SGU Episode 887

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SGU Episode 887
July 9th 2022
Using Polycam 3D scanning app for "Backup Ukraine"
SGU 886                      SGU 888
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
G: George Hrab
Guest
DS: Dave Stanton
Quote of the Week
Don't keep your minds so open that your brains fall out!
Walter Kotschnig, U.S. political expert
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, updates on missing Rogues

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 6^th 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: ...Evan Bernstein.

E: Hello everyne!

S: And our recurring rogue George Hrab. George welcome to the show man.

G: Gentlemen! It's been far too long. It's been, what, four weeks? Three weeks? Eight weeks? What's it been? (Transcriptionist’s note: July 6 was 14 weeks after March 27!)

E: They're all far too long as far as we're concerned.

G: Oh how sweet. Nice to see you. Hear you.

S: Yeah so we have a lot of missing rogues over the summer. Cara as we said last week is getting her surgery which actually the surgery was yesterday. She's back home already doing well. She's recovering nicely.

B: Yeah.

G: Yey!

S: Everything went well. Jay is on vacation. He was gonna try to skype in tonight but he couldn't get his audio to work on his laptop.

E: That's what I would say too if I were on vacation. Which I was last week.

S: Yes.

E: And I'm back.

S: He'll be back next week. Cara will be back in three weeks. So we're gonna have some guest rogues over the next few weeks starting with George.

G: I will do my durndust to live up to the standard that you have all set. Especially jay. Jay and Cara. Doing double. Double duty here. Awesome.

E: That's right you have to know everything about what psychology and meatballs George. So you have to fill in those gaps. Oh and teeth.

G: I'm halfway there.

E: Something about teeth as well.

G: Okay.

Recording Audiobooks (1:43)

S: So yesterday was my first day in the studio recording the audiobook version of the Skeptic's Guide to the Future.

B: How'd it go? How'd it go?

S: Good. You have to get back in the groove. It took me a half hour or so to like find my mojo again.

B: Your voice.

S: Yeah. It's different. It's different than doing a podcast. It's different than anything else. You're you have to read prose and especially a non-fiction book in an interesting engaging way. You know what I mean? It's like you're reading words but you have to put some pizzazz into it.

E: Yeah give it life.

G: Not like for the show where it's just wrote and just going by just whatever. This has to be interesting.

E: Or you have to sound like Morgan Freeman. Either one works.

S: It's just different. Like role playing and improv is different than acting. Tight this is closer to acting because the words are scripted but you have to read it as if you were having a conversation with a listener. And the challenge is that like I don't have the book memorized. It's a whole book. So I'm just sort of trying to infer what the sentence is as I read it and sometimes I get it wrong. I miss guess where the sentence is heading. You know what I mean?

E: Right.

S: And then I just have to--it's not that big a deal you have to stop and read it again.

E: Yeah especially on the lengthier one. On the lengthier sentences that could be challenging.

G: What is the setup like? What is the setup like? Do you have I mean is it on sheets of paper? Do you have a book actually you're reading out of? Like what is it? How is it laid out?

S: It's an iPad. It's all in─

G: Oh iPad okay.

S: ─on an iPad and I'm just scrolling through as I read. So sometimes one of the other tricky things is like when there's a page break like in the middle of a sentence. But that's why I just it's not it's not that hard. I mean you get used to it. And also the pacing is very specific. And I also have a producer. There's somebody from the publisher who's there. So there's the technical guy-producer and then there's the the publisher who is sometimes he'll just stop me and say slow it down a little bit or read that sentence again and emphasize this word. So he'll coach me every now and then. It's not a lot. It doesn't happen that much but just every now and then he'll like he just wants me to nail something that I didn't quite nail.

G: Fewer f-bombs Steve. If you could just fewer f-bombs please. It that's possible.

S: Whatever's on the page. If it's on the page I gotta say it.

G: They're recording the whole time or do they stop and start. Like do you if you make a mistake do you think─

S: They're recording all the time.

G: ─do they mark it? So it's just rolling.

S It's like last night I recorded five chapters and I think there were five files.

B: Damn.

G: Wow.

S: It's like one file per chapter. So just it's not one huge file. So they sometimes they'll even like go back so you know what let's go back and do this paragraph again because I like the way you're sounding now and whatever. Like they're just and it's their job to edit everything. Then occasionally we have to stop to like look up how to pronounce a word. The producer reads ahead and is supposed to set that all up for me. But we got beyond the point where he had prepared.

E: Ahead of the curve, yeah.

S: So there were we got to some Chinese names and stuff like that are french names and they wanted to make sure I was pronouncing it exactly correct.

G: Navala? Is it Navala?

S: So it's its own skill set and I haven't done it for three years but it's like you get right back into it. It's it was fine.

G: How long will it take? Top to bottom. How long is it gonna take? Weeks or days or what?

S: Yeah it's all month. It's basically July but I'm only doing two three days a week for four weeks but I'm hoping to finish early. Last time I finished a couple days early so my pace is a little bit ahead of like the average pace.

E: Good.

B: Steve do you wear glasses or do you increase the size of the font.

S: Both. (laughter) I have to wear my reading glasses.

G: Eye patch.

B: Really? Didn't expect that.

Robot Narrators (5:52)

S: So the producer told me an interesting story though while we were on break. He said that he was given two audiobooks to rate just to say just tell us how the narrator is. One male one female. And he's listening to it and it was it was okay but he said but there's a couple of things that were odd about it. One was that the person mispronounced occasionally like mispronounced easy words. Like why would anyone mispronounce that word.

B: Right.

E: Not regional dialect kind of thing? Just like where Cara has you know Cara and I we all joke about that she's from Texas we're from the northeast so we sometimes run into that in which the same word we will pronounce differently.

S: She says umbrella.

E: Exactly.

S: But it wasn't that. It was just like they were straight up mispronounced some basic words. And then the other thing was that it just it's a little flat. Like there's it's just very perfectly consistent. And then he realized it's a computer. This is AI reading it.

G: Oh wow.

S: And then he realized yeah there's like no breaths. There's no breathing.

E: Huh. Interesting.

S: So he gave it a thumbs down he said this is not ready for prime time.

B: Really?

E: They need really oh so they need they need a algorithm that inserts a breathing sort of what effect.

S: Well that's what we were talking about is chatting with him about it─

B: Interesting.

S: ─they'll get it. This is like CG was 10 years ago where it was too perfect and you could tell that it was CG was kind of dead and flat. So they'll add in all the nuance and the character and the breathing and whatever it takes to get it to sound fully human.

B: Oh my god.

G: Well TikTok and Instagram have these things that as you post it reads it for you and you can kind of choose the voice. And they're not like the old Macintosh voices they're like characters so there's there's like this guy he like says ah look this ball was gonna go inside the house but it hit the car. Like there's that guy that's a it's a and I thought initially like oh this guy does a lot of voice-over but no it's a it's a program. And then there's like the woman that does it or whatever. And they do pronounce certain words that you would. It's weird like why it must be context like yeah whatever you know whether it's whatever the word may be. Like life or live or live and live. It'll mess up sometimes. That's the way you live.

E: I could see it having difficulty with proper names as well. In which my name Bernstein or Bernstein. Which way is the AI going to pronounce that. And some people do one way and some people do the other. There's no right answer.

B: Steve was that guy being tested like a surprise like see if he notices or did he know he was a computer.

S: No he wasn't told anything and he─

B: He figured it out.

S: ─he figured it out.

E: Oh he figured.

B: Good for him. Not he'll be looking for it.

E: They tried to trick him he broke through the matrix. Good for him.

S: But though the conversation was like he's like this is going to collapse the industry because if you really get this over the line where it's good enough.

E: So long human voices.

S: Yeah but he said but you know the thing is─

B: I don't know man.

S: ─yeah it's the question is how long is that gonna it'll happen the only question is how long to get to that point.

B: Can't deny that.

S: There'll be this zone where it's good enough but it's not as good as a professional voice actor. Bob you listen to a lot of books on tape.

B: Yeah there's a handful of guys that are just they're just magical. It's so reuter treats. I mean all of Game of Thrones books and a couple others. Even Tim Curry you know famous actor Tim Curry is a master narrator. Oh my god a master. And I just it's gonna take longer to reach that upper echelon. The last three percent of the masters. But I can't of course I can't deny that they'll get there but and it'll be kind of sad especially if you're if that's your job because I mean there's a people that they just do lots of books.

G: But you you'll get to choose.

B: I didn't see that coming.

G: You'll get to choose what actor you want to read your book because then they're gonna─

B: That's true.

G: ─already. I mean Roger Ebert was the famous example when Roger Ebert got cancer and lost his like whole lower jaw and he couldn't talk for the last five or ten years of his life. They took all the old episodes of at the movies and they synthesized all that and they figured out and they kind of made this Roger Ebert voice. So he had a pod I don't know if it was a podcast or something some kind of broadcast that he was doing where he would write articles and then his Roger Ebert voice computer would read it. And it wasn't great but it was, and this is this is 10 years ago whatever, it was so you'll eventually get to the point where you can have your Lord of the Rings and you want to have Bruce Willis read it? Okay. Or you wanna have Emma Thompson read it? Okay. Like you'll be able to choose. That's bound to happen. That's like totally bound. It's the same way in films you'll have that too you'll have oh you want to see a version of Star Wars where Richard Dreyfuss plays Han Solo? Okay we can do that. Here you go.

E: That's interesting it brings up a whole other subject about the intellectual rights for─

G: Absolutely.

E: ─a person's voice. Is someone allowed to make an artificial version of my voice without my permission without me getting royalties or something like that.

G: Or a sound alike. What's that I mean Darth Vader all the time I think in a lot of the cartoon Star Wars things it's not James Earl Jones. He did the Kenobi series but they get a voice alike and he's like does he should he get paid for that because they're making them sound like him even though he's not doing it but it's his.

S: It was an impersonation I don't think you get paid.

B: Right.

G: I don't know was than an intellectual property?

B: It's a character. It's not really.

G: But it raises issues versus a computer doing it. It's a whole.

B: Yeah and you know what else is tricky? Doing someone's voice is one thing but doing someone's voice doing something else I think is is different. Like some narrators they've got a guy voice. They've got various guy voices and they've got one or two like feminine voices for women and they're very distinctive. Very distinctive. And some of them are like I like the way that they're done and you can't necessarily figure that out. You just got to hear it first and then duplicate it. You can't just be like well this is how he would speak in falsetto. Not necessarily. So those are the top characters.

S: But Bob you're thinking it's very steampunk. Why would you do that when you could just have a a female actresses voice do the female characters. You basically cast it. You have a different voice for each character─

B: But that's no no.

S: ─and a different voice for the narrator.

B: That's a different beast. That's a different beast. When you narrate when one narrator is reading a book in all the different voices that's one thing. But then having a cast often with with sound effects and stuff to in my mind that's a different beast.

S: Yeah but you don't have that.

B: That's fine and that's fine but if you if I wanna if I'm getting a book that that I want Arnold Schwarzenegger to read I don't want to have somebody else coming in. I mean I want Arnie. I don't want anybody else.

S: You could choose.

B: I mean it's just different.

G: I was the night before Christmas.

B: And that goes back to my point. How do you intuit how do you determine yeah how he's gonna talk. That's all I'm saying. That it's an interesting problem that might not be solvable really unless you actually hear the person doing it and then say oh that's how he does it.

E: You want to take it another layer further? Books that are published in various languages you're gonna need you obviously need different readers who are fluent in those languages. So a book if it's published in 10 languages and you're going to have an audiobook you got to have 10 potentially 10 different people read it but not with AI. AI that solves that problem. Boom.

G: Right. You have Arnold Schwarzenegger in Cantonese reading the whatever. Wow.

B: I mentally just answered my own question because I'm thinking how could they do it? They can do it what you got to do is you'd have to mimic you'd have to have like an a digital analog of the the entire voice creation apparatus from your throat to your mouth to your tongue. If you had that then you could say this is how he would speak in falsetto because this is the but the biological apparatus that would make that noise. And you would get much closer.

E: Isn't that how they determined how certain animals that are extinct made certain noises─

B: Yeah exactly. Very similar.

E: ─they had. They were able to recreate what they feel is close if as close as they can get to noises that they made.

B: At least through the the hard bony surfaces anyway.

G: I'm a velociraptor. My goodness. That's what they sounded like. Who knew? Who knew?

Special Segment: The Fate of Fireworks (15:03)

S: George you wanted to talk about just as a like opening banter kind of thing the 4^th of July and the fate of the whole culture of fireworks. Is that gonna change given other changes in society. What were you thinking.

G: Yeah I don't know it's been the 4^th and I've always enjoyed fireworks. I've always kind of liked them. Because I was never really affected by the sound. I was never even as a kid I enjoyed it, I enjoyed the bigness of it. There's a certain aspect of it that gets old kind of quick. Like once you've seen the first six explosions the next 20 minutes it's you kind of know where it's going. It's kind of like okay it's cool.

S: It's still pretty though.

G: It's still pretty. Can be cool and interesting but I was out for a walk on the afternoon of the 4^th of July and some fireworks went off. Subsequently I realized it was a kid had set off a couple fireworks in this park where I was walking. But there was this second or two─

B: Oh yeah.

S: ─where this sort of even though I know it's the 4^th of July but this instinctual thing of like what it means to be an American today kicked in. And I thought like do what I need to and this is a split second but do I need to run? Do we need to cover? Do I need to like what's going on. What's the thing like where is this coming from. And it just occurred to me like wow that's kind of the mindset we're in now and then I went to the fireworks display that night and it just seemed kind of it just seemed kind of strange and invasive. It just seemed so for a local town that puts on a fireworks display. It's incredibly loud. There are all the animals freak out. I know some of you that have dogs. How are you how are your dogs with fireworks?

E: Terrible.

G: It's tough, right?

E: Terrible. I'm comforting my animals all the week leading up to the 4^th of July and this week after because nobody limits themselves to the July 4^th. It's a wind down. So it's two weeks of hell for my animals.

G: Yeah so there's that and then there's like people that maybe might have some kind of like I always thought the last thing that a veteran wants to necessarily hear is like loud explosions in the night.

E: Yeah there's that scene from Born on the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise at the parade and the fireworks are going up and he's having a reaction because he just got back from war.

G: Of course. PTSD.

E: I don't think these are recent sort of phenomenon or shifting. I think it's been happening actually George for some time slowly. But maybe it's more exacerbated lately with obviously with things going on but yeah I've over the years I've drifted definitely into that direction and away from the pageantry and celebration of it all. Rather to more of the annoying aspects frankly of what the fireworks are and have to offer and kind of the downsides to them.

G: And I wonder now with the advancement in drones like these drone shows that they put on that are really cool that you can spell things out and you can have images and whatever. And I was wondering about the cost sort of comparison. And for now the drone shows are quite expensive. I was looking up and there was there was one company that if you want the 200 drones that's a hundred thousand dollars for a half hour show. If you want 500 it's like 200 000. It's crazy crazy money. I'm sure that'll go down in time.

B: That's nuts.

G: But then I was looking at at the the spent money spent on fireworks in the US and most like town shows it's like a thousand bucks a minute basically. So it's like 20 grand for like a 20-minute show. Maybe like half of that or whatever. But this was interesting. I came across this. So in 2015 Americans bought 260 million pounds of fireworks. And then in 2020 during the pandemic that jumped all the way up to 385 million pounds. And then in 2021 it went even higher with 416 million pounds. So during the pandemic sales almost doubled of personal use fireworks. So if it feels like more fireworks are going off during the during the year and throughout the time. They absolutely are. Twice as much. And these are not even like show fireworks. These are personal use fireworks. And I'm just like wondering like why? Is this smart? Do we need to encourage maybe some like I'm wondering if there will be a watershed moment where like the Macy's Day. Not Macy's day. Macy's fourth of July thing that happens in New York City. Which by the way is a six million dollar show. Like will they go park drone and then full drone and then that'll kind of set up a thing. I just was wondering what you guys think of all of it.

S: I don't think it's going anywhere.

E: They're not going away.

S: The culture of fireworks.

E: Too cultural, right?

S: Too embedded too well established.

G: It's so old.

S: It's so old as an industry behind it. I mean I think yeah there will be times like oh there was actually people killed at a fourth of July parade in Chicago that it there's a new layer to it but I don't think that that's gonna make it go away. But it is interesting though about the the drone show instead. I think if there's a cheaper substitute. We could spend eight million dollars on one show or we could spend half a million dollars on drones that we could show a million times. Indefinitely. Or whatever. I don't know what the exact numbers are but something like that. That may happen. So we it may there may be a shift. I don't think it would entirely go away.

G: Yeah. I don't know. There's that myth of the one of the first Chinese like a Chinese monk or alchemist or something. This guy named Li Tan that is sort of recognized as being the first guy about a thousand AD. He stuffed bamboo with salt peter and and lit it and it exploded and threw some sparks and he thought oh that's kind of entertaining, that's interesting. And so he showed it to the emperor. And the emperor was like oh that's that's fun, that's neat. Could this be used for a weapon? And the legend is that Li Tan said if this was ever used as a weapon it would be the end of the world.

E: Steve, didn't we have a Science or Fiction about the earliest firearms recently? [1]

S: Yeah. We did.

E: Was that the reference you had or was it a different one?

S: No. It was different. It was this was like the stick you put in the ground and you would have the explosion. It's like buckshot.

E: Right where Kirk shoots the Gorn.

S: Yeah right it was exactly that. It was exactly what Kirk used to shoot the Gorn. That was the first like primitive firearm. But it does go back that far. It goes back a lot farther than you think. Most technological items do.

G: Yeah even just general gunpowder sort of that burning of gunpowder which again wasn't used. No one thought to weaponize it until much later and it was I just think it's so interesting that the initial thing was just for entertainment. And even then they realized the dangerous potential of like of this explosive power. So yeah I don't know it just got me thinking of like that there are so many invasive elements to it and I just was curious if if towns or cities or it's one thing if you're at a rock and roll show or at a football game or something. But a small local park that is setting off explosions in the middle of the middle of the night it just seems so weird like what are we doing? Plus the fact that you're celebrating things that dealt with explosions. You know what I mean? Like okay we had this war for independence so we're going to celebrate it with explosions or like in England when they do the Guy Fawkes day. Yeah we're gonna celebrate the fact that the thing didn't blow up by blowing stuff up. It's like okay I guess. It's weird.

E: Yeah when they destroyed the Death Star over Endor and there were fireworks.

G: There you go.

E: That was that was a long time ago.

G: Far far away yeah.

News Items

Universal Coronavirus Vaccine (23:19)

• Possible Universal Coronavirus Vaccine

S: All right guys I'm gonna start out the news items with an interesting one as we like to say. Research looking at the possibility, a new vaccine technology that might get us to a universal coronavirus vaccine.

B: Oh boy. (George laughs)

S: Well listen to this though. I mean we've heard the promise of universal this vaccine of that vaccine for a long time. It's tough. It's you know the "holy grail" of vaccine science. Like the flu vaccine is the one where we hear about it the most. Why is it so hard to develop a universal flu vaccine. We have a vaccine for each variant. And you have that's why you have to get your booster every year and they cover three or four variants they've got the trivalent and the quadravalent vaccines but you can't just make one that covers all flu viruses. The reason is that these viruses are clever little bastards.

E: Right. Little buggers change.

S: They hide the important bits and they cover them with variable bits that change. So that you to it specifically to evade the immune system.

E: It's like an enigma code almost.

S: Right so it's hard to get to the the part of the virus that doesn't change because it's necessary to its function. All right so let's talk about coronavirus. Coronavirus is not necessarily as tricky as the flu virus. The corona viruses that family of viruses is so called because of the crown of spike proteins around the outside. And the spike proteins are the business end of the the virus outer coat. Those are the proteins that give it its affinity for specific human cells. Allow it to invade cells and undergo its replication life cycle. So the spike proteins are critical to its infectivity and to the symptoms that it causes and to its deadliness etc. And all the vaccines that we have so far they target one or more of the spike proteins. Which makes sense. Again there's parts of the proteins that can that change fairly rapidly creating new variants. Sometimes it does change the actual infectivity or deadliness of the virus itself because it's not it's it is part of the actual functionality of the virus. It's not just about the variance alter functionality. It's not just about evading the immune system. But the the trick is being able to target spike proteins that are universal to even just all of the covid variants would be nice. But the the virus is the SARS-CoV-2. Covid is the disease. The virus that causes COVID-19 is SARS-CoV-2 which is one species of the coronavirus family. The other ones that are that caused big outbreaks of human infection was the SARS-CoV the first one which caused SARS epidemic and then MERS which caused the MERS epidemic. So there's SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. Those are the three big ones now that they spill over coronaviruses from animal to human populations. And they have different spike proteins. They're different enough that a immunity to one would not necessarily convey immunity to the another and again even just over the last two years of this of the COVID pandemic we have the delta variant and now the omicron variant and they're different enough that they the vaccines are less effective against them. Immunity is less effective against them. You need to get really high titers. They don't completely evade immunity but you need much higher titers to to maintain activity and so that's why we needed to get the boosters. And now the vaccine manufacturers are trying to make new vaccines against the newer variants. Like an omicron specific that booster. So that right to retarget like reacquire the target and maintain immunity.

B: And they're all SARS-CoV-2, right? What would warrant a CoV-3?

S: Yeah it's a fuzzy line. They have to be different enough that we would say okay this warrants a new designation rather than just a variant. And there's also like there's omicron BA.4 and omicron BA.5. They didn't get their own Greek later letter they're just sub variants of omicron. It's all fuzzy like I don't know how they started like where to draw the line. It's like with software. When is it 1.1 and when is it 2.0. I don't know.

B: Gotcha.

S: So but what if we could design one vaccine that would target all of the variants of SARS-CoV-2? And not only that what if it could also target MERS and SARS and even potentially other coronaviruses that don't even exist yet as a human infection that haven't spilled over yet into the human population and we might in the future.

B: Yeah. And we could deliver them in our flying cars.

G: Yeah.

B: And jetpacks.

S: So this is what the researchers did. This is the new bit now right the new study. This is Pamela Jerkman from Caltech and her team created a nanoparticle Bob.

B: Uuu. Nano! Nano!

S: They called a cage protein. Not the cage protein is a platform and essentially you can attach other proteins to it. You can attach 60 different proteins to this one cage protein nanoparticle. So what they did was they made three vaccines. One contains just the naked cage protein, that's a control. One contains 60 particles all from the SARS-CoV-2. That's they call that homotypic because it's all the same virus the SARS-CoV-2. Then they created one from eight different coronaviruses. Now this is a subset of the coronaviruses that are the beta coronaviruses. Those are the ones that infect humans. The beta coronaviruses. So they took 60 proteins from eight different beta coronaviruses and not just spike proteins but the receptor binding domains of those spike proteins. The RBDs, the receptor binding domains. Again that's the business then. That's the important bit. So then it's that's the third one. So they have the what they're calling mosaic eight. So there's the just the naked cage protein control, there's the homotypic just SARS-CoV-2 one and then there's the mosaic eight from eight different beta coronaviruses. But specifically though while it's eight different coronaviruses they did not include any receptor binding domains from SARS-CoV. From the first SARS virus. For a reason that'll become obvious in a second. They then injected them into mice. These are mice that have been genetically altered to have human immune systems kind of. So in other words they have the same receptors that humans do and so that these coronaviruses would infect them. And also the mice if they get infected they die. So it's really easy to tell if they got infected or not. So against the naked cage protein all the mice who were challenged with the SARS-CoV-2 they all died. Against they said they challenged them with with SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1. SARS-CoV, the first one. Both killed all the mice in the the control group. In the SARS-CoV-2 homotypic vaccine the mice survived when challenged with SARS-CoV-2 but died when challenged with SARS-CoV-2. The first one, right? Which makes sense, right?

E: What works against one doesn't work it's another.

S: Yeah so the homotypic one that's just got the SARS-CoV-2 protected only from SARS-CoV-2. But the mosaic eight the mice that were vaccinated with the mosaic eight so the the cage protein with 60 receptor binding domains from eight different coronaviruses but not the SARS-CoV virus. Remember that. So they survived challenges from both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV. So that's important. So they survived a challenge with a coronavirus that they were not vaccinated against.

E: Right the CoV.

S: Yeah so the other eight sort of protected them against the SARS-CoV. Does that make sense?

E: Did they figure out why that was the case?

S: Well they think that there's you're the it's resulting in antibodies that are cross-reactive against so many different parts of the receptor binding domains that every coronavirus has to have some of them. So every coronavirus will get targeted enough even ones that are novel that are not part of the mosaic eight will also get targeted and provide effective immunity. So that's pretty cool.

E: To cast a wider net basically.

S: Absolutely. It's casting such a wide net it could theoretically protect against a future spillover event of another coronavirus. Theoretically. So they did follow-up research looking testing the effectiveness because so this is kind of like genetically modified mice. So it's kind of a weird target and it may not translate to how humans would respond. So they tested it in non-human primates and they found the same thing. That it did replicate so that the the mosaic eight was protective against SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 in non-human primates. So that's where the research is. So the the next step is to do a phase one human trial now that we have the animal data. Remember phase one studies are mainly about safety and pharmacology and stuff. We just wanna make sure that they're not gonna shut down the liver or how it how much of a dosing like just measuring antibodies. It's not really about measuring clinical effectiveness it's just like how it works and how safe is it.

E: How were they able to figure out the original cage protein though? That this would happen?

S: They designed it. They designed a protein that the nanoparticle protein that would bind to these spike proteins.

G: Are they physically manipulating that nanoparticle or is this all chemically just done in terms of modifying it?

S: Yeah that's a good question. I didn't get that deep. I didn't really go into that or if they did it was so technical I just glossed over it.

G: It's just magic man. It's absolute magic.

S: That would be it's an interesting question. I'd like to do some further research I might have to talk to somebody who─

E: Pamela should come on the show.

S: ─understands the technical aspect of how you create it. Is it just chemical or is it how do they build that cage protein.

B: I'd say it's purely chemical at this point but be happy to be wrong.

S: But think about it. This is a platform. This is a new vaccine technology. This is like going to mRNA vaccines. It's not just a new vaccine it's a whole new─

E: A whole new weapon.

S: ─vaccine technology yeah.

E: New tool in the toolkit. Great.

S: Maybe we will develop a universal flu vaccine from this. I mean you get basically 60 targets in one vaccine. That could be 60, I don't know. Could that give you specificity against 60 different flu various variants. I mean that's like 60 years worth of vaccine flu vaccines. I don't know.

B: Could there be too much variation that you might then start attacking something you never imagined that your immune system would build antibodies for?

S: Well that's always the risk of vaccines. Vaccines are designed to stimulate the immune system. To provoke an immune response. And there are diseases that occur after an infection. The so-called post-infectious syndrome like Guillain–Barré is the classic one. So Guillain–Barré there are different types but the main type of Guillain–Barré you get infected with the virus. There are proteins on that virus that look a little bit like the proteins on your nerves. Your immune system─

E: Oh it attacks the nerves.

S: ─gets confused. So there's a there's the initial phase of the infection. Remember antibodies are not black and white. It's not like they have a 100% affinity for their target or 0% affinity. The way your immune system works is that just blankets it just pre makes antibodies against everything.

E: Almost like chemotherapy except for cancer.

S: Yeah except for self. It's like all right don't make antibodies against self. But everything else to make antibodies. The self ones get selected out. And so you don't attack your own body but that's where autoimmune diseases are when that process fails. But anyway it and then when you have an infection or some new thing invading your body chances are some antibodies are going to be 20% affinity for it or 30% affinity for it. And then those cells that make those antibodies are stimulated to make even more antibodies with with like now there's variations on that theme. And some of those will be 50 or 60% affinity. And then you may so they literally evolve we evolve antibodies during the infection to get more and more affinity for the target. That's why vaccines work. Vaccines are doing all of that up front so that you have the cells ready to go. You don't have to spend days and weeks evolving the specific antibodies for the infection while it's killing you. You immediately go to an optimal antibody response. But sometimes what if the antibodies that have 80-90-100% affinity for the virus have 20 affinity for your nerve proteins? Then those get stimulated and you have this secondary response six weeks later or whatever. Like four to six weeks later against your nerves. That's Guillain–Barré. That's exactly what that is. It's this secondary immune response because there was some crossover affinity. So that's always the risk. A vaccine could do the same thing. You're making you're targeting proteins that may unfortunately have some crossover affinity for something in your body. But that's why they get tested. That's why we test the vaccine to make sure that that doesn't happen. But it's always gonna, there's always gonna be the million-to-one side effects that happen with vaccines. There's no way around that. And that's about the level of like the serious side effects. It's about one in a million.

B: Screw that risk! [sarcasm]

S: Statistically yeah the the risk is extremely small. But it's never going to be zero. And that's part of the reason why. So listen hey imagine if we can in two years or three years, I don't know how they're going to fast track this, I mean hopefully they will could get a one booster one vaccine that will cover every possible variant of SARS-CoV-2 and also give pretty good coverage of any beta coronavirus even if we have another pandemic 10 years from now-you're covered. Know the other issue is how long will the antibodies last but even if it's if your antibodies have faded the vaccine's ready to go for any infection. We just we don't have to make a new vaccine. This vaccine will cover it. And again of course like if the technology works for flu vaccines imagine any one flu vaccine and covers every variant? That's the big question mark with flu vaccines from year to year is how close is our guess of which variants are going to be circulating.

B: Sometimes their guess sucks.

S: Sometimes the guess sucks. Sometimes you only get 20-30% effectiveness because the guess was off but if you had a universal flu vaccine you wouldn't wouldn't be an issue we'd have really really good coverage.

G: Do you think the pushback would be the same on on a flu vaccine as it was with COVID?

S: Yeah.

G: Like that they would be identical.

S: Totally.

G: Not because the flu is more of a yeah but just even would it be the same I guess the same people would have the same problems with it, right?

B: Plus it's a new technology.

S: I mean there's the core--yes. Will it become political like COVID did? Hopefully not. I mean hopefully that was a one-off because of─

G: That's what I'm wondering about.

S: ─the politics of it but who knows. We'll have to see. I wrote that's what I wrote like I concluded my article when I wrote about it on science-based medicine that fortunately we have the infrastructure of scientific research to combat these pandemics which are probably going to be increasing in frequency going into the future. But we may lack the political and social infrastructure to adequately deal with these pandemics. So we have the science. We have the technology but we're just too dumb to implement it as a society unfortunately. But still it's good to have the science. And it's still progressing. So hopefully this will all work out and hopefully it won't take too long. This is pretty encouraging technology.

E: It's a neat tool.

G: Yeah.

S: Yeah. Absolutely.

Preserving Ukraine's Landmarks (40:44)

• UNESCO project aims to digitally preserve Ukraine landmarks facing damage by war

Detecting Particles with Gravitational Waves (52:01)

• Detecting new particles around black holes with gravitational waves

Who Owns the Moon? (1:00:37)

• China rejects NASA accusation it will take over the moon

S: ... We've talked about this before, ^{[link needed]} but this is now rearing up again.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Question #1: What is a Skeptic? (1:09:54)

A skeptic is defined as someone who questions "factual" evidence and maintains a "doubting" attitude. This is contrary to what I believe your show is about, in terms of convincing people that their belief in pseudo-science is invalid. My question is, what is the best way to overcome the conventional attitude associated with the word skeptic when trying to make a valid argument with someone who questions the foundation upon which the argument is built? Questioning the questioner?

– Nicholas O'Meara, Australia

Interview with Dave Stanton (1:14:32)

Dave Stanton, paleogeneticist and Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London

• Ice Age wolf genomes home in on dog origins
  
• Ancient wolf DNA is being used to sniff out where our love story with dogs began

Science or Fiction (1:33:16)

Theme: Weird Science Item #1: Shortly after Alfred Wegner proposed his theory of continental drift in 1912, English geologist, Henry Peckingham, proposed that the primary mechanism was the prevailing wind and ocean currents pushing the continents, a theory that enjoyed substantial, although minority, support into the 1930s. Item #2: Dr. Henry Cotton became the famous superintendent of the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital from 1907 to 1933, during which time he and his assistants removed 11,000 teeth and performed 645 surgeries to remove organs in the belief this would cure mental illness. Item #3: In 1894 Hanns Hörbiger developed his World Ice Doctrine, the notion that ice is the fundamental building block of the universe, a theory that remained popular until 1945, and was even officially adopted by Hitler and his government.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Continents are pushed
Science	Removing teeth & organs
Science	World ice doctrine

Host	Result
Steve	swept

Rogue	Guess
Bob	Continents are pushed
George	Continents are pushed
Evan	Continents are pushed

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:54:32)

Don't keep your minds so open that your brains fall out!
– Walter Kotschnig (1901-1985), American political expert, from a speech given on November 8, 1939

Signoff/Announcements ()

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' 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@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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Today I Learned

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References

Vocabulary