SGU Episode 991

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SGU Episode 991
July 6th 2024
Advanced robotic prosthetic leg equipped with sensors for enhanced mobility and adaptability.
SGU 990                      SGU 992
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"Rarely do the advocates of cleanses explain what is meant by toxins. It is one of those nebulous pseudoscientific terms rolled out by people deliberately avoiding the specificity required for a science-based analysis. It’s the modern-day equivalent of “evil spirits,” vague enough to mean just about anything while retaining the ring of scientific legitimacy.”
― Timothy Caulfield, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

S:Born on the 4th of July. Always a big event in a Novella household.

E:Oh, yes.

B:Yes.

C:What are you guys doing?

B:Having about 30 people over, and we're going to have lots of food. Going to have some amazing cake. She's making me, right now, a peanut butter ice cream cake. It's going to be epic. And to prevent other people from eating it as much as they normally would, I bought a cake, like a classic birthday sheet cake, you know, a sheet cake. So I'm hoping a lot of people gravitate towards that and not so much towards the peanut butter one. They can eat whatever they want, but I'm just playing the odds.

C:What's the fireworks itch like in Connecticut where you all live?

B:Well, basically, a lot of towns, all the major towns will have a display. So you may, when I used to live in Danbury, and you could see from my deck, like six or seven different towns in the distance, you could see literally like four or five different, decent sized displays going up. These are like town size, nothing like, you know, Disney sized or New York sized. But so yeah, so the towns do it and then there's lots of people. I'll hear fireworks at my house. Yeah, lots of people.

C:How are the illegal fireworks?

S:Yes, technically not legal, but it's not really policed. They don't do much about it yet.

C:L.A. is known for our loot. I mean, it's already started, right? It must be nuts.

S:Oh, and it started here, too.

C:Yeah. And every year, I'll sometimes scan around the horizon with my binoculars for trees. That are on fire. It's so bad. It's like, what are you doing?

S:Bob, we're bringing a tabbouleh salad. That's been our contribution for the last 20 years or so. So that's a parsley-based salad. But here's the thing. I love the tabbouleh salad that we make. But it's very labor-intensive because you have to pull all the stems off of the parsley.

B:But there's a quick way to do it. There isn't. There really isn't.

S:No, there really isn't. It depends on what your tolerance is for stems. If you want to just pull all the big stems off and you're okay with the little stems, yeah, that's the cheaty way to do it. But if you want even the little stems gone, you have to do more than that. You have to almost pull them all off individually. You could sometimes do them like a little clusters, you know, but like what restaurants do is they just chop it all up, you know, but then you get the little bits of stem and stuff and you don't want to pull them out.

J:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein.

B:It just says Bob in this really cool font, and on the bottom it says my birth year, and then nothing. I was going to do goofy stuff, but I'm like, I'm just going to do... It's not finished yet, obviously. No way. And it looks really good. It looks really old. It looks like a tombstone that's been sitting out in a field for like 300 years. It looks awesome.

S:Proud of you.

E:So am I. Bob, you've got hundreds of years to go, what with... Technology is going to save the day and reverse aging. All that stuff is coming right around the corner.

B:That would be nice. I think we're going to just miss that technology, unfortunately.

E:Right? Oh my gosh. It's sad to think about the things we're just going to miss.

S:Well, it depends on how you define just. But yeah.

C:There's also probably a lot of things you're going to miss that you should be happy about.

E:Well, that's true too.

B:We'll be right back. Oh my God.

J:I mean, we had a horrible one seven years ago. It was bad. I remember that.

C:Isn't there a horrible hurricane that's like, maybe not the earliest, but that's like unseasonably early, battering Jamaica right now?

E:Right now, yeah. Is that the one that will eventually hit Texas, they were forecasting?

C:Yeah, I think it's a category five already.

B:I think that was the earliest category five ever. Oh, okay, yeah, I knew it was early.

E:It's very early.

C:But I didn't know it was the earliest.

B:I read it was the earliest cat five ever. Yay, warming ocean. That's our life. Can you can you imagine? I can't even imagine when it's gonna be like 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now. Steve, did you see that news item where they're saying that their their temperature predictions now are just like, going to be ridiculously off. And now they're looking at five, six degrees. It was by 2100 or something. It was I couldn't even finish the article.

S:This is like, oh, my God.

E:How will the food supply not collapse?

S:Six degrees Celsius is extreme, right? That's when you start to hit multiple tipping points where the Earth's climate has changed for thousands of years.

E:Right, in which crops can't sufficiently grow to feed people.

S:They'll move. They'll shift, yeah. But it will have a massive impact on our ability to grow food.

E:Oh my gosh, the disruption will be... We'll see.

B:The big problem is going to be climate refugees. People will have to... I've got to leave my country now because it's actually too hot to live.

E:Get away from the center.

C:It's not just hot, it's because it's underwater. It's because of all these different things. And Bob, the hurricane, I just looked it up, it's broken like multiple records. Eastern most to form in the tropical Atlantic in June. Earliest category four hurricane on record in the basin, strongest June hurricane as measured by wind speed, and earliest category five hurricane on record.

E:I can't remember a June hurricane. I mean, not in my lifetime.

S:Yep, and 2024 is on track to be either the warmest or second warmest year on record. Oh, man. So it's still happening.

E:It's still happening for second warmest.

S:And, you know, it's not going to stop.

C:Yeah, this is not something that's going to happen in the future. It's going to get worse in the future, but it is happening.

B:But tomorrow, the weather will be nice for Bob's birthday.

E:That's right.

B:Let's get back to Bob. Are you sure I saw little sprinkles later in the day? No, no, no.

E:Those are for the ice cream later, Bob.

Quickie with Bob: Simulating Black Holes (07:23)

• Cosmic simulation reveals how black holes grow and evolve 

B:Three orders of magnitude in one simulation. That's pretty awesome. Their biggest discovery so far is that black holes are more dominated by magnetic fields than they ever thought. So when they ran the simulation, they zoomed in really tight into a supermassive black hole. And this is where theoretical astrophysicist Phil Hopkins said, in our simulation we see the accretion disk form around the black hole. We would have been very excited if we had seen just that accretion disk, but what was surprising was that the simulated disk doesn't look like what we thought for decades it should look like. Now, I've described black hole accretion disk many times, and I always basically say, oh, this is a flat disk, right, that goes around the black hole. It turns out it's not as flat as we thought. These researchers describe it as fluffy like angel cake, angel cake accretion disk around a black hole. So what the simulation showed was that the amazing heat pressure that exists in an accretion disk is not the dominating force that we thought, the pressure from the magnetic fields are actually 10,000 times greater than the heat from the gas in the disk. It's the boss. Magnetic field is the boss. Hopkins said again, so the disks are almost completely controlled by the magnetic fields. The magnetic field serves many functions, one of which is to prop up the disks and make the material puffy. So this can have a dramatic change in the predictions that they make about accretion disks, like how massive are they, how dense they are, how fast the hot gas moves from the disk into the black hole, and even their very geometry. So the next time you look at a black hole accretion disk, don't think pancake, think fluffy angel cake. This has been your Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

E:Now I'm hungry.

B:I wonder how fluffy they are though. I mean, how, I mean, how far above and below the, that ecliptic. It's a bit nebulous. If you would.

E:Thanks.

B:But, uh, it's interesting. Imagine you zooming like, holy crap, that does not look like we've thought it looked like for like forever. Right? It's always pictured as a flat disc orbiting the black hole.

News Item #1 - DNA Nano-Killbot (09:57)

• DNA Nanorobot Kill Switch for Cancer - NeuroLogica Blog 

S:But we've taken a big step here. Here's the actual paper, a DNA robotic switch with regulated autonomous display of cytotoxic ligand nanopatterns. All right, so what does all that mean? So first, let's talk about DNA origami. I know we've talked about it on the show before, making robots or nanomachines or whatever, just little nano shapes out of DNA is a technology that's been in the work for a couple decades at least. And the idea is that, you know, DNA is a complicated molecule that you could, you know, because it has the four different base pairs, you can actually structure it, right? You could design the sequence so that it will take on a certain three-dimensional shape, right? DNA origami refers to not only that, but the ability to change shapes, right? So now you have a DNA nanoscale, quote unquote, robot that can alter its shape. That's a DNA origami. Get it? Yes. All right, so what the researchers were trying to do is come up with a DNA nanobot that would kill cancer cells. There's another little background concept here. When we tried to kill cancer cells, one of the big approaches, conceptually speaking, is You ask, well, what's different about the cancer cells than healthy cells? And can we use that, whatever it is, to target the cancer cells, right? Chemotherapy is premised on the notion that cancer cells have a higher reproductive rate, a higher dividing rate than normal healthy cells. And so if you use drugs that target rapidly reproducing or rapidly dividing cells, it will disproportionately affect cancer cells over healthy cells.

C:Well, early chemo does that. Not all chemo does that. But that's, yeah, that's how chemo started.

S:That's one basic concept that, you know, behind a lot of, especially the classic, yeah, chemo therapies. But then there's other ones that's like, well, they also need more blood supply, so we'll target things that grow more blood vessels. And now we're looking at more molecular targets. Yeah, well, they have this genetic difference or this whatever. Whatever we can identify that is different about cancer cells, you can target it, right? This research targets not something about the cancer cells themselves, but the environment of solid cancer tumors. And what that is is that the pH is lower. They tend to be more acidic. So it's like, OK, so can we design a DNA origami that will be in one shape at a normal pH, a normal body pH, that's not dangerous, and then another shape at the acidic pH of a solid cancer tumor that will be deadly? So they use what they call death receptors, DRs, death receptors.

E:Don't let the name scare you.

S:And so this is a ligand of about six amino acids. These exist on—these are ubiquitous. They exist on all healthy cells, right? But when they're sufficiently clustered together, they trigger apoptosis. Apoptosis is programmed cell death.

E:Death.

S:A death switch, a kill switch, right? I.e. death receptor. So what they did was they created a hexagon of clustered death receptors in the middle of this DNA and at normal pH it's folded up and it covers it and then at acidic pH of a tumor it opens up, that's the DNA origami, revealing the cluster of death receptors and then triggering apoptosis.

B:So then that would interface with the cell wall and trigger apoptosis?

C:Yeah, how does the cell itself then undergo apoptosis?

S:It binds to the death receptors on the cells, right?

C:Yeah, but the problem that I see with this, I mean, I see it being helpful, is that one of the eight hallmarks of cancer is that they resist apoptosis. Even if you try to induce apoptosis, they're probably going to develop a resistance to that pretty quickly.

S:But that's why they had to develop a like really strong signal, right? It's not just one death receptor, it's a cluster of death receptors.

E:Ooh, an array.

S:You know, resistance is another issue, right? That's... Well, resistance is futile.

C:Sadly, and cancer resistance is really good.

S:Cancer has a few exceptions.

C:It's an interesting, the thing that always worries me about all these, it doesn't worry me, it's huge and it's super important about all these new approaches to utilizing things that cells know how to do to die is that cancer cells are by definition evolving a way not to do that anymore.

S:All right, so they tested it, right? Good in theory, but of course, does it work? So they had a mouse model of induced human breast cancer, right? They basically gave mice human breast cancer. And then they had control mice and mice that they treated with these DNA killbots. And the tumor growth was reduced in the treated group by 70%. Whoa.

E:OK, that's not insignificant.

S:Yeah, it's pretty good. Not 100%, but it's by 70%. And that's out of the gate. So they're hoping they can get that figure higher. So here's the next step is that they want to include on the outside of the DNA receptors that are specific for the individual tumor type, which is another thing that is happening in the cancer world is like you were figuring out how to To find out this cancer, your cancer has this receptor, this marker, this DNA sequence, whatever. We're going to target that specifically. So that will increase the concentration of these killbots in the cancer and decrease the concentration outside of it.

C:Yeah, did they determine what areas these killbots, because like, you know, obviously, as you said, early chemos target rapidly dividing cells. So that's why you see hair loss. That's why you see, you know, problems with your fingertips, neuropathy, all that kind of stuff. What areas have that high pH?

S:The low pH.

C:Or sorry, that low pH, like what off target sites

S:Thanks for watching! Thank you for watching. So, it's an interesting idea. It's a novel approach. I like utilizing multiple different high-tech thingies in order to kill cancer cells in this novel way. I always like you read about these new cancer treatments, and it looks like it should just eviscerate the cancer, but it's always like 50% reduction, 60% reduction, whatever. It's always a partial treatment, partly for the reasons you say, Cara, that cancer's good at evading it. But the thing is, you add a bunch of them together, and then you beat the cancer back far enough that the immune system could do the rest, right?

C:Maybe. That's the thing that's so scary about cancer is, I'm not saying 70% is no percent. It's not like an eclipse, right? Because every intervention— It's all about survival, right? Yeah, it gives you more time. But ultimately, if there's any cancer left, it's going to divide and come back. That's just how cancer works.

S:Right, but that's why you want to kick it when it's down, right? So first of all, we're going to remove the bulk of it. Then we're going to use radiation therapy and chemotherapy. And now we're also going to hit it with this kill switch. Maybe that will get rid of whatever mop up whatever's left. That's the idea. You keep hitting it over and over again with multiple different things. And then even if it's either you cure it or you put it, you knock it back so far that it's going to be 10 years before it comes back or whatever. So you're just trying to extend life as much as possible.

C:The hope is that you can always remove it completely. It's always interesting to me when I have a new patient who has a new diagnosis and there's like, why can't they just give me this drug? Why do they have to do surgery? It's like, oh, you're a candidate for surgery? This is a good thing. It is always a good thing if they can cut the cancer out of your body. It's actually one of the only really, really curative things.

S:Yeah, although, blood-borne cancers are very curable these days. Yeah, that's true too. And there's no solid tumor, but that's just for different reasons. Yeah. But yeah, we have to think of each of these cancer treatments as a partial treatment, as incremental. Right, in an arsenal. Every year, cancer survival improves by about 1%, and it's because of this kind of stuff. Nothing is a cure for cancer. It's a home run. We just keep making these steady incremental advances, one more thing to knock cancer back on its heels. It's not in every type of cancer for everyone. This one is more about solid tumors. Other ones are better at blood. You know, born cancers or whatever. Some are better at metastatic cancers or whatever, or preventing metastasis or preventing recurrence. Yeah, it's just one more tool. And I think, you know, it's been very encouraging. The immunotherapies, I think, are the real, you know, the recent immunotherapies against cancer. They've been amazing. Amazing.

C:Some of them have fully reversed. It is really interesting to see them do things that we didn't know was possible.

S:Right. Again, not an abject cure, but it's like a solid, solid progression in treating cancer. So, yeah. But of course, this news item is more than just about treating cancer. It's also just exciting to see how good we're getting with the DNA origami robot. What else can you do with it? Yeah, because there's a lot of potential applications for that, not just in medicine, but also in manufacturing as well.

B:And assassinations, too.

C:Find that with some sort of nano or tiny robot, maybe not nano but micro, maybe nano, that targets the drug. Now we're really cooking with fire.

S:Yeah, it could also be opening up and releasing targeted chemotherapy or whatever. Yeah, there's lots of things you can use this for. Bob, this is actual nanotechnology, you know, this kind of stuff. It's the real thing, Bob.

B:Absolutely. Yeah, Bob.

E:You should be more excited than you are right now.

B:I mentioned it on a recent podcast is that nanotech is really just taking pre-existing bio-nanotech and tweaking it, you know, from bacteria to DNA to our own cells, taking that and tweaking it and bending it to our will. That's where nanotechnology is really going to flourish for a while.

S:I also wonder if these DNA origami robots, especially if they're targeted with some kind of specific surface receptor, could be a good vector for CRISPR or some other genetic modification across those streams. A lot of interesting stuff happening.

News Item #2 - Bionic Leg (21:53)

• Bionic leg restores natural walking speeds and steps: ‘I didn’t feel like my leg had been amputated’ 

J:A couple of interesting things. First, guys, how many Americans do you think are suffering from limb loss right now?

E:Oh, gosh.

C:A lot.

J:Almost 2 million.

U:1%.

E:Wow.

J:Almost 2 million. Yeah, it's a significant number of people. It significantly changes the person's life in lots of different ways. Of course, the limb that they lost is a factor. You also what happened to them to lose the limb because it's not just losing the limb. They could have been injured in other ways. It's a big deal. It's a very emotional thing to go through and it's a very hard thing to deal with on the other end of that. Unfortunately, through these statistics that I was reading, they were saying that this number is expected to double by 2050. Wow. There was a recent study at MIT that involved a new neuroprosthesis controlled entirely by the nervous system. The new bionic leg that they developed, when paired with the newly developed amputation technique, which is called agonist-antagonist myoneural interface, or AMI, they reported that this preserves muscle and brain signaling, pre-existing muscle and brain signaling. Which provides the wearer a more natural movement sensation. And this is very important. So what they did was they took 14 existing amputees. These are not people who, you know, they weren't getting their leg amputated for this. It was people that had already had the amputation surgery. They took seven of them and they said, OK, these are going to be the control. We're going to let them use the new bionic limb, but we're not going to give them the specialized new surgery technique that they came up with. And of course, the other seven got the new surgery technique. That's the AMI. So what they ended up doing with this new surgery technique is they changed the anatomy of the amputation site. And this preserved the communication between these two muscles. What were those two muscles called, Steve?

S:The tibialis anterior and the gastrocnemius.

J:It's so interesting.

C:We always pronounce that gastronemius. We didn't pronounce the cuh. Do you think that's a regional difference?

J:It might be.

C:Interesting.

S:And we always say gastroc for short.

J:So those two muscles, guys, they are the agonist and the antagonist muscles. That's what the name of the procedure is called because those two muscles actually communicate with each other. They designed a new cup that the leg goes into that has pressure sensors in it. So the person that's using it, the leg muscles are actually feeling the movement of the limb with more clarity, right? And that sends information back to the brain. So just the operation site and the cup are where all the magic is happening. So typically, with more recent artificial limbs, they would be using artificial intelligence to create these pre-programmed movements that simulate the movement or mimic the movement of a human leg movement, say for example. But that isn't really coming from the person that's operating the limb. It's coming from like a program and they have to kind of ride on top of that. Which is odd. So what they realized was they have to let the person control the limb and their goal was to try to get them to make the limb feel more normal. To feel like it's a part of their body. So they're in control. They're not like being controlled by software. They are actually in control of the limb. So here's how it works. So the neuroprosthesis uses sensors that are placed between the amputation site and the bionic leg, right? That's in the cup, like I said, and these transmit electrical signals from the brain. Now, this setup allows the prosthetic to sense its position and its movement, like, you know, how fast is it moving, what position it's in oriented in 3D space, and this sends information back to the patient. This perception of your limb movement is called proprioception, and it's very important To have a functioning proprioception in order for you to know where your body is at all time. You move your fingers independently from each other and you understand exactly where your hands and fingers are in 3D space because you could feel it and that information is coming back from the limb or the finger or whatever going back to your brain. This is what they did. They were able to send information back to the brain that previously was Much less, right? So now, they were able to get it up to 18% of what a natural proprioception would be like.

S:I think it was just 18% more than the control group.

J:Bionic limb could be controlled using just 18% of natural proprioception. That's what the article said.

C:Is that what the scientific article said or the write-around said?

J:No, I think the actual study said that the bionic limb could be controlled using just 18% of natural proprioception.

C:And that's all it takes for them to be able to kind of, I guess here, here's an interesting question, Jay, like, when I think about case studies where somebody has lost proprioception, like because of a weird brain thing after anesthesia or something like that, they have to physically look at their limbs in order to control them.

S:Yeah.

C:And so, you know, I can imagine that that maybe the the individuals in the control group had to look down at their legs when they would move them. Do these can these individuals walk without looking down?

S:Yeah. Jay, to clarify, this is a very technical article. I didn't even read the writer out. I went right to the technical article because the other one was hopeless, in my opinion. But here's right from the abstract. In a cohort of seven leg amputees, the interface is shown to augment residual muscle afferents by 18% of biologically intact values. So it's augmenting by 18%.

J:So what that was able to do, so that 18% gave the amputees that had the surgery It increased their walking speed by 41% and that matches the walking speed of people that don't have amputations. So that's profound because it puts them right back to a normal level of walking speed which gives them, you know, they have enough sensation and control and understanding of where the limb is to a degree where they are moving what would be considered to be a typical movement of someone that doesn't have an amputation. And interestingly, the person who led the study, Dr. Hugh Herr, he's the principal investigator. He noted that this is the first bionic leg that's fully controlled by the nervous system to achieve natural walking speeds and gait patterns. And he happens to be a double amputee. He had a hiking accident happen, and I think he lost both of his legs. So, he said, this is a quote from him, it feels natural as if the limb were made of flesh and bone. And that's a pretty big thing to say.

B:That's amazing, right there, that quote.

J:I really enjoyed reading some quotes from people that were in the study. One person said, I didn't feel like my leg had been amputated. It was the happiest moment of my life. When she first walked on it, that was her emotional response to it, like, I feel like I have a leg. So it's a big deal. Now, again, this was a study that took place. They came up with a new technique on fixing the amputation site to augment it, to make it work better with the prosthesis. They could take this a lot farther. This was the first step that they took. Now, it was novel, absolutely. They just completely broke new ground here. But they clearly are on to the absolute right direction to go in.

S:Yeah.

J:Again, there is an amputation site, meaning that it's going to still have pressure pain and all of the things that they have to do, you know, because you're putting weight on a part of your body that wasn't meant to support weight, right?

C:But they're doing that anyway if they're wearing prosthesis.

J:Yeah, definitely.

C:Yeah, that's not a change.

J:No, no. What I'm saying, though, is like they're still dealing with an amputation. They're still dealing with normal things that people have to deal with. This isn't like replacing their leg and everything's good and they're all good to go now. It's still a thing that they strap to their body.

C:But it seems like this would reduce, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but does this have the dual benefit of almost being like a very high-tech mirror therapy where it would reduce phantom limb pain because they feel like the limb is actually an extension of their body?

B:Oh, it sounds like it would get rid of it.

C:I don't know about getting rid of it, but because, you know, the way the mirror test works is you're looking at it and that makes you think, you know, it tricks your brain. But if you're feeling it in this way, maybe you could then, I don't know, scratch your leg or you could you could do the things that you might need to do to relieve that pain.

J:They also said the future work that they're going to do, they're going to try to have more tactile information sent back to the brain, which is great. I mean, look, we want people to be thinking out of the box and to try these crazy ideas because every once in a while, like they pan out and something incredible happens.

C:Yeah, sensors on the bottom of the feet or like, yeah, I could see a lot more information coming up.

J:It's, it's definitely hopeful. I mean, if, if I were an amputee, I would want to be on this immediately. You know, it sounds to me like it solves a lot of the problems that these people are suffering from. And you know, I mean, I can't, the sci-fi geek in me is like, you know, we're one step closer to having like, you know, at some point they're going to make something and it'd be like, this is even better than a human leg.

E:You know what I mean, Bob? Transhumanism.

J:But very good. You know, MIT again, knocking it out of the park, like just wonderful work that they're doing.

S:Well, it's a great proof of concept. I was very interested in the idea that doing this kind of approach, where the user is affecting the function of the robotic limb, even with just a little bit of sensory feedback, performs better than using AI, which is basically learning, this is how people move their legs when they walk, and now we're going to replicate that movement. Thank you for joining us today. You could certainly imagine just iterating this to when you do the amputation, you do it with this in mind. Now we're going to modify it. We're going to almost do it at the same time, like integrate the amputation with the prosthesis. That's one procedure.

C:Or you customize the prosthesis based on the available undamaged tissue. Like, these nerves are preserved, these are going to be the things that we connect and we maximize.

S:And we have to note this is a below-the-knee amputation, not above-the-knee amputation. Below-the-knee amputations are a lot easier to deal with because you have a knee, you know? And these people had the tibialis and gastroc muscle available. Usually that's the flap that you make, right? You know, when you're the cushion at the bottom. So that was already there. But in any case, this wouldn't necessarily apply to every amputee, right? One other thing you didn't bring up, Jay, that's I think an important aspect of this. Lower extremities are a lot more difficult than upper extremities for prosthetic limbs. And the reason is, is that just neurologically it's more complicated, right? Upper extremities, it's basically mostly voluntary control, right? But when you're walking, it's this weird mix of reflex, spinal reflex, subcortical walking reflexes, and voluntary control. And getting that mixture just right is what was very challenging, even for the AI-driven prosthetic limbs. And that's what this does better, is integrate those different levels of neurological control that are happening when you're walking. Right? Does that make sense? So that's actually why this is such a huge step forward, because this is working in a leg with walking.

C:But as you mentioned, it's working in a leg that still had a lot of intact... Well, yes, yes. They're picking a low-hanging fruit, but still... The gastrocnemius is your calf, and it connects to your Achilles. It does a lot of work in your leg.

J:They were also reporting that the feeling of putting the prosthetic toes on a staircase and going up It felt completely natural where previously it just didn't feel like it was a part of their body and now it just seems more natural to them.

S:It crossed over some kind of barrier in terms of closing that sensory motor feedback loop. All right, thanks Jay.

News Item #3 - Neanderthal with Downs (35:22)

• First Neandertal with Down Syndrome: Evidence of Altruistic Care in Prehistory - Neuroscience News 

C:When I was, I tend to use a reader sometimes when I'm prepping for SGU because it's like on a very busy day. So I'll have the article in front of me, but then I'll have my phone read the article to me. And it kept saying neendertal That's how I was pronouncing the word Neanderthal.

B:Oh my gosh.

C:Mean durdle.

B:Yeah, right.

C:I was like, Oh, no, this is very distracting. So I will not be talking about neanderthals. I'll be talking about neanderthals. And they, a group of scientists in Spain, they dubbed a little girl, what do I call it? I hate calling it a specimen. Like she was a person, you know, so they dubbed her remains Tina. And they found out that Tina was around six years old. And Tina had a pathology in her inner ear that is associated with Down syndrome. So they did a lot of cool things in this study. They use some really interesting imaging techniques to look at the inner ear and compare that to To typical anatomy, they were able to see that this congenital pathology, which is associated with Down syndrome, often results in hearing loss and vertigo. And so using those scans, they discover that. Then you add to that that they were able to kind of age this individual. And they said, OK, this is the first time that we've seen this type of pathology, which is associated with Down syndrome, This individual lived to the age of six. This is potentially the first example of something very interesting among the Neanderthal fossil record. So there have been previous studies that have shown that Neanderthals were able to Thank you so much. That would require care. Were they doing it as some sort of a quid pro quo? Like, I scratch your back, you scratch my back, I help you in this way, you help me in that way. But the fact that they found the remains of a six year old kind of changed their narrative a little bit. And so some of the researchers directly involved in the study are saying that this may be, and I'm going to copy it, I'm gonna say may because it also, you know, it's an interpretation. It may be the first example of Neanderthals providing purely altruistic care, right, because you're not really going to get much from a six year old in terms of like contributing to the kin or contributing to the group's hunting capability or, you know, whatever the sort of positive outcome from behavior would be. Really, this is a six year old child who had needs, who probably couldn't hear and very likely wasn't able to walk very well or stand up very well without extreme dizziness. And so this is an individual and also potentially some of the other things that come along with Down syndrome. So this is an individual in the community that would have required caretaking and she lived to be six, which shows that she was cared for. And so that's pretty, it's a pretty interesting takeaway. Obviously, it does require some assumptions. But I don't know, it doesn't sound like it's outside of the realm of possibility. What do you guys think?

S:Well, I think the fact that she was six cuts both ways, because I wonder like, how dramatically different was it from just caring for any kid? You know what I mean?

C:Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

S:Well, if she lived to adulthood, that would have been way more impressive.

C:And then it becomes the double edged sword of... Well, yeah, maybe they would have been able to show that that specific pathology had to be congenital, even in adulthood, or maybe that I don't know if there's an acquired version of that. But But yeah, you're right. If they had, if this child had lived much longer, it would have shown increased, I guess, evidence of that type of altruism. Although in some ways, I think it's, it's a little bit unsafe, or it's a little bit unfair to say that an adult individual with Down syndrome and yes, hearing loss and yes, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria. Yes, there is historical evidence of individuals with severe debilitating injuries that really shows good evidence that people within the group cared for those individuals. And so that really was their question. But was that person previously an elder? Was that person somebody who had a lot of knowledge and wisdom that they were passing on? Did they want to protect them and care for them because of what they contributed to the group? And so the argument here is how much is a six-year-old really contributing to the group? But you're right, Steve, it's an interesting question. How much has any six year old contributed? Except for the potential that they would grow up, right? And that they would be able to contribute. I also am super curious, and I don't, I don't know what the evidence of this looks like. I didn't do this deep a dive. How quickly were young Neanderthal children weaned? How fast were they already starting? Because I have a feeling that they were quicker to mature and that maybe a six-year-old child, although probably still dependent, may have been more independent than a six-year-old, you know, human child in 2024.

S:Yeah, it's an interesting question. We don't know.

C:It's hard to know. And so so there's another study that's sort of in this, not really in the same vein, but related, that was published in Nature just today, called Narrative Cave Art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago. And this is this is also kind of a new dating of something that we previously had identified. This is art, cave art, rock art, In an Indonesian cave in Sulawesi, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, so I apologize, where the scientists used a new approach. It's a type of uranium series analysis. Looking at the deposits of calcite that were inside of those limestone caves, they used a new approach, something called laser ablation U-series imaging to redate some of the things that had previously been dated. And when they redated them, they found out that they were older and they were able to make a more accurate assessment of the age of these I don't want to Thank you for joining us today. There is narrative, what they call narrative composition. So these are human-like figures and pig-like figures that are engaging together. And so they're calling this the earliest known example of visual storytelling in the world. Because even though there is Neanderthal cave art, there's cave art going before modern humans. It was not apparently representational. It wasn't telling a story. You didn't have characters interacting with one another. And so and you didn't have like these anthropomorphic figures and animals doing something together. And, you know, the researchers, they kind of talk a lot about how this may be a fundamental part of human evolution, the ability to abstract, the ability to pass on narratives to tell stories. And we don't see that in Neanderthal art, we just see kind of these individual, concrete etchings. So this is really interesting because it pushes it back even farther than we thought. And perhaps maybe there's even older ones out there that have yet to be seen.

B:Cool. Why did they keep calling that the pig, right? There was a pig. They kept saying a warty pig.

C:Yeah, it's the type of pig. It's a warty pig.

B:Okay. I don't see any warts on it. What's going on?

C:Yeah, I think that's the name. It's actually got a name beyond that. It's called a... Oh, no. It's called a Sucellabensis, which is a warty pig. That's the name of the pig. And also there were some Buballus, which were dwarf buffalos. They called them anoas. And so warty pigs and anoas were present in this representational art. Pretty interesting.

S:All right. Thanks, Cara.

News Item #4 - Festival Fail (45:50)

• Festival Implodes With Third Day Canceled, Statements Released 

E:Several magazines and online blogs and other things have picked this up. Now, it's a topic I don't think we've really covered directly on the SGU before, and I really like the opportunity to get a chance to talk about something different. Now, Cara, you and I, and I'm sorry for invoking your name here, but I happen to know this about you. We love documentaries about Fyre Fest.

C:Yes, we do.

E:And I know it's this, you know, it was a terrible thing and all, but at the same time we have a good laugh with it because... Oh, it's such a schadenfreude moment.

C:Everything about Fyre Fest was just, it was like Tiger, it just hit right at the right time, you know what I mean?

E:Oh, totally, totally. And against, you know, a lot of privileged people who, you know, Basically, could afford to be scammed out of this stuff. If you don't remember, though, Fyre Festival, a fraudulent luxury music festival organized by Billy McFarland. You remember that guy. His cohort was American rapper Ja Rule. They created it with the intent of promoting their Fyre app for booking music talent. This was back in, what, 2017 is when it took place. It was supposed to be a festival out in the Bahamas. And it was a total failure. People got out there and actually no festival took place whatsoever. People were swindled. And it was a fraud.

C:It wasn't just that they failed. They just didn't. Yeah.

E:Yeah. Fire fraud is ultimately what it became known as. And the next year, McFarland pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud to defraud investors. And what, six years in prison? Twenty-six million dollars. So I think of all the infamous concert festival disasters, fires, probably the one that's most on people's minds. There have been other ones though, plenty of them. Altmont in 1969, Woodstock 1999, Glastonbury 2005, and AstroWorld Festival 2021. That's just to name a few, and those were cases where people died, and many more were injured, and there was damage and destruction as far as the eye can see in some of these cases. The festival that my daughter Rachel and I attended this past Friday here in Connecticut was called Capulet Festival. And this is the third year that they're running this festival. And it features a very respectable lineup of metal and metalcore bands. And among them certainly was August Burns Red, which was the reason Rachel wanted to go, because that's her favorite group. So we decided to buy tickets for the entire festival. This was earlier in the year, around February, we decided this was going to be our summer trip. Instead of going away to another state somewhere for a week or taking a flight somewhere, we decided this was going to be our summer. Fortunately, we're right here in Connecticut, nice and easy, happening on June 28th, June 29th, and June 30th at an outdoor venue that can accommodate 12,000 people. Respectable sized festival. We go ahead and we bought the premier ticket packages. And those are the ones that give you the VIP meet and greets with several of the headlining bands, and you get the premier parking and special access to areas of the festival that other people don't have access to. You get a campsite if you wanted to come and bring your tent or your trailers or your camper. The cost was about $750 per ticket. But there was a lineup of over 50 bands over a three-day period. And the amenities, that's actually a reasonable deal. So that's what we did. We bought those tickets, two of them. So June 28th, right, first day of the festival. On June 27, yeah, 24 hours before the start of the event is when the facade began to come down. Rumors online started to swirl that the festival would not be taking place at the original site for 12,000 people. Oh no. It was going to be moved to a small concert hall in Hartford, Connecticut. With a maximum capacity of 1,200 people. And I'm reading. There's no changes. All the original information is there. And I go to their Facebook page. Same thing. Nothing official, no official word. This is just some rumors being passed around. Okay. I sent an email as fast as I could to the people, to the festival organizers for an update. And then not long after I sent my email, the official word came, did come down about the venue change. And sure enough, the power of social media, that meant the floodgates opened. There was talk of cancellations. First it was some of the supporting acts, and then some of the main artists were being rumored to have pulled out of this festival. This is 24 hours before it's ready to go, and we're finding this out. Oh my gosh, fans spreading information via back channels, sharing text threads that they have with some of the members of some of these bands. They'll actually take a screenshot of their phone with the text thread. Before opening day, it opened up at that point. Once the crack formed, it came spilling out, drinking from the fire hose as it was. I spent the whole Thursday night just reading updates about what the heck was going on here. Was there actually going to even be a festival at this point? Oh my gosh. Well, Rachel's band, August Burns Red, they were still going, so we decided, all right, we're going to go. All right? We're going to go. But not without my reservations, obviously. I had to- So you made reservations? Well, you know, I had a specific- Hi-o. I had a specific fear about this, because the rumor was circulating that the concert was way undersold. There were about 3,000 tickets sold, right, for 12,000. Thank you for watching. I wasn't the only one really asking those questions. Other people were concerned about this. You go up there, you get squeezed into this venue that can't hold 3,000 people, and it's an angry crowd of people, frankly, to begin with, who are pissed off that all these changes are happening last second, and some of their favorite artists are no longer performing at this thing. But we decided to go. We would give it a chance, and if we felt it was too dicey, we were going to just leave after that. It's only Hartford, Connecticut. Not too much for us. Say that to the other people who actually drove from North Carolina or flew in from Florida or Wisconsin and so many other people. I felt much worse for them. Those fears wound up being unfounded. By my estimate on Friday, there were about 500 people at the show. No. One of two things happened. The thing was way undersold, even to a Lower extent that I had, you know, understood it, you know, where they were saying maybe 3000 people or just people were so mad that they decided to just forfeit the damn thing and walk away from it.

J:What about getting a refund?

E:Yeah. So refunds, right? If you go to their website, obviously they have a policy in which they say there will be no refunds issued for things like exchange, like exchanges or, you know, bands dropping out and the, and these sorts of things is basically what they said. I will get to that because at the end of this news item is when basically some other people come along and say, nah, that doesn't hold water. I'll get to that, Jay. I'll tell you what happened. We went there Friday night. This venue had two stages, a small room that holds 200 people with a small stage, and the main room, which holds about 1,000 people. They alternated the stages. About nine acts, I think, wound up performing on Friday. Okay, fine. But it was a cluster. They didn't know where anything was going to ... Where were they going to put the vendors? Where were people going to drive their campers into the middle of downtown, basically downtown Hartford? It's not going to work. So there was all kinds of things going on in which it was a total cluster, total cluster, and everyone was certainly really mad about it.

J:Why did they lose the original venue?

E:The reason ultimately why they lost the original venue is because they did not secure the correct insurance for the festival. It's called the Thompson Motor Speedway here in Connecticut. And when they couldn't provide it with 24 hours, they basically said, okay, you lose rights and you're not coming in. We can't do this, right? They're not gonna take it on the chin for them. I don't even know why they really let it go that far. But yeah, they couldn't get the insurance is what I heard. So Friday night happens, really weak turnout, everyone's kind of down. The next day, this is Saturday, June 29th, it was a lackluster day. I think about 12 or 13 artists performed. The last act on the small stage was performing Saturday night. And then what happened is they got cut off. The venue officials stepped in, they cut the mic, and they sent everybody out. They're kicking everybody out before the music ended on Saturday night. It was it. It was over right then and there. No completion of the second day of music. And there was going to be nothing on day three. One of the original rumors was basically saying, hey, guys, beware. We think that Sunday is outright canceled. But the promoters were promoting Sunday as Saturday was unfolding. They said, we're going to have a great lineup on Sunday because they were still trying to sell more tickets, even though they seem to have known. That Sunday was a total, total bust. Now the reason that the venue stepped in and cut it and stopped the show was because the venue did not get paid. They were promised that they were gonna get paid, and they did not get paid. And so they pulled the plug in the middle, basically, of the event. And that was it. So, I mean, look, some good, some okay things about, you know, nobody got hurt. There were no injuries, physical injuries that I'm aware of of any kind. Nobody died, right? So, I don't think you can put this on a list of other festival disasters in which people actually lost their lives in these massive crowds and things, but that did not stop the people from being so mad, so mad. You should have read the social media going on during this whole thing. It was something.

C:Well, do you think that they'll, does this qualify as like a Ponzi? Like, do you think that what they did was, you know, expect all these ticket sales to pay for things that they hadn't paid for?

E:Well, and this is when we get to the attorney general of the state of Connecticut, who on July 2nd, not only, not only announced, made a, what, a public announcement, right? He had a, he had a press conference as well about this very thing. His name is Attorney General William Tong, and here's how the letter reads. Today, July 2nd, he's opened an investigation into Capulet Entertainment following dozens of consumer complaints. It's up to hundreds of now, by the way, regarding the abrupt collapse of the three-day Capulet We've received dozens, now hundreds, of complaints from frustrated ticket holders. Fans paid hundreds of dollars in booked campsites, overnight accommodations, and traveled for this three-day festival. This is not what they got. The Capulin entertainment people need to explain exactly why things went wrong and provide prompt refunds to every consumer that they let down. An official investigation has been opened By the Attorney General of the State of Connecticut looking into this. Yeah, so I definitely registered my complaint. There's an official form you go to their website and you fill out and you provide them with all the details of what you've got. Plus, they obviously had no idea that I was going to be there and that I'd be talking about this on my podcast concerning skepticism.

S:Evan, I wonder how much of this was just incompetence?

E:Yes, that's what they're going to investigate, to determine if this person was, you know, just, right, incompetent, or did he try to perpetrate a fraud from the get-go? Or did it evolve into a fraud?

S:That's what I think, it evolved into a fraud. They were in over their head, it wasn't going well, they were underselling tickets, and then the fraud kicked in to cover their asses, right? Rather than do the right thing, whatever that would have been.

E:Pulling the plug a month ago or whatever when you realized you didn't have the sales and the money to back this entire thing up, you should have shut the whole thing down. I think people and artists and even vendors would have been disappointed but understood, but certainly to let it go to this extent, now you've got people who are frothing and lighting torches and carrying pitchforks and wanting Thank you for joining us today.

C:Well, and I don't I don't want to get into the legal weeds here, but does fraud require intentionality?

E:Yes. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

C:Because I mean, why is it legal? Or is it legal to say, I want to do a thing that I can't afford to do. And I'm going to hope that the money that the people who are going to come to the thing will pay me will cover the thing I plan to do. Without having done the appropriate financials and having, you know, checked all the boxes. Like it seems, I guess that's American, you know, entrepreneurship, but it seems very dangerous. It seems like you need to have enough money in the bank to cover all your bills. Otherwise, you're just step one of a Ponzi scheme.

E:And people thought that this person, because this is the third year he was doing it, knew what he was doing. He's not a total rookie.

C:Unless it finally caught up to him. Unless he's been paying his debts with the new money that's supposed to be paying for the things today, but he's paying for yesterday with today.

E:And there's the Ponzi aspect that you brought up. And thank goodness our Attorney General is actually going to now be investigating this, and we will eventually. Find out exactly how it happened, why it happened, and if there's going to be any sort of, you know, what, refunds issued and people made whole by this, and if anybody is criminally liable for anything. But I was caught up right in the middle of it all. It was unfolding right before my eyes. It was like, wow.

S:Well, it is a good example of how incompetence bleeds into fraud, you know what I mean? And like as Cara was saying, this is why you need regulations, too. And I know it's, you know, because we've done events and like, oh, my God, we got to get this insurance and that. It's burdensome. It's absolutely burdensome. But there's a reason for it, because otherwise, you know, jerk offs like this. You know, try to pull something off, they fail, and then at the end of the day, hundreds, maybe thousands of people get defrauded, even if it wasn't the original intention. That's what happens.

C:And this is a service, it's a luxury, it's not a necessity. If it's too burdensome for you to do the job right, you're not the person to be doing this job. Right? Don't take it on if you're not willing to do the work. And I don't know, it's like you think about Elizabeth Holmes, I think that's a perfect example. It was incompetence that turned into fraud. She legit thought she had a good idea that was working. And once she realized it wasn't, she covered her tracks. And I think you see that story a lot.

E:Sure, sure.

C:Some fraudsters set out to commit fraud from the get-go, but I think a lot of fraudsters, they end up committing fraud because they get in over their heads.

E:You know, because you brought up Elizabeth Holmes in some of the interviews and the stories I've seen in documentaries about Elizabeth Holmes is that when she did bring this to initially two people, there were some that told her, This is not right. This can't happen.

C:Some people told her it's impossible and others said it's a great idea, let's do it.

E:Right, right.

C:And it was people with equivalent credentials, sadly.

E:Sure, yeah. Yep. So whenever there's an update on this, I'll be sure to give it to you.

J:Evan, are you going to try to get your money back?

E:Oh, yeah. I mean, if there is money to have to be gotten back, that's the other part of this, Jay, is like, what kind of assets does this person have? I looked him up. I believe it's a sole member LLC, and it basically has no protection against For that, against them going after his personal assets. If he has a house or something, he might have to sell it.

S:Is there a vent insurance that you can get? If this goes a bust, it covers any liability? I don't know.

E:My guess is yes.

C:Or maybe if you bought it with your credit card? Like, I think some credit cards have protections built into them.

S:But I mean like insurance for the event operators, like, you know, you have to take out quote unquote event insurance. I don't know.

C:Maybe, but he didn't even take out insurance on me.

S:If you bought your tickets using a credit card, go to your credit card.

C:Yeah, I would try that too.

E:I could definitely try that. That would be a good step. Yep.

S:All right. Thanks, Evan. Yep.

News Item #5 - Kugelblitz Black Holes (1:03:59)

• A black hole made from pure light is impossible, thanks to quantum physics  

B:A Kugelblitz is a geon. Well, what's a geon? It goes back to the famous theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler. Quite a guy. I was an amazing scientist. Wheeler came up with the concept of a GEO in 1955 in a physical review paper. GEO stands for gravitational electromagnetic entity. And the idea flows from general relativity and its idea of mass and energy. And here's the critical bit. If a giant star could collapse and concentrate so much mass that its gravity wraps space-time completely around itself, becoming a black hole, then so could energy itself, because energy and mass are kind of interchangeable. So heat or radiation or light, they should all be able to form a black hole as well, as long as you have enough of it in a small enough place. So that's kind of what General Relativity was saying about that. So nowadays we call it not a geon, but a kugelblitz. Which is German for ball lightning. And it really is fascinating. I've read a bit about it. And you obviously can't just dismiss predictions from general relativity, right? I mean, you can't dismiss them out of hand. Its track record is too ridiculously good. Hello, gravitational waves. So kugelblitzes have even seeped into popular culture. Steve, if you saw the show Umbrella Academy, I think it was season three, there was a guest star and it was a kugelblitz in that show for a lot of episodes. Of course, it had some artistic license. More subtly, Star Trek Next Gen had an episode called Timescape, where a Romulan warbird's power source was revealed to be an artificial quantum singularity, almost certainly a kugelblitz. So and there's actually been real discussion over the years about how advanced civilizations might be able to create a kugelblitz and as a power source since small ones tinier than a proton could theoretically emit literally petawatts of usable energy. They would be amazing if they existed. So those were the good old days. Then this damn research came out like, oh, crap. The researchers looked at Kugelblitz's through a quantum mechanical lens, just like Hawking did for black holes. When Hawking did it decades ago, he famously concluded that black holes can in fact emit radiation, Hawking radiation. So that was obviously a really huge discovery. So when theoretical physicist Eduardo Martin Martinez and his colleagues did the same thing, they looked at Kugelblitz's through this Welcome to the show. Thank you for watching. To precipitate the formation of an event horizon, we argue that the dissipative quantum effects coming from the self-interaction of light are enough to prevent any meaningful buildup of energy that could create a black hole in any realistic scenario. So it turns out that enough of these particles are created, these antiparticles, that soak up the energy, essentially, and then they escape, and that prevents any chance of a black hole forming. And there's even a name for it. It's called the Schwinger effect. And this has been confirmed in the lab and even in neutron star observations. So the confidence level is very, very high that their conclusions are true. I don't know how you would calculate that with something as theoretical as the Kugelblitz, but they're very confident because of their confidence in quantum electrodynamics. Okay, and when they say that it can't happen in any realistic scenario, they really mean it. Their calculations showed that even laser light intensities 10 to the friggin fiftieth times more powerful than state of the art lasers could not overcome this effect and create a kugelblitz. 10 to the 50th, that's 100 quindecillion. That's also 100 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion. So even something that powerful could not create this black hole because the particles and antiparticles would just bleed away. The most luminous objects among the most luminous objects in the universe, quasars, are far too dim to create one. They even looked at kugelblitzes that were incredibly small. Maybe we can create a really, really tiny kugelblitz, a hundredth of a quintillionth of a nanometer And then they also calculated all the way up to 100 million meters and no dice. You can't create one even within that range. And if you tried to go even smaller or bigger than that, a huge range, they still say it would still be very, very unlikely. Not looking good. There is a tiny loophole. They threw us a little bit of a bone in their paper. The researchers say that there is tiny hope that one could have been created, but don't get your hopes up here. Apparently, there's a possibility that in the first millionth of a second after the Big Bang, during the inflationary period, it might have been possible that energy collapsed into a Kugelblitz to form primordial black holes, which you've mentioned on the show many times. That would be cool, but unfortunately, a black hole Made from mass would look the same to us as one made from light. So yeah, thanks a lot guys. Even if there is one out there, and there might be one out there, these primordial black holes that have survived for billions of years, we would never even be able to tell the difference because they would look the same. All right, whatever. So bummer for me. It's kind of depressing because there are theoretical things that you could have created with a Kugelblitz. Like I said, you could have made a power source, an amazing power source. People have come up with ideas to power spaceships using these artificial singularities. That really could have been amazing, far better than even Thanks for watching! Yeah, but hey man, General Relativity predicted it, so I was like, alright, okay. That's a decent one. It's a damn good track record, but this one, no. Einstein, you messed up.

E:Yeah, what a failure he's been.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:11:59)

E:You tend to think noises are animals. It did, actually. It had the rhythms.

C:Very animalistic and... Rhythmic. ...episodic. Yeah, rhythmic, exactly.

J:Somebody definitely wrote in something like that, Cara, so let me read these for you.

C:Because that's what it sounds like.

J:I got so many guesses this week. Listener named Emily Markwell said, the Tasmanian devil, right? Here we go, Cara. My partner Andrew is a huge fan and avid listener. We are currently driving back down to the Australian East Coast from Byron to Bellingen and love arguing over what the noisy is. We hope we are right this week. You are incorrect, but Cara agrees with you. Another person wrote in Richard Smith, he said, this week's noisy sounds a bit like a bunch of Tasmanian devils sharing a meal.

Voiceover:Wow.

J:Which it's interesting because people are hearing this Tasmanian devil. So I tried to find a noisy of a Tasmanian devil. They don't make this noise at all. They don't sound like this. The other listener named Zachary Dorma said, a Cybertruck windshield wiper that needs recalling. I thought that was so clever. So clever. Listen, it does kind of sound like a really crappy windshield wiper. Listen. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe And I've seen those. They exist. He's not joking. And I labeled this as the close guest because there was a key word in there that he used. The key word was bicycle. We have one last guess. Guess why I put it in here. This is from Peter. He said sawing an ice fishing hole. Jerky question mark. So any reference to the jerky boys you're going to get me. All right, guys. Nobody won, but this this one has something to do with a bike. So tell me what it is.

S:It's a flat tire.

J:It's a flat tire. It's rolling a bike with a completely flat tube over asphalt. Now, I've heard this noise as a kid. I've heard this noise as a kid. I recognized it when the listener sent it in.

C:Yeah, I've definitely heard that more often than Tasmanian devils doing it.

J:But it definitely has its own sound. There is a scrunching rubber sound in there. Listen. You know, like that almost sounds like a Star Wars alien talking. I just thought that was cool. There's everyday sounds around us, weird sounds that that many of us would experience that you might not stand out when you hear it, like, you know, a flat tire on a bicycle. But when you hear it up close like this, it has a unique sound profile. And again, I say this all the time. Sounds sound like other sounds. It's context is everything when it comes to noises. Have you guys noticed that? All right, guys, I got a new noisy, another fun one for you. This was sent in by a listener named Vigot Telesfsen. T-E-L-L-E-F-S-E-N, Telesfsen. That's only his middle name. His last name is Wivstad. He's going to email me. I guarantee it. Dude, I'm sorry, Vigo.

C:You got to include the phonetics, man.

J:Vigo, my friend, Vigo. If I had Vigo as a friend, every time I see him in person, I'd go, Vigo. Definitely. All right. Here we go, guys. Wait for it. So many clues, so many clues in there. It sounded like so many things. If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, if you also, if you heard something cool, you work in weird places, right? There's got to be people out there that work in all sorts of different factories and everything. Come on. There's noisies all around you. Email me at WTN at the Skeptic's Guide dot org. Steve, I've got so much to say to you right now. One of them is, lately I've been asking our listeners, if you are interested in supporting the work that we do, the Skeptic's Guide has been going on for 20 years. We started in 2005. We have been doing this program for 20 years. We are going to be recording our 1000th episode in August of this year. If you enjoy the work that we do, if you think there's any value to the work that we do, please seriously consider becoming a patron of the show. You would enable us to do more, reach more people. There's so many things that we'd like to do that we can't just because we don't have the time and material to do it. So becoming a patron can really help. And also if you do become a patron you can join our wonderful community of awesome friends. They are the super friends. You can join our Discord. And of course, you know, then you can meet them in person at the next Nauticon, which is going to be happening in 2025. More details coming soon. I'm just trying to get past the current show that we're doing because it's a big one. I got so much stuff I'm doing. But go to the patreon.com forward slash Skeptic's Guide to learn more about becoming a patron of the show. If you are interested, every week we send out an email. It has everything that we've done over the past week. You can just join that on our website, theskepticsguide.org. There's a button on there for you. You could also give our show a rating or tell a friend. Both of those things can help new people find the show, which would be wonderful. We have tickets available. We have two shows coming up that tickets are available at. We will be doing a extravaganza. This is our stage show. This is a show where we teach you how you cannot trust your senses. And there's a lot of improv comedy. The Skeptic's Guide is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. The 1000th SGU show. There are not many tickets left. I had to cut tickets off because I wanted to give people, everybody a wonderful view of the stage and the screen and everything that we're doing. So I decided to whack back the numbers a little bit. So right now there's not many left, but there's still some tickets left. You can go to theskeptic'sguide.org. There's a button there. That show will be happening on August 18th. Yes, Cara will be there. People are asking.

C:Oh yeah, I'll be there.

J:Will Cara be there? Everybody wants to know where Cara is, what she's doing, what she had for dinner. I don't tell anybody anything about you, Cara.

C:Except that I'll be there.

J:She will be at the show, though. You can ask her yourself. And there's something else I decided to do. I was talking to Ian today. You know, we get emails from listeners where they tell us, you know, hey, I really appreciate the show, you know, because of you, blah, like something happened in their life. And it made me think, you know, we have our 1000th show coming up. I thought it would be cool if you're interested, there's a button on the homepage now where you can click it and you can tell us if the show had an impact on you in any way. I'm looking to find some interesting ones that I could read during the 1000th show. It's important to us to hear these types of things because we basically operate in a vacuum here. You know, 99% of the time, it's just the five of us here talking to each other. You know, we're not doing that many live shows a year, so we don't really get out and get to talk to people as often as we'd like. And I just think it'd be great, like, if the show had an impact on you or helped you make a decision or, you know, anything along those lines, please do drop us a quick note. Just understand that I might play it on the 1000th show. So if you want to leave your name out or personal details or anything, But that's that. So you can go to the SGU, theskepticsguide.org. Again, that's our website. Please join us into the future. It's going to be a rough one, guys. We need critical thinking now more than ever. I tried to clone Steve. It failed. It didn't work.

S:Miserably. Try again.

J:It was a failure. I wanted to make a young Steve to go on to the next generation. We don't have the technology. I got close. I got close, but I didn't get all the way. So, the only other thing you could do is join us in this effort.

S:Thank you, Jay.

Name That Logical Fallacy (1:21:31)

Topic: Is there is a term for a pattern of behavior from religious individuals, they seem to divorce themselves for the responsibility of convincing others and instead make it a problem within the audience, if your heart wasn't hardened the proof would be evident. I even see this in texts, the parable of Lazarus has someone asking Abraham for help convincing his family to believe and he gets rejected. Randy

S:Randy. Okay, so what Randy's asking is, is this a logical fallacy, and if so, what is it, to say, well, if you don't believe, it's not because the proof is not self-evident or there isn't proof, it's because you have a hardened heart, or you lack faith, right? That's the most common one. You lack faith. Or I've been told personally, you're just blind to the truth of the Bible. That's it. You're just blind.

C:Or have you ever, have you ever had a, I think this follows the same structure when it's like more of a pseudoscience claim and they're like, you're just not open-minded enough.

S:Yes. Yes. Open-minded and lax faith are basically the equivalent of a claim from a logical perspective. So what do you guys think?

C:I'm so bad at these. I can never remember all of the informal ones.

S:Well, so if you're saying you're having a disagreement with somebody and you're saying that basically you're wrong, but it's because of some negative feature that you have, what is that? Well, that's an ad hominem. That's an ad hominem. So there's definitely that is in here, right? It's like you lack faith. You aren't open minded. You are blind. Right. And that's the problem here. Not my, not the power of my arguments or the quality of my evidence or the validity of my logic. It's that you are the problem because you are blind or whatever, lack faith. So that's an ad hominem. But there's another thing going on in here, I think.

C:Is it special pleading?

S:No, I don't think so.

C:You know, because it's kind of like, I don't know, like the way I understand it is that it's like making up exceptions when like you can prove that That it's not true. It's like, yeah, but yeah, I guess it's not really because it's not like the Bible says so. Yeah. Because then that would also be like some appeal to authority stuff. And it's not a burden of shifting the burden of proof.

S:So Randy goes actually on to speculate about it. I didn't want to say it because it kind of gives it away. He says he thinks it could be some sort of unstated major premise. And I agree, I think that's in there as well. The unstated, but the unstated major premise is that there is proof, right? Or that there is a solid argument for it. So it's not that unstated, but it's definitely implicit instead of explicit. Like, there's the assumption that if you weren't blind, you would be convinced by the evidence, right? Or you didn't have some kind of failing of faith or open-mindedness or whatever. So again, I think it's mainly an ad hominem, but I think it's feeding into this unstated premise of because the argument that there is proof or whatever that the evidence is convincing or it is compelling.

Voiceover:Sounds good.

S:But I think the 99% are here is the ad hominem.

Voiceover:Yeah, true.

S:And you absolutely right, Cara. I wrote a whole article about this, that saying that you're not open-minded is exactly like saying you lack faith.

C:It makes me so angry. I get so frustrated when that is the claim.

S:It's also wrong. I always like to flip it. I'm open to any outcome here. I'm open to this being real, to it being not real. I will follow the evidence wherever it leads. I'm just doing that. I'm following evidence and logic. You're closed-minded because you're closed-minded to the possibility that you're wrong. You're closed to the possibility that this is self-deception or whatever, that there's some alternate explanation. I can't tell you how How many times I've had true believers say to me, you'll never convince me that this isn't true. It's like, yeah, you're pretty much admitting that you're closed-minded. In the same breath that they're accusing me of being closed-minded, they're like, because you'll never convince me. It's like, well, you could convince me. You just are not because the evidence is crap. It's shite.

C:And it's such a weird, it's such a weird mental gymnastics. It's kind of like saying, OK, you're not open minded enough. And then you're saying, no, I am open minded. I'm looking at the evidence. The evidence says the evidence has disproven that. Let's say we're talking about something really obvious, like iridology. The evidence has disproven these claims. Yeah, but what if you're wrong?

S:What if there are unicorns?

C:Exactly. It's like, OK, but what if you're wrong?

S:We're all wrong, right? It's all about being less wrong by following logic and evidence. Yeah, it's just, you're right, it's mental gymnastics. And it does turn into special pleading at some point. That process leads right to special pleading.

C:Yeah, because they just keep kind of changing.

S:Yeah, because you're starting with the answer. So this is what you do when you want to maintain the answer. Okay, let's move on to science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:26:53)

Theme: None Item #1: In a sample of almost 10 thousand people, smoking was found to correlate with lower personality scores in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness and higher Extraversion scores. Item #2: Researchers find that the standard pasteurization process eliminates 100% of H5N1 bird flu virus from infected milk. Item #3: A new study finds that introns (non-coding segments of genes) can affect protein folding, independent of their effects on splicing.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Item #3
Science	Item #1
Science	Item #2

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

S:That's obviously in the ocean construct, you know, the five personality types. 2. Researchers find that the standard pasteurization process eliminates 100% of H5N1 bird flu virus from infected milk.

U:3.

S:A new study finds that introns, non-coding segments of genes, can affect protein folding, independent of their effects on splicing. Genes, right? A gene codes for a protein. They have exons and introns. The exons are the part that codes for the protein. Introns are bits that are cut out and thrown away. They don't contribute to the final protein. They're non-coding.

B:But you wouldn't call them junk DNA, though?

S:No, because they're not junk. They used to be considered junk DNA, but they're not. They're non-coding DNA, but they do affect things, right? I'm not going to get into much more detail there, but they're non-coding but not irrelevant. Like, for example, they affect splicing. That's why I had to say that as a caveat, independent of their effects on splicing. All right, Evan, go first.

E:Well, okay, 10,000 people. Smoking was found to correlate with lower personality scores in conscientiousness and agreeableness and higher extraversion scores. Okay. I mean, smoking, there's a ton of chemicals going on in smoke. I'm assuming we're talking about cigarette smoking.

S:Cigarettes and cigars.

E:Thanks for watching! The second one about pasteurization. It eliminates 100% of bird flu virus from infected milk. That would be good. I hope that's true. That's a positive one, very much so. I mean, sure, but does it? That is a binary one right there. It either is or it isn't. I really hope it is. And then this last one. Oh boy. Introns, my first introduction to this word I think, or I've probably read it and didn't know what I was reading. They can affect protein folding independent of their effects on splicing. Well, obviously this is the one I know, I just don't know anything about this. So I really don't have a sense for it. I have a good sense for number two. I have a decent sense for number one. I have no sense for this last one about the introns. So what will I do? I have to kind of just make a guess here. I will say that the introns, I'll go with the introns ones being the fiction.

J:Okay, Jay. This goes from easy to hard. The first one here about the smokers and the fact that they score lower on conscientiousness and agreeableness, I think that one is science. Researchers, for number two, the researchers find that standard pasteurization process eliminates 100% of H5N1 bird flu. I mean, I don't see why it wouldn't kill 100% of it, because once you get up to a certain temperature, the virus is going to die and that's it. I'm not sure. I don't know if they treat it chemically. I don't think that they do. I think it's all a matter of pressure and temperature. So I think that one is science. I can't see that they would be I can't see that that pasteurization process wouldn't be doing that. And then three, the last one here, the one about introns. I mean, you know, this is a toughie because I don't have a good working knowledge of this stuff. So I'm just kind of using my gut here. So we're saying that these non-coding segments of genes can affect protein folding. I don't know why that is significant, meaning that this has to be independent of their effects on splicing.

S:The introns are already known to affect splicing. What that means is one gene can code for multiple different proteins based on how it gets spliced up, and that is controlled by the introns. And of course, that would affect folding, right, if the ultimate protein is spliced from different segments. Does that make sense? I mean, the resulting protein would be different, and so therefore it would fold differently. This is saying even without that, like it's the exact same protein, but it's folding differently based upon the introns.

J:I would have liked to have heard from Cara and Bob.

E:Sure. Me too.

J:Yeah, right? I mean, look, you know, Evan and I know where we're at. OK, I am going to deviate from what my gut told me, which was to think this one was the fiction. And I'm going to say the milk one is the fiction. I don't know why. There's a thing in there. There's a little doodad in there that makes me think that this one is the fiction. I'm going with that one. Okay, Cara.

C:You probably can't answer this, but like, for the smoking and the big five, are we talking, is this like a new study? Yeah. Because this has been studied a million times. And historically, yeah, I think it's, I think it's low conscientiousness, agreeableness, Hi, I'm Cara Santa Maria. But that's so hard with science or fiction, because when you're like, a study says, well, yeah, any study can say anything. But the literature shows that what you are listing there is science. Researchers find that the standard pasteurization product 100% is a hypothesis. But I have a feeling that this one is science, because I don't know, I feel like I've been covering bird flu a lot lately. And we would have heard if a bunch of people were falling ill from drinking milk, because we know it's in the milk. But if it's then killed, then who cares if it's in the milk? So I think that one is science. Otherwise, I think we would have more deaths, or at least more infections. And then introns affecting protein folding, independent of their effects on splicing. Oof. So I know they're removed prior, and I thought that they affected like ribosomes, but I could see there being some sort of indirect effect on protein folding. God, are they all, can they all be science? No. So, I think the devil's going to be in the details with this. My guess is that either this new study actually showed a difference in what previous study shows about smoking, and maybe it's because smoking has changed over the years, and maybe we're seeing, I don't know, lower extraversion scores now or something, because it's no longer a social, what do you call it, behavior. That while introns can affect indirectly protein folding, it's not independent of their effects on slicing. It's a function of their effects on slicing. So it's one I think it's one of those two things. So I'm going to say it's the intron one that is the fiction and it's because it's due or related to their effects on splicing.

B:And Bob. Yeah, the smoking one kind of makes sense, although I agree with Cara's angle on it, like what's new. Maybe it has changed because the culture has changed. Ah, man, pasteurization. Yeah, it makes sense. That seems reasonable to me that pasteurization could impact it. And yeah, we would have probably heard something about it. Probably would have caused a milk panic. Yeah, this intron one, I mean, I could see that there's some subtle influence that we hadn't seen before, but this is the one that's the most dodgy. I'm going to have to say, I'll say the intron one's fiction as well.

S:All right, so you guys are all agreeing on the smoking ones. We'll start there. In a sample of almost 10,000 people, smoking was found to correlate with lower personality scores and conscientiousness and agreeableness and higher extraversion scores. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. Yep, this is basically confirming prior studies, Cara. That's why it's like 10,000 people, you know, it's a huge sample. The neuroticism, lower neuroticism and higher openness was found among cigar smokers only, compared to both cigarette and non-smokers.

C:So maybe that is a shift.

S:Yeah, it's a little bit of a shift, but conscientiousness and agreeableness being lower and higher extroversion was found in just smoking in general. And the interpretation is that the extraversion one is that it's a social behavior. People do it because it enhances their social interactions. And that conscientiousness, given that basically it's impulsive, it's not really good decision making for their health and whatnot.

C:It's also not a conscientious thing to do around non-smokers.

S:Right, and that's where the agreeableness comes in, just saying, yeah, you're basically a jerk. Yeah, but not surprising. And Evan, it's not that the smoking is causing these personality changes, that these personality changes are causing the smoking, right? What are these differences? That people with these traits are more likely to engage in smoking because they're less conscientious about the health effects in other people. They're less agreeable in terms of not being disturbing to other people. They're more interested in the social aspects than they are in the health aspects.

C:Yeah, the big five are thought to be traits, not states. So they tend to be persistent throughout the lifespan.

S:Yeah, they're remarkably persistent. And refractory to interventions.

C:Yeah, like you can bump them a little, but yeah.

S:Right, they can be mitigated, but not changed. I guess we'll just take these in order. Researchers find that the standard pasteurization process eliminates 100% of H5N1 bird flu virus from infected milk. Jay, you think this one is fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. Yeah, 100%. That's a really high bar. But functionally, it means that it was undetectable by whatever mechanism we use to detect it. The mechanism that they used to detect it, if you're interested, was PCR, which is very, very sensitive. This one is science. Not necessarily, because the inoculum is low enough that your immune system can handle it. I guess, but I don't want to be drinking live. You're right, it's certainly reassuring to know that the standard FDA pasteurization process leaves no functional virus behind. There were fragments of virus, but not intact functional virus. Yeah, so that's good to know. And you're right, that's probably why there hasn't been massive H5N1 outbreaks going on.

B:Thank goodness.

C:At least in people.

S:In people, right.

B:But raw milk is still okay, right?

S:But give it time. Raw milk, man. Don't drink raw milk.

B:Gosh, have you ever tasted that? Reason number 37.

S:Steve, if you took raw milk and you just boiled it on your stove top, would that do it? No, I don't think boiling is enough.

C:Maybe for some things, but also, like, wouldn't it weird your milk?

S:Yeah, you gotta, you know, why DIY that? You know, just let them know what they're doing, do it correctly, you know? Okay, they got it down to it, they're literally down to a sign, just let them do it. You don't have to get angry with this.

E:Bad advice, Jay.

S:This means that a new study finds that introns, non-coding segments of genes, can affect protein folding independent of their effects on splicing is the fiction. I just wanted to talk about this news item because it's cool. It has nothing to do with protein folding.

B:You used us. You just wanted to say intron over and over.

S:No, this is actually pretty, what they were looking for, it's a little subtle and I couldn't, the thing they were actually looking at was too subtle to make into a science or fiction, so I just made something else up and made that the fiction. But here's the question. So again, I gave you the backstory about what introns and exons are. So like the whole gene is comprised of coding and non-coding segments. The entire gene gets transcribed, right? It gets turned into messenger RNA, like a pre-messenger RNA. And then the messenger RNA gets chopped up to remove the intron segments to create the final mRNA, which then makes the protein only from the exons, right? So only from the coding, by definition, regions. And so by definition, the introns are the non-coding regions of the genes themselves. Now, they have been found to influence things like gene expression, right? How much of the protein are you going to make? The introns may influence that. They also are involved in regulating alternative splicing, so you could actually make multiple different proteins from the same gene by which of the exons you splice together, right? But here's the question. This is a very interesting question. Are they randomly placed in the gene? Or are the exons functional units?

C:The introns are sort of like the scissors in CRISPR.

S:Are the exons these modules, a part of the protein? And so one of the things that might, practically what that might mean is that, you know, different amino acids and different sequences of amino acids have different effects on protein folding. Some segments of the protein fold and some don't, right? And so they fold in different ways. So, is an exon coding for a part of the final protein that has a specific folding functional unit that therefore evolutionarily functions as like this module that can be exchanged or moved around or whatever, right? So that's the question. So to address that question, they looked evolutionarily at different species, etc. They wanted to say, if you look at the foldability of exons, is it varying randomly or is it varying not randomly? And what they found was that the answer was basically yes or no, but depending on whatever, the gene and the species or whatnot. But that definitely for some exons, there is a non-random distribution of the foldability to the point where they're calling some exons, I think, are foldons. As they use that term, it's a foldable unit of the protein. And so evolution is basically like, all right, I'll take one of these and two of those and we'll put them together. It's like, we'll just take these exons and they will switch them around. That does happen. Exons do themselves get sort of swapped evolutionarily to different proteins and whatnot. Here's the thing, not all exons are conserved evolutionarily, but some exons that have a specific folding anatomy, folding structure, do get conserved more than you would predict at random. That's what they found. So, for some exons, they basically evolved into this foldable module that then gets preserved as its own little subsection of a protein. Does that make sense? It's pretty cool. Not all exons are foldons, but some are. From an evolutionary perspective, I thought there's a whole idea I find very neat. But it was hard to get science or fiction out of that, so I just made it the fiction and just made it something else. But yeah, then I looked, I said, do introns affect folding? And it's always hard to prove a negative. As far as I could tell, with the time I had to search, I did multiple, multiple queries. I couldn't find anything, but it might just be because the way I was searching was just getting diverted to other questions. You know what I mean? Sometimes Google just makes certain matches and doesn't get to the money that I'm trying to get to. So if somebody out there knows of a study which says that some intron affects the way proteins are being folded, let me know. I could not find that anywhere. Rarely do the advocates of cleanses explain what is meant by toxins.

E:It is one of those nebulous, pseudoscientific terms rolled out by people deliberately avoiding the specificity required for a science-based analysis. It's the modern-day equivalent of evil spirits, vague enough to mean just about anything while retaining the ring of scientific legitimacy. Timothy Caulfield from his book, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? One of the famous cel-less elixirs of health, beauty, and happiness. And yeah, you're right, Jay. The answer is no. I mean, yes. Yes. Yes, she is wrong about it. No, she is wrong. No, yes, right. Yes, she is right.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:46:22)

"Rarely do the advocates of cleanses explain what is meant by toxins. It is one of those nebulous pseudoscientific terms rolled out by people deliberately avoiding the specificity required for a science-based analysis. It’s the modern-day equivalent of “evil spirits,” vague enough to mean just about anything while retaining the ring of scientific legitimacy.”  – ― Timothy Caulfield, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness, (description of author)

S:Yeah, that's a very good quote, very pithy way of saying it. We talk about that a lot on science-based medicine, the toxin gambit, as we call it. He's exactly right. I do love the analogy to evil spirits.

C:Yeah, it's like miasma.

S:Yeah, it's miasma.

E:I love that word, miasma. It's so quaint. Love it. Timothy Caulfield will be, as will we, at Sci-Con 2024, this coming October, out in Las Vegas, Join him. Join us. Come on out. Join us, Bob.

S:All right, everyone. Well, thank you for joining me this week. All right. See you next week. Bob, happy birthday.

B:Thank you. Happy birthday, Bob. Thank you, peoples.

S:And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.