SGU Episode 987

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SGU Episode 987
June 8th 2024
On the far side of the Moon, the Chang'e-6 lander deployed a small roving vehicle to take a selfie. Credit: CNSA
SGU 986                      SGU 988
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
George Box, British statistician
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Cara's dog's ailment

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, June 5^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone.

S: How's everyone doing?

B: Good, good, good.

E: Okay.

C: It's been a week.

E: Oh, you had a week.

C: I had a week.

B: What's going on Cara?

E: Oh, no.

C: So I have a little bit of news, but it's got a happy-ish ending. So on Thursday, after I saw my last patient, I was upstairs writing my progress notes like you do, and I heard downstairs like a thump. And I ran downstairs to see what it was. And my dog had these like really intense neurological symptoms. Like he was standing, which was a good sign, but little Killer's eyes were showing like really intense nystagmus, which means they were kind of darting right to left, right to left, right to left in this really stereotyped way. And I called to him, and he didn't respond to me. And I kind of came closer, and he just didn't seem to like see or hear me. So I scooped him up, ran to the emergency vet in my slippers, because I was working from home. So I'm like business on top and like pyjamas on bottom. So I ran to the vet in my slippers. I didn't even grab my wallet. I was like driving without my driver's license. I just knew something was wrong. And at first I was like, oh, buddy, you're having a seizure. But he didn't pee or poop himself. And he was semi-oriented to me in the car because he was licking my hand. He was also weirdly calm. He wasn't whining. He wasn't... He didn't seem upset. Took him to the vet, ran a bunch of tests. Is this toxicity? Is there something wrong with his livers, kidneys? Remember he's 14. Is did he ingest something he shouldn't have ingested? Of course, the vet came back and was like, it's clearly neurological. We're not really sure what it is at this point. All we can really do is monitor. But they also don't have a neurologist on staff at my regular emergency vet. So I found a vet's office that has... Because did you know veterinarians also have specialities? So I found a vet's office that has neurology capabilities. Went there. So basically, Killer had this acute vestibular syndrome. And that can be brought on by a bunch of different things. But we ruled most everything out. So at this point, we think either he had a stroke, probably in his cerebellum, or that it's fully idiopathic, which can happen. The only way to know is to get an MRI. Do you guys want to know how much an MRI for a dog costs?

S: $1,500.

E: I can guess.

C: That was my guess. That was my guess.

E: Was it $3,000?

C: I was like, okay, between $1,000 and $2,000, $6,000 to $8,000.

S: That's crazy.

B: What? Come on.

C: Like a people MRI.

S: But that's more than a human MRI.

C: Yeah, because they also have to anaesthetize the dog and read it. And the truth is, it wouldn't really guide treatment at this point. So basically, they gave me...

S: But they offer it. The thing that blows me away is that they offer it.

C: Well, she was really... Actually, this woman, I will say, was great, because I asked for it. I said, if he's having a stroke, I want to see it. Can we get imaging? And she was like, hold your horses. Get ready for sticker shock. And she was like, that is the gold standard. But we don't have to do the gold standard yet. She was like, let's wait and see for a few days. If his symptoms start to resolve, we know he doesn't have a tumor that's causing this. It's either a focal stroke or it's idiopathic. Either way, we don't change anything with how we treat them. So really, you don't have to think about the MRI unless he doesn't get any better over the weekend.

S: So Cara, to make you feel a little bit better, my dog had the exact same thing, had a miniature long-haired dachshund who had a sudden onset of severe nystagmus, couldn't walk. You could see the eyes moving back and forth.

C: Super dizzy?

S: Same thing. He was younger, though. He wasn't 14. He was probably like six or seven. And so we brought him to the vet, and they said, well, either he has something horrible going on in his brain, or it's a virus.

C: Or did he have a virus?

S: Well, so again, given his age, it's probably not a stroke. These dogs, the purebreds are not that healthy, to be honest with you. So it could be a tumor. So again, we were offered the neurology consultation. I think we actually did get the neurology vet to chime in, but we didn't do any workup because I'm not spending thousands of dollars for things that are really... Because I always like, what are we going to do if we find something?

C: Exactly. Yeah. It's an important question to ask yourself. Does it change what you do moving forward?

S: So we just did the comfort care and wait and see, and he got better.

C: Yeah, like the anti-nausea medication or the motion sickness medication. So I have a question for you. Did all the symptoms resolve? Did anything stick around?

S: No, he pretty much got better 100%.

C: Okay. So what I was told by this vet, and it could be because it's age-related, so it's more likely that it's a stroke, is that the nystagmus, if it's not a tumor, right, the nystagmus should go away. The dizziness should start to go away after a little while, but the head tilt will probably be permanent. And so far, so that was Thursday, we're recording this the following Wednesday, it's been almost a week, his nystagmus has completely gone away, but he's still, I don't trust him to walk down the stairs, he's still stumbling a lot. He can go up the stairs now, so I'm really proud of him that he's made that gain. He thinks he has more capability than he has, so he will try to jump on and off the couch, and I cannot let him do that because he's so dizzy. He'll still every so often shake his head like dogs do, and every time he shakes his head, he falls over because it's vestibular. But the head tilt is still there, and I don't think that's going to go away. So you know how when you like make a noise and a dog cocks his head to the side to listen? That's how he looks all the time.

S: Yeah, he's permanently in that.

B: He's always curious.

C: And so he's basically like a dog whose alignment is off, so he leans to the left when he walks, and if he tries to like scuttle too fast or if he gets thrown off balance, he falls over to the left. So it's not a left-side weakness issue, it's a dizziness issue, it's a vestibular issue. His world is tilted, and he's trying to accommodate to that.

E: Yeah, compensate.

B: Can you put training wheels on him?

C: I know, right? Like I'm trying to think of all the different like hacks that I can use.

J: With his head tilt, he's the ultimate skeptic dog.

C: He so is, yes. He's always thinking very sceptically.

E: Skeptic dog says.

C: Yeah, and so I mean, I'm really proud of his progress, because the day that it happened, when I took him home that night, he couldn't take more than one step. One step and he'd fall over. And now he is able to walk all the way up the stairs by himself. He's able to walk freely around the house. I just have to keep a baby gate at the bottom, like so that he can't go down the stairs. That's sort of my rule with him right now, because I'm trying to let him be a little bit more independent. But it's hard. I have to watch him like a hawk because he'll hurt himself.

S: Yeah.

J: Yeah. I'm sorry, Cara. That's rough, man.

C: It was terrifying when it happened. I will let you know that that vet definitely saw me cry and did the like, here is a box of tissues move. But I'm so glad to see that whether it was a focal kind of stroke or whether it's completely idiopathic and we don't know what brought it on, which can happen in old dogs. At least I know it's not something hopefully ongoing because he did resolve, he resolved most of those.

S: There's some improvement.

C: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

B: You guys remember Bocci?

J: Yep.

B: He's an American Eskimo. Lived to be 18.

C: What?

B: Oh, yeah. He was almost 18. He like when he was like 15 or 16, he would have, I think I figured out that he was having these seizures where he would bark like crazy, bark like crazy. And then he would have the energy of a puppy for like an hour. And I figured out that he was, based on some research, that he was probably having a seizure, probably was blind for a little while while this was happening. And that freaked him out, probably causing the barking. I'm not sure why he would have the energy. So I would actually go downstairs like two in the morning, put him on a leash and walk him around the house for about 45 minutes because he had to move. Walk him around the house, make sure he didn't hit anything or whatever. Walk him until he exhausted himself, then he go to sleep. Like what the hell? So weird. But I find...

C: I have to admit, I'm really grateful that Killer has had such a long and healthy life. He turned 14 last month. He's a really, really mixed breed dog. You guys have seen him. He's... I don't even know what he is. I had him DNA tested once and I don't even buy it. It was like too many things. And I think that that has contributed. You know, we've gone his whole life without any... He never would get like chronic infections. He's never broken a bone. I think all... The majority of the money I'm going to spend on this dog is definitely skewed to the latter part of his life.

E: Well, yeah, that's true of people too.

C: Yeah. Yeah, it is definitely true. But I feel very grateful that I've had him for as long as I have. I'm cherishing every minute with him. And I'm just really happy to see so much improvement.

E: Yeah.

C: Oh, man.

B: It's all about quality of life.

C: He's in my lap right now. He's going to be in my lap during this recording. Yeah. He's a little more needy the last few days. That's for sure.

S: Sure. They are little proxy children.

C: Yeah. I know. Yeah. Sweet boy. But they don't live long enough. But you know, we signed up for that.

S: I know.

B: Ridiculous. It's annoying.

C: We knew it going in. It is annoying. But it's worth it.

B: They should last for at least 40 years.

C: I know.

B: It'll happen.

S: Think about that though. But do you really want that? I mean, there's a sweet spot in there. But committing to a pet for 40 years is a big commitment.

E: Ooh.

C: 25?

E: Well, it depends. I mean, only if the last five years are kind of in declining health, right? I mean, you don't want an animal that's old and suffering for half of its life.

S: Right. Exactly.

C: That's true. Yeah. For sure. But I'd take 20, 25 years.

S: Yeah. But 10 seems like it goes by really fast.

C: 10's too short.

S: 10's too short.

C: That's hard.

S: 20 is probably the sweet spot for a pet.

E: Do you think lifespans of pets, do you think those have proportionally gone up with human lifespan?

S: I don't know if it's proportion, but animals in captivity usually live about twice as long as their wild counterparts, just because they're not being hunted.

C: They're cared for.

S: Life is rough out there in a while. So yeah, if they're cared for and they're not getting pathogens and scrapes and bruise and all that stuff, yeah. They live about twice as long.

B: 20 would be decent. If you can guarantee health for 20 years, I mean, that'd be-

S: Yeah. Reasonably healthy 20 years is good.

B: That'd be good for some kids too.

J: I mean, with the dog that I have now-

B: Sometimes it's just they're nuts, not good kids.

J: I would want my dog for the rest of my life. If I had him another 30 years, 40 however long I live, I would always want him. I never would want to see him go in 10 years from now, you know?

S: Your current dog.

J: Yes.

S: Yeah. But the question, your current dog though is awesome. But what happens-

C: So is Killer. That's the tough thing.

S: But not all pets turn out to be-

C: It's true.

S: -the most awesome version-

B: I think-

S: -that you might want. But also, I kind of enjoy experiencing different breeds. You know what I mean?

C: I don't know if I'll get another dog after Killer. I know everybody says that.

S: Yeah, you will.

B: For once I want my next dog to outlive me. I'm done seeing pets die.

C: You know what's interesting, Bob, is that obviously I work in cancer and I work in end of life with quite a few people. And that is when people are actually facing the end, the sentiment is usually the other way around. It's a really big sticking point for a lot of people, what's going to happen to my pet? I actually, I need to work to outlive my pet. It's really interesting how many people I've worked with who that was their goal, was to keep fighting so that they could at least outlive their pet because they were really distraught at the prospect of leaving their pet behind.

E: Oh, gosh.

C: Yes.

E: But then you see those videos of the pets who won't leave the sides of their dead owners and stuff.

C: I know.

E: I can't. I can't go there.

C: It's so sad.

E: That's beyond sad.

C: I know. They're so good. What would we do without them?

Quickie with Bob: Drake Equation Update (13:06)

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S: All right, Bob, start us off with a quickie.

B: Oh, thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. The infamous Drake equation in the news. You remember that, right? Astronomer Frank Drake created the equation to estimate the number of alien civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that could communicate with us. A lot of the numbers in the equation are very rough estimates, right? Since we only have one damn data point, I mean, how good can you be at figuring some of those things out? For example, the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point. All right. Yeah. That belongs in the Drake equation. But we don't know what the hell the real number is. That said, though, there are some not ridiculous solutions to the Drake equation that show thousands of potential communicative aliens right now. But of course, then the Fermi paradox rears its alien head saying, well, where the hell are we then? There's so many of us. Come on. You'd find us by now. So new research published in the Scientific Reports proposes updates to the equation which could help potentially deal with the Fermi paradox. They propose adding to the equation the fraction of habitable planets with significant continents and oceans and the fractions of those planets with plate tectonics operating for at least 500 billion years. Interesting. It's these aspects of Earth that these researchers claim were so critical to the evolution of complex life and technologies that they deserve to be represented in the Drake equation. And sure, they're making assumptions here. It's not hard to list them out. But it's hard to avoid assumptions when you only have that one data point of life in the universe. So yeah, it's hard to be assumption free. So when they plug this into the equation, their takeaway is unsurprisingly that advanced civilizations are quite rare. They put the chance of a lucky planet like Earth between 0.0034% and 0.17%. That translates to 100,000 active communicative civilizations in our galaxy at one end of the spectrum. But at the other end of the spectrum, it's only 0.006 such civilizations. I mean, that would be a really tiny one, right? Yeah. So they say that this lame end of the spectrum, the 0.006 civilizations, that end of the spectrum, it's essentially zero, right? They say that's more likely.

S: Let's round it off to one.

B: Yeah. They say that that's actually more likely. That end of the spectrum is more likely because the ability to communicate is limited by such things as societal collapse or extinction. There's lots of things that could limit it. So they say, yeah, it's probably closer to zero, which then, of course, would explain why, the Fermi paradox. Why haven't we seen them? Yeah, mainly because we might be the only damn ones in the Milky Way. So who knows? But it's interesting to read the details. Check out online to see the other parts of what their claims are. And this has been your Sciencey Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

S: Yeah. I mean, I think the Drake equation gets a bad rap. I think a lot of skeptics say that, oh, we don't know what all the numbers are. It's all speculative. That's not the point. The point is, if we were to calculate it, here's all the parameters. It's a thought experiment, right?

J: Yeah.

B: Yeah.

S: And it's also interesting to plug in potential numbers and see how that affects.

B: Yeah, and get a range. Get a range, yeah.

S: What would that mean to the number of civilizations out there if we assume this value or that value, that Earth-like planets are more common or less common, or do we need plate tectonics? So I think the recent proposed additions are not really trying to calculate the probability of technological civilizations, but more the probability of human-like technological civilizations.

B: Exactly.

S: And that's another variable that we just don't know, is what's the range of potential life out there that could then develop a technological civilization that would be able to communicate with us? So, again, it's all speculative. It's all speculative. But it's interesting to think about those details.

B: It is. It's interesting. It's fun, and it's also cool when we actually get a better handle on one of the factors in the equation, right? It's like, oh, yeah, we know a lot more about this one, so now you constrain the range of possible numbers even more to a certain extent. I don't think we're going to really get a real handle on this until... We may need to do something like simulating the galaxy in a computer with such a resolution that we are nowhere near at this point. But I mean, we could reach it at some point. But such a high-resolution simulation could potentially help flesh out a realistic Drake equation. But, I mean, that's real pie in the sky.

S: We need a lot more data.

B: Yeah.

S: All right. Thanks, Bob.

News Items

Chang'e-6 Lifts Off from Moon (18:11)

• Carrying lunar rocks, Chinese probe lifts off from far side of moon 

S: Jay, give us an update on the last Chinese probe to the moon.

J: So this is China's Chang'e-6 lunar probe, and it successfully left the far side of the moon on Tuesday, which, just to remind everyone, it's not always dark there. It's dark half the time. So this happened Tuesday, it was June 4th. Well think about it.

E: No, I know. Dark side, far side.

J: Yeah, Pink Floyd had Dark Side of the Moon. It's in the common culture here. I think a lot of people might still think that. So the probe carried the first lunar rocks ever collected from the moon's far side, which is a pretty... It's a big deal. I mean, you don't expect to find wildly different stuff, but it is great to sample the opposite sides of this planet, or this moon. So the Chang'e-6 entered lunar orbit on the same day, and now the return journey to Earth is expected to take about three weeks, and it's going to land, hopefully, in-

B: Three weeks.

J: Three weeks in Inner Mongolia around June 25th. The thing that I find unbelievably remarkable is that we could do math and we understand physics well enough to pull something like this off, like really let that sink in. I think it's incredible that we land something on the far side of the moon, it worked, we took samples, now it's coming back, and they know where it's going to land. I still don't quite understand how they can, with that kind of precision, how they could have these things land on the moon, come back, and land in a particular place on Earth. It's still mind-blowing to me.

B: Science, baby.

J: I know. It really is incredibly powerful, and it's super accurate. I'm very impressed with what we can do. So China is now the first country to display their national flag on the moon's far side. They're the only ones. And the Chang'e-6 probe-

E: No one will see it, but okay.

J: Yeah. Well, they're the first, and we could see it with spacecraft and they'll take pictures and stuff.

E: Yeah, of course.

J: So the probe withstood very high temperatures and collected samples by drilling into the moon's surface, and then after it did the drilling, it scooped up soil and rocks with its mechanical arm. The samples that they collected will provide, hopefully, key insights into the moon's origin, evolution, and as well as the Earth and our solar system. We could find out stuff about everything in our solar system by taking these samples, if you think about it. It's pretty amazing, the information that's stored in the regolith there. The probe landed on Sunday in the South Pole. It's called the Atkin Basin, the moon's oldest impact basin, in fact, and it represents the second successful mission to the far side of the moon after China's Chang'e-4 probe. This was back in 2019. This is part of China's broader plan to become a dominant space power. They're putting the money in and they have a lot of plans, including they want to land astronauts on the moon by 2030. I'm hoping that this mutual lunar exploration that we're doing could help relations with China. I'd love to see astronauts and taikonauts, US and China, I'd love to see them get together on the moon and start to collaborate and you never know, it might soften things up. Their lunar ambitions are part of a broader international competition, which is good. This is actually good that all these countries now are competing. It's driving more innovation and putting more money into exploring space. The one fantastic thing, last week I was talking about how NASA gives out its patents to industry in the United States to help US industry. I'm sure that other countries are doing the same. Lots of trickle-down technology from all of this, which is great. Multiple nations are expanding their lunar programs, we're all inspiring each other, and recent efforts include India's successful lunar landing, Russia's failed Luna 25 mission and Japan's Moon Sniper Lander, which had those power issues, right? That was the one that tipped over. In the US, the NASA-funded IM-1 mission by Intuitive Machines landed near the lunar south pole and this marks the first US-made spacecraft landing on the moon in over five decades. Too long, I don't know why we stopped. A lot of people might be like, what's the point? My answer to that is I think humans are explorers. This is another frontier for us to move out into and eventually we could move to other planets. It's an incredibly huge universe.

B: Humans are also power hungry. Part of this is to be the nation that has control of cislunar space. That's a big part of it. That's a part of it.

J: I'd like to think that if the world was just one big nation that we would still do stuff like this.

B: Yeah, we absolutely would, but you can't ignore that dark edge of it, for sure.

J: Yeah, it factors in big time, definitely. Now, Steve, I don't want to miss the opportunity right now to talk about the next cool thing that happened in outer space, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. It launched its first astronaut mission today, June 5th. NASA astronauts Barry, Butch, Wilmore, and Suni Williams, they were aboard the Starliner. The launch took place at 10.52 AM. That's Cape Canaveral time, Eastern time, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This was the first time astronauts launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Big deal.

B: Wow.

J: The mission called Crew Flight Test CFT aimed to test the Starliner's capabilities over an eight day stay at the ISS. It's up there. Everybody made it. Everything worked great. They fixed all the problems. They had an initial launch date, what was that? Back on May 6th to June 1st due to technical issues. This included that valve problem they had, there was a helium leak, and again, not unexpected. These things happen, and that's why they push these ships out there and they fuel them up and they put everything up to max, and sometimes something goes wrong and they got to pull it back and fix it. We're talking about some of the most complicated machinery that's ever existed is going up into outer space. The final delay on June 1st was caused by ground equipment power issues, which you think, okay, how hard can that be? This is stuff on earth. It's terrestrial. It's not even going up into outer space, but still, super complicated stuff to do this. The Starliner, if it's successful, it will be certified for regular six month missions to the ISS, and this could start as early as 2025. The first operational flight, Starliner 1, will carry NASA astronauts Mike Finkel and Scott Tingle. That's funny. No, it's Mike Fincke. Sorry, not Finkel. Mike Fincke. Sorry. I saw an L and I'm like, Finkel and Tingle? This is great. Sorry. Mike Fincke.

E: It's like a cartoon.

J: F-I-N-C-K-E. Right. It's not Finky. It's Fink.

C: It might be Finke.

J: Finke. Okay, whatever.

C: I don't know.

J: Look, Mike, if you're listening, don't be mad. I do this with everybody's name. Scott Tingle, though. I got Scott's name. Scott Tingle and a Canadian astronaut named Josh Kutryk. So NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which includes Boeing and SpaceX, began in the mid-2000s. The Commercial Crew Program stemmed from the success of the Commercial Cargo Program and that started in 2006. So Boeing's development, they had tons of setbacks. This includes an unsuccessful first uncrewed mission back in December 2019. They had more technical issues. SpaceX has already flown 12 crewed missions to the ISS. They're kicking ass. That company really has got their thumb on this. The ISS is expected to remain operational until 2030. That date hasn't changed, by the way. I've been paying attention and it's been 2030 for quite a while now. They're going to require multiple spacecraft for astronaut transport and that's what we're starting to see. It's really starting to happen here. Russia's Soyuz spacecraft will continue to send crews to the ISS until 2028 and Boeing's focus is currently on fulfilling its NASA contract, which thank God they are doing it because tons of money have been allocated. So we are going to see lots of different missions by different companies going to the ISS and we're going to retire that space station pretty soon, guys. I mean, we are just over five years away from retiring that and then what the hell are they going to do with it? Aren't they going to dump it?

S: They're going to let it crash into the atmosphere?

J: I hope so. I think that would be the best thing to do, but you really don't want to see anything crazy happen. You know?

B: You could do a controlled orbit and make it land in the ocean.

J: Would they do it together? Would they separate it up and push them separate? I don't know.

S: I don't know, but that's what I read though. They're planning to drop it into the ocean. You know there's like this point in the Pacific that's the farthest away from anything?

E: From everything.

S: Yeah, that's where they aim for. It is possible for them to boost it into a higher orbit so that its orbit won't eventually decay and it could be preserved, but they're not going to do that because it's too expensive.

J: That would be cool though. I mean, imagine if they do that. I don't even know if this is actually possible. Imagine if we had the technology to bring it back down without it falling apart and put it in a museum. That would be amazing.

S: Or it's there a thousand years from now as its own museum floating in space.

B: Yeah, visit it. Yeah, visit it.

J: There you have it, Steve. Lots of space stuff happening and it's going to continue to grow. We're going to see more and more companies, more and more nations doing this. We are, in my opinion, very much taking our stride as a space-faring species.

S: Seems that way.

J: Yep.

S: All right. Thank you, Jay.

Adaptogens (27:48)

• What are "Adaptogens"? 

S: Have any of you guys heard of adaptogens?

J: Not ever.

C: Oh god, yes.

E: There's pathogens.

C: No, these are like supposed to be good things.

S: Yes.

C: It's like a supplement-y kind of a thing, right?

B: It's like a brand of sneakers.

S: It's a supplement-y kind of thing.

J: Okay. But what do you do with them, do you eat them? You do.

C: I think they make you smart or something. They make your body better.

S: All right. The idea is that these are herbs and supplements that help your body adapt to stress.

C: What kind of stress? Who cares?

S: Right. But it's extremely vague. It doesn't have any accepted scientific explanation or definition. It's just like your body deals with stressors better. How does it work? Nobody knows. If you read-

E: Magic.

S: Yeah. If you read the site, it says, experts believe, meaning they have no idea, that adaptogens interact with the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, which initiates your body's stress response and plays a big role in keeping your body in balance.

J: Steve, how do we know the-

E: Sounds testable.

J: But how do we know it's functioning?

S: We don't. There's like-

C: Yeah. That's the thing too. That is a well studied pathway. Basically, what they're saying is it interacts with your hormones.

S: Your hormones.

C: With your endocrine system.

E: Well, you can measure that, right?

J: Hormones are so complicated. Oh, my God. How many hormones do we have?

B: Four.

E: At least three.

S: At least three. Yeah. I'm fascinated by this just as the evolution of the bullshit marketing terminology of herbs and supplements and snake oil, basically, which is what this is. It's not based on anything. Actually, the term was first coined. This is always the case, I find. Like, who was the first person who said this? It was in 1947, Soviet toxicologist, Nikolai Lazarev, came up with the term adaptogen. He thought he was developing, again, herbal treatments that would enhance the functioning of the body. This research essentially failed. He didn't come up with anything specific. But the idea then, now, as having a second life as a bullshit marketing term, I would note that the FDA does not recognize this term. You can't market something just as a "adaptogen", because they don't recognize that term. Companies that have tried to do that, they said, they're basically saying this is a new drug if you're going to claim that it's doing something like that. Because this is not grass, generally recognized as safe, you know what I mean? But the FDA doesn't have the resources to really tamp down on this. How is it used in marketing? A lot of snake oil, herbs, and supplement type stuff, there's this evolving terminology of what it is and what it's doing. It's all just trying to rebrand essentially the same stuff. When you read the sites that are pushing the adaptogens, it's like, it's all the same stuff that they've been selling.

C: Ashwagandha.

S: Yeah, whatever.

C: Yeah, it's all the things.

S: Echinacea. Yeah, whatever.

C: Yeah.

S: And the claims for it, again, well, how does it help your body adapt to stress? Well, by boosting the immune system and reducing oxidative stress through antioxidant activity. Yeah. So it's like, oh, so it's doing all the same crap you've been claiming for decades, you're just calling it something different now. And now they're throwing in balancing hormones. But balancing, like helping your body balance itself is thousands of years old in terms of like a vague sort of pre-scientific.

J: What does that actually, is there even any definition?

E: What pseudoscience, yeah, what pseudoscience doesn't use the term balance in its lexicon?

S: So, I mean, you can go back to the four humors, right? All of you humoral medicine was this is like bloodletting and purging and all that stuff was about balancing the four humors. This is a very basic concept that people have in terms of health. Things need to be in "balance", right? Your yin and your yang need to be in balance. Your humors need to be in balance.

E: Your chakras.

S: Your chakras need to be in balance. Your vibrations need to be in balance.

E: Heck, acupuncture has balance claims to it.

S: Yeah, but the thing is, hormonal balance is an actual real thing though, right? So it's not like that.

C: Of course.

S: It's not as if there is no homeostasis is what we would call it in more scientific terms, you know, rather than just balance. So there is some legitimacy to that concept in biology. The thing is, they're just lifting it and applying it without really any details or any specificity or any evidence, right?

C: Right. So if you go to an endocrinologist, they are there to help you figure out those kinds of things and there are interventions for them, but they have to measure them first.

S: Exactly. They will measure specific hormones and not only the hormones themselves, different versions of the hormones and the hormones that regulate those hormones, right? You'll measure a thyroid stimulating hormone and T3 and T4 and see how it's all working together and then maybe do some further investigation to find out what is out of balance. Is your thyroid overactive or underactive or is the thing that's driving your thyroid overactive or underactive, whatever.

C: And there are names for all those diseases, by the way.

S: Right. That's right. Same thing with your adrenal glands and whatever. But if you just vaguely reference, it's going to balance your hormones and maybe it works through this hormone axis that I just read about in a book and I don't understand. We're not going to be actually measuring anything like this. So the other thing is I always, what's interesting is when they start to try to backstop their vague snake oil claims with references to actual biology, like it's an antioxidant or a boost to the immune system or it alters your hormones, it's like if it were really doing that, the chances are greater that that's a bad thing than a good thing, right? It's like boosting the immune system, but wait, I thought anti-inflammatories were a good idea. Now we want pro-inflammatories?

C: Right.

S: Because that's what boosting your immune system means, right? So you can't just take a carefully balanced, highly complicated, evolved homeostatic system and say, we're going to push it in this random direction and that's going to make it better. And I'm just going to frame it as "better" in the terminology. It's boosting the immune system as instead of saying it's causing autoimmune disease is another way to say boosting the immune system, right? Producing autoimmunity or pro-inflammatory, that's another way to say "boosting the immune system". And altering hormones could be throwing them out of balance way more easily than into balance. Like first of all, how do you know they're out of balance to begin with? And if just randomly altering your hormones, if it were doing something, the chances are overwhelming that you're going to make it worse than better. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, you're probably not making it better. It's like saying, I'm going to randomly alter your blood pressure and assume that's a good thing. You need blood to perfuse your brain, right? So let's give you more blood pressure.

C: Right. So let's give you more blood pressure.

E: Turn up the pressure.

S: Boost your, I'm going to call it boosting your perfusion and really just increasing your blood pressure.

E: Steve, stop. You're giving people a bad idea.

S: But it's basically the equivalent of what they're doing, you know?

C: It is.

S: Right? It's like, yeah, but there's a sweet spot to your blood pressure where you have good perfusion without blowing your arteries out and causing heart failure and all that stuff. High blood pressure is a problem. Low blood pressure is a problem. The inability to regulate your blood pressure is a problem. All these things are a problem. But they have to be very carefully measured and intervened on. And even then we can sometimes say, oh, we overshot a little bit. We got to back off or whatever. It's tricky. Just randomly, "boosting" one aspect of a homeostatic system is nuts.

E: Change for change sake.

S: Yeah. It's just, well, it's just rhetoric to backstop that, all right, we have this same snake oil that we've been selling for hundreds of years and we just have this revolving verbiage of marketing it. We're going to call it a nutraceutical.

C: That's it right there. That's it.

S: It's a nutraceutical. What's a nutraceutical? It's the same old shit, but we're just calling it something different, right?

C: Because your grandma called it something else, but now Huberman and Tim Ferriss are calling it, you know? And so now it's trendy and it's cool.

S: It's a nutraceutical or now an adaptogen or ergogenic is another one. What's an ergogenic?

E: Oh, that sounds great.

S: Yeah. Anything that reduces fatigue we'll call it ergogenic, it increases your energy because that's a good vague claim.

E: Yeah. Like taking speed.

C: Yeah.

S: So it's the same vague claims for the same list of things and just evolving marketing. It's just all a marketing ploy and there's no science behind it. They don't even have an operational definition. They don't even have a... And that's always step one in science is having a precise definition. We like to talk and sometimes joke about jargon, honestly, because jargon is poetry. I love it. But when it's real, like real scientific jargon is so wonderfully precise and unambiguous and like the terminology evolves to refer to something very specific. And that terminology, those words, they are placeholders for ideas, for our understanding of what's actually going on. When you have a vague term that's poorly defined, that reflects sloppy thinking, right? Vague terms-

C: And that happens-

S: -equal vague thinking.

C: -all the time.

S: Of course. Right.

C: It's... I think about... I have friends, right? I have friends who are really into this alternative medicine stuff and I'm always trying to understand what their weird practitioners are saying and what they're talking about. And they'll often use terms like leaky gut, adrenal fatigue.

S: Adrenal fatigue is wonderful. It's like adrenal fatigue comes from, it's like, well, when we measure your adrenal function, it's normal, but I still want to treat you for your adrenal function, so I'm going to call it something vague, like adrenal fatigue. It's not really...

C: And listen to what the symptoms are, tiredness, cravings for sugar. They take natural experiences of being human, like I feel bloated sometimes, I feel dehydrated sometimes.

S: You need an adaptogen.

C: And that's the saddest thing, is that instead of really drilling down, are you sleeping a full night every night? Are you eating enough food every day? Are you drinking enough water? It's like, no, there's something wrong with your liver and so you need this weird adaptogen for your liver. We didn't test that. We're just saying these vague symptoms of feeling gross, which all human beings have, and then we're treating a problem that doesn't exist to make money off of vulnerable people.

S: Yeah. We're going to take vague symptoms and use vague claims to treat it with something that doesn't do anything that we know about, right?

C: It's so sad.

E: That makes it worse.

S: That has vague, nonspecific effects when you look at it scientifically. It's like, yeah, stuff happens in the petri dish and we're going to call this boosting the immune system, whatever.

J: Steve, this sounds to me like all medical pseudoscience is steeped in this.

S: Yeah, totally. No, there's an art to this as well. And here's the worst part. In the United States, and in other countries as well, but probably worse than the US, they've actually codified this vagueness into law. Again, as I like to say, the vagueness is not a bug. It's a feature, right? And they've codified it into law with DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which I talk about a lot, because they created this category of structure function claims that you can make without evidence for things that are at least generally recognized to be safe. You could say, okay, well, people have been using echinacea for a couple hundred years, so we're going to consider that grass, right? People don't drop dead when they take it. So now you could make whatever, "structure function" claims you want for it, as long as you don't name a disease by name. But you could say it promotes a healthy outlook, right? It promotes a happy mood. It doesn't treat depression, but it promotes happiness. Or it balances your whoziewatts, or your connecticazoid, or it boosts this or that, it boosts your immune system, and blah, blah, blah. These are all structure function claims. They're basically a legal loophole for vague, sciency-sounding claims that don't mean anything, right? And now we're going to drive the bus of adaptogens and nutraceuticals through this giant loophole, and the industry exploded when this happened, because of course it did, right? You're just basically saying, yeah, we're going to carve out this regulatory exception so you can basically do whatever you want. The consumer be damned, which is very, very, very anti-consumer. And then they sell it to consumers as you want the freedom to make your own choices, right? You don't need the government to tell you what you can take and what you can't take. So yeah, they got that rhetoric down, Pat, as well.

E: Is Alex Jones selling these things yet?

S: Yeah, I don't know for sure. I don't watch him. I don't know for sure.

C: Yeah, Alex Jones is almost like, he's not cool enough to sell an adaptogen. These are like Rogan-level supplements.

B: I don't think he can pronounce it.

S: He's still talking about antioxidants. That's old school.

C: Exactly.

E: Oh my gosh, get out of the 2000s.

C: Yeah, he's got a different audience.

S: It's also devices, as well. It's not just herbs and supplements. It's also like magnets and copper bracelets and all this kind of stuff, as well.

E: Oh yes. I know about those.

S: Fits into the same category. And it's a multi-billion dollar industry. People are spending billions of dollars on this, and there's no evidence that it's doing anybody any good. In fact, whenever you really look at it, it looks like it's a net health negative, right? People who have breast cancer who use these kinds of alternative treatments have a lower life expectancy than people who don't.

C: Do you think that's attributed to the fact that they are often less likely to seek the legitimate treatment early?

S: Well, that's the concern, that this is due to their delaying the more proven treatment or they're diverting their resources away from it. Or it could just be a marker for generally they're wasting a lot of time and effort and money on things that are pseudoscientific and nonsensical.

C: And also, as you mentioned before, these things are still drugs. Since they're not studied the same way that drugs are studied and drug interaction, there are certain things that we don't know. It could be reducing the efficacy of the real drug you're taking.

S: Well, yeah, that's right. They are drugs. We're talking about herbs, right? They are drugs.

C: Yeah, yeah. I'm talking about, let's say you're taking an adaptogen to help you with your, I don't know, immune system during cancer treatment. That, "adaptogen" could be changing the efficacy of your cancer treatment.

S: There are a lot of serious researchers who research herbal products because they are a good source for new actual drugs, right?

C: Yeah.

S: That's a whole discipline of translating naturally occurring substances into useful medicinal products. And those researchers are frustrated by this as well. One researcher talking about a specific herb was saying, the term adaptogen, which has not been well defined scientifically, undermines the need for increased inquiry and research into the many promising effects of this herb. So he's saying, we need to study this herb. But selling it as an adaptogen actually undermines efforts to study it scientifically. Because now you sort of are assuming a conclusion that's vague and not worthwhile and that's it. And so the process is done. So it's actually, yeah, it actually, if anything, keeps the useful stuff away from people in a way because it's just, all the resources are being diverted to just this multi-billion dollar industry that wants the vagueness. Keep that in mind. They want the vagueness. That is a feature.

C: Yeah.

S: Right? Because then nothing can be proven wrong. If you don't make a specific claim, you could never be proven wrong. Right?

C: Yeah.

S: All right. Let's move on.

Younger Periods (44:42)

• Age of first period declines and researchers say it could be obesity or even pollution 

S: Cara, I understand that girls are getting their period younger over time. What's going on?

C: So we've long seen a trend towards the first period coming younger and younger. The word for the first period is menarche or menarche. But yeah, it's a weird word. But that's what the word is. And you're going to see it a lot.

J: It also sounds like malarkey, you know?

C: Malarkey. Yeah. It's like menarche. M-E-N-A-R-C-H-E.

E: Portmanteau of what, menopause and malarkey?

C: Well, it's not. But I think it sounds like one. I was like, I hope. I don't think that's. Actually, now, see, now I'm curious. I'm looking it up.

E: Oh, no.

C: Modern Latin from month and beginning. The beginning of the month is where it comes from. But so we've long seen this trend. And there have been a few different studies that have looked at what's going on, why is it going on? There's a new study that I wanted to talk about today that was published in JAMA Network Open in the pediatric section. And this was an American study out of Harvard where the researchers were able to look at participants who were engaged in this really big kind of big data initiative by Apple. So it was the Apple Women's Health Study. So it's this longitudinal study of like menstrual cycles, gynecologic conditions, lots of different women's health that's conducted by the Harvard Chan School. In coordination with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and with Apple. And so they're able to get just a lot of data. They looked at a data set of 71,341 women and girls all throughout different decades. So they sort of divided the participants into different buckets. There were those who were born between 1950 and 1969. Those who were born between 70 and 79, 80 and 89, 90 and 99, and then 2000 to 2005. And then they had these cutoffs. They called early periods starting at age 11 or younger, or actually not 11 or younger, younger than 11 was considered an early first period. Very early was younger than age 9. And then late was age 16 or older. And so they basically asked all these different women and girls, lots of stuff, and they looked at this data. And they were also kind of curious about what happens, how long does it take for girls' periods to become regular? It is not uncommon when a girl starts her period that she then doesn't have it for a month or two, or it comes and it goes. And then eventually the cycles regulate. And sometimes that's changed by taking hormonal treatments like birth control. And so they looked at that as well. And then they also wanted to look at a potential moderating variable, which is body mass index. Because we know that you're required to have a certain amount, or generally your body wants to have a certain amount of fat before it will have a period. Like when I look back to being a little girl, I was this teeny tiny waif of a thing who was really active, doing a lot of gymnastics and cheerleading. And I started my period the month before I turned 16. So according to this study, that's technically not late, but it's one month outside of being late. But we're finding some really interesting things here. So when you look at the group of people who were born between 50 and 69, the average age was 12 and a half years. And when you look at somebody who was born between 2000 and 2005, the average age was 11.9 years. And I know that doesn't sound like a big difference, but we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And we're talking an average of more than half a year over the course of that time period. And that tracks along with almost every other statistic that they looked at. So in the 1950 to 1969 subgroup, those who had early periods, remember younger than 11, it was 8.6 of the individuals. And those who had very early periods, younger than 9, was 0.6. So very few of the 1950 to 1969 births were at a younger than 9 when they first started their period. We're talking a little over half a percent. When you look at the 2000 to 2005 group, those numbers were 15.5% and 1.4%. So almost doubling and then tripling. So not only is the period coming sooner, the number of girls or the percentage of girls with very early periods is also growing. Also, the percentage of girls with later periods was shrinking. Another interesting thing that they found, and this is something that they want to work with more because they're curious as to why, is that those who reached regularity within two years, so from the time they start their period to the time they're having a regular period every month, decreased. So that means that over time, it's taking longer for young girls to have a regular period. They're starting sooner and it's taking longer for their periods to regulate. Now they also found some interesting trends in the demographic data. So even though periods are trending younger over time across all socioeconomic groups and across all races or ethnicities, the trend is most severe among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and mixed race individuals. Non-white individuals' periods are coming sooner than white individuals' periods, even though all of them are coming sooner than they used to come. And also among low SES groups, the periods are coming sooner. And so they said could this be a function of a higher body mass index? You know, childhood obesity is a problem. Could that be? We know it's a risk factor for early puberty. Could that be what's going on? And their statistical analyses show that it is or it does appear to be responsible for some of the variance in the data, but not all of it. Just under half of the variance they think is responsible is childhood obesity. What are some other things that could be contributing? Can you guys think of any? Because this study didn't specifically look at other ones, but the researchers do talk about other ones based on past literature.

J: I would think diet.

C: Dietary patterns is definitely one of them. Also psychological stress, adverse childhood experiences, like growing up in an abusive household was one of them. And then there's a really big interest right now in the research on like environmental factors, so like air pollution or endocrine disrupting chemicals that are in water supplies. And so that is being, that's an active area of research. And it could be that it's some combination of all of these things that's contributing, but researchers still need to dial down a little bit more. And why is this important? Like why does it matter if a girl starts her period at 9 or 11 or 14? Well, apparently starting your period early is associated with a bunch of adverse health outcomes later in life. Cancer, cardiovascular disease, a lot of these things are correlated. Now, this could be because of BMI. It could be because of SES. You know, we don't know what the mediating or moderating variables are. This is definitely a correlation, not a causation. But it is interesting to know that it can be in some ways a marker for those things. So it's important to look at the trends in the literature and to understand why these things are trending the way that they are.

B: Cara, you said that stabilization is taking longer. Does that mean that the age of stabilization is staying roughly similar to what it used to be?

C: Oh, that's an interesting question. And I don't know if they actually gave a specific age. Let me check here. I don't know if they looked at the data that way. Okay, time from anarchy to cycle regularity. No, they only looked at it based on how many years until it was regular. So they put it into different buckets. Less than two years, three to four years, more than five years. It's not yet regular or it only became regular after hormone use. So they didn't map that then onto are the youngest people taking longer to become regular, if that makes sense, to see if those numbers lined up and netted out the same. So I'm actually not sure, but that would be a really interesting follow-up to this study to look at the data that way and to make some determinations based on that because maybe there is sort of, I don't want to call it a set point, but a time period in which, I don't know, age of maturation does level out in that way.

S: So if one of the hypotheses is that it's obesity, was there any later analysis or are they planning on doing a follow-up analysis looking at different obesity rates and whether that correlates? Because those are not evenly distributed.

C: Yeah, so they basically did look at BMI at the age of the period starting. So within this study, and remember, this was all self-report data, so that's important to remember. So when you're talking about somebody who was born in 1969 and you're saying, how much did you weigh when you started your period? That's kind of a difficult question to answer. But for those who felt confident to answer that question, again, self-report, they did look at that information. They measured height and weight and they calculated BMI and they measured that against these different eras. And so they found that it was responsible for a decent chunk of the variance, like half of the variance. But there are other studies that show that trend as well and I could see drilling down into that and looking at it a little bit more specifically. But yeah, the data here do support the fact that a sum of the lower age is attributed to a higher body mass index.

More Aliens (56:44)

• US Army officer claims 'aliens exist and are already interacting with humans' 

S: Evan, more people claiming more aliens.

E: Oh, yeah, not just more people. You know, not insignificant people, shall we say. Because here's the headline I read at a website called Irish Star, the Irish Star. I think it's part of the Daily Star kind of tabloid newspaper system in England or Europe. But in any case, this is what I read. Here's the headline. Former U.S. Army officer claims, and this is in quotes, "Aliens exist and they are already interacting with humans." So stop. Think about that headline. Alright? Aliens exist and they're interacting with humans. If that were true, would that not just be the news of the day or the month or the year or the century or arguably the biggest revelation in human history? Seriously. Right? How can a person, alright, former U.S. Army officer, how can they so nonchalantly sort of mention this? And this is clearly not a stupid person. Someone who has to be of sufficient intelligence, not just to rise to the rank of colonel in the armed services. But listen to a little bit of who this guy is. His name is Carl Nell. N-E-L-L. And back in November of 2023, I found a write-up about him titled, Who is Carl Nell? And here is how the final sentence of that write-up prophetically reads. It says, "What he claims to know about goings on behind the scenes, it seems likely that he'll have a rising profile in the unidentified anomalous phenomenon, UAP, story in the months and years to come." And sure enough, he did. Because he came out just two weeks ago to make these claims at a symposium, which kind of surprised people. A lot of people, I think. Let me tell you a little bit about this guy. Former Colonel Carl Nell. This is from his bio. I'll give you that first. A seasoned executive, respected thought leader, dedicated change agent, an accomplished multidisciplinary engineer, comfortable across multiple business models from aerospace high-end development to integrated solutions to advisory services. He's an Ivy League graduate, certified PMP. I'm not even sure what that is. Published author, War College alumni, and fully joint qualified commissioned officer in the Army Reserve. He has been in command at every grade level through Colonel, including activation of the Army's newest expeditionary military intelligence brigade, supporting the 18th Airborne Corps and JSOC. Right. Culminating his military career as Army Director, he was supporting the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Task Force, and his engagements with senior leaders with the Defense Department as well as Congress directly contributed to the creation and inclusion of UAP legislation within the National Defense Authorization Acts of 2022 and 2023. This is not some random crank kind of in a corner of the internet, yelling at the clouds as they pass by. He's got fingerprints in a lot of different areas of national defense, political connections, and defense contracting. Now, the article back in November also said this about him. Over the course of his career, Nell gained experience working with space-related technologies, collecting and analyzing foreign materials, overseeing large-scale modernization efforts, and working across various government agencies. He would also have had very high security clearances for much of his work. And if you were setting up a reverse engineering program for UFOs, this is exactly the kind of guy you would want involved. And that's effectively what he told an audience at a symposium two weeks ago called the SALT Conference. S-A-L-T. It used to stand for Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty, but I don't know if that's still what that is. SALT Conference. This was New York City two weeks ago, and he was asked to talk about non-human intelligence, NHI, and UFOs and UAPs. And here's his quote. So, non-human intelligence exists. Non-human intelligence has been interacting with humanity. This is not new, and it has been going on, and it has been going, and there are unelected people in the government that are aware of it. And then he was pressed on his confidence level regarding that statement, and he asserted with certainty, zero doubt.

B: Give me break.

E: Very high-level folks with access to the information.

B: Zero doubt.

E: Zero doubt. He says, very high-level folks with access to the information have come out now and said the same thing. People in a position to know are telling you the same thing. Then he was asked, why hasn't anyone admitted this? Leaders of countries or other people? Why is the public not being told this by their leaders? And he said, there are six basic reasons. Number one, national security. Number two, lack of a plan. Number three, potential societal disruptions. Number four, the possibility of non-public agreement. Number five, misdeeds and covering that up. And number six, basic organizational intransigence. He says that national security supersedes all the others. A responsible leader would be irresponsible to come forward without a plan. Anyone paying attention realizes UAPs are real, they are not ours, and they are not our adversaries. The Pentagon already said that. That shoe already dropped. It's a global phenomenon. It's affecting other countries, not just the United States. Organized religion has a say. This is an all-planet problem.

C: What? What does that have to do with religion?

E: Because he's, in a sense, as part of the conference, he was also talking about why this hasn't come to be yet. And because the pressures of organized religion and how societies are structured through those religious pressures, in a sense, are too important to ignore in a decision this big to release that information, basically, to the public. Too disruptive, in a sense. So that's effectively what he is saying. He's running in circles with, oh, let's see, what's his name? David Grush, right? Who we spoke about last year, right? His characterization of David Grush is "beyond reproach". Now, David Grush, if you remember, just as a reminder, he said that the U.S. government possesses unidentified crashed extraterrestrial craft and non-human bodies. The U.S. federal government maintains a highly secretive UFO retrieval program and possesses multiple spacecraft of non-human origin and the corpses of deceased pilots. Biologics came with some of these recoveries, he had said, non-human, and that was on the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the program I talked to that are currently still on the program. So, a couple of things here. He's coming out and saying these things now, so in a way, that article back in November of last year correctly said that, yes, this guy would be starting to make advances sort of publicly in speaking about this stuff, and he was correct because he just did that. You know, and number two, I'm sorry, can we have some evidence anywhere? We are still lacking evidence, the most basic fundamental thing that would influence the minds of people in our understanding of exactly what it is he's talking about. They only ever have stories.

B: He has zero doubt. Zero doubt.

E: But he has zero doubt, right?

B: Based on words. Zero doubt of an amazing thing based on other people's words.

S: What's interesting here is that this guy, I've read some of the articles that he's written. He seems like a mature senior military person who has wrote very thoughtful analyses of world political situations, etc. You know what I mean? He's not a nut job. He seems like a very respectable guy. So how is he going so profoundly wrong in this one area? Now of course, the UFO believers, it could be a sacred cow for him, or it could be that he just has blind spots somewhere, and what would that blind spot be? I think he grossly underestimates the degree to which this is kind of, the UFO phenomenon has taken on a life of its own, and generated a lot of people like David Grush, who can superficially look like they too are mature people who have something intelligent to say, but who's spouting utter nonsense, demonstrable, like tinfoil hat crazy nonsense. So why is it that he's not able to see that? I think it's just another example of how critical thinking and skeptical chops really is sort of a thing unto itself. You know what I mean? It really is a set of skills that you could lack, even if you have topic expertise in another area. You could be functionally very intelligent in terms of your area of expertise, and still lack significant critical thinking skills. I see that in so many people. I know some people personally who are like, this is a generally savvy person with a job that involves doing investigations and whatever. They're generally intelligent and savvy, and yet they hold some astonishing beliefs. How do you square that? How is that immune to your otherwise rational outlook on the universe? It is amazing how people can compartmentalize nonsense.

C: I really do reinforce, I think Bob, you're the one who said sacred cow. I think UFOs for some people are a religion.

S: Totally.

C: Even if they're not fanatics about it, and they're not reading about it and studying about it, there are plenty of people, I think, who are like, well, I had an experience. That's enough for them. They had some sort of feeling. They saw something. They had a hypnagogic hallucination. They had something happen in their life that made them believe it. It's so firmly rooted in them that giving up that belief would, yeah, I think be difficult. It would be a hit to their identity.

S: There's something else going on here as well, I think. Similar to what I was saying, I think that he is talking to people who sound rational, who are speaking with high confidence, who are saying things as if they are facts when they're not. It's just nonsense. They are fooled into thinking that they are reasonable people because they are superficially acting reasonable, and they're grossly underestimating the ability of people to get into this completely delusional mindset. It's kind of like a delusion by proxy. Jay and I were doing our TikTok thing today, and one of the TikToks I did was a guy who claims that when he was a kid in the 1970s, he time-traveled back to Lincoln's town, the Gettysburg Address. You hear him, it's an interview with him where he's saying these things as if he's talking about a visit to the grocery store. This is what happened. Then he's giving the analysis of how time travel works and blah, blah, blah, and just saying it as a fact. You might be fooled because of that superficiality to think, he doesn't sound like a movie version of crazy. You know what I mean? He's not drooling on himself. He's like a well-put-together adult talking in sentences, and so that confuses people into thinking that the words, therefore, make sense. I think this guy, in personal opinion, is just completely lying. The time travel guy, I think. He's somewhere along the spectrum from he's just a con artist selling books or whatever, or this guy is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs delusional. Somewhere along that spectrum, but you can be that and still clean up well and look like you're an adult who has reasonable thought process. It fools people into thinking, there's got to be something going on. This guy's not drooling on himself, maybe there's time travel. No, maybe he's just lying to you. Have you thought about that?

E: Confidence artist, by any other name. He's a con artist.

C: There's a documentary right now on Netflix called American Conspiracy, The Octopus Murders, and it's fascinating because it really grapples with exactly what you're talking about. These people who have legitimate titles, legitimate ties to NSA stuff, people who are operating in political shadows, making claims, and the individual in the documentary who's trying to investigate it is really struggling with is this real? Or are these people insane? Are these people fully buying it? It's a fascinating look at how easy it is to get wrapped up in somebody else's delusion if that other person or group of people have an air of legitimacy about them.

J: Steve, you said something today while we were doing our TikTok stuff that resonated with me. You said that the internet gave lots of people a platform and a lot of people out there have a platform now that might have, they could have emotional problems, they could have-

S: They could be psychopaths.

J: They could have mental health problems. In order for someone to believe something like this, that's a significant thing to go all in on and to take to this level.

S: Or again, there are psychopaths who are doing it deliberately.

E: I wish the interviewer in this symposium that Colonel Nell attended asked a couple of follow-up questions such as, Colonel Nell, did you see a body? What did it look like? Can you give us some details? Did you physically see an alien ship? What was it made of? What can you tell us about? There are never those details.

S: It's always a friend of a friend. I didn't, but I spoke to somebody reliable who did. Okay, let's talk to that. Who did you see? No, I didn't see it. I was talking about this other guy. He saw it. It's a classic. Everyone thinks they're one step removed from the person who actually saw the evidence, but you never can get to that person because they don't exist. It's just a circle jerk of reference. He said, the Pentagon said this. What the Pentagon said was, one, there's no evidence of aliens, and two, it is a circle jerk of self-referential evidence. That's what they said. They didn't use the word circle jerk, I'm saying now. It's just cranks referring to other cranks as references. That's what it is. That's all it is.

Metasurface Night Vision (1:12:18)

• A Metasurface Approach to Night Vision 

S: All right, Bob, tell us about these new night vision doohickeys.

B: This is, yet again, another fascinating news item, which is why I grabbed this. Metasurfaces in the news again, this time researchers show a thin metasurface breakthrough that can directly convert invisible shortwave infrared light to visible light with record efficiency and more simply than conventional infrared detectors. They compare the thickness of this material to thinner than cling wrap, which is pretty thin. This is from researchers from the Australian National University in Canberra and also including scientists from Friedrich Schiller University, Germany. The title of their paper is called Enhanced Infrared Vision by Nonlinear Upconversion in Nonlocal Metasurfaces. It sounds nasty, but it is nasty, but I'll make it non-nasty. We humans, and Jay, have notoriously bad night vision compared to many animals. Our pet dogs and cats, they just laugh at us, especially the cats, as we stumble in the dark, and this is partly because, why?

J: We can't see shit! Because we don't have those cones, right?

B: No.

E: Cones, rods.

B: No, that's a good try. We don't have a tapetum lucidum. That's that. That's what makes their eyes glow. That's a reflective tissue they have behind the retina that gives photons basically a second chance to be absorbed. That's why their eyes famously light up at night in such a wonderfully creepy way. Now, the light that we do see from their eyes, that's the loser light that couldn't get absorbed even after a second chance. But the fact that they have photons getting a second chance, that's why they can see in extra detail at night, and we don't, of course. Now, this news item deals with infrared light, but only a tiny piece of infrared. There's lots of different types of infrared. This is the infrared that's very, very close, almost right next to the visible spectrum. It's called shortwave infrared. Shortwave infrared is different from other infrared. For example, shortwave is 1,000 to 2,500 nanometers. Infrared, classic thermal radiation, the full sweep of it, that goes from 780 nanometers to 1 million nanometers, otherwise known as 1 millimeter. So there's a huge range of infrared. There's a very narrow range of this shortwave infrared. Now, shortwave infrared is very helpful because a typical thermal image, the classic thermal image, it doesn't tell you much, right? Oh, there's a blob of a thing that's warmer than its surroundings, and maybe it's got a vaguely human shape to it, but it's just this vague blob, whereas a shortwave infrared can tell you precisely what the object is that is emitting it or reflecting it. So it's much more helpful in terms of assessing what's around you in low-light scenarios. Now, this shortwave light comes from lots of different things. Some of it comes from the air glow, or night glow, it's called, that's created by these various chemical reactions and processes in the atmosphere. It emits this infrared. Infrared lamps and LEDs emit some shortwave infrared. Plants and trees reflect and emit this light. Soil and rocks can reflect it. Concrete and asphalt can reflect it, and warm-blooded animals can emit some of this shortwave infrared. So it's coming from lots of different things, even if it appears really dark to you. It's all over the place. Now, the fact that you can detect it gives you lots of different and interesting and very useful applications. You can use detecting shortwave infrared for remote sensing and environmental monitoring. This type of light can be used to monitor vegetation health and soil moisture and things like that. It can be used for the military and surveillance. They use it now for target acquisition and surveillance in very low-light conditions. And think about it, you're not revealing the observer because you're not emitting any light that you then enhance. If you have this type of detector, then you can be basically unseen yourself. It's used for industrial inspection. It's used for medical imaging. Did you know that, Steve? Shortwave infrared light can penetrate deeper into tissues than visible light and can be used for medical imaging. So there's lots of uses. It's very interesting. It's really interesting to actually do some research on this. I wasn't really familiar with these aspects to shortwave infrared. Now, conventional detectors, we've all seen them, especially the goggles and stuff that are looking in low-light conditions. And there's lots of different goggles, lots of different types of technology. Typically, they're taking the infrared light and they're converting it to electrons first and then they convert it to visible light that we can then see. But they're bulky, they're heavy. Some of them even need cooling systems and they need that to get rid of a thermal noise. Thermal noise is often a problem. So the researchers wanted to get past a lot of those disadvantages so they've been using metasurfaces to try to use as a detector for this shortwave infrared light. These metasurfaces can manipulate light in amazing ways. And we've talked about it on the show a few times. And they've just made it even more amazing. These researchers are using what's called resonant dielectric metasurfaces. Now, wait, wait. Don't tune out. This is simpler than it sounds and it's fascinating as hell. So a resonant dielectric metasurface. Resonant in this context, all that means is that the metasurface has these tiny structures on its surface like pillars and disks that are arranged in these very special periodic or aperiodic patterns. The structures are actually smaller than the wavelength of the infrared light. Smaller than the wavelength. When the light with a certain wavelength or other characteristics hits these structures, the light interacts with these minute structures in ways that you can then manipulate the light. And that's what resonance is. You've got the light interacting with these sub-wavelength structures in specific ways to manipulate the light and have the light do what you want it to do. In this case, it's converting the infrared into visible light. Directly into visible light. So that's all that resonant means in this context. Dielectric is even simpler. All that means is that some of these structures are not made of metal. Because metal in a lot of cases will absorb energy and you don't want it to absorb this energy. You want to deal with it. You don't want to absorb it and have it disappear. So that's all. So resonant dielectric metasurface. That's all that is. Fairly simple at a high level. The metasurface material itself is made primarily from a substance called lithium niobate. And on top of that is a very thin film deposition of silicon oxide. That's it. I don't think these have ever been paired before. And lithium niobate has never been used as a metasurface before. So this was new. And it's this surface. It's this silicon. This very thin silicon dioxide surface. This is the surface that has the fine patterns and structures carved into it. And they use two methods. They use an electron beam to carve these complex patterns. And they also use a dry etching technique to remove material. Now where do you think these techniques came from?

C: NASA?

B: They came from semiconductor manufacturing.

C: Why would we guess that?

B: Right? No, I mean, well, I don't know. If you follow semiconductor manufacturing, you would have come across that. But I just love the fact that, oh yeah, we've got to make these chips smaller and smaller. More and more sophisticated. Oh, guess what? We can use these tools we have for creating these computer chips. And now we can use them on surfaces. It's amazing because all you're basically doing is you're making super fine, super tiny nanoscale structures on certain materials. And you could, of course, apply that to anything. But I don't think anyone would have guessed that. Oh yeah, we'll use this for metamaterials too. I just love the connection between the two. All right. The big breakthrough here came when they used that lithium niobate. What happened is, and they knew this would happen because they've done other studies. China has done some work with these surfaces as well. They knew that you can get really, really good efficiency. But when they used this lithium niobate in this case, it created unprecedented efficiency. It converted the infrared into visible light like it's never been done before. It was really, really impressive. They were really surprised. Also, the other thing is that one benefit of using the lithium is that it's transparent to infrared and visible light. Now that means they're really excited about that. That means that eventually what they should be able to do is they could show to you an infrared image, an infrared image of an object, but they could layer that on top of the visible light image at the same time, which is something that really wasn't practical to do before. They would essentially just show you the infrared image that's been converted to visible. But now because it's lithium, they can compare, they can overlay one on top of the other, which of course would give you much more information. The other breakthrough was that when China did these studies and created their own metasurface, they also had pretty decent efficiency, but the problem was the light was dispersed. So the metasurface was essentially lowering the resolution to unacceptable levels. It's like the new iPhone camera, right? This new iPhone camera is better in every way except the resolution is a lot worse than it used to be. It's a deal-breaker. That's why we haven't seen this before because the metasurfaces were really cool, but it created these blurry images. What they did is that they solved the problem. No one has been able to do this. They are the first to solve this problem. What they did was, this was kind of hard to put into words that even I understood. Initially they said, place the metasurface in the furrier plane instead of the imaging plane. All that basically means is that they discovered that if you take the metasurface and move it to an intermediate focus point rather than right where the image forms, it would de-blur it and make it really crisp. That was actually a huge breakthrough right there. That's what pretty much makes this viable. In the future, the researchers would like to expand the wavelengths available. Perhaps they can go deeper into the thermal imaging section of infrared, maybe mid-infrared or even far-infrared. It would be interesting if they could possibly do that. Even if they can't do that, this looks like this technology could become the standard for high-resolution infrared remote sensing, environmental monitoring, surveillance, medical imaging and more. Lots of different applications that I think we're not even imagining. This was fascinating. For me, this is just another notch on the metasurface and metamaterial belt. I think we're going to see amazing applications of metamaterials in the future. We're seeing some amazing things right now. This is the kind of technology that when you look at it, you're like, oh, wow, that's kind of like magic. Like invisibility cloak or some crazy stuff. I can't imagine when we have an even finer control of nanoscale or even smaller materials and the kind of metasurfaces and metamaterials that we can make to do amazing things with light and even other things. How about a metamaterial that could diverge an earthquake around your building so that it just kind of swerves around it so that none of the shaking ground ever gets to your...

C: That would be great.

B: Those are the crazy applications that we could see for these metamaterials. I'm really excited to see.

C: I got woken up by a brutal earthquake this past weekend.

B: Whoa, really?

C: Remember once on air, I was like, I can't even feel a 3.5. It was a 3.5, but it was in South Pasadena so it was like one town over for me.

B: Whoa, we can do the epicenter.

C: Anyway, sorry.

B: That's all I got. I'm really loving it if you can't tell metamaterials and I can't wait to see what's next.

S: Bob, when can I buy these? When can I buy a pair of slim night vision goggles?

B: Just go on Amazon. It's on Amazon right now. Or ten years.

S: Five, ten years?

B: I don't know. I didn't see any estimates. I did read this though, that for conventional home night goggles, we might not see that because it doesn't really apply to conventional thermal imaging right now. Maybe they can extend it, but this will, I think even best case scenario, this will be quite expensive and not at the level of consumer grade. Already consumer grade infrared images are pretty sophisticated, but this is more for industrial and military application, but you never know.

Who's That Noisy? (1:25:29)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Controlled audio feedback via "pendulum music"
Note: the Noisy is based on this piece/installation: Pendulum Music - Steve Reich (1966)

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

J: All right guys, last week I played this noisy.

[Airy bird calls or squeaky metal]

Well, could be so many things. I got lots of responses this week, so Visto Tutti wrote in. He goes, this could so easily be a bird call, but that is just what you want me to think. Yeah, it does sound like birds. So I'm saying it is mechanical because I also hear a kind of gas and valve sound. I call a wave power generator via air column turbine. And then he says, I just realized that a bird's syrinx is also a moving gas and valve system. Okay, that is incorrect and that was one hell of a guess. I got another guess here from Marshall Dixon and Marshall says, hello Rogues, my name is Reese. I live in Colorado and I've been a huge fan of the show since 2012. I was listening to the show with my girlfriend's 8-year-old son, Aiden, today and he wanted to submit his guess to Who's That Noisy. So Aiden said it sounds like an orca, but he took a second guess and said it also sounds like a mockingbird. And since Reese is only 8 years old, I will allow him to give two guesses. I don't let adults give two guesses. So that's not correct, but that was a really good guess and I have to give you props for even trying because so many adults don't even try. So good for you. Absolutely good, Aiden, for trying and you'll get it next time. I have another listener here named Tenanda Desmore and Tenanda said this week sounds like something starting up a lathe or someone starting up a lathe, doing a quick pass and shutting it down. I was trying to, because I know what lathes sound like. I've never heard a high-pitched sound like that coming from a lathe. But if you use one, I guess you'd know better than me. Another listener named Jason Youngberg said my guess is that it's the primate house at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo. Jason, that's a good guess. That's a good guess because I can totally hear monkey noises in there. But there was no winner this week, guys. This one is really cool. I really like this noisy. So the guy named Jim who sent it in, here's a quote from the YouTube. He says, here's a little throwback to when DB's tutor, Dr. Emmanuel Spinelli, recreated pendulum music. So this is pendulum music and I'll explain to you what that is. It's an experimental piece by a composer and audio pioneer, Steve Reek, dating back to 1968. The piece is created by using several microphones that are suspended at varying lengths above a set of speakers and pulled back and released. Now the microphones are swinging because they're on a cable and they're swinging past the speakers as they go. The speakers are stationary, the microphones are above them swinging back and forth. It says the different cable lengths cause the microphones to pass over the speakers at varying heights and speeds which generate a chorus of feedback. This is controlled feedback. Let me play it again now that you know what it is. It's a really interesting sound. [plays Noisy] Now you can imagine that this would get dissident at some point when the intervals change and those sounds are coming at different times. It's a cool thing. I think we live in an interesting world where people do stuff like this. You don't know what the result is going to be. And then they come up with something and maybe they refine it after a little while. Really cool. Take a look on YouTube. I think you'll like it.

New Noisy (1:29:20)

J: I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Armel. And here it is.

[Background whooshing, foreground whirring/siren]

J: If you think you know what this week's Noisy is or you heard something cool, you can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Announcements (1:29:45)

J: George and I came up with a couple of crazy things that we want to do at the 2.30 extravaganza. That's the early extravaganza on August 17th. Saturday, August 17th while we're in Chicago so we have two extravaganzas. We have the nighttime one and then the daytime one we thought let's experiment because it's an afternoon show. We didn't sell as many tickets to the show and we thought we'd go a little bit off the rails and try a couple of new bits for the extravaganza and test them out on a smaller audience. And we are so excited about these bits because they're really weird and they're really cool. Anyway, if you're interested in that show, you can come see us in Chicago for a skeptical extravaganza on Saturday afternoon, August 17th. Go to the website, go to our website theskepticsguide.org and you can find a link there for more information. The big show, a five hour celebration of the SGU's 1000th episode. Now I'll give you a little piece of trivia right here, guys. Steve is the only person on this show right now that did all 1000 episodes. The only guy. So it is Steve's 1000th episode. But we're all part of the SGU.

S: It's the SGU's collectively.

J: Yes, but collectively we have created 1000 episodes as of August 18th. And this summer we will be doing our 1000th episode live. Now to clarify some questions, people ask, why can't I listen to this episode? And the answer is you will be able to listen to an edited version of this episode. If you're a patron, you'll be able to listen to the entire version of this episode if you don't come to the show. But if you're in the Chicago area during August, why not join us live? Do it with us. George Hrab will be there. He'll be interviewing all of us. I opened up last week to the public. If people are interested in helping us go through the SGU back catalog and finding the best moments that we can, funny or interesting or whatever it is, I created a spreadsheet with Ian and you can go on theskepticsguide.org. You'll find a link to the spreadsheet there. You'll find a link to buy tickets for the 1000th episode there. So if you want to help us, you could go sign up, pick one or two episodes, however many you want to listen to, and then you could write in the spreadsheet all these interesting moments that are there and then I will go through thousands of sound bits to find out because I'll pick the best of the best.

S: It's a good thing this is your day job.

J: Yeah, that's it. Alright guys, all of these tickets can be found on the Skeptics Guide website, theskepticsguide.org. Go there now and join us.

S: Alright, thanks Jay.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:32:29)

Email #1: Megabits

S: A couple of emails. One quick correction. When I was talking about the Starling thing, I said megabytes per second instead of megabits per second. As I'm sure everybody knows, there are 8 bits per byte and typically download upload speed is expressed in megabits per second, not megabytes per second. So I was off by a factor of 8 there.

B: I must have been not paying attention. I would have called it.

E: I blame Bob.

S: Yeah, Bob. What the hell, man? Yeah, that's an easy confusion to make.

B: Oh yeah.

S: Megabits, yeah. Anywho, because different things use different like some things are in megabytes, some things are in megabits. You got to keep it all straight.

Email #2: Ancient Pyramids

S: We got a few emails about our comments that believing that the pyramids were built by aliens has a racist element to it. There are sometimes we say things because it's an off-the-cuff open conversation, but a lot of times we say things and usually try to be clear about it, but that's because there is a background, an academic support here. Like we're not just making this up willy-nilly. Even though we may just be referencing it very, very quickly, it doesn't mean that this is like an off-the-cuff comment. And this is one of those situations. The idea that many ancient non-European cultures were not responsible for their own history has a long racist pedigree. This is well established in history, in archaeology, in academia. And we were specifically referencing that. One point I want to make is that someone said that I called people who believed in aliens built the pyramids racist. I never said that. That was never the point. I never said, you're a racist if you think this. I said that there are elements of racism in the belief itself, which is undeniably true. We'll go over that in a little bit more detail in a second. And then people said, what about these other factors? Factors which I explicitly mentioned and said it's multi-layered. We had this whole conversation about how people underestimate the technological prowess of ancient civilizations and the power of ancient technology, of the basic engineering principles. I'm not saying it's 100% racist. It's just that there's a racist element here. Now let's talk a little bit about what that is. There are lots of references. If you're interested in this topic, you don't have to listen to us. You could easily research this on your own. There's a vast literature out there. We were referencing actual academics and archaeologists talking about this. I think one of the best papers that Cara you, I think you and I independently found this when we were looking for recent things that were published about this. This was by Stephanie Helmhofer who was an archaeologist who was saying that these theories definitely have a racist history, a racist background to them. She points out a number of things. One is that there is definitely an asymmetry that when you're talking about ancient marvels in Africa, in the Americas, in Asia, it's always some long lost white race was responsible for that or aliens or people from the future or people from Atlantis or whatever. But not so much in Europe. There's definitely, again, this is an archaeologist who is writing about pseudo-archaeology and saying straight out, there's absolutely an asymmetry there which is based on race. Based on the notion that Europeans are not nearly as questioned as much in terms of their ancient accomplishments as other cultures. Also, she points out many of the negative effects of this pseudo-archaeology because then what you have are these pseudo-archaeologists, basically people who are motivated by finding the real history like the real people who built the pyramids whatever they were, aliens or some long lost ancient race. They do damage to sites because they don't know what they're doing and they often don't get permission because they don't trust the powers that be. They think that the people in charge are trying to hide the real history of the world so they got to go behind their backs and they do real damage to these archaeological sites. That's just sort of one, obviously as an archaeologist she's particularly annoyed at that. There's another article this one by the Southern Poverty Law Center that goes into the history of these beliefs and in order to understand this phenomenon you have to understand the history. So even if you go back even 100 years, which obviously 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, there was the racism in Europe and in America was much more predominant than it is even today. The belief that these ancient artifacts were actually the accomplishments of white people was an explicit statement that was 100% racist. In that case it wasn't a really complicated phenomenon. For example, in the Americas there are lots of Native American mounds and locations and buildings and whatnot. This is like the mound builders. There was an entire pseudo-archaeology around the lost race of mound builders. These were a white, once powerful race that was wiped out by the Indian savages who then took credit for the stuff that they built. That was literally the belief.

C: They literally couldn't believe. They believed that indigenous peoples were subhuman. They literally could not believe-

S: That they themselves were primitive. Absolutely. That establishes this historical background of every non-white ancient artifact was really the product of this long lost white race or just non-humans like aliens or whatever. That bakes that into the culture and then you fast forward 150 years. Some of the emailers were saying that, I used to believe that. I wasn't a racist. That's not what we're saying. We're not saying you're a racist. We're saying that this belief has racist roots, racist origins and that carries through. Why do you think ancient Egyptians didn't have the technology to build piramids? Why do you think that? That belief derives from everything that we're talking about. It derives from this notion that they were somehow too primitive to be able to pull something like that off. That belief itself is not like a separate reason to think that they couldn't have done it. That's part of the racism itself, in fact. Today, there is massive overlap between the pseudo-archaeology subculture saying that everything we think we know about the past is wrong and the white nationalism. White nationalists love it. They're like, yeah, those brown people didn't make that thing. It must have been some long lost white race that did it. They're going back to the origins of all this from 150 plus years ago and completely leaning into that. It's explicitly racist in that formulation, but that is the context and the history there. I'm not saying that everybody who heard the aliens built the pyramids and believed it is a racist. That's not the point. The point is that there is this cultural belief that undeniably has racist origins and undeniably currently is being used by white nationalists to erase indigenous history and give these mythical ancient white races credit for anything amazing that was built in the past. That's happening. You can't deny that. If you disagree with us, fine, but do some research. This information is out there in academic circles, in archaeology circles. We're not making it up. This is not our opinion. As we try to always do, reflecting the consensus of expert opinion.

C: That opinion, by the way, it's not even new. It's well documented historically. I think that's the thing that's also important to remember. These views are part and parcel of the colonial attitude. It was, I have come upon this place full of people who are less than, who are, as you said, they'd use terms like savage or primitive. They couldn't have possibly done all of this interesting stuff. I must come up with an alternative explanation. That just grew and grew and grew. When we talk about the shows like Ancient Aliens that perpetuate those stereotypes, even if they're not explicitly perpetuating racist values, they're implicitly perpetuating them. I think that's the point.

S: It's good to know where these beliefs came from. It didn't come out of nowhere. There was an undeniable history here. Anyway, it is a fascinating topic and there's a much deeper history here than you might think if you look into it. Modern archaeologists are all over it because it's so blatantly pseudoscientific. This is really bad pseudoscience.

C: It's also really important for many modern archaeologists to overtly discuss this because there's so much blatant racism in the history of archaeology.

S: They're trying to rid themselves of their racist roots. Oh, we shouldn't go into places and just steal all their artifacts and put them in art museums. I guess so. It's complicated, but that is going on at the same time. Okay, let's move on with science or fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:42:55)

Theme: GMO News Item #1: Researchers have developed a photosynthesis-enhanced poplar tree variety with a greater than 50% increase in above ground biomass accumulation. Item #2: The pink glow pineapple is approved in the US, it has pink flesh that is sweeter, less sour, with hints of watermelon. Item #3: A biotech company has begun shipping "firefly petunias", which glow when you touch or shake them.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Firefly petunias
Science	Enhanced poplar tree
Science	Pink glow pineapple

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Firefly petunias
Jay	Enhanced poplar tree
Bob	Enhanced poplar tree
Evan	Enhanced poplar tree

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake news and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week. The theme is GMOs. We haven't talked about GMOs in a while. I was wondering what's new in GMO news recently and this would be a good science or fiction. Alright, here we go. Three items. Item number one, researchers have developed a photosynthesis enhanced poplar tree variety with a greater than 50% increase in above ground biomass accumulation. Item number two, the pink glow pineapple is approved in the U.S. It has pink flesh that is sweeter, less sour, with hints of watermelon. Item number three, a biotech company has begun shipping firefly petunias which glow when you touch or shake them. Cara, go first.

Cara's Response

C: I may ask a question on this first one for clarification. A photosynthesis enhanced poplar tree variety, so meaning it can do better photosynthesis?

S: Right.

C: With a greater than 50% increase in above ground biomass accumulation. I guess I don't understand what that means. The tree is accumulating biomass?

S: It's growing more is all that means. They're weighing it.

C: I thought it was accumulating it from somewhere else.

S: Into its own body. It's growing 50% faster than other plants, but that's how they measure it because you can't really measure the underground biomass. The part that we could see, the above ground biomass, is more than 50% greater than a regular poplar.

B: I thought I heard that if you actually touch that tree, it sucks in your biomass.

C: I was so confused. I was like, no, that sounds scary. Okay. The pink glow pineapple. It's good marketing. Pink flesh that is sweeter, less sour, and has hints of watermelon. Also sounds like good marketing. You're saying it's approved in the U.S. A biotech company has begun shipping firefly petunias, which glow when you touch or shake them. Okay. All three of these seem reasonable, but they all have their hiccups, so let's look at those hiccups. The poplar, we do like that because poplar is woody mass. We need that to build stuff, so we would want just more woody mass. Of course, there would be a motivation to make something that is basically photosynthesizing faster or at a greater quantity to just make more mass, but is 50% the amount? Maybe it's only 25. Who knows? Pink glow all sounds good. I doubt you would be like, well, it's actually slightly bitterer. That's why this is the fiction. Those all seem like good marketing things. I hope that's the case. I'm always seeing these really interesting grapes on the market, like cotton candy grapes and blah, blah, blah. I don't know if they're genetically modified, but I like it. I dig it. That one doesn't bother me, so I'm going to take that one out of the running and say that that's science. And then the biotech company has begun shipping butterfly petunias. They glow when you touch or you shake them. Well, I think about bioluminescence in the ocean, like phytoplankton. And then I also think about what is it? Is it GFC? No. What's the name of that gene? Like a lot of research organisms that glow sometimes just under a blacklight. Sometimes they just kind of glow for purposes of identifying structures. So I think the technology is there for this, but I don't know if they've started shipping them. I think that might be the fictional part, that they're not available yet. So is it a 50% increase in biomass, or are they not available yet? I think the one that's slightly harder for me to believe is the glow in the dark or whatever, the glowing flower. So I'm going to say that that one's the fiction.

S: Okay, Jay.

Jay's Response

J: The firefly petunias don't seem that crazy to me because they make all sorts of different things, including animals glow in the dark. So why couldn't they do it to a plant? I mean, there are already, I think, some plants that have some type of glow-in-the-dark effect. Anyway, that just doesn't seem that crazy to me, and it's just within reach, I think. So that one, to me, is science. Now Steve, Evan and I are big fans of pineapples.

E: My favorite fruit.

C: Oh, really?

J: Yeah, they're wonderful. I hope I'm with you when you try your first sugarloaf pineapple.

E: Let's make that a thing. Yeah, I'm in.

J: Yeah, we can order one. We can order a couple of them. They're so good.

B: Be wary, though, because once you have it, no other pineapple will be good enough.

J: It didn't kill inferior pineapples to me, but it still. Alright, so, I don't know. See, this, to me, this is not that big of a deal. Selectively breeding a pineapple to have properties.

S: Again, these are all GMOs.

J: So genetically modified to do this. Okay. Yeah, so, I mean, that's why I go back to the first one. So genetically modified photosynthesis enhanced poplar tree with a greater than 50% increase in above ground biomass. So what would be the point of increasing the biomass by 50% in the above ground? Is it to grow more wood?

S: And sequester carbon.

E: Oooh. Oh, boy.

J: So, I'm vacillating between the pineapple now and the poplar tree. I am going to go with my gut and say that the poplar tree is the fiction because I don't think that increasing the biomass by that much above ground is a good idea.

B: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: The pink little pineapple, to me, that's the easy one. It's just like, yeah. Which is probably Steve's trick all along. Bastard. So, that one just seems way too much like science to not be science. The third one, firefly petunias. Yeah, that seems a little, I mean, sketchy, but it doesn't compare to this first one. Photosynthesis enhanced? That's huge. 50% increase? That, to me, seems massively huge. I mean, once you can apply photosynthesis enhancement using GMOs to other plants? I mean, come on. That's just way too big, I think, to be just like, oh, I don't know. To me, that's just like, I hope it's true. I really hope it's true, but based on what little I know, that sounds way too good to be true. So, that's fiction.

S: And, Evan.

Evan's Response

E: And, I think I'm going to go there as well. The other two, what? The pineapple, pink little pineapple. I can see that. That seems very reasonable. Also, the, for all the reasons that were mentioned, the glow-in-the-dark petunias, yes. However, the poplar one, which I really couldn't put my finger on, but I think Bob did an excellent job of sort of, he's probably going to be correct in having nailed that one as the fiction. So, I'll say that's fiction.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Okay, so you all agree on the middle one, so we'll start there. The pink glow pineapple is approved in the U.S. It has pink flesh that is sweeter, less sour, with hints of watermelon. You all think this is science, and this one is science. In fact, I ordered one. It'll be here in a minute.

E: You're inviting me over, right?

S: Of course.

E: Pineapple party.

S: Yeah, it's a pink flesh pineapple. They tweaked a gene that increases the beta-carotene in it, so it gives it more vitamin A. It's supposed to be more nutritious. It has more of the same kind of sort of aromatics that things like watermelon has it in, so that's why some people think that it has this sort of hint of watermelon flavor to it. It's sweeter, less bite to it and probably similar to the sugarloaf, I would imagine. So, yeah, this is it's four genes were introduced. One from a tangerine and three from an ananas comosus? I don't even know what that is.

E: Anise? Is that a... I read that once in a homeopathy remedy. Seriously.

C: Ananis?

E: I think so.

S: Oh, it's a pineapple. They introduced it from another pineapple, I guess. Yeah, so a pineapple the species name is ananas comosus. A-N-A-N-A-S C-O-M-O-S-U-S, commasis.

C: Like banana, but ananas.

E: Oh, interesting, Cara. Good connection.

S: Cool.

E: Can't wait.

C: I want to try it.

S: We'll report back on that.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Let's go to number three. A biotech company has begun shipping Firefly petunias which glow when you touch or shake them. Cara, you think this one is the fiction.

B: Not looking good for you, Cara.

S: Bob, Jay and Evan, you guys think this one is science and this one is the fiction.

C: Solo win!

E: Good job, Cara.

S: Nice solo win, Cara.

B: Cara, your knowledge and your luck and your instincts are really getting frustrating.

C: So wait, what's the fiction? Is it just you made it up?

S: Hang on, I'll tell you. You're right for the wrong reason. It is shipping.

B: At least we got that, boys.

S: In fact, I ordered three of them and I'll have them here within a couple weeks.

C: I'm like John Oliver of you right now.

S: In fact, I thought it myself. In fact, of course I did. It just glows in the dark. It doesn't glow when you shake or touch them. They're just regular green glow-in-the-dark petunias.

C: Just all the time they glow in the dark.

S: Yeah, they just glow in the dark.

C: That's actually very cool though.

E: When you touch or shake them.

S: Yeah, that's the part I made up. Hence the Firefly. They're like fireflies. So yeah, I'm going to put them on my deck and then they'll have glowing petunias on the deck at nighttime.

C: I'm going to order some right now.

E: You know what else is unique about Firefly petunias? They only grow in one season. Firefly, one season. Did you get that?

S: Yeah, I got it.

E: I just couldn't hear your belly laughing.

C: I don't get it.

B: I'm not even going to try again.

C: Because I never saw that TV show.

E: There will be Firefly fans who email us saying that was great.

S: It's not just that it had one season. It was an awesome show that everybody loved and it tragically was cancelled after one season which took everybody by surprise.

E: Yep, that and Faulty Towers. Those are the only two shows that should have gone on.

C: This is cool, Steve. They're only $29?

S: Yeah.

E: Just don't touch or shake them.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: This means that researchers have developed a photosynthesis-enhanced poplar tree variety with a greater than 50% increase in above-ground biomass accumulation.

E: No way.

S: Bob, I had the same reaction you did, which is why I chose this one.

B: Of course. I could just see, Steve, I'm going to screw Bob with this one.

S: It's being promoted as this is great for carbon sequestration. It was 53% in the laboratory trials they did. It's currently undergoing field trials. They have 400-something trees planted on a 1,200-acre lot that they have. They're comparing it to some regular poplars. They have another 300 or so regular poplars to see if they could replicate it out there in the wild. Yeah, that would be great. Fast-growing trees are always good, right? If you're a homeowner, the conventional wisdom is the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago because they're famously obviously slow-growing. Whenever you put it, just do it now. If you're thinking, someday I'll put a tree in, just do it now because they need time to grow. There's a whole industry of what are the fastest-growing trees you can get in your yard for either firewood or just for aesthetics or whatever. Now, of course, we have this other layer of what's the fastest accumulation of carbon and biomass that there is so that we can... The clock is ticking on climate change. If we're going to try to do some mitigation through planting trees, we might as well plant really fast-growing ones, ones that accumulate a lot of biomass very quickly. That's the whole point behind this. Bob, you're right. Photosynthesis-enhancing genetic technology is fantastic. I don't know how transferable this is.

B: Yeah, that's the weak link. Photosynthesis is damn photosynthesis, man.

S: Let's see if you understand this. They selected a photorespiration bypass pathway to see if that would increase the efficiency, basically, and the effectiveness of photosynthesis, and it did by 53%.

B: Photorespiration?

S: There's all kinds of... Plants have all kinds of protective mechanisms that add inefficiency for safety. If you bypass some of that, it actually makes them grow faster, even though they might be a little bit more susceptible to sunburn or whatever, things like that. I don't know if it's that sort of thing. I'd have to do a lot deeper dive. The jargony superficial summary was... I do think this is a C3 to C4 carbon fixation thing. For most plants, they use a C3, what's called a C3 pathway, and it's not as efficient as a C4 pathway that some plants have evolved. They found this way metabolically to get a little bit more efficiency out of photosynthesis. That's what we're trying to do, take the C4 pathways, which can involve a dozen genes from plants that have it and genetically engineer them into other plants so that they then get the benefit of this enhanced photosynthesis. The fact that they've been successfully able to do it in any plant is wonderful. It means that we're definitely getting closer to being able to transfer this to other plants.

B: Steve, you said it enhances biomass. What about something like fruit biomass?

S: I think that could potentially be the case, too. In fact, this is being looked at for productive plants, not just accumulating biomass, but things like crops, like wheat. If you have a 50% increased growth rate in wheat, that would not suck. That's what we're looking at it for.

B: Can you make Willy Wonka fruit, like gargantuan strawberries?

S: Or what was that? Sleeper? Even if they just are able to grow faster, grow more, you could increase the productivity of fruit-bearing trees or crop plants. Absolutely. That's the idea.

B: GMOs, baby. It's going to save the world right after we kill it.

S: It's a great technology. Whenever you research it, you run across the anti-GMO propaganda. It's just so frustrating. It's just nonsensical. It's just wrong. It's just factually incorrect. We talked about this recently, Cara, about the idea that it didn't change anything. The seed companies were already 95% of their seeds were hybrids. They were patented, and you couldn't plant them and everything. We're keeping the seeds from the farmers and the... Stop it. You don't know what you're talking about.

C: Go talk to a farmer. Talk to a farmer. Come back.

S: Talk to a farmer. You could see the map of in 1996 when the first GMOs were introduced. Obviously, 0% of crops were GMO, and now it's like 90% to 95%. It's all farmer's choice.

C: They're not being held at gunpoint to buy these seeds.

S: It's good for their business. They are making a business decision.

C: Yes.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:59:39)

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.  – George Box (1919-2013), British statistician, from Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987)

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

E: Here we go. "Remember that all models are wrong. The practical question is, how wrong do they have to be to not be useful?" That was written by George Box in his book, Empirical Model Building and Response Services, back in 1987.

S: Yep. I've heard that so many times. I think that's one. I don't know if that idea originated with him, but that is now conventional wisdom. I feel like going through a science education and working in a scientific field, so many people have said to me over the years, all models are wrong. That idea is well represented. All models are wrong. They are models.

C: That's the point. They're approximated.

S: This is not exactly how the universe works. This is just a human understanding, a human model to predict. It's also predictive. We just have predictive models. Those predictive models are either more or less useful. That's it. That's really all we can say. Of course, we assume that a highly useful model is probably highly useful because it reflects something meaningful about the underlying reality.

C: It's less wrong than the other.

E: Less wrong.

S: Less wrong, right. It's important to recognize that we don't know any absolute truths about the universe. We just have models that work. They get spaceships to Pluto. They cure cancer. They do useful things. You live longer or whatever. We can build higher buildings. They function in some way. That is all the validation we're really going to get. It's internally consistent. It makes predictions. It's useful. It's not right or wrong. I think it's a very helpful perspective when thinking about science. Good quote, Evan. All right guys, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

J: You got it Steve.

C: Thanks Steve.

B: Thanks man.

E: Thanks, Steve. Can't wait to taste the pineapple.

Signoff

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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