be more likely to be a zebra

S: Yeah

R: than a Skunk Ape. I mean, cuz the skunk ape doesn't exist.

E: Unimpressive, sorry. It is getting a lot of headlines

J: Alright, Ev, c'mon. This whole thing has been a little vague, ya know. What's your gut tellin ya?

E: My gut's telling me that there is a network of Skunk Apes living in those fields, all over Florida.

J: And once again, I want there to be a Skunk Ape. You know, somebody please find some real evidence and I'd be all over it. But these fuzzy pictures, I'm getting tired of it guys.

S: By the way, I am patenting the word pixelsquatch. Everytime you say it, you've got to give me a quarter.

J: Pixel squatch!

E: Alright, well you'll hear from my lawyers.

S: So have any of you guys heard about the GyroStim?

J: No

S: Probably not.

R: It's pronounced "Yeerow"

S: "yeerow?"

E: Is that a new sandwich they're serving at Subway or something?

R: Yeah it's a combination. It's like a regular gyro, but with Slim Jims

E: Haha cool

S: So this is a machine that was developed by an engineer whose daughter has cerebral palsy. And it's essentially a chair. You sit in the chair and you have a little joystick remote control and you can swing around in all three dimensions, you know.

E: XYZ?

S: Exactly. In every axis. He developed this because she was getting physical therapy in which she had to do exercises to essentially do the same thing. Rotate around in order to um improve her balance in her walking. And, it was a bit tedious. So he, being an engineer, was like I'm gonna help her out, automate this. So he built a chair, the GyroStim, you know he built this chair and it does what he wanted it to do. It rotates around in all three axes. Now unfortunately, some not science-based practioners got their hands on this machine and have ran with it. The engineer is Kevin Maher, and you guys remember Ted Carrick? He is a quote un quote chiropractic neurologist.

J: Yeah I remember that

S: So he is using the GyroStim, and claiming it can cure all kinds of things. So I wrote a review on Science-Based Medicine of the GyroStim. Which, you know, is just one of an endless sequence of devices with overblown claims without adequate evidence. The thing hasn't been studied. It's actually not an illegitimate concept, there is such a thing called vestibular therapy where you essentially do just that. You stimulate the vestibular system by you know putting by rotating and changing your head position over and over again. And it can treat...it's actually a very effective treatment for some kinds of vertigo.

J: What's the vestibular system, Steve?

S: The vestibular system, that's a very good question Jay, is the system in your brain that senses two things - your orientation with respect to gravity and acceleration. So, this is the three semi circular canals that are in your inner ear. They have fluid in them so when you rotate around you're oriented towards gravity the fluid flows through those semi circular canals, which there's three of them, one in each axis, and then that moves hair cells that sense the movement of that fluid. And that's the sensing organ, but then that vestibular information gets taken in by the brain and is process compared to your visual information and tactile information and that's how you get a sense of motion and stability and balance ya know.

J: So this is your internal accelerometer

S: Yeah, well exactly. When there's a disconnect between your visual input and your vestibular input, that results in dizziness and motion sickness. That's why you get motion sick. When your vestibular system is telling you that your rocking up and down and your visual system is not because it is locked to something in the foreground. It's also a very delicate system, and a lot of people have dizziness of vertigo and we can't really identify anything specific that's not working. There's no lesion anywhere and it looks normal. But that integration of misinformation is just a little bit off. Those are the people who do well with vestibular therapy or essentially just retraining the brain to integrate this information. Conceptually it's perfectly fine. But where we get into trouble is in two areas. One is, the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, so it's very expensive. There is no evidence to show that getting vestibular therapy with this 20 30 40 thousand dollar machine is superior to getting vestibular therapy manually with no machine; or just getting a twenty dollar swing and swinging back and forth on it as a way of stimulating your vestibular system. Which is something that physical therapists actually do. Investing in an expensive piece of equipment and paying a lot of money for expensive sessions is not justified until there's research showing this is not only as good as the far cheaper options, but is significantly superior to it. But there's no research, we don't even know if it works at all or that it's safe. All you have is the idea of using the machine. But of course that doesn't stop chiropractors, like Ted Carrick, from starting to use it. But in addition, the claims that are being propogated for this machine, especially by Ted Carrick and also by others now, is that it not only is a way of delivering vestibular therapy- which is the plausible component of the claim - but that it actually helps the brain recover from a traumatic injury.

J: Oh, yeah

S: In genaral, yeah. So I was reviewing a specific article written by a sports writer who wrote and article about the GyroStim, because it's being used to treat a lot of like hockey players who have had head injuries. And he did the typical journalist thing of antecdote miracles happening every day, then quicky, generic canned disclaimer. Well this scientist said it hasn't been tested yet and hasn't been approved by the FDA, now let me go back to these glowing antecdotes. Meanwhile he's talking, he's mentioning Autism and Asperger's. I mean it's ridiculous. So I wrote a typical blog post about it on Science-Based Medicine, and the author of the original article, Adrian Dater who is again a sports writer writing for the Denver Post, leaves a comment, like a really pissy comment - it didn't immediately get, because he was a first time poster it went to moderation and it didn't immediately get approved because we work for a living - in the middle of the day. Then he writes a blog post saying "I'm being censored over on Science-Based Medicine".

E: *laughs* He gave you all of 45 minutes. That's not...

S: He gave a full hour. So, but anyway, that's just a little aside. The thing is he like doubled down and completely defended his journalism. So then I of course, I had to write a follow up post on Neurologica, just about science journalism using him as an example of horrible science journalism.

J: Uh Oh!

E: Gee why would a sports writer be bad at science journalism?

S: Yeah I mean the thing is the guy's a sports writer, I don't expect him to be a good science journalist. But his problem was he wrote an article about science, and he got it all completely wrong. He fell for all the typical pit falls that non-experience trained science journalists fall for when they think that they can cover these complex topics. And he actually was defending his token skepticism. So in my follow up article I characterized different levels at which articles deal with science, especially when there's something contreversial. There's the false balance aproach in which you say oh experts over here say this, and this fringe lunatic over here says that; and you treat them like they're equal. Then there's the token skepticism where you actually give the bulk of the time to the fringe claim and you only have a quick skeptical blurb, which is what he fell into. And then there's the just complete abject gullibility without a hint of skepticism. So he was in the middle category of token skepticism, in which you don't get much credit for that. There's of course the fourth category which is the way it should be, which is appropriate skepticism. Right? But we didn't get that from him. So he was defending his token skepticism and also defending the GyroStim, completely ignoring all of my legitimate actual different criticisms. And in the end he was like criticizing David Goreski and the others on Science-Based Medicine about the positions that we were taking. We were like look, dude, you cover hockey. Go back to covering hockey. Seriously, you're arguing with a group of physicians who have spent a decade writng about these topics. You're telling us we don't know what we're talking about?

J: Did you say that to him?

S: Yes! How arrogant does this guy have to be?

E: Are you serious?

S: Like he had a fit that we disagreed with his journalism. He had a fit and it was horrible. It was horrible token skepticism and bad science writing. He didn't understand the issues at stake. And again, I wouldn't expect him to understand; but he had no sense of his own limitations. And of course he has no editor who would know, you know, that this is an innappropriate way to cover a medical science news story.

E: Yep

J: Steve, it also sounds like he's never engaged in any kind of legitimate discourse about things like that. You know?

S: No, he didn't engage, he got childish right out of the gate. Which, you know, always makes it worse of course.

J: Yeah, I mean I can understand from one perspective a guy like him never really entering that arena before. Not knowing what to expect, you know. And of course let's like, let's also achknowledge the idea here that you went up against Science-Based Medicine, you guys.

S: Yeah that's the thing. He had no idea what he was up against. So he started to back pedal a little bit. Like I wasn't endorsing it, I was just relaying the stories. Peple have a right to know about this; that whole coy bs. And one of our commentors dug up a twitter

E: *laughs*

S: A tweet that he did where he was like read about the device that cured you know this hockey player of his traumatic brain injury. Oh yeah, you're not endorsing it.

J: Uh oh! That sounds like an endorsement! He's just stating facts?

E: Yeah, he's just reporting what he heard

S: Yeah he was totally busted. He was totally busted.

J: How did it end, Steve? Did he just end up having to quit?

S: Yeah, he went away. It was a fun little exchange though.

J: Yeah it's something to learn... it's something for people like us to learn from and it sadly... Did that go back to his man cave and lick his wounds or did he actually say hey you know I screwed up here like what did I do wrong?

S: He did not give any evidence of any self awareness in this exchange.

E: mmmm

R: They rarely do though. You might have planted a seed

S: I might have planted a seed, you never know. But yeah, I don't expect most people to have the scales fall from their eyes and to say I was wrong, mea culpa. Very few people have I think the security and maturity to do that. Especially when you're in the middle of an internet fight. You know everyone has, as you like to call Jay, internet balls. You know?

J: Yeah

E: mmhmm

S: But, yeah you're right, you never know. Maybe he'll be a little bit more gun shy the next time he dips his toe into science journalism. Who knows?

E: Or he'll do some real research into what the hell he's talking about.

S: And we were, we got very polite and very proffesional. We were like listen, we want to help journalists write better. You know next time you want to cover a story like this, we're happy to provide you with some perspective and background information.

J: What?! That'll take hours!

S: *laughs*

J: I don't have time for that!

S: This is, this is what... I just told someone the other day you know in a similar context I'd much rather provide advice ahead of time rather than criticism after the fact. You know, run these things by somebody who knows what they're talking about ahead of time. We're here, we're a resource, ask us. We're, you know... What's the worst thing that could happen? We make your journalism better?

J: Yeah

S: You know? What's the worst thing that could come out of it?

J: It's basically you're like you're saying to them, I'll write your freakin essay paper for you pal just all you gotta do is pick up the phone.

S: Good journalists know how to do that. They know how to use resources well.

== Who's That Noisy? (55:54)==
55:54
S: Alright well, Evan, we're still falling behind on Who's That Noisy, but you're gonna give us a new one for this week.

E: Yeah I'll give you a new one for this week. We are going to catch up on all the correct answers and winners and everything in a couple more episodes. Bare with us while we get through this little stretch of podcasting. And uh I'm gonna play for you this week's brand new, fresh off the presses Who's That Noisy. It is an actual noisy, a classic as I like to say, and here we go...

R: mmm

S: hmmm

E: Okay

S: What do you want to know? Who that was speaking?

E: That's it. Send us your guess wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sgu forums.com. And that's about it; good luck everyone.

S: Thanks Evan

E: Thank you

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Staticman ()===
<blockquote>Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, 
Damian Tinkey 
Marlboro, NY</blockquote>

== Science or Fiction () ==
[http://www.nature.com/news/light-flips-transistor-switch-1.13178 Item #1]: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. [http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/06/05/G34100.1 Item #2]: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617110929.htm Item #3]: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in 12 weeks.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth.</blockquote>

== Announcements () ==

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 415

2014-02-12T04:23:24Z

Lmwood: /* Skunk Ape (36:31) */

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|episodeDate = 29th Jun 2013
|episodeIcon = File:Biosphere_2.jpg
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|qowAuthor = Robert Royar
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== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''
Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is June 29th 2013 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening everyone

R: Where the hell is Bob?

S: Bob, once again, is too busy to join us. Bob has a major thing happening at work

E: uh huh

S: that does keep him away.

== This Day in Skepticism (0:35) ==
June 29: Happy birthday to Dr. Roy Wolford, calorie restriction pioneer and Biosphere 2 inhabitant
R: Hey, happy birthday to Roy Wolford, Dr. Wolford.

E: Awesome! Is he a listener?

R: Well, uh no, he died in 2004. He was born June, 29 1924 and Dr. Roy Wolford is probably best known for being one of the inhabitants of Biosphere 2.

E: I love that movie

R: He was also though a pioneer of calory restriction as used for longevity. He wrote a book about living to 120. It was not, uh...

E: A life of perpetual hunger, that's what the title of the book was called.

J: Imagine what Perry would have said about that.

R: I think Perry would have said that he would gladly die at 20 than live on a restricted calorie diet.

J: Choking on a hamburger right?

R: Right

E: hahaha

R: Yeah, uh, Wolford lived on something like 1600 calories a day

E: Alright

S: It's not that bad.

R: Which is realy not that bad

J: That's not bad

R: That's slightly more than what I take in when I'm trying to cut back on my fats.

S: That's a weight loss diet, 1600 calories a day is a pretty reasonable weight loss plan

R: He died at the age of 79 uh, from comoplications from ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease.

E: That's not, that's got nothing to do with his lifestyle

R: It's not, yeah it's not a fair, it's not really a fair judgement wether or not his calorie restriction were the... Although he claimed at the end of his life his calorie restriction helped extend his life further by a couple of years after he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's.

J: Unprovable

R: Yeah

E: That's a nice antecdote.

S: Honestly, ya know, again this is all antecdotal I have no idea about the individual case but, that's unlikely to be true.

R: Yeah

S: Calorie restriction actually hastens death in ALS. It often, the ability to get enough calories in and keep your calories up is a huge pragnostic factor in ALS. So if anything, ya know, ya can't, it's very hard to argue that calorie restriction prolonged his life once he developed ALS.

R. But yeah, he also thought that his ALS was possibly caused by his time in the Biosphere due to lack of oxygen and increased nitrous oxide. Exactly what causes ALS is not entirely settled and so he suspected that that might have had something to do with it.

S: That's wild speculation.

E: Nitrous Oxides builds up in these Biodomes? I didn't know that.

J: Well they were having trouble in there right?

R: They had a lot of trouble. Although, they did stay in there for two years. But, one of the problems they had was a severe lack of food and so it was helpful that their resident doctor happened to be this guy who believed in calorie restriction. So he convinced them all to go on this diet. Ya know, to join him in his diet.

S: Yeah since we have no food anyway.

R: Right. And so they did, but even so at some point many months in they finally broke down and opened up a container of food that was grown outside of the Biosphere in order to supplement their diets.

J: That would have made an awesome YouTube video

E: Watching the moment of breaking that chest open

S: So they just didn't...Did something go wrong with their food production or they didn't plan properly?

J: If you couldn't grow enough food in the Biodome, and ya know, it was never done before. They didn't have the data going in to it, it was all just engineered and it failed. Biodome experiments didn't last as long as they hoped

S: It wasn't self sustaining.

J: No

R: Yeah by all their models I guess it seemed like it could be done but one thing after another went wrong.

S: Now imagined if that happened on Mars.

R: Well that's why they do this stuff. Although I'm sad that they're not, they haven't continued trying that sort of thing. I would love to see that project continue.

S: Yeah

R: I don't know the details of why nobody has tried Biosphere 3

J: Ya know what I noticed?

E: Pauly Shore

J: I noticed, looking at pictures of Biodome, first its interesting if you look at it today, a weed infested back yard. I also noticed it looks a lot like Logan's Run, that's 1970s movie of the people that get put into a Biodome like thing because that was like a last ditch effort to sav humanity and people were in there so long that they forgot what happened. That was Biodome man. Ya ever see, like it looks like it.

S: Well, it was a lot bigger

R: There was apparently a Biosphere 3, maybe still is in Syberia and there's a Biosphere J in Japan. But one other thing, despite the potential pseudoscience with origins of disease and wether or not calorie restriction can actually work in humans to extend life, Walford seemed like a really awesome guy. At one point he would like take off for a time as part of his studies and measure the rectal temperatures of holy men in India.

E: uh huh

R: He traveresed the African continent on foot, according to his obituary in the New York Times. So he specifically wanted to go out and just have adventures. He said, " If you spend all your time in the laboratories, as most scientists do, you might spend 35 years in the lab and be very successful and win a Nobel Prize. But those 35 years will be just a blur. So I find it useful to punctuate time with dangerous and eccentric activities." He once broke his leg on a motorcycle.

E: That qualifies as dangerous.
R: Yeah he just seems like he was a fun guy.

== News Items ==
=== Podcasting Patent (06:42)===
* http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-05/company-sues-tech-giants-claiming-podcast-patent-breach/4735786
S: Alright well Jay, tell us why we're gonna be shut down. We can't do podcasting anymore.

R: Nooooo

E: We're done? This is it?

J: I'm not convinced that we're gonna get shut down as a podcast, but this story has to do with patent trolling. Patent trolling is the business du jour. And if you haven't heard about it, those of you who haven't, it's a pretty simple and amazingly lucrative idea. Here's how it works: Patent trolls, also known as non-practicing entities, or NPEs, are typically companies that buy defunct businesses or ya know any kind of organization or even individual patents. And they buy these companies for their patents specifically, and then they used those acquired patents to sue other companies for patent infringement. It's pretty basic and it goes a long way and they've made a ton of money. These organizations make all or most of their income through the lawsuits. Most of them, like I said, they don't have anything else going on. They become a patent troll and they don't actually have a product or sell anything or do any other type of commerce. It's not 100% fast and true but a large majority of them are just companies that revolve around these lawsuits. And this scam, or whatever you wanna call it, has worked on some of the worlds' most biggest and lucrative companies. The US patent office is widely known to issue patents for ideas that are already in use and common place. And these are ideas like, say online shopping or shopping cart system or a file sharing system or an in app purchase, as an example. And many of these lawsuits are about things that should never have been patented in the first place. Like I think that a shopping cart system should have never been patented. You really can't say, hey you owe me money because you're using this workflow process to sell products online to online customers; to me that's insane. In 2011, patent trolls cost the United States, or companies inside the Unites States, a total of twenty-nine billion dollars; and, they have increased their activity 400% since 2005. And they are 62% of all patent lawsuits in the United States. It's a phenomenal portion of patent lawsuits and they're really growing leaps and bounds year for year. I guess, instead of these companies finding new uses for their patents and expanding on the technology they already own, they're focusing on these lawsuits. You know these companies are, in my opinion, they're pretty transparent because they use similar procedures to get to the point where they can start hitting up the big companies and one of the things that they do is that they'll find a week company or a financially poor company, with no regard of winning anything other than just the lawsuit from this company to set a legal precedent. And then they take that legal precedent, and they take it to a bigger company, and they'll tell the next court, "Hey, we already won a lawsuit about this." And now ya know instead of them ya know just trying to win a lawsuit and maybe stopping that company, they're gonna ask for fifty million dollars. And they guise it as a licensing fee. Oh we're just sueing for licensing fees here. We want them to pay us for the use of the patent, and we want them to go back to this year, or whatever, and now and we're not gonna sue them in the future because they're actually going to be paying us for this licensing fee. Companies like Rackspace, Microsoft and Ebay, just to name a few, are starting to turn and face these patent trolls and go for it. Really really get down and dirty in court, and let the years go by and spend the millions and millions of dollars to fight them. But they're putting they're um they're putting a flag in the ground and saying, "No, we're not going to pay any of these blackmail fees. We're actually gonna fight you and try to get you to go out of business." Very recently, June 4th of 2013, the White House enacted five executive actions and seven legislative recommendations to restrict the activities of patent trolls. And this is a huge step forward in helping companies protect themselves and make it much much more difficult for patent trolls to actually win against US based companies. A patent troll named Prsonal Audio LLC has sued three podcasters and sent demand letters to a number of others. Now this is the case that Steve was talking about. Recently this company filed suit against CBS and NBC, and has also sent additional demand letters to small podcasting operations. So an organization called EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is fighting against Personal Audio LLC, which is the company that's sueing these podcasters. And what EFF is trying to do is help to save podcasting. Now the first thing that they did was they asked for donations so they can raise the thirty thousand dollars to begin the lawsuit process. And what they're trying to do, is they're trying to prove that the patent that Personal Audio LLC owns is actually not a legitimate patent at all. And what the, the reason that they're trying to do this is it's the quickest and most direct route to stop the lawsuit. And they way that they're doing it is that they're asking for people to help them find proof that the idea of podcasting, either in part or similar ideas or even the entire idea, if it was ever stated, written down or communicated online. Any way that they can prove before October 2nd of 1996, then they can take that proof to the patent office, go to court and say, "Look it, ya know this idea predates their patent. It was ya know on a public forum and this whole thing is illegitimate." The worst case scenario here is if this company gets a foothold and starts sueing the bigger organizations, ya know some of these organizations that can afford will probably pay; but I'd imagine some of them won't because as most people know podcasting is not really a lucrative venture. For those people that are running a lucrative podcasting venture, like Adam Corrola as an example, he's one of the people being, his company is being sued. Ya know Adam Corrola does a pretty damn good job on his podcast

E: Yeah

J: He's making some decent money over there, I mean this could put him right off the air. Of course, being a podcaster and being just a huge fan of the podcasting world, I stand very firmly against what this company is trying to do. Now, I did read some things that troubled me. That made me think that there might be some legitimacy to this lawsuit because it is possible that the person, the engineer the software engineer, is claiming that he did make these engines and that he does deserve some compensation.

S: So what though? What did he invent? RSS, ya know the really simple syndication, they didn't do that, that's open source. What, MP3 files?

J: No, I I I'm not 100% sure, Steve. I tried to find it, I was all over the web searching for facts and I think it's vague and it's deliberately vague. I think it boils down to the idea that you're distributing serialized episodes of something over the web. That's what I read. That's it. I didn't get to more detail than that.

E: So he's um

S: Yeah, that's still simply b.s.

E: patenting the concept, right? Just the concept of podcasts.

J: Yeah. But let me let me give you a

E: Sounds Week

J: It does sound weak. And let me give you an example of something that I saw on Shark Tank as an example. I really like that show for a lot of reasons, it is entertaining. There is a pretty good amount of stuff to learn if you want to watch it and one of the sharks on the show, it... Real quick, what the show is people come in and pitch their business to rich people, business men and women, and they uh they're asking for money like they wanna they want to be funded. So uh Mark Cuban, who is my favorite person on the show is really, first off we've mentioned him on The Skeptics' Guide before, he's he's the only person I think is really a critical thinker on the show. And he he's fought against pseudoscience when it comes on that show. But one guy came on with a, it was like a vest, and he had a patent where if you had like your iPhone in an internal pocket it runs a wire up to like your neck and you have your ear buds there. And the guy patented basically running a wire through clothing; and Mark Cuban went ape shit on him. Just saying this is b.s. Like, you know it's guys like you that are you know destroying innovation and and growth and and you know companies developing new technologies because ya know you're holding this ridiculous patent. It stops other people from using a similar technology. You can't patent a wire going through clothing. It's absurd. And I think when I watched it, at first I didn't understand why he was getting so upset. I did get his idea, but I didn't understand everything that we just discussed. I have learned a lot since I watched that episode; and now I fully understand it. I completely agree with Mark Cuban. This is the type of thing that squelches innovation, puts companies out of business and ya know all that money is just being syphoned out of these companies that are developing technology. These patent trolling companies are not technology developers. All they're doing is, they're in the business just to make money, that's it. They don't. There's no good side to it. Somebody is just getting rich.

S: They're like just, they're parasites.

J: So if you if you are interested ya know take a look online. Uh look up the company, the name of that company again is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're fighting a lot of other technology and digital based threats to the future of our technology. And I do believe in what they're trying to do and if you're interested, take a look and maybe even make a donation.

S: Obviously, patents are important. People need to be able to protect their intellectual property and benefit from their innovation. But yeah, but patenting like a really basic idea is is counterproductive, it's absurd. The kind of idea that like anybody can come up with "I'm the first person to submit a patent for it". In fact, you can patent ideas that can't even be implemented yet. In other words, if you see a technology coming on the horizon, you can patent a use of that not yet existing technology. And then when the technology does come online, you can then start sueing anybody that tries to use it in the way that you patented. And all you're doing is patenting an idea, a basic obvious idea. It just becomes a race to see who can patent it first. It is totally broken. That kind of system is completely counterproductive.

J: Yeah, it's, well the government is taking steps to heat and it's moving forward. There doesn't seem to be that much holding these decisions that they're making so. I think things are moving in the right direction.

S: Hopefully

=== Class System in Mice (17:21)===
* http://www.universityherald.com/articles/3575/20130617/mice-big-brother-setup-develop-social-structures.htm
17:21
S: Alright well, Rebecca tell us about how mice have their own class system.

R: I will. Uh, yeah, there's a really fun experiment that's been happening on mice; looking at their social strati. And what's interesting isn't the fact that mice set up class systems and different social statuses; but the way in which scientists are starting to study them, and study their social behavior... It's not necessarily...like studying the way animals are interacting with each other isn't necessarily as easy as studying, let's say studying what a particular drug is doing to a particular mouse system, uh it's much more complex. You've got mice interacting with each other, displaying different behaviors doing different things that you have to constantly watch and log in, you know, an objective a way as possible. This study, by Dr. Tali Kimchi, which I did not know was a last name, but I really like it, Kimchi

J: Kimchi

E: Kimchi

R: Yeah Kimchi is a delicious condiment uh, and also a last name. So Dr. Kimchi at the Wiseman's Institute's Neural Biology department is studying mice and their social interactions using a big brother house. So if you recall the tv show, which hasn't been around in the US for quite a long time. Big Brother is a show where they have cameras that are constantly watching the residences of the house. And the residents aren't allowed to leave the house, and the cameras are watching 24 hours. And in the UK, they were broadcast 24 hours in the most boring feed you can possibly imagine. Same sort of deal here, only slightly more complex, uh because the human big brother inhabitants were not microchipped. In this case, yes, the mice had microchips implanted in them.

S: RFIDs

R: RFIDs, yes. Yeah, exactly. The same sort of microchip you put in cats and dogs to keep track of them if they run away.

E: and credit cards.

R: yeah credit cards or tube cards, things like that. So in this case uh the microchips were used to track the mice movements. Mice?

S: Meece

E: Meeces. Meeces to pieces

R: Ok. To track the meeces movements. And they go around their little house so their ccd cameras all over this relatively large house, for a bunch of mice, I think. And a computer examining what those behaviors are.And it was extraordinarily effective at parcing the different movements, at figuring out what the mice were doing, when they were doing it how they were interacting. To the point where uh they could predict with over 90 percent accuracy who the mice were going to be mating with. For instance... uh and they were also able to differentiate between the different genetic strains of the mice, so different strains uh showed different behaviors that they were able to see in the computer analysis. So it was an interesting way of collecting a vast amount of information and parcing it in a way that could have important uses in the future when figuring out uh behavviors. Some of the other things they figured out, they found that within 24 hours uh one group of normal strain mice had already established a leader and like a caste system. So it took about 24 hours for them to figure that out. Uh they also did an experiment where they put, they filled the house with another strain that they labeled as autistic. These mice exhibited very little social engagement. And what they found with the autistic mice, is that

E: they were fascinated

R: Yeah, right. Uh what they found with the autistic mice was that no leader emerged at all, uh no social strati happened. Except like occasionally it would appear that a leader would emerge and then they would promptly be dethroned. So social mice like immediately organized themselves into like a caste system. While autistic mice did not. Part of the, the intersting thing about this system that they've developed of analyzing behavior, can in the future be used for things like identifying the different aspects of disorders like autism or schizophrenia.

S: Yeah, it sounds like a really great research paradigm.

R: Yeah, exactly. It's fun, you can go online and see uh, I'm sure if you google Dr. Kimshee you can find a video of the mice running around in their little house. And it's kind of cool, they're all color coded uh when you watch the videos and you can follow them around as they do different things. It made me want to get my own mouse set-up.

S: They should make it into a reality tv show.

E: They should.

R: People would watch it. I bet within like two weeks, whichever mouse established itself as king would be on the front page of Us magazine.

=== Anti-GMO Pseudoscience (22:50)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/ Once More: Bad Science in the Service of Anti-GMO Activism]
S: Alright, well let's move on. There's a study making the rounds. Another one of those studies reporting to show severe negative outcomes from uh feeding animals GM food, or genetically modified food. Uh so from the abstract of this study, let me read to you a part of the abstract and you can uh tell me what you think about it: Feed intake weight gain mortality and blood biochemistry were measured; organ weights and pathology were determined postmortem. There were no differences pigs fed the GM and non GM diets for feed intake, weight gain, mortality and routine blood biochemistry measurements. The GM diet was associated with gastric and uterine differences in pigs. GM fed pigs had uteri that were 25% heavier than non GM fed pigs. And GM fed pigs had a higher rate of severe stomach inflammation. With a rate of 32% of GM fed pigs compared to 12% of non GM fed pigs with a P value of .004. This severe stomach inflammation was worse in GM fed males compared to non GM fed males by a factor of 4. And the GM fed females compared to non GM fed females by a factor of 2.2. So that sounds like pretty impressive.

E: Bad news

S: Pretty impressive outcome, but does anything jump out at you guys that there might be some problems with this study?

R: Nope, seems legit.

E: Everything's great.

S: This is like our lessons on how to evaluate studies right? One thing you have to always ask is whenever they're comparing two different groups, is how many comparisons do they actually look at? Because if you look at enough different comparisons, then you can cherry pick, by random chance you know there's gonna be some correlation somewhere. And if you're cherry picking that out of many comparisons, that's one of the...Remember the researcher degrees of freedom? You know, researchers can manufacture positive results by manipulating the data. And one way of doing that, even if they're doing it honestly or inadvertantly, one way to do that is to make multiple comparisons. Now there's a statistical fix that you're supposed to do for each additional comparison that you do or you make. You have to adjust the statistics to see if it's truly statistically significant. So for example, if you set the P value at .05, then roughly speaking that means that one in twenty comparisons are going to be statistically significant and by chance alone. If you make twenty comparisons and one is .05, that's probably just random chance. But even if you just look at that one thing, if that were the only comparison you made, then the P value of .05 would be meaningful. So they tell you right here in the abstract that feed intake, weight gain or mortality, a whole panel of blood biochemistry were measured. Organ weight, apparently all the organs were weighed and pathologically examined; and now they're just telling us about the stomachs and the uterus. So, that's what we call a fishing expedition, right? David Gorski wrote about this on science-based medicine, so if you want you can... He goes into it in great detail. And I think he absolutely correctly characterizes this as a fishing expedition. You go looking for a whole bunch of things, you're gonna find correlations by random chance alone, right? Astrologers are famous for this. This is astrology with pigs and GM corn. But it's actually even far worse than what you might um, than what you might... Even from the abstract you can say this is B.S. They went fishing and they came up with these two randoms. Why would GM corn cause severe stomach inflammation? But it's actually much worse than that. Because what they did was, this is a good way to increase your probability of generating false positive results. They took inflammation of the stomach, and they broke it down into different, somewhat arbitrary categories. No inflammation, mild, moderate, severe, erosions pinput ulcers, frank ulcers and bleeding ulcers. Out of all of those categories, only severe inflammation was worse in the GM fed versus the regular pigs.

E: Ohh... That's not what they said in the abstract

S: You wouldn't know that from just reading the abstract. All they say is severe inflammation was worse in the pigs fed the GM feed. Yeah but, not all the other kinds of inflammation. And, in fact, if you look at all inflammation, regardless of how severe it is, there was a slight decrease in the GM fed group compared to the non GM fed group.

E: Wow

S: It was just if you cherry pick out the one category in the middle, there wasn't even a dose response curve. That's another question you ask yourself. How many comparisons are being made, is there a dose response to any effect that they're claiming exists? You also of course have to ask is it plausible, but we could put that aside. So this data... So this is an exercise in cherry picking data. They cherry picked the severe inflammation out of this arbitrary categorization of different levels of inflammation. Over all inflammation... ya know this is just a random scatter of data, this is random noise. But actually, the thing that they're claiming, it increases the risk of sever stomach inflammation, overall inflammation was actually decreased in that group. Contradicting what they're pointing out. So this is complete B.S., this is just utter B. S. And this is coming from researchers, Judy Carman for example, who have a history of doing anti GM research.

E: mmmhmmm

S: just seems to be someone with an agenda, basically.

E: Yeah, how does she account for her personal biases.

S: So yeah, there's a bias, misdirection, crappy data ya know just horrific methodology.Also, David pointed out that, which is a very legitimate point, you always wanna know also in studies was anything unusual happening? When you're studying a disease, did the disease behaved like it always does. When you're studying animals, were they animals otherwise normal and healthy other than the thing that you were manipulating. These pigs, did overall, did pretty poorly. They had a very high rate of infection and complications. It's almost as if they weren't well cared for. So that's like an outlyer and really calls into question just what was happening in this study. The final analysis, again you want to avoid nitpicking little details of a study and then claiming that the results are invalid; you have to put it into context. But these are fatal flaws that we're talking about. And taken together, they make the results of this study worthless and uninterpretable. But yet, this is being spread around the internet as a stunning ya know study showing that GM corn and GM feed causes this horrible stomach inflammation in pigs. As if there's something dangerous ya know about this particular type of GM feed. And it's all based upon the naturalistic phallacy. It's all just genetic modification ain't natural. It's really just nonsense.

J: Are people eating the same exact food as they feed the pigs.

S: Well this is , animal feed. So no. They're trying to make genetically modified food seem scary.

J: Yeah.

S: It's just fearmongering, at the end of the day, is what it is.

J: Now, are they gonna do a follow up, Steve? Because typically, when a study like this happens, some other group will do another one similar or exactly like they did just to see if their results match.

S: Yeah, I'd like to see this replicated. You know, I strongly predict this is not the kind of study that's gonna replicate. And replication, of course is in the final analysis, that's how you tell. When you do this kind of multiple analysis where you're just looking at... you're just throwing a whole bunch of crap up against the wall and seeing what sticks, that study is never conclusive. That is always an exploratory study. Then you say, okay, we have this correlation and we looked at twenty, thirty fourty comparisons. We found this correlation. Then you get a fresh set of data, you replicate the study and see if that correlation holds up. If it was all random statistical noise, it will go away. And you'll probably see some other random association. But if it's a real effect, it should replicate. And that's how you know. So this is an exploratory study at best, because of all the multiple comparisons. It's not the kind of thing that should be reported in the press as fear mongering about GM foods. The kind that, at best, inspire a folllow up study. Let me give you an analogy to help put this into perspective: Prayer, intercessory prayer research, you guys familiar with research? Where the number of studies that were done looking at people who were sick and they were getting prayed for by a third party, intercessory prayer and they often didn't even know that they were being prayed for. They knew that they were in the study, but they didn't know if they were in the prayed for group or the not prayed for group. Tons of problems with this research, but the bottom line is, that they did multiple comparisons. For example, they looked at patients in the cardiac ICU and they followed a number of complications, number of days in the ICU, number of days in the hospital, survival... They looked at multiple multiple different end points. And then in one study, again there weren't differences across the board. There was like this one outcome was a little bit better in the prayer group. Then they replicated the study, and a different outcome was a little bit better, but not overall. Like overall it's random noise. But again the same outcome wasn't better, it's like a different outcome every time. That's, that's not a replication, that's a failure to replicate. That is consistent with random noise, which is of course what you would expect when you're hypothesis is magic makes people better, ya know.

E: Hahaha that's true

S: This is when you're considering the multiple comparisons that are being disclosed in the study. You may not be aware that they may have made, the researchers may have made multiple comparisons and only published the ones that were positive, or just a small subset. So they might have done all kinds of comparisons bu that doesn't work that doesn't... just discarded it and never reported it. Which is why why you know no single study is ever that believable, especially if it's like one research group. Uh, or, still one off study. It's hard... We get confronted with this all the time. Oh here's a study on ESP, why don't you guys believe this? Cuz it's one study. Because you have no idea what these researchers really did behind the scenes.

R: It would be great if grade school science tearchers would, during a science fair, point out to their students that all of the things the students did to make their science fair project look better and get an A. It's exactly what scienctists still do once they're actual working scientists and, hey that's wrong. Make sure that you don't actually do that

J: Like fudge the numbers?

R: Yeah, like I did that when I was doing science fair projects I would have outlyers and be like, "Oh that one just didn't count like if I just this then I get, I got like a nice clean line here and uh I get an A. Because it looks like I knew my stuff. Yeah So

S: You're absolutely right. Teachers should emphasize that its the messiness that they wanna see.

R: Yes

S: If they get something that looks too clean, that should count down your grade should go down, not up. Yeah my daughter recently, my older daughter recently like last year had a science fair. And I made sure that there were no shenanigans with her data. But going, walking through the posters of all the other students studies ya know there were a lot of them. Of course ya know we were uber skeptic evaluating a twelve year old science fair project.

J: Could you imagine? Steve walking around like checking out all these like hey kid, you're all wrong over here.

S: I just did it, it was a good teaching opportunity for my daughter. I didn't like criticize the students and make them cry.

J: Sure you didn't

S: It was like to Julia, it was a good lesson. Hey let's look at this study. What do you think about this? What were the methods and what are they doing wrong here? Like are they not using control groups and not carefully defining terms. I mean every error that was possible to make was made. But it is, it was a good and awesome learning opportunity. To ruthlessly pick through those, you can do it in a constructive nurturing way. But that would be a great learning opportunity to show how hard it is to do good science. All the ways in which, even a simple science project can go awry.

R: And on that note, I just wanted to mention that, I think I might have mentioned this before, but you can, if you're interested you can volunteer to be a judge at the local science fair. They'll probably be happy to have you. I did it a couple of years ago at a local high school and I really enjoyed it. Just talking to the kids and finding out what they were interested in, it was pretty cool.

S: Awesome

E: That is cool. Very cool

=== Skunk Ape (36:31)===
* http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/06/14/man-claims-he-spotted-floridas-elusive-skunk-ape/
S: Alright, well Evan, you're gonna finish up the news segment of our show with a the latest stunning evidence of the Florida Skunk Ape.

J: Skunk Ape?

E: The Skunk Ape, of course. In Sarasota County Florida, a man claims he has spotted Florida's elusive Skunk Ape.

S: Very elusive

E: ...so the headlines read from CBS Miami. Alright, so what is a Skunk Ape? Well who better to ask than the folks at Floridaskunkape.com. Yes, there is such a website.

S: Anybody?

E: They claim, it's what Floridians call their big foot, as best known as sasquatch in most other places in North America, oh yeah. Evidence supporting the existence of the creature has been gathered over the years, and consists of hundreds of documented sitings, a few pictures, several foot casts and a few hair samples. Mmhmm. So they have actual evidence, apparently. It gets its name from the very fact that it lives in Florida it in itself emits an awful stench. Now that's their writing, I didn't write that, that's from their website. Lives in the state of Florida and emits an awful stench. People who've had the pleasure to experience the smell, it's described as that of an elephant's cage or a trash dump. And one person even said it was like the scent of a skunk that did battle with a dumpster.

J: *laughs*

E: I went to the gallery on that website to have a look at the photos and stuff and it said, "your search yielded no results." So much for that. But, forget that for now because we have new video evidence. This is smoking gun evidence, smoking gun so hot it must be shot evidence. Mike Falconer is the person who posted the video and still pictures on YouTube.

S: I wonder what his ancestors did for a living.

E: They probably made barrels or something. Uh he says that he captured this footage on March 2nd of this year 2013. That he and his son spotted a large hairy creature off in the, off, it was a field at the Myakka River State Park which is a place in which the Skunk Ape has been sited before, apparently. And there were other people in who um, in this footage you can hear them and they've also stopped their cars on the road to try to get a glimpse as well. Now I think that's um, well not important, but I think noteworthy in the case of this. Instead of having this, we're so used to having this you know there's someone out in the wilderness with a camera shooting ya know whatever they think is a big foot off in the distance. But this one is different it has a gathering, sort of a group of people who are all... They've all seen something; they've seen something off in the distance.

S: Yeah, but they were strolling around like nothing special was going on. Honestly, it didn't seem that impressive to me.

E: They were saying some things in the background like ya know "oh what is that over there" and "I'm trying to get a glimpse of it". At no point did anyone say they smelled something funny or were like ooo that's a skunk or like... I know that if a skunk gets hit by a car like a mile up my road from here I can smell it. That's a very powerful smell and if it's half what they're describing, according to the websites and stuff, I think you would ya know perhaps smell something. But, in any case. So what they did is uh a guy and his son started to pursue whatever it is that they saw out in the fields. So they've got their iPhones right? And they're recording video. And at one point you can kind of see something off in the far grassland. It looks like it has to be hundreds and hundreds of feet away. Something is kinda moving around back there, just some little brown dot or something and they're saying "Oh yeah can you see it? There it is! There it is! Let's go get a closer look".

S: It's pixelsquatch

J: *laughs*

E: Exactly. And that's when they decided, of course, what you do when that happens. Well you turn off your video camera and you start shooting photos instead. So when they started to take photos is when they supposedly captured the quote unquote evidence. And Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, they're brown blotches.

S: Yeah it's

E: Brown blotches off in the trees

S: It turns from pixelsquatch to blobsquatch, to the more classical blobsquatch. Absolutely. It's a completely unrecognizable amorphous brown blob.

R: Enhance!

S: Enhance! Enhance!

R: Zoom in, enhance

E: zoom zoom zoom

S: Evan, do you know what the difference is between the Myakka Skunk Ape and the Hamden Bald Eagle?

E: Oooo um, one really exists and the other doesn't.

S: Yes. I have close up, in focus, unambiguous photographs of the Hamden Bald Eagle

E: Exactly. And yet, once again, someone does not have such shots of the supposed Skunk Ape.

J: The freakin bald headed eagle, that thing could just fly away. You know talk about...it's not just stuck on the ground.

E: Apparently in the year 2000, there was some video footage shot of something that they deemed the Skunk Ape. And then around 2006 someone else came up with something that was more clearer, but to me it was clearly just a hoax, a guy in a suit walking around of some sort. And that's, and then there's this. And that's pretty much it; and a few other blurry photos out there which could have been anything shot by anyone at any time. That's it. That's the sum of evidence you have when it comes to this thing. For the folks who, the guys who, Falconer when he shot this video, when he posted it to YouTube he put up a description on the YouTube channel, YouTube page he has and here's what he wrote in regards to this, and I think this is a bit revealing. He says that: This is real footage my son and I took in Myakka March 2nd 2013. We had iPhones with us. You'll see actual still shots of the thing. Some have called it big foot or sasquatch. The only editing we did to these pictures was to lighten it up. Alright? So here we go. At one point, you hear us talk of two of them. It was a deer out there hiding in the tall grass; maybe that's what it was after. You can see it in the middle at the thin tan line of grass under the tree. You will also see the deer a little to the left and closer in. Hello, deer!

S: Okay

E: Ok, so what's more likely? You've got Skunk Ape legend, ya know, in which there is absolutely no physical evidence whatsoever. It's all a bunch of blurry photos and weak videos of. Or, the people actually shooting this stuff saying that was clearly deer there, running around. And um, hmmm gee. Skunk Ape or deer? I don't -know. What does Occam's Razor tell us to think in this situation?

S: Hey it's more likely to be a Florida panther than the Skunk Ape.

J: Yeah

R: It'd be more likely to be a zebra

S: Yeah

R: than a Skunk Ape. I mean, cuz the skunk ape doesn't exist.

E: Unimpressive, sorry. It is getting a lot of headlines

J: Alright, Ev, c'mon. This whole thing has been a little vague, ya know. What's your gut tellin ya?

E: My gut's telling me that there is a network of Skunk Apes living in those fields, all over Florida.

J: And once again, I want there to be a Skunk Ape. You know, somebody please find some real evidence and I'd be all over it. But these fuzzy pictures, I'm getting tired of it guys.

S: By the way, I am patenting the word pixelsquatch. Everytime you say it, you've got to give me a quarter.

J: Pixel squatch!

E: Alright, well you'll hear from my lawyers.

S: So have any of you guys heard about the GyroStim?

J: No

S: Probably not.

R: It's pronounced "Yeerow"

S: "yeerow?"

E: Is that a new sandwich they're serving at Subway or something?

R: Yeah it's a combination. It's like a regular gyro, but with Slim Jims

E: Haha cool

S: So this is a machine that was developed by an engineer whose daughter has cerebral palsy. And it's essentially a chair. You sit in the chair and you have a little joystick remote control and you can swing around in all three dimensions, you know.

E: XYZ?

S: Exactly. In every axis. He developed this because she was getting physical therapy in which she had to do exercises to essentially do the same thing. Rotate around in order to um improve her balance in her walking. And, it was a bit tedious. So he, being an engineer, was like I'm gonna help her out, automate this. So he built a chair, the GyroStim, you know he built this chair and it does what he wanted it to do. It rotates around in all three axes. Now unfortunately, some not science-based practioners got their hands on this machine and have ran with it. The engineer is Kevin Maher, and you guys remember Ted Carrick? He is a quote un quote chiropractic neurologist.

J: Yeah I remember that

S: So he is using the GyroStim, and claiming it can cure all kinds of things. So I wrote a review on Science-Based Medicine of the GyroStim. Which, you know, is just one of an endless sequence of devices with overblown claims without adequate evidence. The thing hasn't been studied. It's actually not an illegitimate concept, there is such a thing called vestibular therapy where you essentially do just that. You stimulate the vestibular system by you know putting by rotating and changing your head position over and over again. And it can treat...it's actually a very effective treatment for some kinds of vertigo.

J: What's the vestibular system, Steve?

S: The vestibular system, that's a very good question Jay, is the system in your brain that senses two things - your orientation with respect to gravity and acceleration. So, this is the three semi circular canals that are in your inner ear. They have fluid in them so when you rotate around you're oriented towards gravity the fluid flows through those semi circular canals, which there's three of them, one in each axis, and then that moves hair cells that sense the movement of that fluid. And that's the sensing organ, but then that vestibular information gets taken in by the brain and is process compared to your visual information and tactile information and that's how you get a sense of motion and stability and balance ya know.

J: So this is your internal accelerometer

S: Yeah, well exactly. When there's a disconnect between your visual input and your vestibular input, that results in dizziness and motion sickness. That's why you get motion sick. When your vestibular system is telling you that your rocking up and down and your visual system is not because it is locked to something in the foreground. It's also a very delicate system, and a lot of people have dizziness of vertigo and we can't really identify anything specific that's not working. There's no lesion anywhere and it looks normal. But that integration of misinformation is just a little bit off. Those are the people who do well with vestibular therapy or essentially just retraining the brain to integrate this information. Conceptually it's perfectly fine. But where we get into trouble is in two areas. One is, the machine costs tens of thousands of dollars, so it's very expensive. There is no evidence to show that getting vestibular therapy with this 20 30 40 thousand dollar machine is superior to getting vestibular therapy manually with no machine; or just getting a twenty dollar swing and swinging back and forth on it as a way of stimulating your vestibular system. Which is something that physical therapists actually do. Investing in an expensive piece of equipment and paying a lot of money for expensive sessions is not justified until there's research showing this is not only as good as the far cheaper options, but is significantly superior to it. But there's no research, we don't even know if it works at all or that it's safe. All you have is the idea of using the machine. But of course that doesn't stop chiropractors, like Ted Carrick, from starting to use it. But in addition, the claims that are being propogated for this machine, especially by Ted Carrick and also by others now, is that it not only is a way of delivering vestibular therapy- which is the plausible component of the claim - but that it actually helps the brain recover from a traumatic injury.

J: Oh, yeah

S: In genaral, yeah. So I was reviewing a specific article written by a sports writer who wrote and article about the GyroStim, because it's being used to treat a lot of like hockey players who have had head injuries. And he did the typical journalist thing of antecdote miracles happening every day, then quicky, generic canned disclaimer. Well this scientist said it hasn't been tested yet and hasn't been approved by the FDA, now let me go back to these glowing antecdotes. Meanwhile he's talking, he's mentioning Autism and Asperger's. I mean it's ridiculous. So I wrote a typical blog post about it on Science-Based Medicine, and the author of the original article, Adrian Dater who is again a sports writer writing for the Denver Post, leaves a comment, like a really pissy comment - it didn't immediately get, because he was a first time poster it went to moderation and it didn't immediately get approved because we work for a living - in the middle of the day. Then he writes a blog post saying "I'm being censored over on Science-Based Medicine".

E: *laughs* He gave you all of 45 minutes. That's not...

S: He gave a full hour. So, but anyway, that's just a little aside. The thing is he like doubled down and completely defended his journalism. So then I of course, I had to write a follow up post on Neurologica, just about science journalism using him as an example of horrible science journalism.

J: Uh Oh!

E: Gee why would a sports writer be bad at science journalism?

S: Yeah I mean the thing is the guy's a sports writer, I don't expect him to be a good science journalist. But his problem was he wrote an article about science, and he got it all completely wrong. He fell for all the typical pit falls that non-experience trained science journalists fall for when they think that they can cover these complex topics. And he actually was defending his token skepticism. So in my follow up article I characterized different levels at which articles deal with science, especially when there's something contreversial. There's the false balance aproach in which you say oh experts over here say this, and this fringe lunatic over here says that; and you treat them like they're equal. Then there's the token skepticism where you actually give the bulk of the time to the fringe claim and you only have a quick skeptical blurb, which is what he fell into. And then there's the just complete abject gullibility without a hint of skepticism. So he was in the middle category of token skepticism, in which you don't get much credit for that. There's of course the fourth category which is the way it should be, which is appropriate skepticism. Right? But we didn't get that from him. So he was defending his token skepticism and also defending the GyroStim, completely ignoring all of my legitimate actual different criticisms. And in the end he was like criticizing David Goreski and the others on Science-Based Medicine about the positions that we were taking. We were like look, dude, you cover hockey. Go back to covering hockey. Seriously, you're arguing with a group of physicians who have spent a decade writng about these topics. You're telling us we don't know what we're talking about?

J: Did you say that to him?

S: Yes! How arrogant does this guy have to be?

E: Are you serious?

S: Like he had a fit that we disagreed with his journalism. He had a fit and it was horrible. It was horrible token skepticism and bad science writing. He didn't understand the issues at stake. And again, I wouldn't expect him to understand; but he had no sense of his own limitations. And of course he has no editor who would know, you know, that this is an innappropriate way to cover a medical science news story.

E: Yep

J: Steve, it also sounds like he's never engaged in any kind of legitimate discourse about things like that. You know?

S: No, he didn't engage, he got childish right out of the gate. Which, you know, always makes it worse of course.

J: Yeah, I mean I can understand from one perspective a guy like him never really entering that arena before. Not knowing what to expect, you know. And of course let's like, let's also achknowledge the idea here that you went up against Science-Based Medicine, you guys.

S: Yeah that's the thing. He had no idea what he was up against. So he started to back pedal a little bit. Like I wasn't endorsing it, I was just relaying the stories. Peple have a right to know about this; that whole coy bs. And one of our commentors dug up a twitter

E: *laughs*

S: A tweet that he did where he was like read about the device that cured you know this hockey player of his traumatic brain injury. Oh yeah, you're not endorsing it.

J: Uh oh! That sounds like an endorsement! He's just stating facts?

E: Yeah, he's just reporting what he heard

S: Yeah he was totally busted. He was totally busted.

J: How did it end, Steve? Did he just end up having to quit?

S: Yeah, he went away. It was a fun little exchange though.

J: Yeah it's something to learn... it's something for people like us to learn from and it sadly... Did that go back to his man cave and lick his wounds or did he actually say hey you know I screwed up here like what did I do wrong?

S: He did not give any evidence of any self awareness in this exchange.

E: mmmm

R: They rarely do though. You might have planted a seed

S: I might have planted a seed, you never know. But yeah, I don't expect most people to have the scales fall from their eyes and to say I was wrong, mea culpa. Very few people have I think the security and maturity to do that. Especially when you're in the middle of an internet fight. You know everyone has, as you like to call Jay, internet balls. You know?

J: Yeah

E: mmhmm

S: But, yeah you're right, you never know. Maybe he'll be a little bit more gun shy the next time he dips his toe into science journalism. Who knows?

E: Or he'll do some real research into what the hell he's talking about.

S: And we were, we got very polite and very proffesional. We were like listen, we want to help journalists write better. You know next time you want to cover a story like this, we're happy to provide you with some perspective and background information.

J: What?! That'll take hours!

S: *laughs*

J: I don't have time for that!

S: This is, this is what... I just told someone the other day you know in a similar context I'd much rather provide advice ahead of time rather than criticism after the fact. You know, run these things by somebody who knows what they're talking about ahead of time. We're here, we're a resource, ask us. We're, you know... What's the worst thing that could happen? We make your journalism better?

J: Yeah

S: You know? What's the worst thing that could come out of it?

J: It's basically you're like you're saying to them, I'll write your freakin essay paper for you pal just all you gotta do is pick up the phone.

S: Good journalists know how to do that. They know how to use resources well.

== Who's That Noisy? ()==

== Questions and Emails () ==
=== Staticman ()===
<blockquote>Hey guys! Thanks for the show. I've been listening for years now and it's by far and away my favorite podcast. I was wondering if you heard about Static Man reported in Australia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4252692.stm Sounds like balderdash to me, but who knows maybe it's a new Scientology superpower. Keep up the excellent work, 
Damian Tinkey 
Marlboro, NY</blockquote>

== Science or Fiction () ==
[http://www.nature.com/news/light-flips-transistor-switch-1.13178 Item #1]: Researchers at MIT have developed a transistor that is switched by a single photon. [http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2013/06/05/G34100.1 Item #2]: Geologists have found evidence for a new subduction zone forming near Portugal which may indicate the beginning of the next phase of continental movements in which Europe will move towards North America. [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130617110929.htm Item #3]: A new study of whole body vibration therapy finds that it produced significant weight loss in obese subjects, who lost on average 10% of their body mass in 12 weeks.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week () ==
<blockquote>Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth.</blockquote>

== Announcements () ==

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 415

2014-02-02T05:52:27Z

Lmwood: /* Anti-GMO Pseudoscience (22:50) */

SGU Episode 415

2014-01-19T06:12:30Z

Lmwood: /* Class System in Mice (17:21) */

SGU Episode 415

2014-01-17T01:20:00Z

Lmwood: /* Podcasting Patent (06:42) */

SGU Episode 415

2014-01-16T03:48:14Z

Lmwood: /* This Day in Skepticism () */

SGU Episode 415

2014-01-16T02:52:12Z

Lmwood: /* Introduction */

SGU Episode 415

2014-01-16T02:51:38Z

Lmwood: /* Introduction */

SGU Episode 414

2014-01-15T04:19:58Z

Lmwood: /* Science or Fiction (58:37) */

{{Editing required
|transcription = y

|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
|categories = y
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|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 414
|episodeDate = 22nd Jun 2013
|episodeIcon = File:chinese-alien-head.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = DL: {{w|Daniel Loxton}}
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2013-06-22.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=46390.0
|qowText = Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing
|qowAuthor = {{w|Harlan Ellison}}
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, today is Wednesday, June 19th, 2013, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: Hey, everybody

S: Rebecca Watson,

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, guys.

S: and Evan Bernstein.

E: Salutations, everybody

R: Hello...

S: Salutations and felicitations, Evan.

E: Oh, and felicitations, how could I forget the Squire of Gothos. Shame on me,

S: I don't know (chuckles)

E: shame on me.

R: The hell you guys talking about.

E: Well, Rebecca, aren't you watching the Star Trek series?

R: I guess I haven't gotten up to that point, yet.

E: This is the original series.

R: I'm watching The Next Generation.

S: You know what I saw recently? "Star Trek Continues".

E: Hm?

S: which is a a

J: Wha?

S: fan.. "Star Trek Continues", it's a fan episode, a fan video, where it's as if the ep... the seasons continued as if it wasn't canceled after three seasons. So it's not, it's not like a parody, and it's not an update or a reboot or anything it's like what would a fourth season have actually been like,

B: Oh, cool.

S: and and they do their best to reproduce, the production value, the sets are identical, all the sound effects, the music the acting

R: Hm

S: the whole culture that was definitely embedded in that late '60s you know in terms of everything. And the

?: (inaudible)

S: some of the actors are damn good, the guy who's doing Kirk has his mannerisms down, absolutely down.

B: And it's not a parody of his mannerisms?

S: No, no it's not, it's not a parody, it's an imitation. And it like things like it's like "Yeah, Kirk does do that!" You know, it's like, (laughter) you uh things you wouldn't even think of. Like the

R: That is so Kirk.

S: ways he moves his arms when he walks. Yeah, it's just amazing.

R: Hey, remember that Star Trek episode where, uh, poisonous gas covered most of the planet, and murdered millions of people?

E: Ahhh.

R: Oh, wait, no, that was real life. Oh, my God!

B: (laughs)

E: That's worse.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:58) ==
R: On June 22, 1783, a poisonous cloud caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland, uh, finally reached France. So this is kind of, um, I really could have picked any date, uh, it's very interesting, it's something that I didn't even realize was the thing, uh, it was one of the most deadly if not the most deadly volcanic eruptions in human history, as I said it happened in Iceland but it spread all over the globe, uh, first of all though in Iceland it killed about 50% of the livestock which lead to a famine which killed a quarter of the population of Iceland. Uh, so it was pretty immediate but then it also went on to possibly cause droughts in India and Africa which lead to millions of more deaths, uh, as well as crop failures in Europe and air pollution and this deadly gas... from this deadly gas. So, all to... all told, it killed probably over 6 million people

?: What?

R: globally. Yeah, 6 million.

E: That's a lot (inaudible)

R: It was a pretty big volcanic eruption.

E: 1783, that's (inaudible) quite a bit.

B: Holy crap.

R: And the cloud was sulfur dioxide that

E: Oh, that'll do it

R: and also the hydrogen... the hydrogen fluoride apparently I think killed most of the people in Iceland but the sulfur dioxide is what drifted into Europe to start murdering people there. But yeah and it also caused severe global temperature change, uh, it was the hottest summer on record followed by really violent winter with hail and storms and all that good stuff which probably lead to more deaths.

S: It was the longest period of below zero temperatures in New England.

R: Oh, yeah, the US... the US area just had some severe weather. They don't... I.. I didn't find a whole of talk about deaths that resulted in it but I think people were just dying left and right anyway, at that point, so

S: A bad winter in 1783 was no joke.

R: Exactly, yeah, that's... that's what I'm sayin'. But...

B: So this gas released it wasn't part of like a.. a pyroclastic flow, it was just this, just this gas that came out and went

S: Just a bubble of gas

B: all over the place

R: Yeah, like a volcanic fart, silent but deadly

E: Probably wasn't too silent, either

R: Too soon?

?: Too soon (laughter)

S: Volcanoes are no joke, that superheated gas that kills people it's not just the lava and the ash, I mean, it's usually the gas, even if it's not poisonous gas if it's superheated it's like your lungs explode, you know. Well, let's move on, uhm, have you guys heard...

?: (stage inhalation)

?: Uh?

== News Items ==
=== Osteoarthritis (4:41)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/knee-osteoarthritis-thumbs-down-for-acupuncture-and-glucosamine/ Knee Osteoarthritis: Thumbs Down for Acupuncture and Glucosamine]

S: the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons has released their, uh, 1200 page report evaluating evidence for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis

R: Now the last time you led us into one of these and we made all made light-hearted jokes about how boring the topic was, we got a bunch of angry letters from botanists, so, no, Steve, not gonna fall for it, this sounds fascinating, tell me more. (laughter)

S: Yeah, but like last time I convinced you how cool botany was, now I wanna convince you how cool osteoarthritis is.

E: Here come more letters (laughter)

S: Oh, boy. (laughter)

S: um, so osteoarthritis is, essentially degenerative arthritis of a joint, mainly from wear and tear, but there are other obviously biological factors involved, and so knee osteoarthritis, very common, um, as people get into their 40's and 50's they uh, their knees start to ache, you know, and they just wear out, they just don't really last 80 years unfortunately. There are lots of potential treatments for osteoarthritis including many that are not evidence-based. This report is interesting for a number of reasons, not just for the specific recommendations that are made. Harriet Hall writes about this on Science-based Medicine and I recommend that for those who are interested but I just want to highlight some of the interesting things. First of all, it shows that science-based practitioners actually care about evidence, despite all of the propaganda about "Oh, those doctors only want drugs and surgery" here we have a uh a major you know a professional organization in the United States dedicated to orthopedic surgery reviewing thousands of published studies, putting out a 1200 page comprehensive report looking in-depth into the evidence for many different approaches, and here are the highlights of what they found, where there was strong evidence you know for or against. So glucosamine chondroitin you guys are familiar with this, right, this is a dietary supplement that has been and still is promoted, um, has been for years, for arthritis. What do you think they found?

E: It doesn't work.

S: It doesn't work. So it was one of the few things where there was strong evidence against its effectiveness. Glucosamine and chondroitin doesn't work, there have been large studies. Exercise, strong evidence for, in favor of it. Weight loss, moderate evidence in favor of it. Acupuncture, what do you think they concluded?

R: No evidence.

?: Overwhelming evidence.

S: Strong evidence against its effectiveness. So very nice to see that they took a science-based approach to acupuncture research and didn't fall for the bait-and-switch of "Oh, it works like a placebo" you know, they didn't fall for that business. And also, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories strong evidence they are effective, that's not surprising. And here's one: arthroscopy with lavage and debridement --- strong evidence against.

B: Really?

E: Lavage, huh?

S: So lavage is like just washing it out. So arthroscopy is putting the scope into the knee and looking around, you know, for diagnostic, but if you take anything out then it becomes a therapeutic procedure, right, that's debridement, you know, cutting away any fraying pieces of cartilage and then washing out those pieces, that's the lavage part. So, this is a pretty lucrative, popular procedure for orthopedists to do. And here they are, the official organization of orthopedists, coming out with a statement saying there is strong evidence against the effectiveness of this procedure. This is something that we've written about on Science-based Medicine previously when there...there... when a review came out, I think now about two years ago, showing that arthroscopy was not effective, and there was some push-back from some orthopedists, and we said "Hey, this is the evidence, baby, this is, this is what it shows". So it's nice now to see the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons looking at the evidence and honestly saying "Yep, our beloved procedure, that we would love to have work, doesn't work". So it's hard in the face of this, if you look at the bigger picture, it's hard to justify the typical knee-jerk criticisms that alternative medicine proponents have against mainstream medicine

R: Heh, knee-jerk

S: Yeah, knee-jerk. That it's they only care about drugs and surgery, well here they are saying um, their favorite surgical procedure doesn't work, that they don't care about other things, here they're strongly in favor of exercise, moderately in favor of weight loss, Um, and that they're not, they don't care about actually treating people, well, this is, I think this shows their dedication to the evidence to what actually works regardless of what the modality is, and this is, this is, what we see in mainstream medicine all the time. This is a Herculean effort and it's great document, but this is what we see all the time, you know, the... academic professional uh physicians looking at the evidence objectively and the chips fall where they may, in its direct contradiction to all the anti-mainstream medicine conspiracy theories that you're going to hear from the alternative medicine side, so I thought that was worth pointing out. Also, Harriet pointed out something interesting, things like homeopathy didn't even make the list, it wasn't even worth their time to take a look at.

B: Oh, awesome.

E: Good.

S: Yeah.

R. Good (inaudible).

E: I don't know if we'd be able to say that if this were British Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, right? That probably would have made that list.

S: Homeopathy probably would have,

E: Yes

S: just because homeopathy is more popular across the pond, yeah.

B: Uh, Steve, did they mention why it wasn't on the list?

S: No, just... it didn't even... didn't even make the radar. Just wasn't even, yeah, not... not mentioned one way or the other.

B: OK

== Quickie with Bob (10:27)==
* ESO: [http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1326/ New Kind of Variable Star Discovered]

E: Oh, hey, wait, wait. I would like a Quickie with Bob right now.

B: Really?

E: Yes, right this moment.

B: Thank you, Evan, I'm almost certain you will not regret this.

E: (laughs)

B: This is your Quickie with Bob. Astronomers in Chile, guys, have discovered a new type of variable star it was pretty interesting story uh they did detailed observations of 3700 stars in this specific cluster over 7 years. Um, and showed that they found 36 of these stars had very minute changes in their brightness of about only about a tenth of a percent over an hour or as much as over 20 hours. And uh this is... this is big news in the community because variable stars are in... are incredibly common there's lots of different types of variable stars and it's always interesting to... to add another one to the group actually the list of uh of typ... of variable stars um the types themselves was much bigger than... than I remember them being but just to break it down real quick there's... there's two different main types of stars that are variable, there's the intrinsic and extrinsic and it's kind of obvious what they... what that means the intrinsic stars that are variable are variable because of that's just the way they are something about their internal dynamics makes them makes the light output variable whereas the extrinsic... the extrinsic stars... variable stars are variable only because you know say something might move in front of them or... or there might be some... something in the way that changes the light that reaches the Earth. So within these intrinsic stars there's... there's just a few categories there's the pulsating variables, there's the eruptives, and there's the cataclysmic or explosive variable stars. This new one that they found I think is pretty obvious that it's within the... the pulsating variable star category

S: Is there a throbbing category? (laughter)

E: Is there a grooving category?

B: So like I said these variables are most certainly they'll be within the pulsating variety they haven't actually named this type of variable yet but I'm sure it's gonna be within that... that category They're not sure why they pulsate, either, basically because current models say that they should not be variable so this is the real surprise that these... that these varied so much and but one clue that they found is that many of these variables rotate very very fast

S: Yeah, that seems pretty telling

B: Yeah, more than 50% of their critical velocity, in fact, and the critical velocity

E: Wow

B: is a velocity that if they... if they reached 100% they would actually start throwing off mass so they're spinning very very fast and uh this spinning might... may have an effect on the dynamics of their interiors which then would result in the variability of the light output. So, uh, so keep an eye on it, I'm curious to see what they're gonna call it and uh, and... and you know what more they can determine, um, about these types of stars based on uh, on... on this... these studies that they're... these very detailed studies that they're doing. So, uh, so I got guys this has been your Quickie with Bob, I hope it was good for you, too.

== News items continued ==
=== Patenting DNA (13:07)===
* BBC News: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22895161 US Supreme Court says human DNA cannot be patented]

S: Thanks, Bob. OK, Rebecca, you're gonna tell us about a major Supreme Court case regarding patenting genes.

R: Yes, you are correct, Steve. There is a huge decision that just happened in the Supreme Court on, uh, June 13th, the Supreme Court ruled that, uh, companies, particularly Myriad Genetics, in this case, cannot patent a human gene. So in this specific case, it was this company Myriad Genetics which was one of the patent holders on the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes. Now, astute listeners might recall that we were recently talking about these very genes, in the case of Angelina Jolie,

S: Yeah.

R: who came out and said that she had the mutation in her BRCA gene that said she was much much much more likely to get breast cancer and ovarian cancer and so she had her breast removed. Now, we also mentioned that Angelina Jolie had spoken briefly about the fact that not everyone has access to the genetic testing required to find out if you have the mutation, in order to get the life saving operations you would need. Well, the reason why many people don't have access to this genetic testing is because Myriad Genetics was one of the patent holders and... and they were the only company that was allowed to perform this testing on these genes. So, if you wanted to find if you had the mutation you had to go through Myriad Genetics and that increases the price dramatically so they could charge thousands of dollars to people who wanted the testing. What this ruling means in this specific case it's a huge win for women particularly because this means that you... women can go get genetic testing anywhere to find out if they have this mutation they don't have to go through Myriad in order to find out, so, now you have companies competing against each other, prices go down, etc., etc., and more lives are saved because of it, so that's one result of this and one of the reasons why women's rights groups were a huge part of the uh lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision it was a unanimous decision the case was led by uh the ACLU um representing women's rights groups as well as scientists and other interest groups but also scientists win from this case because it means that uh any scientist can now pursue research on the... these genes where prior to this only Myriad and the other patent holders would technically be able to do that. Basically the court ruled that you can't patent a human gene however they did leave it open that you could possibly patent a gene that had been fiddled with.

?: Yeah.

R: So uh if you

?: (inaudible) huge

R: come up with your own gene, like a synthetic gene like cDNA... c... cDNA, that could still be eligible for a patent. Uh, but because Myriad the company did not actually create anything, they just researched the gene they're not allowed to patent it.

S: Yeah. So

R: So

S: products of nature cannot be patented and what this decision was exploring specifically was how much modification is necessary before a product of nature is an innovation. An... yeah, this that needed to be explored for the in... for this specific case of genes. And it seems that everyone pos... with the possible exception of Myriad, is happy about this decision this is a... I've seen nothing but universal praise for this decision.

E: Myriad shouldn't be too sad their stock rose that day

S: Is that right? (laughs)

E: as a result, yeah.

R: They have been fighting this

E: That will fade.

R: for a very long time so this is a huge loss for them, but it's... it is a great gain for humanity, we're

S: Yeah, for humanity.

R: literally talking about lives being saved

E: Yeah, absolutely.

R: and more research being done.

B: Yeah, it does seem...

R: So it is a good thing.

B: it does seem (inaudible) to me lots of benefits but what about the idea, the one negative thing that I've heard, that I've seen in a couple of places was that some people are afraid that companies like Myriad, of course, will scale back investment because they're not gonna be rewarded ah with patents for this so I just wonder how much of a genuine concern that aspect of this is.

R: Consider how much research is done by private companies compared to the huge amount of research that's currently being done through government institutions and universities. Private companies have always focussed on what's going to make the most money and that's why we have uh government funding for scientific endeavors. There's one other thing I wanted to mention, a bit of, uh, myth-busting. This... this thing was going around that... uh, Scalia doesn't believe in genetics, or in molecular biology. So, uh, it was a unanimous decision but Justice Scalia wrote a separate thing... ruling...

S: Separate opinion.

R: opinion, thank you, that's the word.

E: Opinion, yeah.

R: Uh, Scalia wrote a separate opinion uh saying that he, uh, agrees to vote with the majority, but he does not agree with one part of the opinion that has no effect on his final vote. What he said was, um, that he wouldn't sign on to Part 1a and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology because he can't affirm those details on his own knowledge or his own belief. So, Part 1a, deal... it's just a list of basic facts about DNA, about genetics, uh it's all kind of just basic level genetic stuff.

E: So was he basically saying I don't know what this is?

R: Yeah, you know, so some...

E: and therefore I can't really

R: some people were

E: say anything about it.

R: taking uh that he wouldn't affirm those details on his own knowledge or his own belief to mean that he didn't believe in genetics or he didn't know about genetics and so he didn't believe them, something like that. But, I've heard from lawyers who have said that this is a bit of legal-speak in a way, that there's this sort of ongoing argument on whether or not they should in... judges should include basic information that's not necessary to the final ruling, and so that's kind of what he was saying, is that this chunk I'm not a scientist, I'm not going to sign my name on this and say that as a Justice I approve of this because I have no idea I'm not a scientist and it has nothing to do with the case.

S: He's being a legal stickler,

R: Yes.

S: not a science denier.

R: Exactly.

B: Oh, OK.

R: That...

E: Right.

R: that's what I'm hearing from... from lawyers, and

S: That makes sense.

R: it makes sense to me.

S: And that's kind of his shtick, too,

R: Yeah.

S: is to be a legal stickler.

B?: Hmmm, OK.

=== Foot Fungus (20:02)===
* Science News: [http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350599/description/Foot_fungi_a_thriving_diverse_community Foot fungi a thriving, diverse community]

S: OK, well thanks, Rebecca. Bob, can you explain to me why my toes occasionally itch? (laughter)

R: Ew, bugs, probably.

B: Well, guys, uh, last May... at the end of last May, uh, the, uh, the issue of Nature, they discuss the... the first census... the very first census of skin-dwelling fungi (fung-ee), that... that's

S: Fungi (fung-guy)?

B: Well, there's three ways to pronounce it as far as I can tell

S: Fungi (fun-jee)?

B: Fungi (fung-ee), fungi (fung-eye), fungi (funj-eye). Those are the three that I came across

R: But "fungi" (fung-eye) is the only one that works with that "mushroom walks into a bar" joke.

B: OK.

S: What about... what about "fungi" (fun-jee)?

B: That's actually my preferred pronunciation and I didn't find it. So, whatever, I'll just go with... I'll just go with one of the ones that I found. So this study reveals

E: (chuckles)

B: there's a fungus among us. OK, somebody had to say it, it's out of the way, I said it. So, actually, it...

E: (laughs)

B: it reveals that there's a little variation... there's very little variation in the fungal communities on our bodies except for our feet which calls home to 80 to 100 different types of fungus, they're just like all

?: (inaudible)

B: over the place down there. So, for... just for a quick

?: (inaudible)

B: high-level refresher uh fungi (fung-ee) are the third type of multi-cellular organisms, they're neither plant nor animals, um, one major difference between them and the other two is that their cell walls contain chitin, now that's (inaudible) that's like the exoskeleton of a crabs and lobsters or... or even the beaks of squid uh made of chitin. Uh, fungi play a pivotal role in decomposing organic matter and cycling uh nutrients in the environment and they also appear to be inordinately fond of feet. So here's a quick quote from the study: "A human's skin surfaces are complex ecosystems for microorganisms including fungi, bacteria and viruses which are known collectively as the skin microbiome". So I was as... I was surprised as I said that this initial study was the first of its kind. It seems, I guess, in terms of... yeah, human cohabitation bacteria and viruses get all.. get all the press and all the research dollars, so one reason why the lowly fungus I guess may have been neglected is that it's notoriously difficult to culture, I didn't know that, unlike bacteria which is easy, culturing a fungus from say uh the toenail can take weeks... weeks for it

S: And yet... and yet it's hard to kill when you wanna get rid of it.

B: (chuckle) Right. So... so how did they do it? They looked... they looked at the DNA, of course. They took ten volunteers and they swabbed 14 sites on their bodies including taking toenail clippings apparently. Uh, they then put them in a DNA sequencer which of course is uh one of the key technologies advanced by leaps and bounds uh by the Human Genome Project. Um, they used these molecular tags that stick only to the fungal DNA, so they wouldn't have to worry about all the human DNA and the bacterial DNA and viral DNA, that... that... that was mixed into the samples, so now they have this pure sample of just... of just fung... uh the fungus DNA. They then examined the tiny bits of fungal DNA uh called the phylogenetic markers to tally up all the different types of... of fungal species and bam, they were done, they had... they had a tally of all the different types of species. So, if you look most anywhere on the head or the torso you... you're likely to find one genus and that's called Malassezia. Uh, different areas have different species uh though, like the crease behind your ear or... or on your forehead there's little variation there. Surprisingly, your hands have tons of bacteria but very few fungal communities. So your feet, though, it's... it's completely different ecosystem, um, on your... on your toenails alone there's forty different uh fungi varieties, sixty between your toes, and eighty live on the bottom of... of your heel, which I think would ac... I wouldn't think that would be the most plentiful spot I would think, like, between your toes would have more but apparently there's lots of 'em on the bottom of your heel. So... so why is... how come? Why... why is this so? And it...

E: Gravity.

B: Yeah, gra... (laughs)

E: (chuckles)

B: Well it's... it's not hard to imagine one... one reason, right, your feet are... are often on contact with surfaces that fungi like to hang out on like your socks or locker room floors. I never walk barefoot at... at the gym, uh, never would do it.

E: Uhhhh,

B: So also

E: gosh... (inaudible) so bad.

B: your... your feet... I didn't know that your feet are cooler than other parts of your body, and... and fungi like cooler places, apparently, they hang out. Um, so... so should we all be grossed out? Are you guys like really grossed out... about this stuff?

R: (inaudible) obviously

?: Ahhh...

E: (inaudible) more grossed out about...

R: It takes more than that to... gross out Steve.

B: Yeah, I... I'm not...

S: Oh, yeah...

B: Yeah, I wouldn't think Steve would be, but I'm not... I'm not

S: I've had my head inside of a corpse

B: Cool, um...

R: Hey, thanks for that...

E: A human corpse? Wait, a human corpse?

B: I di...

S: Yeah.

B: Of course.

S: So has everyone who has gone through medical school.

E: You put your head in the corpse?

S: Well, you gotta get into the anatomy, I mean you gotta... you know you're disecting something...

E: I don't...

S: They... so, you get so grossed out in your first year of medical school you're basically done getting grossed out for life.

?: Yeah.

R: Yeah.

B: Totally desensitized.

R: I don't... I don't find what you've said so gross, Bob, but when in... you're talking I was thinking of that... toenail fungus, uh, commercial where...

E: Oh, yeah.

R: where the germ, like, lifts up

E: Little critters.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

R: the toenail and then climbs inside and that's like the worst... worst commercial ever made.

B: Oh, my God I remember that something about detaching a toenail yes I... I cringe

R: Yeah.

B: every time I saw that, nothing to do with the

R: It's awful.

B: fungus or anything but it's just the lifting that toenail

R: Yeah, like the fungus didn't help

B: was nasty. Yeah right, yes. I mean it doesn't gross me out, the... thinking that there's... em... potentially s... you know... well over a hundred different types of these guys all over us. I thin... it's good... it's good that we're colonized by these critters because they're... they're likely to prevent other nasty... guys from taking hold on our skin so it's good that they're there. Likewise, this.. this research can actually help improve our treatment for skin disease and maybe even help with some types of cancers, some people were saying. So... so I say embrace the... the fungi living on your skin, you really don't have much of a choice until we replace them all with nanobots.

=== Chinese Fake Alien (25:46)===
* The Telegraph: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10115832/Chinese-farmer-jailed-for-making-a-rubber-alien.html Chinese farmer jailed for making a rubber alien]

S: All right, thanks, Bob. Evan, you're gonna tell us about a fake Chinese alien.<ref>[http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20130612000078&cid=1103 WantChinaTimes]</ref> (laughter)

?: Oh, God.

E: Now that could mean several different things, I'll... I'll do my best to clarify. Now, there are times when news outlets totally, totally botch their headlines... right, I mean really botch

B: No.

E: We've talked about some real doozies on the show. But rarely do we give them credit when they actually get it right. Let's give The Telegraph its due, because they got this headline spot-on. They wrote: "Chinese farmer jailed for making rubber alien". That kind-a says it all.

?: OK.

E: (chuckles) So it's being reported out of the Shandong province, that, uh, local police recently arrested someone named Mr. Li, a farmer slash alien enthusiast by day and an alien enthusiast farmer... slash farmer by night. And here are his versions of the event, this is Mr. Li.

S: "Mr. Li" 's a pseudonym, probably, by the way.

E: He said: <blockquote>"I was setting an electrical trap for rabbits by the Yellow River, when I saw a bright light. Above my bike, a UFO was floating. One by one, five aliens came down, but one of them stumbled onto one of my rabbit traps and was electricuted. The others went back into their ship and flew away."</blockquote>So that's his story.

S: Quite a tale he's got there. So this alien from who knows how far away from another solar system in super advanced technology and then dies in a rabbit trap.

E: Exa...

S: And his friends leave him behind.

E: And they leave him behind.

R: Was he rabbit shit? (laughter)

E: No.

R: Maybe he was... maybe he was a rabbit, like from another dimension.

E: Well, then rabbits look an awful lot like little grays with Chinese accentuations around the eyes

B?: Yes.

E: and head and stuff. But

B: Plus... plus only mice... only mice are from other dimensions.

E: But how did he go about backing up his claim. Well he does what any true believer does and he post pictures of the ET on the Internet. And in three days these pictures happen to go viral, so after five days of having posted the pictures the local police show up at his door and he's taken in for questioning. Now during the questioning Mr. Li admitted, willingly or otherwise, that the whole thing was a hoax.

S: Shock, shocked.

E: He made an alien, he constructed it himself out of this gluey rubber sort of substance uh tied together with ropes and uh other things and you know... a few... he... he drew his inspiration from the Simon Peg film Paul I don't know if you guys have seen that

?: Hall?

R: Yeah, the one where they go to Comicon.

S: Yes.

E: Right... right.

S: Yes, I saw it.

E: And the alien does a little bit sort of kind of look like that I suppose.

S: But you're right, Evan, the... the uh alien head looks Chinese.

E: It... it does (chuckles).

S: It does... so I mean it's his cultural bias leaking through in his sculpture and he's not aware of it but to these Western you know American eyes it has this... it looks like uh something... that it... like an piece of art that a Chinese person would create.

E: Right.

S: You know, it's not just the eyes it's the mouth it's everything you know it's just there's a subtle sort of Oriental appearance to it. Uh, which is always, I think, a... a very telling sign to look for when people are imagining or faking alien phenomena and their cultural biases come through, and of course we're... you're much more attuned to them when it's from a di... from another culture.

E: But why did he... why did he do it why did you think he did it well he says it with the intent of helping more people believe in aliens. Which is

S: Yeah.

R: Weird.

E: an interesting way to go about doing that... uh, I suppose... um, he claims that and these are his words again:<blockquote>It's still disputed whether or not UFOs and aliens exist but we believe</blockquote>not sure what he means by we<blockquote>they do and we want to expand our group</blockquote>I don't know what group he's part of... uh<blockquote>and make more people believe that aliens do exist.</blockquote> So that's

R: Was this him

E: the approach.

R: saying this or was this

E: That was him.

R: the government saying that he said that.

E: Uh, that is the report from The Telegraph say... uh... which is quoting him as saying that.

R: Hm.

S: Who knows.

E: Yeah you who... who really knows. It's for the conspiry theori... conspiracy theorists,

S: (chuckle)

E: I guess to... to... to sort of figure it

R: Well, you know I mean you don't have to stretch far to come up with a conspiracy involving the Chinese government making a guy say something (chuckle) I mean

E: (chuckle)

R: making a Chinese prisoner say something that they want him to say. Um...

E: That's true.

B: Yeah, my mind all bets are off

R: Yeah, especially if they wanna

B: soo as he... soo as he ga... soo as the government got a hold of him they can well, nothing he says now... really (chuckle) you know whatever

R: Even if it was just a case of they... they wanted to trump up the charge a bit so they didn't look like they were just hassling some farmer, now they've got like a cult that they can

?: Yeah

R: pin on him, you know,

?: Yeah, yeah

E: But

R: 'cuz they're... they hate... they hate the cults.

E: Mr. Li spent five days incarcerated, the crime was fabricating lies and disrupting normal social order.

B: Oh, boy, wow.

E: Yeah, that... that doesn't sound too Orwellian or anything (inaudible)

S: Yeah, disrupting the social order that yeah really Orwellian, I agree

?: scary

E: Now, guys, to wrap this up, I'll say that the rubber alien was examined by scientists and deemed to be a hoax, the dead giveaway is when they broke open the alien and pulled out a slip of paper with a fortune, that's right

S: (laughs)

B: Oh!

E: And it... and the fort... it read "Help I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery

R: Hm, hm.

E: and your lucky numbers are 4, 14, 22, 31, and 49". So

?: Jesus

E: that sort of sealed the deal.

B: Oh, boy.

R: That joke fails, though, on the fact that fortune cookies aren't Chinese.

S: Yeah, that's true.

E: No, that enhances the joke and the... gaw.... (inaudible, possibly expletive) (laughter)

== Who's That Noisy? (31:24)==
S: All right, well Evan, you also have to tell us about Who's That Noisy.

E: I will do that, now, um... what we'll do is next week we're gonna reveal last week's winner.

S: We're recording a little ahead of schedule 'cause of... we're on our TAM recording schedule, so, the... we're gonna have to get caught up on the Who's That Noisy-s t... towards the end

E: Right

R: We might all be dead right now.

S: (chuckles) That's true.

E: Maybe, I mean who knows, another volcano you know might spew

R: Hm

E: sulfur dioxide or whatever the hell's

R: could happen

E: gonna come out of it, however, we do have a puzzle for this week, so that will be this week's Who's That Noisy, is a puzzle and, here we go. So, there is this machine, OK? Now this machine does one thing. It shuffles playing cards. However, this machine always rearranges cards in the same way relative to the original order of the cards. OK, we're talking about a deck of playing cards here. Now all of the hearts arranged in order from ace to king were put into the machine. The cards were shuffled, and then they were put into the machine again. After the second... after the second shuffling, the cards were in the following order: 10, 9, queen, 8, king, 3, 4, ace, 5, jack, 6, 2, 7. So you need to tell us, now, what order were the cards in after the first shuffle.

S: Very tricksy.

R: Eh-hm.

E: It is tricksy, yeah.

B: (inaudible)

E: I don't know if, uh... I don't if Bilbo would have gotten that in the cave while he was dueling it out...

B: Ahhh.

E: (inaudbile) wits with Gollum

S: Not without a pen and paper, I don't think

E: (laughs) that's for sure (laughs). So... think about that

S: Or quill and parchment

E: Qua... yes, of course, Middle Earth and all... wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sguforums.com is the forum's website... so... think about it, give us your best answer, and good luck to everyone.

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Can We Know Everything? (33:23)===

S: All right, thanks, Evan. We do have one email for this week. This one comes from Mark Dennehy from Melbourne, and Mark writes:
<blockquote>I have been listening to the show for 4 years and although I have always been a sceptic</blockquote>with a C<blockquote>I have learnt a great deal from your show. I would like to hear the rogues view on whether science has the potential to explain the physical world in such a way that we understand everything. Is there a limit to what we can comprehend? For example a dog has no concept of quantum gravity and wouldn’t ask the question of himself "Is space-time fundamentally continuous or discrete?" We have gone from asking ourselves how to grow food to "why is there far more matter than antimatter in the observable universe?" Our brain appears finite in capacity so I would assume that would limit our ability to understand the world around us. Reaching a limit at some stage seems inevitable. Or will our brains develop as we need to solve increasingly more difficult questions, after all our brains appear</blockquote>to need... our brains appear<blockquote>not to need to store every bit of information we discover perhaps more the ability to solve a problem, and the capacity to grasp the variables at that time. I could be wrong though. Your opinions would be greatly appreciated and interesting. (Mark Dennehy, Melbourne)</blockquote>Thank you, Mark. So, what do you guys think?

R: I already learned everything there is to know

?: (inaudible)

R: when I was a teenager, so...

S: Yeah.

E: So you're done.

B: (inaudible)

R: Q.E.D.

E: You maxxed out.

R: Uh, hm.

B: I think we're definitely not smart enough to understand everything, I mean there's always gonna be... som... I think there's always gonna be some ways to explain aspects of nature that... that... that could be beyond us. It's amazing that we've... that we've come this far but I think as we progress I think there's definitely areas that we'll hit that will be just... just it'll be similar to a dog trying to think about quantum gravity but the thing is that, uh, it's not just our brains anymore, I mean we'll you know we'll have you know aids, we'll have in... we'll have supercomputers and eventually even artificial intelligence that wi... that will help us and work with us and probably eventually completely outclass us in... in understanding this stuff. So, um, and then... they'll... they'll also be, I believe, uh, br... you know, uh, we'll not evolve our brains but we'll en... we'll artificially enhance our brains. There's lots of ways to g... (inaudible) to do that

S: We'll probably do both.

B: So, yeah, so... so I think there's... th... th... there'll probably be very little that, um, that we won't eventually figure out... who knows how long that'll take... but I think, uh, we will hav... we... we have and we will have the ability to understand, uh, as much as can be understood.

S: Well, yeah, I think there's two ways to look at this question. One is, wha you were discussing, Bob, which is the finite limitations of the human brain. I agree that there are probably limitations to our ability to understand the universe, but, we will augment, evolve, supplement, our brains as technology progresses. That ther... there's no, I guess, theoretical limit to that, so, um, through those tools I think we... we, you know, that... that.. that limitation wi... is something that we can surpass. The other way to think about that, though, about just, um, cognitive limitations... I'm not sure, I've never liked the analogy to the dog. Maybe

B: Why?

S: it's apt but, uh, I'm not sure because it seems like there is not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference, between a dog and a human brain... that maybe once you have the ability to think about things at a certain level then you're there and then... then, you know, you... that gives you qualitative abilities, you know, of investigation, of asking questions, of exploration. Right, so it's not just that... you... we're a certain amount farth.. more intelligent than a dog therefore we can understand a certain amount more about the universe

B: Uh, huh.

S: It's that, we can engage in a kind of introspection and exploration and questioning that a dog can't even engage in at all.

R: Yeah, but, I mean there are apes who can engage in a certain level of that much more than a dog but less than humans, so, (inaudible) surely we can imagine a level up from us, right, where there's something we're missing. Like there's... there're very few things that humans are capable of, that apes or other animals can't do in some capacity.

S: I... (inaudible) I agree, that is possible, I'm not convinced that has to be the case, though, that's my point. It's possible that... uh... our current abilities are limited and we won't be able to figure out the universe but it's also possible that we have the tools necessary and now it's just a matter of applying them.

B: So... so we've passed some sort of cognitive threshold, where we

S: Yeah.

B: could eventually figure out everything, but... so what you're saying is that we... we could pretty much figure out most anything but what I'm taking away from that, though, is that it might... it might be so fiendishly difficult that it would take... that it could take uh... an extremely long time for us to find... to ev... to finally wrap our heads aroung something.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: Right, so... so, so far we're talking about the one approach to this problem which is the... the human capacity. And, again, there's a couple of ways to look at that which we explored. The other way to look at this question is "Is it even theoretically possible to understand everything about the universe". There may be limitations to the ability of any intelligent creature to gain certain bits of knowledge, and I think, first of all, I think that that... that is absolutely true, there are things that we will never know, because the information is lost. It's just lost to the universe... but depends on what ya mean by understanding everything about the universe.

E: Right, that's what I thought too, yeah.

S: Yeah, so like, what, like what color

E: It's nebulous.

S: was a certain dinosaur, you know, again, that... that information

E: Right.

S: may be lost to the universe. But let's put that aside so that, we'll... we'll say OK obviously we can't know about information that's lost to the universe. You... you could frame questions about the universe that cannot be explored by science.

B: Yeah, and I would add to that, Steve, uh, you... chaotic systems, you know, sensitive dependency

S: Yeah.

B: on initial conditions. Those things are inherently unpredictable no matter how smart and no matter what technology you have, so, I would add that, but that's kind of a... maybe a trivial addition, an obvious addition.

S: Right. And there may be other questions like "What happened before the Big Bang" that we just... we will... may never figure out a way to... to fi... to answer that question.

R: But, of course, you (inaudible) even with that we've already started reaching back before the Big Bang, and making some observations

E: Inferences,

R: so

E: yeah.

S: Yeah.

R: yeah...

S: Yeah, I agree, (inaudible) we've started to make some inferences but there... but there may be limits.

R: Yeah,

S: (inaudible)

R: I agree with that. I... I feel though, that in general tha.. I... I... I think there's also a difference between... (inaudible) everything there is to know about the things we know about, and then  is there... if there's a... if there's a gap in our understanding that we can identify will we have the tools to fill that gap, but also, are there... are we constantly surrounded by gaps we're not even ever going to realize just because of the limits of our own

B: Yeah.

R: senses and things. Um, I

S: Right.

R: think that's a possibility as well.

S: Yeah, it's (inaudible) it's sort of the, uh, things that we don't know we don't know.

R: Exactly.

?: Uh, huh.

S: Yeah. All right, guys, uh, well, let's go on to our interview.

== Interview with Daniel Loxton (40:25) ==
About his new book: ''Abominable Science''

== Science or Fiction (58:37) ==
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130612173326.htm Item #1:] New fossil evidence reveals the presence of kangaroo ancestors 25 million years ago in what is now Europe. [http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/15806 Item #2:] Researchers find that male guppies can reproduce up to 10 months after they have died. [http://www.anl.gov/articles/discovery-new-material-state-counterintuitive-laws-physics Item #3:] Scientists have discovered a material that gets larger under pressure, in apparent defiance of the laws of physics.
S: Bob, why don't you go first

B: So material that gets larger under pressure. So instead of getting of getting more dense, closer together, it's doing the opposite. Wow, that's messed up. Rearranges for the bonds, I don't know. Um that's pretty bizarre, I'm trying to figure out how that would work. Let me go to two. Male guppies can reproduce up to ten months after they have died. So are we talking about zombie guppies with good game, is that it? Wow, so that's kind of bizarre. So if their...so I mean yeah, if their, perhaps their...their sperm can last a really long time and um be used after the death of the rest of the body. The kangaroo ance says 25 million years in what is now Europe. There's something about that. Australia was isolated for millions of years. I don't think you need to... that one is rubbing me the wrong way; even more than those other ones. Uh, I'm gonna say the kangaroos are fiction!

S: Ok, Rebecca

R:That's where I was leaning to; because, I mean if that's true, that just completely rewrites the history of not just kangaroos but all marsupials. Right? I feel like that would be big big news. The presence of kangaroo ancestors... That could mean anything really though; something really far back. But, I mean, kangaroos and other marsupials, evolved after Australia broke off right? I think? So, that seams really suspect to me. Um, male guppies reproduced after they died. It's not, it doesn't surprise me they could reproduce after they die; I can picture their sperm being somehow long-lived.and being able to swim out and fertilize eggs. But ten months! I didn't know that guppies could live for ten months, let alone their sperm. So the length of time there is what's really crazy; but I can buy it. The thing that gets larger under pressure, for some reason I can completely believe that. I don't know why. Like in my head I'm picturing non neutronium, liquids and other things that react weirdly in non-intuitive ways when you interact with them. So that one I buy. So for me it's between the guppies and the kangaroos. And I'm gonna have to GWB on this one. The kangaroo thing is just way too bizarro for me so I'm gonna say that one's the fiction.

S: Alright, Jay

J: Hey guys

B: Hey Jay

E: Hey Jay

B: Jay, you've been so quiet all show, what's goin on?

R: Really well behaved.

J: I've been very contemplative. I liked everything you guys have said tonight

R: You agreed with absolutely everything?

J: Uh oh, I don't trust you Rebecca.

*all laugh*

J: Uh, I was doing auditions for Occ the Skeptical Caveman.

S: How did it go?

J: It went great! It took a lot longer, but tonight was a good night. But in regards to these news items... The one about the new fossil evidenced about the kangaroo ancestor. So the key here is that they found a fossil that was in Europe. That one I really, I don't know. And I don't know if 25 million years is way too long or way too short. It sounds reasonable though. The second one, researchers finding about the male guppies can reproduce ten months after they've died. I agree with Rebecca. Okay so the corpse of the guppies is there and their sperm can last for ten months. That might even be like a built in thing that they've evolved to be able to do. You know and as the carcass is there something happens and the sperm is able to feed off it, I don't know. I have no idea, it's weird but I can see that happening. And the last one about the scientists discovering there's this material that gets larger under pressure, that one out of the three of them I really do believe is true. So now I'm down to the first two, alright I'm gonna say that the fossil evidence, the one about the kangaroos, is false.

S: And Evan

E: The kangaroo, I mean we always think of kangaroo as an Australian or what is it

B: Australasia?

E: I'll move on to the guppies. They can reproduce up to ten months after they have died. So we've got this dead guppy and something perhaps comes along and is able to extract something from it so it technically reproduces. Unless its, do guppies reproduce on their own? Is it one of these creatures that doesn't need a partner in order to reproduce? I don't know, it seems unlikely. The material that gets larger under pressure, I don't know what it is, I was thinking plasma but that's probably a well known, the properties of plasma. Um, but maybe Rebecca was on to something there.

J: I get larger under pressure because I eat more when I'm stressed out.

R: I was sure that was gonna turn into a dick joke, I was so sure. How did that not even?

*all laugh*

J: Rebecca cannot believe it!

B: No, I liked it because everybody went there mentally, everybody. And he didn't even have to say anything!

R: Everybody was like, "here comes Jay's dick joke."

J: Wow you think I'm that decultured?

R: Well I think if that was a word then yes. You're not just uncultured, you've gone through some processes

J: I have invented the process!

E: Alright thanks to Jay's suggestion, I have come to the determination that this one's gonna, the material that gets larger under pressure is going to be science. Therefore, guppies or kangaroos... I'm gonna go with the guppies. One, I don't know what's goin on here. Ten months after they've died? Boy that's something! I'll say the guppies, I'll hang out there by myself.

S: Alright, good for you Evan for being brave. So I guess we'll start with the third one: scientists have discovered a material that gets larger under pressure in apparent defiance of the laws of physics! You guys all think that the laws of physics have been broken, and this one is SCIENCE.

*yay*

S: Materials we're used to, I guess materials doing all sorts of weird things. But the scientists, and I was really surprised by this, so much so that they spent a couple of years verifying this to make sure it was really really true before they

B: Wow, two years!

R: How many times do you have to punch someone before they get bigger

S: They noticed that there was no anomaly here or error, this is

E: I thought they need to do a press release and announce it in a journal, and then go and figure it out.

S: So this is researchers at the Argon National Laboratory and they found a class of materials that becomes more porous under pressure. So, Bob you're right in that the pressure forces a reorganization of the molecules which makes the substance more porous, thereby increasing its' size even while it's under greater pressure. So that may seem like just an interesting anomaly but this could be potentially useful. Porous materials like this are used in drug research and drug manufacturing. It also may be useful in carbon sequestration or in material separation and catalysis.

J: What's catalysis?

S: Catalyzing reactions, making them go faster. So, yeah probably not the kind of thing you're gonna be purchasing at the store, but useful in industry and producing things that you'll find useful. Alright, I guess we'll keep working our way backwards. Number 2, researchers find that male guppies can reproduce up to ten months after they have died. Evan, you think this one is the fiction; the rest of you believe in zombie guppies and this one is science.

E: Wow

R: Zombie Guppies!

S: So how do you think this works?

R: Zombie Guppies!

J: I think it's what Rebecca and I were saying all along.

B: Nah, it's the females

S: Yeah, the uh sperm can survive in a female ten months which is a lot longer than anyone thought was possible . Ten months after a guppy, a male guppy, has died theoretically they can reproduce with sperm they have pre-deposited in the female.

J: That was really cheaty

S: It was a little cheaty but I can do that, I agree with that

R: So wait does that mean, shut up I have questions, does that mean that a female can hold on to different male sperms, like collecting different ones and then using them as she pleases? That's like a conscience decision on her part?

E: Holding on to sperm I mean come on

B: I don't think they can necessarily hold on to multiple dads' sperm at the same time

S: The research article I'm looking at does not comment on that one way or another.

E: No comment

B: There's a real benefit to this. Say there's ya know 10,000 different males; with this ability there's more than 10,000. There's 12 or 13,000, whatever. You can advocate traits still being propagated even though there's no specimens with that trait. Like I think they mentioned color, the guppies color well the female guppies are attracted to certain patterns of color and they kind of like rejuvenate that line that you know those genes, even two generations that the dad died out.

S: Yeah, so they're saying that the effected population size is greater than what it appears and so is the genetic variation, the genetic diversity.

B: Yeah, which is a huge benefit.

S: So the female guppies live for about two years, male guppies only live for 3-4 months.

B: oooo nasty

S: You're right Rebecca, male guppies don't live for ten months.

R: Huh, called it. I'm not just terrible at taking care of fish.

S: But the headline, Jay, was "research shows male guppies reproduce even after death." That was the headline.

J: Alright look, I won science or fiction

S: So I feel justified in propagating that little bit of misdirection. Which means that new fossil evidence reveals the presence of kangaroo ancestors 25 million
years ago in what is now Europe, is complete and utter bollocks and fiction. Because, when did Australia break off from

J: I thought it was like a couple of hundred million

E: Yeah hundreds of millions

B: No, no not that long

R: I never

S: 110 million years ago. Yeah so, Pangaea broke up into Gondwana and Laurasia. And then Gondwana, which is the southern of those two continents so Australia broke off from there with Antarctica which broke off from Australia; I think that's the order in which it happened. So for about 100 million years or so Australia has been its own continent. Pretty much isolated from everything else. So there's no possible way that an ancestor of kangaroos could be in Europe 25 million years ago, the timing doesn't work out. So I just totally made that up. This was the main split between mammals, marsupials and placentals. The marsupials were isolated to South America and Australia and the placentals everywhere else and then when the land bridge opened up between Panama land-bridge, being South America and North America, that's when those mammal populations mixed while Australia remained isolated. Which is why the only native mammals in Australia are all marsupials. The few placentals were introduced at some point. I remember when we were touring in Australia, you guys remember this, and our tour guide said that fruit bats were the most closely related animals to humans

B: Yeah I'll never forget that

R: Yeah that's right.

S: But what he means was animals that are currently native to Australia.

J: Well that's a pretty key thing there at the end of the sentence

S: That's because it's the only placental. Any placental would be more closely related to humans than all of the marsupials.

J: When you say placentals Steve am I hearing the reference correctly?

S: Yeah yeah

R: To a placenta?

J: Rebecca, I don't wanna make any assumptions on this show

S: Mammals pretty much divided up into marsupials and placentals, yeah. With an occasional duck billed platypus thrown in there.

B: Monotreme

S: Monotreme yeah

R: Monotreme, Jinx!

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:13:12) ==
<blockquote>Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing.</blockquote>
Harlan Ellison

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 414

2014-01-15T04:15:32Z

Lmwood: /* Science or Fiction (58:37) */

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{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 414
|episodeDate = 22nd Jun 2013
|episodeIcon = File:chinese-alien-head.jpg
|rebecca = y
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|evan = y
|guest1 = DL: {{w|Daniel Loxton}}
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2013-06-22.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=46390.0
|qowText = Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing
|qowAuthor = {{w|Harlan Ellison}}
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, today is Wednesday, June 19th, 2013, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: Hey, everybody

S: Rebecca Watson,

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, guys.

S: and Evan Bernstein.

E: Salutations, everybody

R: Hello...

S: Salutations and felicitations, Evan.

E: Oh, and felicitations, how could I forget the Squire of Gothos. Shame on me,

S: I don't know (chuckles)

E: shame on me.

R: The hell you guys talking about.

E: Well, Rebecca, aren't you watching the Star Trek series?

R: I guess I haven't gotten up to that point, yet.

E: This is the original series.

R: I'm watching The Next Generation.

S: You know what I saw recently? "Star Trek Continues".

E: Hm?

S: which is a a

J: Wha?

S: fan.. "Star Trek Continues", it's a fan episode, a fan video, where it's as if the ep... the seasons continued as if it wasn't canceled after three seasons. So it's not, it's not like a parody, and it's not an update or a reboot or anything it's like what would a fourth season have actually been like,

B: Oh, cool.

S: and and they do their best to reproduce, the production value, the sets are identical, all the sound effects, the music the acting

R: Hm

S: the whole culture that was definitely embedded in that late '60s you know in terms of everything. And the

?: (inaudible)

S: some of the actors are damn good, the guy who's doing Kirk has his mannerisms down, absolutely down.

B: And it's not a parody of his mannerisms?

S: No, no it's not, it's not a parody, it's an imitation. And it like things like it's like "Yeah, Kirk does do that!" You know, it's like, (laughter) you uh things you wouldn't even think of. Like the

R: That is so Kirk.

S: ways he moves his arms when he walks. Yeah, it's just amazing.

R: Hey, remember that Star Trek episode where, uh, poisonous gas covered most of the planet, and murdered millions of people?

E: Ahhh.

R: Oh, wait, no, that was real life. Oh, my God!

B: (laughs)

E: That's worse.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:58) ==
R: On June 22, 1783, a poisonous cloud caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland, uh, finally reached France. So this is kind of, um, I really could have picked any date, uh, it's very interesting, it's something that I didn't even realize was the thing, uh, it was one of the most deadly if not the most deadly volcanic eruptions in human history, as I said it happened in Iceland but it spread all over the globe, uh, first of all though in Iceland it killed about 50% of the livestock which lead to a famine which killed a quarter of the population of Iceland. Uh, so it was pretty immediate but then it also went on to possibly cause droughts in India and Africa which lead to millions of more deaths, uh, as well as crop failures in Europe and air pollution and this deadly gas... from this deadly gas. So, all to... all told, it killed probably over 6 million people

?: What?

R: globally. Yeah, 6 million.

E: That's a lot (inaudible)

R: It was a pretty big volcanic eruption.

E: 1783, that's (inaudible) quite a bit.

B: Holy crap.

R: And the cloud was sulfur dioxide that

E: Oh, that'll do it

R: and also the hydrogen... the hydrogen fluoride apparently I think killed most of the people in Iceland but the sulfur dioxide is what drifted into Europe to start murdering people there. But yeah and it also caused severe global temperature change, uh, it was the hottest summer on record followed by really violent winter with hail and storms and all that good stuff which probably lead to more deaths.

S: It was the longest period of below zero temperatures in New England.

R: Oh, yeah, the US... the US area just had some severe weather. They don't... I.. I didn't find a whole of talk about deaths that resulted in it but I think people were just dying left and right anyway, at that point, so

S: A bad winter in 1783 was no joke.

R: Exactly, yeah, that's... that's what I'm sayin'. But...

B: So this gas released it wasn't part of like a.. a pyroclastic flow, it was just this, just this gas that came out and went

S: Just a bubble of gas

B: all over the place

R: Yeah, like a volcanic fart, silent but deadly

E: Probably wasn't too silent, either

R: Too soon?

?: Too soon (laughter)

S: Volcanoes are no joke, that superheated gas that kills people it's not just the lava and the ash, I mean, it's usually the gas, even if it's not poisonous gas if it's superheated it's like your lungs explode, you know. Well, let's move on, uhm, have you guys heard...

?: (stage inhalation)

?: Uh?

== News Items ==
=== Osteoarthritis (4:41)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/knee-osteoarthritis-thumbs-down-for-acupuncture-and-glucosamine/ Knee Osteoarthritis: Thumbs Down for Acupuncture and Glucosamine]

S: the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons has released their, uh, 1200 page report evaluating evidence for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis

R: Now the last time you led us into one of these and we made all made light-hearted jokes about how boring the topic was, we got a bunch of angry letters from botanists, so, no, Steve, not gonna fall for it, this sounds fascinating, tell me more. (laughter)

S: Yeah, but like last time I convinced you how cool botany was, now I wanna convince you how cool osteoarthritis is.

E: Here come more letters (laughter)

S: Oh, boy. (laughter)

S: um, so osteoarthritis is, essentially degenerative arthritis of a joint, mainly from wear and tear, but there are other obviously biological factors involved, and so knee osteoarthritis, very common, um, as people get into their 40's and 50's they uh, their knees start to ache, you know, and they just wear out, they just don't really last 80 years unfortunately. There are lots of potential treatments for osteoarthritis including many that are not evidence-based. This report is interesting for a number of reasons, not just for the specific recommendations that are made. Harriet Hall writes about this on Science-based Medicine and I recommend that for those who are interested but I just want to highlight some of the interesting things. First of all, it shows that science-based practitioners actually care about evidence, despite all of the propaganda about "Oh, those doctors only want drugs and surgery" here we have a uh a major you know a professional organization in the United States dedicated to orthopedic surgery reviewing thousands of published studies, putting out a 1200 page comprehensive report looking in-depth into the evidence for many different approaches, and here are the highlights of what they found, where there was strong evidence you know for or against. So glucosamine chondroitin you guys are familiar with this, right, this is a dietary supplement that has been and still is promoted, um, has been for years, for arthritis. What do you think they found?

E: It doesn't work.

S: It doesn't work. So it was one of the few things where there was strong evidence against its effectiveness. Glucosamine and chondroitin doesn't work, there have been large studies. Exercise, strong evidence for, in favor of it. Weight loss, moderate evidence in favor of it. Acupuncture, what do you think they concluded?

R: No evidence.

?: Overwhelming evidence.

S: Strong evidence against its effectiveness. So very nice to see that they took a science-based approach to acupuncture research and didn't fall for the bait-and-switch of "Oh, it works like a placebo" you know, they didn't fall for that business. And also, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories strong evidence they are effective, that's not surprising. And here's one: arthroscopy with lavage and debridement --- strong evidence against.

B: Really?

E: Lavage, huh?

S: So lavage is like just washing it out. So arthroscopy is putting the scope into the knee and looking around, you know, for diagnostic, but if you take anything out then it becomes a therapeutic procedure, right, that's debridement, you know, cutting away any fraying pieces of cartilage and then washing out those pieces, that's the lavage part. So, this is a pretty lucrative, popular procedure for orthopedists to do. And here they are, the official organization of orthopedists, coming out with a statement saying there is strong evidence against the effectiveness of this procedure. This is something that we've written about on Science-based Medicine previously when there...there... when a review came out, I think now about two years ago, showing that arthroscopy was not effective, and there was some push-back from some orthopedists, and we said "Hey, this is the evidence, baby, this is, this is what it shows". So it's nice now to see the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons looking at the evidence and honestly saying "Yep, our beloved procedure, that we would love to have work, doesn't work". So it's hard in the face of this, if you look at the bigger picture, it's hard to justify the typical knee-jerk criticisms that alternative medicine proponents have against mainstream medicine

R: Heh, knee-jerk

S: Yeah, knee-jerk. That it's they only care about drugs and surgery, well here they are saying um, their favorite surgical procedure doesn't work, that they don't care about other things, here they're strongly in favor of exercise, moderately in favor of weight loss, Um, and that they're not, they don't care about actually treating people, well, this is, I think this shows their dedication to the evidence to what actually works regardless of what the modality is, and this is, this is, what we see in mainstream medicine all the time. This is a Herculean effort and it's great document, but this is what we see all the time, you know, the... academic professional uh physicians looking at the evidence objectively and the chips fall where they may, in its direct contradiction to all the anti-mainstream medicine conspiracy theories that you're going to hear from the alternative medicine side, so I thought that was worth pointing out. Also, Harriet pointed out something interesting, things like homeopathy didn't even make the list, it wasn't even worth their time to take a look at.

B: Oh, awesome.

E: Good.

S: Yeah.

R. Good (inaudible).

E: I don't know if we'd be able to say that if this were British Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, right? That probably would have made that list.

S: Homeopathy probably would have,

E: Yes

S: just because homeopathy is more popular across the pond, yeah.

B: Uh, Steve, did they mention why it wasn't on the list?

S: No, just... it didn't even... didn't even make the radar. Just wasn't even, yeah, not... not mentioned one way or the other.

B: OK

== Quickie with Bob (10:27)==
* ESO: [http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1326/ New Kind of Variable Star Discovered]

E: Oh, hey, wait, wait. I would like a Quickie with Bob right now.

B: Really?

E: Yes, right this moment.

B: Thank you, Evan, I'm almost certain you will not regret this.

E: (laughs)

B: This is your Quickie with Bob. Astronomers in Chile, guys, have discovered a new type of variable star it was pretty interesting story uh they did detailed observations of 3700 stars in this specific cluster over 7 years. Um, and showed that they found 36 of these stars had very minute changes in their brightness of about only about a tenth of a percent over an hour or as much as over 20 hours. And uh this is... this is big news in the community because variable stars are in... are incredibly common there's lots of different types of variable stars and it's always interesting to... to add another one to the group actually the list of uh of typ... of variable stars um the types themselves was much bigger than... than I remember them being but just to break it down real quick there's... there's two different main types of stars that are variable, there's the intrinsic and extrinsic and it's kind of obvious what they... what that means the intrinsic stars that are variable are variable because of that's just the way they are something about their internal dynamics makes them makes the light output variable whereas the extrinsic... the extrinsic stars... variable stars are variable only because you know say something might move in front of them or... or there might be some... something in the way that changes the light that reaches the Earth. So within these intrinsic stars there's... there's just a few categories there's the pulsating variables, there's the eruptives, and there's the cataclysmic or explosive variable stars. This new one that they found I think is pretty obvious that it's within the... the pulsating variable star category

S: Is there a throbbing category? (laughter)

E: Is there a grooving category?

B: So like I said these variables are most certainly they'll be within the pulsating variety they haven't actually named this type of variable yet but I'm sure it's gonna be within that... that category They're not sure why they pulsate, either, basically because current models say that they should not be variable so this is the real surprise that these... that these varied so much and but one clue that they found is that many of these variables rotate very very fast

S: Yeah, that seems pretty telling

B: Yeah, more than 50% of their critical velocity, in fact, and the critical velocity

E: Wow

B: is a velocity that if they... if they reached 100% they would actually start throwing off mass so they're spinning very very fast and uh this spinning might... may have an effect on the dynamics of their interiors which then would result in the variability of the light output. So, uh, so keep an eye on it, I'm curious to see what they're gonna call it and uh, and... and you know what more they can determine, um, about these types of stars based on uh, on... on this... these studies that they're... these very detailed studies that they're doing. So, uh, so I got guys this has been your Quickie with Bob, I hope it was good for you, too.

== News items continued ==
=== Patenting DNA (13:07)===
* BBC News: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22895161 US Supreme Court says human DNA cannot be patented]

S: Thanks, Bob. OK, Rebecca, you're gonna tell us about a major Supreme Court case regarding patenting genes.

R: Yes, you are correct, Steve. There is a huge decision that just happened in the Supreme Court on, uh, June 13th, the Supreme Court ruled that, uh, companies, particularly Myriad Genetics, in this case, cannot patent a human gene. So in this specific case, it was this company Myriad Genetics which was one of the patent holders on the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes. Now, astute listeners might recall that we were recently talking about these very genes, in the case of Angelina Jolie,

S: Yeah.

R: who came out and said that she had the mutation in her BRCA gene that said she was much much much more likely to get breast cancer and ovarian cancer and so she had her breast removed. Now, we also mentioned that Angelina Jolie had spoken briefly about the fact that not everyone has access to the genetic testing required to find out if you have the mutation, in order to get the life saving operations you would need. Well, the reason why many people don't have access to this genetic testing is because Myriad Genetics was one of the patent holders and... and they were the only company that was allowed to perform this testing on these genes. So, if you wanted to find if you had the mutation you had to go through Myriad Genetics and that increases the price dramatically so they could charge thousands of dollars to people who wanted the testing. What this ruling means in this specific case it's a huge win for women particularly because this means that you... women can go get genetic testing anywhere to find out if they have this mutation they don't have to go through Myriad in order to find out, so, now you have companies competing against each other, prices go down, etc., etc., and more lives are saved because of it, so that's one result of this and one of the reasons why women's rights groups were a huge part of the uh lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision it was a unanimous decision the case was led by uh the ACLU um representing women's rights groups as well as scientists and other interest groups but also scientists win from this case because it means that uh any scientist can now pursue research on the... these genes where prior to this only Myriad and the other patent holders would technically be able to do that. Basically the court ruled that you can't patent a human gene however they did leave it open that you could possibly patent a gene that had been fiddled with.

?: Yeah.

R: So uh if you

?: (inaudible) huge

R: come up with your own gene, like a synthetic gene like cDNA... c... cDNA, that could still be eligible for a patent. Uh, but because Myriad the company did not actually create anything, they just researched the gene they're not allowed to patent it.

S: Yeah. So

R: So

S: products of nature cannot be patented and what this decision was exploring specifically was how much modification is necessary before a product of nature is an innovation. An... yeah, this that needed to be explored for the in... for this specific case of genes. And it seems that everyone pos... with the possible exception of Myriad, is happy about this decision this is a... I've seen nothing but universal praise for this decision.

E: Myriad shouldn't be too sad their stock rose that day

S: Is that right? (laughs)

E: as a result, yeah.

R: They have been fighting this

E: That will fade.

R: for a very long time so this is a huge loss for them, but it's... it is a great gain for humanity, we're

S: Yeah, for humanity.

R: literally talking about lives being saved

E: Yeah, absolutely.

R: and more research being done.

B: Yeah, it does seem...

R: So it is a good thing.

B: it does seem (inaudible) to me lots of benefits but what about the idea, the one negative thing that I've heard, that I've seen in a couple of places was that some people are afraid that companies like Myriad, of course, will scale back investment because they're not gonna be rewarded ah with patents for this so I just wonder how much of a genuine concern that aspect of this is.

R: Consider how much research is done by private companies compared to the huge amount of research that's currently being done through government institutions and universities. Private companies have always focussed on what's going to make the most money and that's why we have uh government funding for scientific endeavors. There's one other thing I wanted to mention, a bit of, uh, myth-busting. This... this thing was going around that... uh, Scalia doesn't believe in genetics, or in molecular biology. So, uh, it was a unanimous decision but Justice Scalia wrote a separate thing... ruling...

S: Separate opinion.

R: opinion, thank you, that's the word.

E: Opinion, yeah.

R: Uh, Scalia wrote a separate opinion uh saying that he, uh, agrees to vote with the majority, but he does not agree with one part of the opinion that has no effect on his final vote. What he said was, um, that he wouldn't sign on to Part 1a and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology because he can't affirm those details on his own knowledge or his own belief. So, Part 1a, deal... it's just a list of basic facts about DNA, about genetics, uh it's all kind of just basic level genetic stuff.

E: So was he basically saying I don't know what this is?

R: Yeah, you know, so some...

E: and therefore I can't really

R: some people were

E: say anything about it.

R: taking uh that he wouldn't affirm those details on his own knowledge or his own belief to mean that he didn't believe in genetics or he didn't know about genetics and so he didn't believe them, something like that. But, I've heard from lawyers who have said that this is a bit of legal-speak in a way, that there's this sort of ongoing argument on whether or not they should in... judges should include basic information that's not necessary to the final ruling, and so that's kind of what he was saying, is that this chunk I'm not a scientist, I'm not going to sign my name on this and say that as a Justice I approve of this because I have no idea I'm not a scientist and it has nothing to do with the case.

S: He's being a legal stickler,

R: Yes.

S: not a science denier.

R: Exactly.

B: Oh, OK.

R: That...

E: Right.

R: that's what I'm hearing from... from lawyers, and

S: That makes sense.

R: it makes sense to me.

S: And that's kind of his shtick, too,

R: Yeah.

S: is to be a legal stickler.

B?: Hmmm, OK.

=== Foot Fungus (20:02)===
* Science News: [http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350599/description/Foot_fungi_a_thriving_diverse_community Foot fungi a thriving, diverse community]

S: OK, well thanks, Rebecca. Bob, can you explain to me why my toes occasionally itch? (laughter)

R: Ew, bugs, probably.

B: Well, guys, uh, last May... at the end of last May, uh, the, uh, the issue of Nature, they discuss the... the first census... the very first census of skin-dwelling fungi (fung-ee), that... that's

S: Fungi (fung-guy)?

B: Well, there's three ways to pronounce it as far as I can tell

S: Fungi (fun-jee)?

B: Fungi (fung-ee), fungi (fung-eye), fungi (funj-eye). Those are the three that I came across

R: But "fungi" (fung-eye) is the only one that works with that "mushroom walks into a bar" joke.

B: OK.

S: What about... what about "fungi" (fun-jee)?

B: That's actually my preferred pronunciation and I didn't find it. So, whatever, I'll just go with... I'll just go with one of the ones that I found. So this study reveals

E: (chuckles)

B: there's a fungus among us. OK, somebody had to say it, it's out of the way, I said it. So, actually, it...

E: (laughs)

B: it reveals that there's a little variation... there's very little variation in the fungal communities on our bodies except for our feet which calls home to 80 to 100 different types of fungus, they're just like all

?: (inaudible)

B: over the place down there. So, for... just for a quick

?: (inaudible)

B: high-level refresher uh fungi (fung-ee) are the third type of multi-cellular organisms, they're neither plant nor animals, um, one major difference between them and the other two is that their cell walls contain chitin, now that's (inaudible) that's like the exoskeleton of a crabs and lobsters or... or even the beaks of squid uh made of chitin. Uh, fungi play a pivotal role in decomposing organic matter and cycling uh nutrients in the environment and they also appear to be inordinately fond of feet. So here's a quick quote from the study: "A human's skin surfaces are complex ecosystems for microorganisms including fungi, bacteria and viruses which are known collectively as the skin microbiome". So I was as... I was surprised as I said that this initial study was the first of its kind. It seems, I guess, in terms of... yeah, human cohabitation bacteria and viruses get all.. get all the press and all the research dollars, so one reason why the lowly fungus I guess may have been neglected is that it's notoriously difficult to culture, I didn't know that, unlike bacteria which is easy, culturing a fungus from say uh the toenail can take weeks... weeks for it

S: And yet... and yet it's hard to kill when you wanna get rid of it.

B: (chuckle) Right. So... so how did they do it? They looked... they looked at the DNA, of course. They took ten volunteers and they swabbed 14 sites on their bodies including taking toenail clippings apparently. Uh, they then put them in a DNA sequencer which of course is uh one of the key technologies advanced by leaps and bounds uh by the Human Genome Project. Um, they used these molecular tags that stick only to the fungal DNA, so they wouldn't have to worry about all the human DNA and the bacterial DNA and viral DNA, that... that... that was mixed into the samples, so now they have this pure sample of just... of just fung... uh the fungus DNA. They then examined the tiny bits of fungal DNA uh called the phylogenetic markers to tally up all the different types of... of fungal species and bam, they were done, they had... they had a tally of all the different types of species. So, if you look most anywhere on the head or the torso you... you're likely to find one genus and that's called Malassezia. Uh, different areas have different species uh though, like the crease behind your ear or... or on your forehead there's little variation there. Surprisingly, your hands have tons of bacteria but very few fungal communities. So your feet, though, it's... it's completely different ecosystem, um, on your... on your toenails alone there's forty different uh fungi varieties, sixty between your toes, and eighty live on the bottom of... of your heel, which I think would ac... I wouldn't think that would be the most plentiful spot I would think, like, between your toes would have more but apparently there's lots of 'em on the bottom of your heel. So... so why is... how come? Why... why is this so? And it...

E: Gravity.

B: Yeah, gra... (laughs)

E: (chuckles)

B: Well it's... it's not hard to imagine one... one reason, right, your feet are... are often on contact with surfaces that fungi like to hang out on like your socks or locker room floors. I never walk barefoot at... at the gym, uh, never would do it.

E: Uhhhh,

B: So also

E: gosh... (inaudible) so bad.

B: your... your feet... I didn't know that your feet are cooler than other parts of your body, and... and fungi like cooler places, apparently, they hang out. Um, so... so should we all be grossed out? Are you guys like really grossed out... about this stuff?

R: (inaudible) obviously

?: Ahhh...

E: (inaudible) more grossed out about...

R: It takes more than that to... gross out Steve.

B: Yeah, I... I'm not...

S: Oh, yeah...

B: Yeah, I wouldn't think Steve would be, but I'm not... I'm not

S: I've had my head inside of a corpse

B: Cool, um...

R: Hey, thanks for that...

E: A human corpse? Wait, a human corpse?

B: I di...

S: Yeah.

B: Of course.

S: So has everyone who has gone through medical school.

E: You put your head in the corpse?

S: Well, you gotta get into the anatomy, I mean you gotta... you know you're disecting something...

E: I don't...

S: They... so, you get so grossed out in your first year of medical school you're basically done getting grossed out for life.

?: Yeah.

R: Yeah.

B: Totally desensitized.

R: I don't... I don't find what you've said so gross, Bob, but when in... you're talking I was thinking of that... toenail fungus, uh, commercial where...

E: Oh, yeah.

R: where the germ, like, lifts up

E: Little critters.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

R: the toenail and then climbs inside and that's like the worst... worst commercial ever made.

B: Oh, my God I remember that something about detaching a toenail yes I... I cringe

R: Yeah.

B: every time I saw that, nothing to do with the

R: It's awful.

B: fungus or anything but it's just the lifting that toenail

R: Yeah, like the fungus didn't help

B: was nasty. Yeah right, yes. I mean it doesn't gross me out, the... thinking that there's... em... potentially s... you know... well over a hundred different types of these guys all over us. I thin... it's good... it's good that we're colonized by these critters because they're... they're likely to prevent other nasty... guys from taking hold on our skin so it's good that they're there. Likewise, this.. this research can actually help improve our treatment for skin disease and maybe even help with some types of cancers, some people were saying. So... so I say embrace the... the fungi living on your skin, you really don't have much of a choice until we replace them all with nanobots.

=== Chinese Fake Alien (25:46)===
* The Telegraph: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10115832/Chinese-farmer-jailed-for-making-a-rubber-alien.html Chinese farmer jailed for making a rubber alien]

S: All right, thanks, Bob. Evan, you're gonna tell us about a fake Chinese alien.<ref>[http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20130612000078&cid=1103 WantChinaTimes]</ref> (laughter)

?: Oh, God.

E: Now that could mean several different things, I'll... I'll do my best to clarify. Now, there are times when news outlets totally, totally botch their headlines... right, I mean really botch

B: No.

E: We've talked about some real doozies on the show. But rarely do we give them credit when they actually get it right. Let's give The Telegraph its due, because they got this headline spot-on. They wrote: "Chinese farmer jailed for making rubber alien". That kind-a says it all.

?: OK.

E: (chuckles) So it's being reported out of the Shandong province, that, uh, local police recently arrested someone named Mr. Li, a farmer slash alien enthusiast by day and an alien enthusiast farmer... slash farmer by night. And here are his versions of the event, this is Mr. Li.

S: "Mr. Li" 's a pseudonym, probably, by the way.

E: He said: <blockquote>"I was setting an electrical trap for rabbits by the Yellow River, when I saw a bright light. Above my bike, a UFO was floating. One by one, five aliens came down, but one of them stumbled onto one of my rabbit traps and was electricuted. The others went back into their ship and flew away."</blockquote>So that's his story.

S: Quite a tale he's got there. So this alien from who knows how far away from another solar system in super advanced technology and then dies in a rabbit trap.

E: Exa...

S: And his friends leave him behind.

E: And they leave him behind.

R: Was he rabbit shit? (laughter)

E: No.

R: Maybe he was... maybe he was a rabbit, like from another dimension.

E: Well, then rabbits look an awful lot like little grays with Chinese accentuations around the eyes

B?: Yes.

E: and head and stuff. But

B: Plus... plus only mice... only mice are from other dimensions.

E: But how did he go about backing up his claim. Well he does what any true believer does and he post pictures of the ET on the Internet. And in three days these pictures happen to go viral, so after five days of having posted the pictures the local police show up at his door and he's taken in for questioning. Now during the questioning Mr. Li admitted, willingly or otherwise, that the whole thing was a hoax.

S: Shock, shocked.

E: He made an alien, he constructed it himself out of this gluey rubber sort of substance uh tied together with ropes and uh other things and you know... a few... he... he drew his inspiration from the Simon Peg film Paul I don't know if you guys have seen that

?: Hall?

R: Yeah, the one where they go to Comicon.

S: Yes.

E: Right... right.

S: Yes, I saw it.

E: And the alien does a little bit sort of kind of look like that I suppose.

S: But you're right, Evan, the... the uh alien head looks Chinese.

E: It... it does (chuckles).

S: It does... so I mean it's his cultural bias leaking through in his sculpture and he's not aware of it but to these Western you know American eyes it has this... it looks like uh something... that it... like an piece of art that a Chinese person would create.

E: Right.

S: You know, it's not just the eyes it's the mouth it's everything you know it's just there's a subtle sort of Oriental appearance to it. Uh, which is always, I think, a... a very telling sign to look for when people are imagining or faking alien phenomena and their cultural biases come through, and of course we're... you're much more attuned to them when it's from a di... from another culture.

E: But why did he... why did he do it why did you think he did it well he says it with the intent of helping more people believe in aliens. Which is

S: Yeah.

R: Weird.

E: an interesting way to go about doing that... uh, I suppose... um, he claims that and these are his words again:<blockquote>It's still disputed whether or not UFOs and aliens exist but we believe</blockquote>not sure what he means by we<blockquote>they do and we want to expand our group</blockquote>I don't know what group he's part of... uh<blockquote>and make more people believe that aliens do exist.</blockquote> So that's

R: Was this him

E: the approach.

R: saying this or was this

E: That was him.

R: the government saying that he said that.

E: Uh, that is the report from The Telegraph say... uh... which is quoting him as saying that.

R: Hm.

S: Who knows.

E: Yeah you who... who really knows. It's for the conspiry theori... conspiracy theorists,

S: (chuckle)

E: I guess to... to... to sort of figure it

R: Well, you know I mean you don't have to stretch far to come up with a conspiracy involving the Chinese government making a guy say something (chuckle) I mean

E: (chuckle)

R: making a Chinese prisoner say something that they want him to say. Um...

E: That's true.

B: Yeah, my mind all bets are off

R: Yeah, especially if they wanna

B: soo as he... soo as he ga... soo as the government got a hold of him they can well, nothing he says now... really (chuckle) you know whatever

R: Even if it was just a case of they... they wanted to trump up the charge a bit so they didn't look like they were just hassling some farmer, now they've got like a cult that they can

?: Yeah

R: pin on him, you know,

?: Yeah, yeah

E: But

R: 'cuz they're... they hate... they hate the cults.

E: Mr. Li spent five days incarcerated, the crime was fabricating lies and disrupting normal social order.

B: Oh, boy, wow.

E: Yeah, that... that doesn't sound too Orwellian or anything (inaudible)

S: Yeah, disrupting the social order that yeah really Orwellian, I agree

?: scary

E: Now, guys, to wrap this up, I'll say that the rubber alien was examined by scientists and deemed to be a hoax, the dead giveaway is when they broke open the alien and pulled out a slip of paper with a fortune, that's right

S: (laughs)

B: Oh!

E: And it... and the fort... it read "Help I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery

R: Hm, hm.

E: and your lucky numbers are 4, 14, 22, 31, and 49". So

?: Jesus

E: that sort of sealed the deal.

B: Oh, boy.

R: That joke fails, though, on the fact that fortune cookies aren't Chinese.

S: Yeah, that's true.

E: No, that enhances the joke and the... gaw.... (inaudible, possibly expletive) (laughter)

== Who's That Noisy? (31:24)==
S: All right, well Evan, you also have to tell us about Who's That Noisy.

E: I will do that, now, um... what we'll do is next week we're gonna reveal last week's winner.

S: We're recording a little ahead of schedule 'cause of... we're on our TAM recording schedule, so, the... we're gonna have to get caught up on the Who's That Noisy-s t... towards the end

E: Right

R: We might all be dead right now.

S: (chuckles) That's true.

E: Maybe, I mean who knows, another volcano you know might spew

R: Hm

E: sulfur dioxide or whatever the hell's

R: could happen

E: gonna come out of it, however, we do have a puzzle for this week, so that will be this week's Who's That Noisy, is a puzzle and, here we go. So, there is this machine, OK? Now this machine does one thing. It shuffles playing cards. However, this machine always rearranges cards in the same way relative to the original order of the cards. OK, we're talking about a deck of playing cards here. Now all of the hearts arranged in order from ace to king were put into the machine. The cards were shuffled, and then they were put into the machine again. After the second... after the second shuffling, the cards were in the following order: 10, 9, queen, 8, king, 3, 4, ace, 5, jack, 6, 2, 7. So you need to tell us, now, what order were the cards in after the first shuffle.

S: Very tricksy.

R: Eh-hm.

E: It is tricksy, yeah.

B: (inaudible)

E: I don't know if, uh... I don't if Bilbo would have gotten that in the cave while he was dueling it out...

B: Ahhh.

E: (inaudbile) wits with Gollum

S: Not without a pen and paper, I don't think

E: (laughs) that's for sure (laughs). So... think about that

S: Or quill and parchment

E: Qua... yes, of course, Middle Earth and all... wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sguforums.com is the forum's website... so... think about it, give us your best answer, and good luck to everyone.

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Can We Know Everything? (33:23)===

S: All right, thanks, Evan. We do have one email for this week. This one comes from Mark Dennehy from Melbourne, and Mark writes:
<blockquote>I have been listening to the show for 4 years and although I have always been a sceptic</blockquote>with a C<blockquote>I have learnt a great deal from your show. I would like to hear the rogues view on whether science has the potential to explain the physical world in such a way that we understand everything. Is there a limit to what we can comprehend? For example a dog has no concept of quantum gravity and wouldn’t ask the question of himself "Is space-time fundamentally continuous or discrete?" We have gone from asking ourselves how to grow food to "why is there far more matter than antimatter in the observable universe?" Our brain appears finite in capacity so I would assume that would limit our ability to understand the world around us. Reaching a limit at some stage seems inevitable. Or will our brains develop as we need to solve increasingly more difficult questions, after all our brains appear</blockquote>to need... our brains appear<blockquote>not to need to store every bit of information we discover perhaps more the ability to solve a problem, and the capacity to grasp the variables at that time. I could be wrong though. Your opinions would be greatly appreciated and interesting. (Mark Dennehy, Melbourne)</blockquote>Thank you, Mark. So, what do you guys think?

R: I already learned everything there is to know

?: (inaudible)

R: when I was a teenager, so...

S: Yeah.

E: So you're done.

B: (inaudible)

R: Q.E.D.

E: You maxxed out.

R: Uh, hm.

B: I think we're definitely not smart enough to understand everything, I mean there's always gonna be... som... I think there's always gonna be some ways to explain aspects of nature that... that... that could be beyond us. It's amazing that we've... that we've come this far but I think as we progress I think there's definitely areas that we'll hit that will be just... just it'll be similar to a dog trying to think about quantum gravity but the thing is that, uh, it's not just our brains anymore, I mean we'll you know we'll have you know aids, we'll have in... we'll have supercomputers and eventually even artificial intelligence that wi... that will help us and work with us and probably eventually completely outclass us in... in understanding this stuff. So, um, and then... they'll... they'll also be, I believe, uh, br... you know, uh, we'll not evolve our brains but we'll en... we'll artificially enhance our brains. There's lots of ways to g... (inaudible) to do that

S: We'll probably do both.

B: So, yeah, so... so I think there's... th... th... there'll probably be very little that, um, that we won't eventually figure out... who knows how long that'll take... but I think, uh, we will hav... we... we have and we will have the ability to understand, uh, as much as can be understood.

S: Well, yeah, I think there's two ways to look at this question. One is, wha you were discussing, Bob, which is the finite limitations of the human brain. I agree that there are probably limitations to our ability to understand the universe, but, we will augment, evolve, supplement, our brains as technology progresses. That ther... there's no, I guess, theoretical limit to that, so, um, through those tools I think we... we, you know, that... that.. that limitation wi... is something that we can surpass. The other way to think about that, though, about just, um, cognitive limitations... I'm not sure, I've never liked the analogy to the dog. Maybe

B: Why?

S: it's apt but, uh, I'm not sure because it seems like there is not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference, between a dog and a human brain... that maybe once you have the ability to think about things at a certain level then you're there and then... then, you know, you... that gives you qualitative abilities, you know, of investigation, of asking questions, of exploration. Right, so it's not just that... you... we're a certain amount farth.. more intelligent than a dog therefore we can understand a certain amount more about the universe

B: Uh, huh.

S: It's that, we can engage in a kind of introspection and exploration and questioning that a dog can't even engage in at all.

R: Yeah, but, I mean there are apes who can engage in a certain level of that much more than a dog but less than humans, so, (inaudible) surely we can imagine a level up from us, right, where there's something we're missing. Like there's... there're very few things that humans are capable of, that apes or other animals can't do in some capacity.

S: I... (inaudible) I agree, that is possible, I'm not convinced that has to be the case, though, that's my point. It's possible that... uh... our current abilities are limited and we won't be able to figure out the universe but it's also possible that we have the tools necessary and now it's just a matter of applying them.

B: So... so we've passed some sort of cognitive threshold, where we

S: Yeah.

B: could eventually figure out everything, but... so what you're saying is that we... we could pretty much figure out most anything but what I'm taking away from that, though, is that it might... it might be so fiendishly difficult that it would take... that it could take uh... an extremely long time for us to find... to ev... to finally wrap our heads aroung something.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: Right, so... so, so far we're talking about the one approach to this problem which is the... the human capacity. And, again, there's a couple of ways to look at that which we explored. The other way to look at this question is "Is it even theoretically possible to understand everything about the universe". There may be limitations to the ability of any intelligent creature to gain certain bits of knowledge, and I think, first of all, I think that that... that is absolutely true, there are things that we will never know, because the information is lost. It's just lost to the universe... but depends on what ya mean by understanding everything about the universe.

E: Right, that's what I thought too, yeah.

S: Yeah, so like, what, like what color

E: It's nebulous.

S: was a certain dinosaur, you know, again, that... that information

E: Right.

S: may be lost to the universe. But let's put that aside so that, we'll... we'll say OK obviously we can't know about information that's lost to the universe. You... you could frame questions about the universe that cannot be explored by science.

B: Yeah, and I would add to that, Steve, uh, you... chaotic systems, you know, sensitive dependency

S: Yeah.

B: on initial conditions. Those things are inherently unpredictable no matter how smart and no matter what technology you have, so, I would add that, but that's kind of a... maybe a trivial addition, an obvious addition.

S: Right. And there may be other questions like "What happened before the Big Bang" that we just... we will... may never figure out a way to... to fi... to answer that question.

R: But, of course, you (inaudible) even with that we've already started reaching back before the Big Bang, and making some observations

E: Inferences,

R: so

E: yeah.

S: Yeah.

R: yeah...

S: Yeah, I agree, (inaudible) we've started to make some inferences but there... but there may be limits.

R: Yeah,

S: (inaudible)

R: I agree with that. I... I feel though, that in general tha.. I... I... I think there's also a difference between... (inaudible) everything there is to know about the things we know about, and then  is there... if there's a... if there's a gap in our understanding that we can identify will we have the tools to fill that gap, but also, are there... are we constantly surrounded by gaps we're not even ever going to realize just because of the limits of our own

B: Yeah.

R: senses and things. Um, I

S: Right.

R: think that's a possibility as well.

S: Yeah, it's (inaudible) it's sort of the, uh, things that we don't know we don't know.

R: Exactly.

?: Uh, huh.

S: Yeah. All right, guys, uh, well, let's go on to our interview.

== Interview with Daniel Loxton (40:25) ==
About his new book: ''Abominable Science''

== Science or Fiction (58:37) ==
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130612173326.htm Item #1:] New fossil evidence reveals the presence of kangaroo ancestors 25 million years ago in what is now Europe. [http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/15806 Item #2:] Researchers find that male guppies can reproduce up to 10 months after they have died. [http://www.anl.gov/articles/discovery-new-material-state-counterintuitive-laws-physics Item #3:] Scientists have discovered a material that gets larger under pressure, in apparent defiance of the laws of physics.
S: Bob, why don't you go first

B: So material that gets larger under pressure. So instead of getting of getting more dense, closer together, it's doing the opposite. Wow, that's messed up. Rearranges for the bonds, I don't know. Um that's pretty bizarre, I'm trying to figure out how that would work. Let me go to two. Male guppies can reproduce up to ten months after they have died. So are we talking about zombie guppies with good game, is that it? Wow, so that's kind of bizarre. So if their...so I mean yeah, if their, perhaps their...their sperm can last a really long time and um be used after the death of the rest of the body. The kangaroo ance says 25 million years in what is now Europe. There's something about that. Australia was isolated for millions of years. I don't think you need to... that one is rubbing me the wrong way; even more than those other ones. Uh, I'm gonna say the kangaroos are fiction!

S: Ok, Rebecca

R:That's where I was leaning to; because, I mean if that's true, that just completely rewrites the history of not just kangaroos but all marsupials. Right? I feel like that would be big big news. The presence of kangaroo ancestors... That could mean anything really though; something really far back. But, I mean, kangaroos and other marsupials, evolved after Australia broke off right? I think? So, that seams really suspect to me. Um, male guppies reproduced after they died. It's not, it doesn't surprise me they could reproduce after they die; I can picture their sperm being somehow long-lived.and being able to swim out and fertilize eggs. But ten months! I didn't know that guppies could live for ten months, let alone their sperm. So the length of time there is what's really crazy; but I can buy it. The thing that gets larger under pressure, for some reason I can completely believe that. I don't know why. Like in my head I'm picturing non neutronium, liquids and other things that react weirdly in non-intuitive ways when you interact with them. So that one I buy. So for me it's between the guppies and the kangaroos. And I'm gonna have to GWB on this one. The kangaroo thing is just way too bizarro for me so I'm gonna say that one's the fiction.
S: Alright, Jay
J: Hey guys
B: Hey Jay
E: Hey Jay
B: Jay, you've been so quiet all show, what's goin on?
R: Really well behaved.
J: I've been very contemplative. I liked everything you guys have said tonight
R: You agreed with absolutely everything?
J: Uh oh, I don't trust you Rebecca.
*all laugh*
J: Uh, I was doing auditions for Occ the Skeptical Caveman.
S: How did it go?
J: It went great! It took a lot longer, but tonight was a good night. But in regards to these news items... The one about the new fossil evidenced about the kangaroo ancestor. So the key here is that they found a fossil that was in Europe. That one I really, I don't know. And I don't know if 25 million years is way too long or way too short. It sounds reasonable though. The second one, researchers finding about the male guppies can reproduce ten months after they've died. I agree with Rebecca. Okay so the corpse of the guppies is there and their sperm can last for ten months. That might even be like a built in thing that they've evolved to be able to do. You know and as the carcass is there something happens and the sperm is able to feed off it, I don't know. I have no idea, it's weird but I can see that happening. And the last one about the scientists discovering there's this material that gets larger under pressure, that one out of the three of them I really do believe is true. So now I'm down to the first two, alright I'm gonna say that the fossil evidence, the one about the kangaroos, is false.
S: And Evan
E: The kangaroo, I mean we always think of kangaroo as an Australian or what is it
B: Australasia?
E: I'll move on to the guppies. They can reproduce up to ten months after they have died. So we've got this dead guppy and something perhaps comes along and is able to extract something from it so it technically reproduces. Unless its, do guppies reproduce on their own? Is it one of these creatures that doesn't need a partner in order to reproduce? I don't know, it seems unlikely. The material that gets larger under pressure, I don't know what it is, I was thinking plasma but that's probably a well known, the properties of plasma. Um, but maybe Rebecca was on to something there.
J: I get larger under pressure because I eat more when I'm stressed out.
R: I was sure that was gonna turn into a dick joke, I was so sure. How did that not even?
*all laugh*
J: Rebecca cannot believe it!
B: No, I liked it because everybody went there mentally, everybody. And he didn't even have to say anything!
R: Everybody was like, "here comes Jay's dick joke."
J: Wow you think I'm that decultured?
R: Well I think if that was a word then yes. You're not just uncultured, you've gone through some processes
J: I have invented the process!
E: Alright thanks to Jay's suggestion, I have come to the determination that this one's gonna, the material that gets larger under pressure is going to be science. Therefore, guppies or kangaroos... I'm gonna go with the guppies. One, I don't know what's goin on here. Ten months after they've died? Boy that's something! I'll say the guppies, I'll hang out there by myself.
S: Alright, good for you Evan for being brave. So I guess we'll start with the third one: scientists have discovered a material that gets larger under pressure in apparent defiance of the laws of physics! You guys all think that the laws of physics have been broken, and this one is SCIENCE.
*yay*
S: Materials we're used to, I guess materials doing all sorts of weird things. But the scientists, and I was really surprised by this, so much so that they spent a couple of years verifying this to make sure it was really really true before they
B: Wow, two years!
R: How many times do you have to punch someone before they get bigger
S: They noticed that there was no anomaly here or error, this is
E: I thought they need to do a press release and announce it in a journal, and then go and figure it out.
S: So this is researchers at the Argon National Laboratory and they found a class of materials that becomes more porous under pressure. So, Bob you're right in that the pressure forces a reorganization of the molecules which makes the substance more porous, thereby increasing its' size even while it's under greater pressure. So that may seem like just an interesting anomaly but this could be potentially useful. Porous materials like this are used in drug research and drug manufacturing. It also may be useful in carbon sequestration or in material separation and catalysis.
J: What's catalysis?
S: Catalyzing reactions, making them go faster. So, yeah probably not the kind of thing you're gonna be purchasing at the store, but useful in industry and producing things that you'll find useful. Alright, I guess we'll keep working our way backwards. Number 2, researchers find that male guppies can reproduce up to ten months after they have died. Evan, you think this one is the fiction; the rest of you believe in zombie guppies and this one is science.
E: Wow
R: Zombie Guppies!
S: So how do you think this works?
R: Zombie Guppies!
J: I think it's what Rebecca and I were saying all along.
B: Nah, it's the females
S: Yeah, the uh sperm can survive in a female ten months which is a lot longer than anyone thought was possible . Ten months after a guppy, a male guppy, has died theoretically they can reproduce with sperm they have pre-deposited in the female.
J: That was really cheaty
S: It was a little cheaty but I can do that, I agree with that
R: So wait does that mean, shut up I have questions, does that mean that a female can hold on to different male sperms, like collecting different ones and then using them as she pleases? That's like a conscience decision on her part?
E: Holding on to sperm I mean come on
B: I don't think they can necessarily hold on to multiple dads' sperm at the same time
S: The research article I'm looking at does not comment on that one way or another.
E: No comment
B: There's a real benefit to this. Say there's ya know 10,000 different males; with this ability there's more than 10,000. There's 12 or 13,000, whatever. You can advocate traits still being propagated even though there's no specimens with that trait. Like I think they mentioned color, the guppies color well the female guppies are attracted to certain patterns of color and they kind of like rejuvenate that line that you know those genes, even two generations that the dad died out.
S: Yeah, so they're saying that the effected population size is greater than what it appears and so is the genetic variation, the genetic diversity.
B: Yeah, which is a huge benefit.
S: So the female guppies live for about two years, male guppies only live for 3-4 months.
B: oooo nasty
S: You're right Rebecca, male guppies don't live for ten months.
R: Huh, called it. I'm not just terrible at taking care of fish.
S: But the headline, Jay, was "research shows male guppies reproduce even after death." That was the headline.
J: Alright look, I won science or fiction
S: So I feel justified in propagating that little bit of misdirection. Which means that new fossil evidence reveals the presence of kangaroo ancestors 25 million years ago in what is now Europe, is complete and utter bollocks and fiction. Because, when did Australia break off from
J: I thought it was like a couple of hundred million
E: Yeah hundreds of millions
B: No, no not that long
R: I never
S: 110 million years ago. Yeah so, Pangaea broke up into Gondwana and Laurasia. And then Gondwana, which is the southern of those two continents so Australia broke off from there with Antarctica which broke off from Australia; I think that's the order in which it happened. So for about 100 million years or so Australia has been its own continent. Pretty much isolated from everything else. So there's no possible way that an ancestor of kangaroos could be in Europe 25 million years ago, the timing doesn't work out. So I just totally made that up. This was the main split between mammals, marsupials and placentals. The marsupials were isolated to South America and Australia and the placentals everywhere else and then when the land bridge opened up between Panama land-bridge, being South America and North America, that's when those mammal populations mixed while Australia remained isolated. Which is why the only native mammals in Australia are all marsupials. The few placentals were introduced at some point. I remember when we were touring in Australia, you guys remember this, and our tour guide said that fruit bats were the most closely related animals to humans
B: Yeah I'll never forget that
R: Yeah that's right.
S: But what he means was animals that are currently native to Australia.
J: Well that's a pretty key thing there at the end of the sentence
S: That's because it's the only placental. Any placental would be more closely related to humans than all of the marsupials.
J: When you say placentals Steve am I hearing the reference correctly?
S: Yeah yeah
R: To a placenta?
J: Rebecca, I don't wanna make any assumptions on this show
S: Mammals pretty much divided up into marsupials and placentals, yeah. With an occasional duck billed platypus thrown in there.
B: Monotreme
S: Monotreme yeah
R: Monotreme, Jinx!

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:13:12) ==
<blockquote>Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing.</blockquote>
Harlan Ellison

{{Outro404}}

== References ==
<references/>

{{Navigation}}

SGU Episode 414

2013-12-21T07:19:09Z

Lmwood: /* Science or Fiction (58:37) */

{{Editing required
|transcription = y

|links = y
|Today I Learned list = y
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|}}
{{InfoBox
|episodeNum = 414
|episodeDate = 22nd Jun 2013
|episodeIcon = File:chinese-alien-head.jpg
|rebecca = y
|bob = y
|jay = y
|evan = y
|guest1 = DL: {{w|Daniel Loxton}}
|downloadLink = http://media.libsyn.com/media/skepticsguide/skepticast2013-06-22.mp3
|forumLink = http://sguforums.com/index.php?topic=46390.0
|qowText = Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing
|qowAuthor = {{w|Harlan Ellison}}
|}}

== Introduction ==
''You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.''

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, today is Wednesday, June 19th, 2013, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

B: Hey, everybody

S: Rebecca Watson,

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella,

J: Hey, guys.

S: and Evan Bernstein.

E: Salutations, everybody

R: Hello...

S: Salutations and felicitations, Evan.

E: Oh, and felicitations, how could I forget the Squire of Gothos. Shame on me,

S: I don't know (chuckles)

E: shame on me.

R: The hell you guys talking about.

E: Well, Rebecca, aren't you watching the Star Trek series?

R: I guess I haven't gotten up to that point, yet.

E: This is the original series.

R: I'm watching The Next Generation.

S: You know what I saw recently? "Star Trek Continues".

E: Hm?

S: which is a a

J: Wha?

S: fan.. "Star Trek Continues", it's a fan episode, a fan video, where it's as if the ep... the seasons continued as if it wasn't canceled after three seasons. So it's not, it's not like a parody, and it's not an update or a reboot or anything it's like what would a fourth season have actually been like,

B: Oh, cool.

S: and and they do their best to reproduce, the production value, the sets are identical, all the sound effects, the music the acting

R: Hm

S: the whole culture that was definitely embedded in that late '60s you know in terms of everything. And the

?: (inaudible)

S: some of the actors are damn good, the guy who's doing Kirk has his mannerisms down, absolutely down.

B: And it's not a parody of his mannerisms?

S: No, no it's not, it's not a parody, it's an imitation. And it like things like it's like "Yeah, Kirk does do that!" You know, it's like, (laughter) you uh things you wouldn't even think of. Like the

R: That is so Kirk.

S: ways he moves his arms when he walks. Yeah, it's just amazing.

R: Hey, remember that Star Trek episode where, uh, poisonous gas covered most of the planet, and murdered millions of people?

E: Ahhh.

R: Oh, wait, no, that was real life. Oh, my God!

B: (laughs)

E: That's worse.

== This Day in Skepticism (1:58) ==
R: On June 22, 1783, a poisonous cloud caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland, uh, finally reached France. So this is kind of, um, I really could have picked any date, uh, it's very interesting, it's something that I didn't even realize was the thing, uh, it was one of the most deadly if not the most deadly volcanic eruptions in human history, as I said it happened in Iceland but it spread all over the globe, uh, first of all though in Iceland it killed about 50% of the livestock which lead to a famine which killed a quarter of the population of Iceland. Uh, so it was pretty immediate but then it also went on to possibly cause droughts in India and Africa which lead to millions of more deaths, uh, as well as crop failures in Europe and air pollution and this deadly gas... from this deadly gas. So, all to... all told, it killed probably over 6 million people

?: What?

R: globally. Yeah, 6 million.

E: That's a lot (inaudible)

R: It was a pretty big volcanic eruption.

E: 1783, that's (inaudible) quite a bit.

B: Holy crap.

R: And the cloud was sulfur dioxide that

E: Oh, that'll do it

R: and also the hydrogen... the hydrogen fluoride apparently I think killed most of the people in Iceland but the sulfur dioxide is what drifted into Europe to start murdering people there. But yeah and it also caused severe global temperature change, uh, it was the hottest summer on record followed by really violent winter with hail and storms and all that good stuff which probably lead to more deaths.

S: It was the longest period of below zero temperatures in New England.

R: Oh, yeah, the US... the US area just had some severe weather. They don't... I.. I didn't find a whole of talk about deaths that resulted in it but I think people were just dying left and right anyway, at that point, so

S: A bad winter in 1783 was no joke.

R: Exactly, yeah, that's... that's what I'm sayin'. But...

B: So this gas released it wasn't part of like a.. a pyroclastic flow, it was just this, just this gas that came out and went

S: Just a bubble of gas

B: all over the place

R: Yeah, like a volcanic fart, silent but deadly

E: Probably wasn't too silent, either

R: Too soon?

?: Too soon (laughter)

S: Volcanoes are no joke, that superheated gas that kills people it's not just the lava and the ash, I mean, it's usually the gas, even if it's not poisonous gas if it's superheated it's like your lungs explode, you know. Well, let's move on, uhm, have you guys heard...

?: (stage inhalation)

?: Uh?

== News Items ==
=== Osteoarthritis (4:41)===
* Science-based Medicine: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/knee-osteoarthritis-thumbs-down-for-acupuncture-and-glucosamine/ Knee Osteoarthritis: Thumbs Down for Acupuncture and Glucosamine]

S: the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons has released their, uh, 1200 page report evaluating evidence for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis

R: Now the last time you led us into one of these and we made all made light-hearted jokes about how boring the topic was, we got a bunch of angry letters from botanists, so, no, Steve, not gonna fall for it, this sounds fascinating, tell me more. (laughter)

S: Yeah, but like last time I convinced you how cool botany was, now I wanna convince you how cool osteoarthritis is.

E: Here come more letters (laughter)

S: Oh, boy. (laughter)

S: um, so osteoarthritis is, essentially degenerative arthritis of a joint, mainly from wear and tear, but there are other obviously biological factors involved, and so knee osteoarthritis, very common, um, as people get into their 40's and 50's they uh, their knees start to ache, you know, and they just wear out, they just don't really last 80 years unfortunately. There are lots of potential treatments for osteoarthritis including many that are not evidence-based. This report is interesting for a number of reasons, not just for the specific recommendations that are made. Harriet Hall writes about this on Science-based Medicine and I recommend that for those who are interested but I just want to highlight some of the interesting things. First of all, it shows that science-based practitioners actually care about evidence, despite all of the propaganda about "Oh, those doctors only want drugs and surgery" here we have a uh a major you know a professional organization in the United States dedicated to orthopedic surgery reviewing thousands of published studies, putting out a 1200 page comprehensive report looking in-depth into the evidence for many different approaches, and here are the highlights of what they found, where there was strong evidence you know for or against. So glucosamine chondroitin you guys are familiar with this, right, this is a dietary supplement that has been and still is promoted, um, has been for years, for arthritis. What do you think they found?

E: It doesn't work.

S: It doesn't work. So it was one of the few things where there was strong evidence against its effectiveness. Glucosamine and chondroitin doesn't work, there have been large studies. Exercise, strong evidence for, in favor of it. Weight loss, moderate evidence in favor of it. Acupuncture, what do you think they concluded?

R: No evidence.

?: Overwhelming evidence.

S: Strong evidence against its effectiveness. So very nice to see that they took a science-based approach to acupuncture research and didn't fall for the bait-and-switch of "Oh, it works like a placebo" you know, they didn't fall for that business. And also, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories strong evidence they are effective, that's not surprising. And here's one: arthroscopy with lavage and debridement --- strong evidence against.

B: Really?

E: Lavage, huh?

S: So lavage is like just washing it out. So arthroscopy is putting the scope into the knee and looking around, you know, for diagnostic, but if you take anything out then it becomes a therapeutic procedure, right, that's debridement, you know, cutting away any fraying pieces of cartilage and then washing out those pieces, that's the lavage part. So, this is a pretty lucrative, popular procedure for orthopedists to do. And here they are, the official organization of orthopedists, coming out with a statement saying there is strong evidence against the effectiveness of this procedure. This is something that we've written about on Science-based Medicine previously when there...there... when a review came out, I think now about two years ago, showing that arthroscopy was not effective, and there was some push-back from some orthopedists, and we said "Hey, this is the evidence, baby, this is, this is what it shows". So it's nice now to see the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons looking at the evidence and honestly saying "Yep, our beloved procedure, that we would love to have work, doesn't work". So it's hard in the face of this, if you look at the bigger picture, it's hard to justify the typical knee-jerk criticisms that alternative medicine proponents have against mainstream medicine

R: Heh, knee-jerk

S: Yeah, knee-jerk. That it's they only care about drugs and surgery, well here they are saying um, their favorite surgical procedure doesn't work, that they don't care about other things, here they're strongly in favor of exercise, moderately in favor of weight loss, Um, and that they're not, they don't care about actually treating people, well, this is, I think this shows their dedication to the evidence to what actually works regardless of what the modality is, and this is, this is, what we see in mainstream medicine all the time. This is a Herculean effort and it's great document, but this is what we see all the time, you know, the... academic professional uh physicians looking at the evidence objectively and the chips fall where they may, in its direct contradiction to all the anti-mainstream medicine conspiracy theories that you're going to hear from the alternative medicine side, so I thought that was worth pointing out. Also, Harriet pointed out something interesting, things like homeopathy didn't even make the list, it wasn't even worth their time to take a look at.

B: Oh, awesome.

E: Good.

S: Yeah.

R. Good (inaudible).

E: I don't know if we'd be able to say that if this were British Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, right? That probably would have made that list.

S: Homeopathy probably would have,

E: Yes

S: just because homeopathy is more popular across the pond, yeah.

B: Uh, Steve, did they mention why it wasn't on the list?

S: No, just... it didn't even... didn't even make the radar. Just wasn't even, yeah, not... not mentioned one way or the other.

B: OK

== Quickie with Bob (10:27)==
* ESO: [http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1326/ New Kind of Variable Star Discovered]

E: Oh, hey, wait, wait. I would like a Quickie with Bob right now.

B: Really?

E: Yes, right this moment.

B: Thank you, Evan, I'm almost certain you will not regret this.

E: (laughs)

B: This is your Quickie with Bob. Astronomers in Chile, guys, have discovered a new type of variable star it was pretty interesting story uh they did detailed observations of 3700 stars in this specific cluster over 7 years. Um, and showed that they found 36 of these stars had very minute changes in their brightness of about only about a tenth of a percent over an hour or as much as over 20 hours. And uh this is... this is big news in the community because variable stars are in... are incredibly common there's lots of different types of variable stars and it's always interesting to... to add another one to the group actually the list of uh of typ... of variable stars um the types themselves was much bigger than... than I remember them being but just to break it down real quick there's... there's two different main types of stars that are variable, there's the intrinsic and extrinsic and it's kind of obvious what they... what that means the intrinsic stars that are variable are variable because of that's just the way they are something about their internal dynamics makes them makes the light output variable whereas the extrinsic... the extrinsic stars... variable stars are variable only because you know say something might move in front of them or... or there might be some... something in the way that changes the light that reaches the Earth. So within these intrinsic stars there's... there's just a few categories there's the pulsating variables, there's the eruptives, and there's the cataclysmic or explosive variable stars. This new one that they found I think is pretty obvious that it's within the... the pulsating variable star category

S: Is there a throbbing category? (laughter)

E: Is there a grooving category?

B: So like I said these variables are most certainly they'll be within the pulsating variety they haven't actually named this type of variable yet but I'm sure it's gonna be within that... that category They're not sure why they pulsate, either, basically because current models say that they should not be variable so this is the real surprise that these... that these varied so much and but one clue that they found is that many of these variables rotate very very fast

S: Yeah, that seems pretty telling

B: Yeah, more than 50% of their critical velocity, in fact, and the critical velocity

E: Wow

B: is a velocity that if they... if they reached 100% they would actually start throwing off mass so they're spinning very very fast and uh this spinning might... may have an effect on the dynamics of their interiors which then would result in the variability of the light output. So, uh, so keep an eye on it, I'm curious to see what they're gonna call it and uh, and... and you know what more they can determine, um, about these types of stars based on uh, on... on this... these studies that they're... these very detailed studies that they're doing. So, uh, so I got guys this has been your Quickie with Bob, I hope it was good for you, too.

== News items continued ==
=== Patenting DNA (13:07)===
* BBC News: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22895161 US Supreme Court says human DNA cannot be patented]

S: Thanks, Bob. OK, Rebecca, you're gonna tell us about a major Supreme Court case regarding patenting genes.

R: Yes, you are correct, Steve. There is a huge decision that just happened in the Supreme Court on, uh, June 13th, the Supreme Court ruled that, uh, companies, particularly Myriad Genetics, in this case, cannot patent a human gene. So in this specific case, it was this company Myriad Genetics which was one of the patent holders on the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes. Now, astute listeners might recall that we were recently talking about these very genes, in the case of Angelina Jolie,

S: Yeah.

R: who came out and said that she had the mutation in her BRCA gene that said she was much much much more likely to get breast cancer and ovarian cancer and so she had her breast removed. Now, we also mentioned that Angelina Jolie had spoken briefly about the fact that not everyone has access to the genetic testing required to find out if you have the mutation, in order to get the life saving operations you would need. Well, the reason why many people don't have access to this genetic testing is because Myriad Genetics was one of the patent holders and... and they were the only company that was allowed to perform this testing on these genes. So, if you wanted to find if you had the mutation you had to go through Myriad Genetics and that increases the price dramatically so they could charge thousands of dollars to people who wanted the testing. What this ruling means in this specific case it's a huge win for women particularly because this means that you... women can go get genetic testing anywhere to find out if they have this mutation they don't have to go through Myriad in order to find out, so, now you have companies competing against each other, prices go down, etc., etc., and more lives are saved because of it, so that's one result of this and one of the reasons why women's rights groups were a huge part of the uh lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court decision it was a unanimous decision the case was led by uh the ACLU um representing women's rights groups as well as scientists and other interest groups but also scientists win from this case because it means that uh any scientist can now pursue research on the... these genes where prior to this only Myriad and the other patent holders would technically be able to do that. Basically the court ruled that you can't patent a human gene however they did leave it open that you could possibly patent a gene that had been fiddled with.

?: Yeah.

R: So uh if you

?: (inaudible) huge

R: come up with your own gene, like a synthetic gene like cDNA... c... cDNA, that could still be eligible for a patent. Uh, but because Myriad the company did not actually create anything, they just researched the gene they're not allowed to patent it.

S: Yeah. So

R: So

S: products of nature cannot be patented and what this decision was exploring specifically was how much modification is necessary before a product of nature is an innovation. An... yeah, this that needed to be explored for the in... for this specific case of genes. And it seems that everyone pos... with the possible exception of Myriad, is happy about this decision this is a... I've seen nothing but universal praise for this decision.

E: Myriad shouldn't be too sad their stock rose that day

S: Is that right? (laughs)

E: as a result, yeah.

R: They have been fighting this

E: That will fade.

R: for a very long time so this is a huge loss for them, but it's... it is a great gain for humanity, we're

S: Yeah, for humanity.

R: literally talking about lives being saved

E: Yeah, absolutely.

R: and more research being done.

B: Yeah, it does seem...

R: So it is a good thing.

B: it does seem (inaudible) to me lots of benefits but what about the idea, the one negative thing that I've heard, that I've seen in a couple of places was that some people are afraid that companies like Myriad, of course, will scale back investment because they're not gonna be rewarded ah with patents for this so I just wonder how much of a genuine concern that aspect of this is.

R: Consider how much research is done by private companies compared to the huge amount of research that's currently being done through government institutions and universities. Private companies have always focussed on what's going to make the most money and that's why we have uh government funding for scientific endeavors. There's one other thing I wanted to mention, a bit of, uh, myth-busting. This... this thing was going around that... uh, Scalia doesn't believe in genetics, or in molecular biology. So, uh, it was a unanimous decision but Justice Scalia wrote a separate thing... ruling...

S: Separate opinion.

R: opinion, thank you, that's the word.

E: Opinion, yeah.

R: Uh, Scalia wrote a separate opinion uh saying that he, uh, agrees to vote with the majority, but he does not agree with one part of the opinion that has no effect on his final vote. What he said was, um, that he wouldn't sign on to Part 1a and some portions of the rest of the opinion going into fine details of molecular biology because he can't affirm those details on his own knowledge or his own belief. So, Part 1a, deal... it's just a list of basic facts about DNA, about genetics, uh it's all kind of just basic level genetic stuff.

E: So was he basically saying I don't know what this is?

R: Yeah, you know, so some...

E: and therefore I can't really

R: some people were

E: say anything about it.

R: taking uh that he wouldn't affirm those details on his own knowledge or his own belief to mean that he didn't believe in genetics or he didn't know about genetics and so he didn't believe them, something like that. But, I've heard from lawyers who have said that this is a bit of legal-speak in a way, that there's this sort of ongoing argument on whether or not they should in... judges should include basic information that's not necessary to the final ruling, and so that's kind of what he was saying, is that this chunk I'm not a scientist, I'm not going to sign my name on this and say that as a Justice I approve of this because I have no idea I'm not a scientist and it has nothing to do with the case.

S: He's being a legal stickler,

R: Yes.

S: not a science denier.

R: Exactly.

B: Oh, OK.

R: That...

E: Right.

R: that's what I'm hearing from... from lawyers, and

S: That makes sense.

R: it makes sense to me.

S: And that's kind of his shtick, too,

R: Yeah.

S: is to be a legal stickler.

B?: Hmmm, OK.

=== Foot Fungus (20:02)===
* Science News: [http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/350599/description/Foot_fungi_a_thriving_diverse_community Foot fungi a thriving, diverse community]

S: OK, well thanks, Rebecca. Bob, can you explain to me why my toes occasionally itch? (laughter)

R: Ew, bugs, probably.

B: Well, guys, uh, last May... at the end of last May, uh, the, uh, the issue of Nature, they discuss the... the first census... the very first census of skin-dwelling fungi (fung-ee), that... that's

S: Fungi (fung-guy)?

B: Well, there's three ways to pronounce it as far as I can tell

S: Fungi (fun-jee)?

B: Fungi (fung-ee), fungi (fung-eye), fungi (funj-eye). Those are the three that I came across

R: But "fungi" (fung-eye) is the only one that works with that "mushroom walks into a bar" joke.

B: OK.

S: What about... what about "fungi" (fun-jee)?

B: That's actually my preferred pronunciation and I didn't find it. So, whatever, I'll just go with... I'll just go with one of the ones that I found. So this study reveals

E: (chuckles)

B: there's a fungus among us. OK, somebody had to say it, it's out of the way, I said it. So, actually, it...

E: (laughs)

B: it reveals that there's a little variation... there's very little variation in the fungal communities on our bodies except for our feet which calls home to 80 to 100 different types of fungus, they're just like all

?: (inaudible)

B: over the place down there. So, for... just for a quick

?: (inaudible)

B: high-level refresher uh fungi (fung-ee) are the third type of multi-cellular organisms, they're neither plant nor animals, um, one major difference between them and the other two is that their cell walls contain chitin, now that's (inaudible) that's like the exoskeleton of a crabs and lobsters or... or even the beaks of squid uh made of chitin. Uh, fungi play a pivotal role in decomposing organic matter and cycling uh nutrients in the environment and they also appear to be inordinately fond of feet. So here's a quick quote from the study: "A human's skin surfaces are complex ecosystems for microorganisms including fungi, bacteria and viruses which are known collectively as the skin microbiome". So I was as... I was surprised as I said that this initial study was the first of its kind. It seems, I guess, in terms of... yeah, human cohabitation bacteria and viruses get all.. get all the press and all the research dollars, so one reason why the lowly fungus I guess may have been neglected is that it's notoriously difficult to culture, I didn't know that, unlike bacteria which is easy, culturing a fungus from say uh the toenail can take weeks... weeks for it

S: And yet... and yet it's hard to kill when you wanna get rid of it.

B: (chuckle) Right. So... so how did they do it? They looked... they looked at the DNA, of course. They took ten volunteers and they swabbed 14 sites on their bodies including taking toenail clippings apparently. Uh, they then put them in a DNA sequencer which of course is uh one of the key technologies advanced by leaps and bounds uh by the Human Genome Project. Um, they used these molecular tags that stick only to the fungal DNA, so they wouldn't have to worry about all the human DNA and the bacterial DNA and viral DNA, that... that... that was mixed into the samples, so now they have this pure sample of just... of just fung... uh the fungus DNA. They then examined the tiny bits of fungal DNA uh called the phylogenetic markers to tally up all the different types of... of fungal species and bam, they were done, they had... they had a tally of all the different types of species. So, if you look most anywhere on the head or the torso you... you're likely to find one genus and that's called Malassezia. Uh, different areas have different species uh though, like the crease behind your ear or... or on your forehead there's little variation there. Surprisingly, your hands have tons of bacteria but very few fungal communities. So your feet, though, it's... it's completely different ecosystem, um, on your... on your toenails alone there's forty different uh fungi varieties, sixty between your toes, and eighty live on the bottom of... of your heel, which I think would ac... I wouldn't think that would be the most plentiful spot I would think, like, between your toes would have more but apparently there's lots of 'em on the bottom of your heel. So... so why is... how come? Why... why is this so? And it...

E: Gravity.

B: Yeah, gra... (laughs)

E: (chuckles)

B: Well it's... it's not hard to imagine one... one reason, right, your feet are... are often on contact with surfaces that fungi like to hang out on like your socks or locker room floors. I never walk barefoot at... at the gym, uh, never would do it.

E: Uhhhh,

B: So also

E: gosh... (inaudible) so bad.

B: your... your feet... I didn't know that your feet are cooler than other parts of your body, and... and fungi like cooler places, apparently, they hang out. Um, so... so should we all be grossed out? Are you guys like really grossed out... about this stuff?

R: (inaudible) obviously

?: Ahhh...

E: (inaudible) more grossed out about...

R: It takes more than that to... gross out Steve.

B: Yeah, I... I'm not...

S: Oh, yeah...

B: Yeah, I wouldn't think Steve would be, but I'm not... I'm not

S: I've had my head inside of a corpse

B: Cool, um...

R: Hey, thanks for that...

E: A human corpse? Wait, a human corpse?

B: I di...

S: Yeah.

B: Of course.

S: So has everyone who has gone through medical school.

E: You put your head in the corpse?

S: Well, you gotta get into the anatomy, I mean you gotta... you know you're disecting something...

E: I don't...

S: They... so, you get so grossed out in your first year of medical school you're basically done getting grossed out for life.

?: Yeah.

R: Yeah.

B: Totally desensitized.

R: I don't... I don't find what you've said so gross, Bob, but when in... you're talking I was thinking of that... toenail fungus, uh, commercial where...

E: Oh, yeah.

R: where the germ, like, lifts up

E: Little critters.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah!

R: the toenail and then climbs inside and that's like the worst... worst commercial ever made.

B: Oh, my God I remember that something about detaching a toenail yes I... I cringe

R: Yeah.

B: every time I saw that, nothing to do with the

R: It's awful.

B: fungus or anything but it's just the lifting that toenail

R: Yeah, like the fungus didn't help

B: was nasty. Yeah right, yes. I mean it doesn't gross me out, the... thinking that there's... em... potentially s... you know... well over a hundred different types of these guys all over us. I thin... it's good... it's good that we're colonized by these critters because they're... they're likely to prevent other nasty... guys from taking hold on our skin so it's good that they're there. Likewise, this.. this research can actually help improve our treatment for skin disease and maybe even help with some types of cancers, some people were saying. So... so I say embrace the... the fungi living on your skin, you really don't have much of a choice until we replace them all with nanobots.

=== Chinese Fake Alien (25:46)===
* The Telegraph: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10115832/Chinese-farmer-jailed-for-making-a-rubber-alien.html Chinese farmer jailed for making a rubber alien]

S: All right, thanks, Bob. Evan, you're gonna tell us about a fake Chinese alien.<ref>[http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20130612000078&cid=1103 WantChinaTimes]</ref> (laughter)

?: Oh, God.

E: Now that could mean several different things, I'll... I'll do my best to clarify. Now, there are times when news outlets totally, totally botch their headlines... right, I mean really botch

B: No.

E: We've talked about some real doozies on the show. But rarely do we give them credit when they actually get it right. Let's give The Telegraph its due, because they got this headline spot-on. They wrote: "Chinese farmer jailed for making rubber alien". That kind-a says it all.

?: OK.

E: (chuckles) So it's being reported out of the Shandong province, that, uh, local police recently arrested someone named Mr. Li, a farmer slash alien enthusiast by day and an alien enthusiast farmer... slash farmer by night. And here are his versions of the event, this is Mr. Li.

S: "Mr. Li" 's a pseudonym, probably, by the way.

E: He said: <blockquote>"I was setting an electrical trap for rabbits by the Yellow River, when I saw a bright light. Above my bike, a UFO was floating. One by one, five aliens came down, but one of them stumbled onto one of my rabbit traps and was electricuted. The others went back into their ship and flew away."</blockquote>So that's his story.

S: Quite a tale he's got there. So this alien from who knows how far away from another solar system in super advanced technology and then dies in a rabbit trap.

E: Exa...

S: And his friends leave him behind.

E: And they leave him behind.

R: Was he rabbit shit? (laughter)

E: No.

R: Maybe he was... maybe he was a rabbit, like from another dimension.

E: Well, then rabbits look an awful lot like little grays with Chinese accentuations around the eyes

B?: Yes.

E: and head and stuff. But

B: Plus... plus only mice... only mice are from other dimensions.

E: But how did he go about backing up his claim. Well he does what any true believer does and he post pictures of the ET on the Internet. And in three days these pictures happen to go viral, so after five days of having posted the pictures the local police show up at his door and he's taken in for questioning. Now during the questioning Mr. Li admitted, willingly or otherwise, that the whole thing was a hoax.

S: Shock, shocked.

E: He made an alien, he constructed it himself out of this gluey rubber sort of substance uh tied together with ropes and uh other things and you know... a few... he... he drew his inspiration from the Simon Peg film Paul I don't know if you guys have seen that

?: Hall?

R: Yeah, the one where they go to Comicon.

S: Yes.

E: Right... right.

S: Yes, I saw it.

E: And the alien does a little bit sort of kind of look like that I suppose.

S: But you're right, Evan, the... the uh alien head looks Chinese.

E: It... it does (chuckles).

S: It does... so I mean it's his cultural bias leaking through in his sculpture and he's not aware of it but to these Western you know American eyes it has this... it looks like uh something... that it... like an piece of art that a Chinese person would create.

E: Right.

S: You know, it's not just the eyes it's the mouth it's everything you know it's just there's a subtle sort of Oriental appearance to it. Uh, which is always, I think, a... a very telling sign to look for when people are imagining or faking alien phenomena and their cultural biases come through, and of course we're... you're much more attuned to them when it's from a di... from another culture.

E: But why did he... why did he do it why did you think he did it well he says it with the intent of helping more people believe in aliens. Which is

S: Yeah.

R: Weird.

E: an interesting way to go about doing that... uh, I suppose... um, he claims that and these are his words again:<blockquote>It's still disputed whether or not UFOs and aliens exist but we believe</blockquote>not sure what he means by we<blockquote>they do and we want to expand our group</blockquote>I don't know what group he's part of... uh<blockquote>and make more people believe that aliens do exist.</blockquote> So that's

R: Was this him

E: the approach.

R: saying this or was this

E: That was him.

R: the government saying that he said that.

E: Uh, that is the report from The Telegraph say... uh... which is quoting him as saying that.

R: Hm.

S: Who knows.

E: Yeah you who... who really knows. It's for the conspiry theori... conspiracy theorists,

S: (chuckle)

E: I guess to... to... to sort of figure it

R: Well, you know I mean you don't have to stretch far to come up with a conspiracy involving the Chinese government making a guy say something (chuckle) I mean

E: (chuckle)

R: making a Chinese prisoner say something that they want him to say. Um...

E: That's true.

B: Yeah, my mind all bets are off

R: Yeah, especially if they wanna

B: soo as he... soo as he ga... soo as the government got a hold of him they can well, nothing he says now... really (chuckle) you know whatever

R: Even if it was just a case of they... they wanted to trump up the charge a bit so they didn't look like they were just hassling some farmer, now they've got like a cult that they can

?: Yeah

R: pin on him, you know,

?: Yeah, yeah

E: But

R: 'cuz they're... they hate... they hate the cults.

E: Mr. Li spent five days incarcerated, the crime was fabricating lies and disrupting normal social order.

B: Oh, boy, wow.

E: Yeah, that... that doesn't sound too Orwellian or anything (inaudible)

S: Yeah, disrupting the social order that yeah really Orwellian, I agree

?: scary

E: Now, guys, to wrap this up, I'll say that the rubber alien was examined by scientists and deemed to be a hoax, the dead giveaway is when they broke open the alien and pulled out a slip of paper with a fortune, that's right

S: (laughs)

B: Oh!

E: And it... and the fort... it read "Help I'm being held prisoner in a Chinese bakery

R: Hm, hm.

E: and your lucky numbers are 4, 14, 22, 31, and 49". So

?: Jesus

E: that sort of sealed the deal.

B: Oh, boy.

R: That joke fails, though, on the fact that fortune cookies aren't Chinese.

S: Yeah, that's true.

E: No, that enhances the joke and the... gaw.... (inaudible, possibly expletive) (laughter)

== Who's That Noisy? (31:24)==
S: All right, well Evan, you also have to tell us about Who's That Noisy.

E: I will do that, now, um... what we'll do is next week we're gonna reveal last week's winner.

S: We're recording a little ahead of schedule 'cause of... we're on our TAM recording schedule, so, the... we're gonna have to get caught up on the Who's That Noisy-s t... towards the end

E: Right

R: We might all be dead right now.

S: (chuckles) That's true.

E: Maybe, I mean who knows, another volcano you know might spew

R: Hm

E: sulfur dioxide or whatever the hell's

R: could happen

E: gonna come out of it, however, we do have a puzzle for this week, so that will be this week's Who's That Noisy, is a puzzle and, here we go. So, there is this machine, OK? Now this machine does one thing. It shuffles playing cards. However, this machine always rearranges cards in the same way relative to the original order of the cards. OK, we're talking about a deck of playing cards here. Now all of the hearts arranged in order from ace to king were put into the machine. The cards were shuffled, and then they were put into the machine again. After the second... after the second shuffling, the cards were in the following order: 10, 9, queen, 8, king, 3, 4, ace, 5, jack, 6, 2, 7. So you need to tell us, now, what order were the cards in after the first shuffle.

S: Very tricksy.

R: Eh-hm.

E: It is tricksy, yeah.

B: (inaudible)

E: I don't know if, uh... I don't if Bilbo would have gotten that in the cave while he was dueling it out...

B: Ahhh.

E: (inaudbile) wits with Gollum

S: Not without a pen and paper, I don't think

E: (laughs) that's for sure (laughs). So... think about that

S: Or quill and parchment

E: Qua... yes, of course, Middle Earth and all... wtn@theskepticsguide.org or sguforums.com is the forum's website... so... think about it, give us your best answer, and good luck to everyone.

== Questions and Emails ==
=== Can We Know Everything? (33:23)===

S: All right, thanks, Evan. We do have one email for this week. This one comes from Mark Dennehy from Melbourne, and Mark writes:
<blockquote>I have been listening to the show for 4 years and although I have always been a sceptic</blockquote>with a C<blockquote>I have learnt a great deal from your show. I would like to hear the rogues view on whether science has the potential to explain the physical world in such a way that we understand everything. Is there a limit to what we can comprehend? For example a dog has no concept of quantum gravity and wouldn’t ask the question of himself "Is space-time fundamentally continuous or discrete?" We have gone from asking ourselves how to grow food to "why is there far more matter than antimatter in the observable universe?" Our brain appears finite in capacity so I would assume that would limit our ability to understand the world around us. Reaching a limit at some stage seems inevitable. Or will our brains develop as we need to solve increasingly more difficult questions, after all our brains appear</blockquote>to need... our brains appear<blockquote>not to need to store every bit of information we discover perhaps more the ability to solve a problem, and the capacity to grasp the variables at that time. I could be wrong though. Your opinions would be greatly appreciated and interesting. (Mark Dennehy, Melbourne)</blockquote>Thank you, Mark. So, what do you guys think?

R: I already learned everything there is to know

?: (inaudible)

R: when I was a teenager, so...

S: Yeah.

E: So you're done.

B: (inaudible)

R: Q.E.D.

E: You maxxed out.

R: Uh, hm.

B: I think we're definitely not smart enough to understand everything, I mean there's always gonna be... som... I think there's always gonna be some ways to explain aspects of nature that... that... that could be beyond us. It's amazing that we've... that we've come this far but I think as we progress I think there's definitely areas that we'll hit that will be just... just it'll be similar to a dog trying to think about quantum gravity but the thing is that, uh, it's not just our brains anymore, I mean we'll you know we'll have you know aids, we'll have in... we'll have supercomputers and eventually even artificial intelligence that wi... that will help us and work with us and probably eventually completely outclass us in... in understanding this stuff. So, um, and then... they'll... they'll also be, I believe, uh, br... you know, uh, we'll not evolve our brains but we'll en... we'll artificially enhance our brains. There's lots of ways to g... (inaudible) to do that

S: We'll probably do both.

B: So, yeah, so... so I think there's... th... th... there'll probably be very little that, um, that we won't eventually figure out... who knows how long that'll take... but I think, uh, we will hav... we... we have and we will have the ability to understand, uh, as much as can be understood.

S: Well, yeah, I think there's two ways to look at this question. One is, wha you were discussing, Bob, which is the finite limitations of the human brain. I agree that there are probably limitations to our ability to understand the universe, but, we will augment, evolve, supplement, our brains as technology progresses. That ther... there's no, I guess, theoretical limit to that, so, um, through those tools I think we... we, you know, that... that.. that limitation wi... is something that we can surpass. The other way to think about that, though, about just, um, cognitive limitations... I'm not sure, I've never liked the analogy to the dog. Maybe

B: Why?

S: it's apt but, uh, I'm not sure because it seems like there is not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference, between a dog and a human brain... that maybe once you have the ability to think about things at a certain level then you're there and then... then, you know, you... that gives you qualitative abilities, you know, of investigation, of asking questions, of exploration. Right, so it's not just that... you... we're a certain amount farth.. more intelligent than a dog therefore we can understand a certain amount more about the universe

B: Uh, huh.

S: It's that, we can engage in a kind of introspection and exploration and questioning that a dog can't even engage in at all.

R: Yeah, but, I mean there are apes who can engage in a certain level of that much more than a dog but less than humans, so, (inaudible) surely we can imagine a level up from us, right, where there's something we're missing. Like there's... there're very few things that humans are capable of, that apes or other animals can't do in some capacity.

S: I... (inaudible) I agree, that is possible, I'm not convinced that has to be the case, though, that's my point. It's possible that... uh... our current abilities are limited and we won't be able to figure out the universe but it's also possible that we have the tools necessary and now it's just a matter of applying them.

B: So... so we've passed some sort of cognitive threshold, where we

S: Yeah.

B: could eventually figure out everything, but... so what you're saying is that we... we could pretty much figure out most anything but what I'm taking away from that, though, is that it might... it might be so fiendishly difficult that it would take... that it could take uh... an extremely long time for us to find... to ev... to finally wrap our heads aroung something.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: Right, so... so, so far we're talking about the one approach to this problem which is the... the human capacity. And, again, there's a couple of ways to look at that which we explored. The other way to look at this question is "Is it even theoretically possible to understand everything about the universe". There may be limitations to the ability of any intelligent creature to gain certain bits of knowledge, and I think, first of all, I think that that... that is absolutely true, there are things that we will never know, because the information is lost. It's just lost to the universe... but depends on what ya mean by understanding everything about the universe.

E: Right, that's what I thought too, yeah.

S: Yeah, so like, what, like what color

E: It's nebulous.

S: was a certain dinosaur, you know, again, that... that information

E: Right.

S: may be lost to the universe. But let's put that aside so that, we'll... we'll say OK obviously we can't know about information that's lost to the universe. You... you could frame questions about the universe that cannot be explored by science.

B: Yeah, and I would add to that, Steve, uh, you... chaotic systems, you know, sensitive dependency

S: Yeah.

B: on initial conditions. Those things are inherently unpredictable no matter how smart and no matter what technology you have, so, I would add that, but that's kind of a... maybe a trivial addition, an obvious addition.

S: Right. And there may be other questions like "What happened before the Big Bang" that we just... we will... may never figure out a way to... to fi... to answer that question.

R: But, of course, you (inaudible) even with that we've already started reaching back before the Big Bang, and making some observations

E: Inferences,

R: so

E: yeah.

S: Yeah.

R: yeah...

S: Yeah, I agree, (inaudible) we've started to make some inferences but there... but there may be limits.

R: Yeah,

S: (inaudible)

R: I agree with that. I... I feel though, that in general tha.. I... I... I think there's also a difference between... (inaudible) everything there is to know about the things we know about, and then  is there... if there's a... if there's a gap in our understanding that we can identify will we have the tools to fill that gap, but also, are there... are we constantly surrounded by gaps we're not even ever going to realize just because of the limits of our own

B: Yeah.

R: senses and things. Um, I

S: Right.

R: think that's a possibility as well.

S: Yeah, it's (inaudible) it's sort of the, uh, things that we don't know we don't know.

R: Exactly.

?: Uh, huh.

S: Yeah. All right, guys, uh, well, let's go on to our interview.

== Interview with Daniel Loxton (40:25) ==
About his new book: ''Abominable Science''

== Science or Fiction (58:37) ==
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130612173326.htm Item #1:] New fossil evidence reveals the presence of kangaroo ancestors 25 million years ago in what is now Europe. [http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/15806 Item #2:] Researchers find that male guppies can reproduce up to 10 months after they have died. [http://www.anl.gov/articles/discovery-new-material-state-counterintuitive-laws-physics Item #3:] Scientists have discovered a material that gets larger under pressure, in apparent defiance of the laws of physics.
S: Bob, why don't you go first

B: So material that gets larger under pressure. So instead of getting of getting more dense, closer together, it's doing the opposite. Wow, that's messed up. Rearranges for the bonds, I don't know. Um that's pretty bizzare, I'm trying to figure out how that would work. Let me go to two. Male guppies can reproduce up to ten months after they have died. So are we talking about zombie guppies with good game, is that it? Wow, so that's kind of bizarre. So if their...so I mean yeah, if their, perhaps their...their sperm can last a really long time and um be used after the death of the rest of the body. The kangaroo ance says 25 million years in what is now Europe. There's somehthing about that. Austrailia was isolated for millions of years. I don't think you need to... that one is rubbing me the wrong way; even more than those other ones. Uh, I'm gonna say the kangaroos are fiction!

S: Ok, Rebecca

R:That's where I was leaning to; because, I mean if that's true, that just completely rewrites the history of not just kangaroos but all marsupials. Right? I feel like that would be big big news. The presence of kangaroo ancestors... That could mean anything really though; something really far back. But, I mean, kangaroos and other marsupials, evolved after Austrailia broke off right? I think? So, that seams really suspect to me. Um, male guppies reproduced after they died. It's not, it doesn't surprise me they could reproduce after they die; I can picture their sperm being somehow longlived.

== Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:13:12) ==
<blockquote>Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it's nothing.</blockquote>
Harlan Ellison

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== References ==
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