SGU Episode 5

Work in progress -- Av8rmike (talk) 20:16, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Introduction

S: Hello and welcome to The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. This is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. And with me, as always, is my panel of skeptics: Perry DeAngelis,

P: Hello, everyone.

S: Evan Bernstein,

E: Hi, all.

S: And Robert Novella.

B: Good evening, everyone.

S: This week we have a special guest with us: Dr. Michael Shermer. Dr. Shermer is the director of the Skeptics Society, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, he is also the author of a column in Scientific American called-- can you guess what it's called? Skeptic. He is the author of many books: The Science of Good and Evil, The Borderlands of Science, Denying History, How We Believe, and I believe, his first skeptical book, Why People Believe Weird Things; still a classic in the genre. Hello and welcome, Michael.

M: Hi, good evening.

S: Thanks for joining us this week.

M: You're welcome.

S: So i thought that we would-- since we're dealing with an expert skeptic, that we would do our Science or Fiction segment with the guest and Michael agreed to play along. So we'll start off with that segment, but first a little bit of follow-up from last week. Now if you'll remember, the first Science or Fiction segment that we did, my fake science news item was that NASA scientists had discovered an Earth-sized planet. And within a few days, NASA discovered an Earth-sized planet.

E: I remember.

S: You remember that. We joked about how prophetic that was. Well, last week, you guys remember the fake story from last week was that scientists had successfully frozen a dog in order to test medical technology. This week, reported on June 27, was that US scientists had succeeded in reviving dogs after three hours of clinical death. They brought them down to near-freezing temperature; they didn't quite freeze them, but they did bring their body temp down to a few degrees Celsius. So I'm two-for-two on predicting future news stories.

P: Don't appreciate your own power of pre-cognition, obviously.

S: Obviously not.

B: Better give Randi a call, Steve.

S: Well, I hope you'll support my application to Randi's million-dollar giveaway.

B: Good luck repeating it.

S: This week, there's an animal theme to this week. I'm going to give you three amazing animal facts and you have to tell me which one of the three is not real.

B: Ooh

S: Are you ready?

B: Yep!

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