SGU Episode 800

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SGU Episode 800
November 7th 2020
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SGU 799                      SGU 801
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
Zora Neale Hurston, American anthropologist
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

Voiceover: 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, November 4^th, 2020, 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, folks.

S: So, I'm sure we're all exhausted after the last 24 hours.

B: Oh, God.

C: Yes.

S: But I'm just going to say that while we're recording this show, we don't know who won the election. We don't know who the next president is going to be. But if you're listening to this show, you probably do. So we're who knows, but I'm assuming you do. So we're not going to really talk about it much. You know, it's still something that's in the process of happening. Anything we say is going to be obsolete before the show comes out. And in any case, there's something much more important to talk about.

J: What's that?

S: This is show episode number 800.

J: Oh, that's right.

C: No way.

B: Sneaked up on us.

E: I knew we'd get here someday.

C: Bananas.

B: I'm done now. I'm totally done now, you know. This is it.

S: So, a little bit less than two years, no, four years.

C: Four years.

S: Four years from now. Four years, we'll hit 1,000. Definitely celebrate that.

E: Oh, something big has to happen.

B: You know, in 2005, I said, Steve, don't forget, after 800, I'm done. And you said, yeah, yeah, whatever.

S: Slipped my mind.

B: All right, I'll do another 800. But that's it.

C: Really had to twist your arm there, Bob.

COVID-19 Update (1:38)

• Superspreading Events

S: We do need to talk about COVID a little bit this week, because there's something else. There's another record today. In the United States, we had the single largest day of new cases. We broke 100,000. So far today.

B: Wait. I thought we turned the corner. Wait.

S: Yeah. The wrong direction, though. 104,000 new cases. So far, the day is not over yet, but it's already broken the record for the most new cases in a single day. This third surge or peak, whatever you want to call it, is definitely going to be bigger than the previous two. It's partly because this is the way this pandemic is rolling. But also it's colder weather is coming to the Northern Hemisphere, which means that people stay in longer, are more inside. I think there's definitely pandemic fatigue setting in. Also, kids back to school. Schools are trying to have kids in the classroom, but then they're doing like Jay's. Your school's got shut down for a couple of weeks. My daughter's doing halftime online, halftime in school. But they're trying. And that may contribute to cases. Probably all the campaigning didn't help. And now we're worried about a double hit from the flu and COVID. So go out there, get your flu vaccine. You don't want to be dealing with two pandemics at the same time. But worldwide, cases are also continuing to go up. It's 48 million worldwide. We're approaching 50 million worldwide. Deaths over 1.2 million. And it's still going up. If you look at daily new cases, it weaves and bobs, but it's always trending up. It hasn't really turned down at any point. Again, it still looks like we're in the middle of this pandemic. We're not rounding the corner. We're not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. This is still moving along. I think that the general consensus that we're not really going to put this behind us until we have a vaccine may be correct.

E: Sounds correct to me. Vaccination.

S: So I did blog about it. Again, it's so hard not to write about it because this is what the medical news is that's happening in the world. But there have been some recent studies. There was a just published study that I was writing about. I'm talking about super spreader events and the idea that about 80% of new cases are a result of super spreader events.

E: Wow.

S: Which by definition is when any one person infects six or more people at a single event, that's a super spreader event.

C: Because then there's all these downstream things that come from that.

S: Yeah, it's all the people they infect and that they infect. If it weren't for that event, then you would have not produced all of those cases. On average, each person infected with COVID-19 gives it to three other people, which is a lot. That's a lot for an infection, for the infection rate to be three people per infected individual. Of course, that's on average. Some people it's zero. Some people it's more.

J: Without a course correction and how we're handling COVID in the United States, is the vaccine really the only thing that's going to get us out of this?

S: Well, again, we don't really know because this is still a novel virus that we don't know. We've never followed it throughout a pandemic. We're still in the middle of it. So we don't know how long immunity lasts and that's a big variable. I'm still reading conflicting data where some studies say it's short, others saying it's at least five months now. In some people, it might depend on the individual or the population. At this point, I think it's best just to say we don't really know, but there's reason to be concerned. We can't assume that there's long-lasting immunity from it because as a family, this virus tends not to have long-lasting immunity, but we won't know until we know. We've got to follow it out to know that. So it's possible it could be endemic where we're never going to get rid of it. It's like the flu, right? The flu has been with us forever, right? It just becomes endemic in the population and we deal with it. In that case, the only way to really control it, obviously use all the mask wearing, social distancing stuff, but if we don't want to have to do that, if we want to get our lives back to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality, vaccine really is probably the only thing that's going to do that. The other thing to come out of this study, because they modeled how the virus spreads and they modeled the super spreader events throughout the pandemic, the virus has what they call a fat tail. If you graph the distribution of how many people each infected person spreads it to, it peaks at three. But the question was, to the right of that peak, does it drop off sharply and so you have a thin tail or does it drop off slowly so you have a fat tail? What they're saying is that statistically it seems to have a fat tail, meaning that big super spreader events are not rare and therefore they contribute a lot to the number of new cases. But what this means is that we can significantly reduce the spread of this virus by limiting large gatherings. If you just say no gatherings more than 10 people, right there you significantly reduce the spread of this virus. Of course, people aren't doing that and it's partly why the pandemic is raging on. But this is a good reminder that it's like, no, we still really need to do this. We need to limit large gatherings. Again, maybe until we get a vaccine. It seems to be the way things are going.

C: It's just so frustrating to kind of, and again, you hear this, and I don't think it's rhetoric, but this idea that if we would just follow guidance and just wear masks, wash our hands, keep our interactions minimal, that we could have a relatively normal life right now, relatively. But instead, because we don't follow guidance, we're having to have all these starts and stops with shutdowns. People aren't able to engage fully in certain activities of daily living that they could previously. And it's frustrating to hear that it could literally be as simple as massive behavioral change, which apparently is not that simple.

E: Not for 300 plus million people at once, unfortunately.

B: I chatted with somebody in Australia just yesterday, and she's like, oh, it's pretty much back to normal.

C: Yeah, you see it in a lot of other countries, and other countries with massive populations. Oh, like all over Southeast Asia.

S: They're used to mask wearing there already.

C: Totally.

S: I know, and it's always a risk versus benefit, or cost versus benefit analysis. It's like one of those basic intellectual skills I wish more people had, to approach a question in terms of what's the cost, what's the benefit, how does it shake out. It seems basic, but people don't engage in that. Like here, it's like, okay, yes, mask wearing is a burden. Nobody would do it voluntarily if you didn't have a reason to do it. Yeah, not being able to have large gatherings, that's a bummer. Having to social distance, not hug your family and friends and stuff. Yeah, sure. But compare that to getting an illness which you could die from, or continuing the spread of the pandemic, which means that we continue to have to do these measures in order to keep from spreading. It's the lesser of two evil by far, by super far. I mean, come on, grow up and wear your freaking mask.

C: And it also requires this kind of more communal view of risk-benefit analysis instead of a purely individualistic one, that even though you're right, even if people just looked at it from a selfish, very sort of, I don't know, traditionally American perspective of like, what is the risk to me and how does this benefit me?

S: It's still a good idea.

C: It's still a good idea. But if they were able to go beyond that and say, what is the benefit to society versus the risk?

S: That's also a risk versus benefit or cost versus benefit because it's just at a different level. Because we agree that if we're going to live in society, I'm better off if I respect other people's rights and concerns in exchange for them respecting mine.

C: True.

S: And if I keep that social contract, it's better for me. But that means sometimes you have to do things because it's good for other people. And you can't have it – again, it's childish to think that people are going to give you every courtesy that you want, but you don't have to reciprocate. That's what children do. They want everything, but they don't want to do their fair share.

B: Yeah. Altruism is not necessarily selfless.

C: Right. It's like when people ask me if I believe in karma and I'm always like, not as some sort of cosmic principle, but if you're an asshole all the time.

S: Mathematically, there's karma. Yeah. Totally. Absolutely. All right.

News Items

Amulets and COVID-19 (10:37)

• Magic Amulets Do Not Prevent COVID

S: So actually the first two news items are tangentially related to COVID. I'm going to talk – this one really isn't about COVID, but it is. This is like the title of a blog that I wrote earlier this week, Magic Amulets Do Not Prevent COVID.

E: They don't?

J: Do we have to cover this? But do we have to cover this?

S: Yes. One of those things you wouldn't have thought that you would have to point out to people, you know?

E: I get a plus one to my constitution with my magic amulet, Steve. What are you talking about?

S: So this is a peer-reviewed published paper, scientific paper, peer-reviewed paper. So it's really about pseudoscience, this news item, and it's just amazing. So the author of – the main author of this paper, Dr. Billety – this guy has a great name.

E: Al Billety?

S: Abe Billety.

B: Abe Billety.

E: Abe Billety.

S: Moses Terkel Billety.

J: No way.

S: You've got to love him, right?

C: Oh, yeah.

S: So Moses – Moses. You'll go out into the desert, Moses. So Moses, or Dr. Billety.

B: I didn't know God was Jewish.

S: He published this article. Here's the title. Can Traditional Chinese Medicine Provide Insights into Controlling the COVID-19 Pandemic? Serpentinization-Induced Lithospheric Long-Wavelength Magnetic Anomalies in Proterozoic Bedrocks in a Weakened Geomagnetic Field Mediate the Aberrant Transformation of Biogenic Molecules in COVID-19 via Magnetic Catalysis. Did you guys get that?

C: No, that's all made up.

B: Wow.

E: Oh, boy.

S: That is a beautiful turbo-encabulator.

C: Yes.

J: I know, right?

E: Is this a – may we find out someday this is a joke?

S: So I actually wrote that, Evan, in my blog. I'm like, if I didn't know any better, like this is like indistinguishable from like a Sokal-like hoax, where you –

E: That's a poe, right?

S: Yeah, but it isn't. This guy has published books on nonsense. So I know that he believes this stuff. But if it weren't for that, like if this guy had no paper trail, I would like be half thinking, okay, any day now, he's going to come out and say, psych. But this shows you that it's satire is indistinguishable from reality these days.

B: Yeah, it's very rare for someone at the end of their life to say, psych.

S: So this came to my attention through Retraction Watch, which is a wonderful website, and one of the co-founders of Retraction Watch was alerted to this paper. And so they wanted to watch it to see what happens, you know. But doing what they do, he wrote to – he emailed Dr. Ability, and here is his email. I blog at Retraction Watch. Can you confirm that you co-authored this paper? Sincerely very simple. This is like absolutely standard within academia. Again, you're dotting the I's. You're making sure that this person actually is the author of the paper. And this is his response.

C: In case there's another Mosesbility out there. I'm not sure you got the right one.

S: I'm not sure I have the correct Mosesbility. So he writes back, Dear Dr. Oransky, that's the guy from Retraction Watch, yes, I published that article, and I kindly suggest you read the article and examine the evidence provided. I also suggest you read the history of science and how zealots have consistently attempted to block and ridicule novel ideas that challenge the predominant paradigm from individuals that are deemed not intelligent enough. I'm not surprised that this article has elicited angry responses. Clearly, the idea that a black scientist can provide a paradigm-shifting idea offends a lot of individuals. I'll be very candid with you. My skin color has no bearing on my intelligence. If you have legitimate concerns about the article and wish to discuss, I'll address. However, I will not tolerate racism or intellectual intolerance targeted at me.

C: Straw man much?

S: That was in response to, can you confirm you're the author of this paper?

C: Wow.

E: He could have stopped at yes.

C: Wow. It's like he mixed up his replies with somebody else.

S: It's like, I think thou dost protest too much. This is all in the small-minded bigots can't appreciate my paradigm-shifting brilliance card, right?

C: That's like a real trope out there.

S: He's playing that card hard. Again, as I had to say, I'm not doubting the experience of minority scientists and that there are not bigots out there. I'm sure that they have to deal with all of that. But that just has nothing to do with this. I dare say, I didn't know what his skin color was. Probably Dr. Aransky didn't know either when he sent the email. It's like literally irrelevant. It was more just that this paper is shit. And before we tear into it, I'd like you to confirm that you're the actual author before I attribute it to you. So Aransky wrote back. And this is his response. Thank you for your quick response, Dr. Billity. Can you please provide actual evidence that, and then he quotes the article, nephrite jade amulets, a calcium ferromagnesium silicate, may prevent COVID-19. I would also be interested in your views on whether promoting non-evidence-based interventions during a pandemic is a good idea. So polite, but that was a little bit more cutting.

C: Yeah, for sure. Like you know what he's asking there.

S: Totally. So this is now Dr. Billity's response. He says, dear Dr. Aransky, please read and understand the article in its entirety before you make a hasty decision. If I may speculate, you neither understand quantum physics nor spin chemistry. You are making a hasting decision based on your knowledge of the classical theories that dominate the biological sciences. Also, certainly you being a white male offers you the privilege to think that you have the right to determine who can propose ideas that challenge a dominant paradigm.

J: There he goes again.

S: Other cultures are not primitive and people of color and indigenous people are not intellectually inferior. Before you jump to conclusions about this article, I suggest you understand quantum physics and spin chemistry and how it differs from classical theories and then read my article.

C: Wait, wait, what? Go become a physicist and then read my article?

E: Who's jumping to conclusions?

S: Here's the thing.

C: That's so weird.

S: Here's the thing I like to point out. Whether or not this guy's paper is legit or is nonsense, that is not the way to respond to a peer review.

C: Oh, hell no.

S: The point of publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. So again, he's saying you don't understand science. I think it's Dr. Billity who doesn't understand science. So that you publish in the peer-reviewed literature so that you can engage with the scientific community. And their job is to tear you a new one. It is to destroy your hypothesis. To find every flaw they possibly can. To challenge your conclusions.

B: They're doing you a favor.

S: Yeah, are your conclusions in excess of the evidence? And he's basically saying you're making a claim here that is not supported by the evidence in your paper. And how do you defend that? And it's also, he was saying it's also irresponsible to do that in the middle of a pandemic. Perfectly 100% legitimate. And he did it way more politely than is the typical what I would consider what would probably happen in- Like if these people are at a conference, it wouldn't be this polite. Be like, really? Really? You think, I mean, come on. They would be completely ridiculing this guy's claims.

C: And the thing is like, Ivan, Dr. Aransky is a doctor. He's not yes, he runs or he's one of the co-founders of Retraction Watch. And yes, he has like all of these amazing journalism accolades. But he has an M.D. as well. Like he is a scientist or a physician who would be included in that kind of peer group, especially with regards to wild claims of treatments for disease.

S: Right. Right. Well, meanwhile, Dr. Billity, not a physicist. Not a chemist. He's a Ph.D. in infectious disease. He's not an M.D. So not a doctor, not a physicist, not a chemist.

C: Wait, this guy studies infectious disease. That's scary.

S: Well, Ph.D. is not a physician.

C: No, but still, like he's doing research in this field.

S: Yeah, and he's worked for the University of Pittsburgh. So he's got a legit degree. He's at a legit university. But he definitely is going way beyond his his degree, his area of expertise. So he's not in a position to criticize other people for not knowing things outside of their area of expertise. That's like a pot kettle situation. So this is just not the way you respond. It's not the way you respond to criticism. When people says, I don't think you're making claims that I don't think are supported by the evidence you presented. And it's irresponsible. Your response is, OK, I understand why you might say that. Here's the evidence. Let me summarize it in a cogent way so that a non expert can understand.

B: Yeah.

S: And am I getting anything wrong? Let me ask an actual quantum physicist. What do you think about what I have to say since I don't have a degree in quantum physics? But so this guy completely lacks all humility. And again, playing the you're too dumb and uneducated and bigoted to appreciate my brilliant paradigm smashing ideas. Again, you might as well stamp the word crank on your forehead because that's what they do.

E: Did he mention Galileo?

S: Well, he might as well have.

C: Just put me in prison for my earth shattering beliefs.

J: The point is only someone who doesn't understand the inner workings of science would even make a comment like that.

S: Right. You know, or a little bit of a persecution complex going on there, making me this guy might have difficulty engaging with the scientific community. But in any case.

C: Yeah.

S: So I read his paper. Right. So. OK, fine. Read the paper before, sure. I'll read your paper. Here's the first. Here's the first paragraph. Thoracic organs, namely the lungs and kidneys, and severe acute respiratory syndrome, coronavirus to associated coronavirus disease exhibit silica glass like hyaline and iron oxides like deposits, which are like serpentization induced minerals. So serpentization is a legit term in geology. It has to do to mineralization process. And so what he's saying here is that the pathology that we're observing in the lungs and kidneys of people with COVID-19 looks like these types of minerals. The silica glass, hyaline and iron oxides. All right. So first of all, is opening right out of the gate thoracic organs, namely the lungs and kidneys. You guys know what the problem is there?

C: The thoracic organs, mainly the lungs and kidneys. The kidneys aren't up with your lungs.

B: Aren't there more than just those two?

S: Yes. The kidneys are not thoracic organs.

C: Yeah. Like you've got your lungs in your heart.

S: Yes.

C: And then you've got other stuff below your diaphragm.

S: The kidneys are abdominal organs and they're specifically retroperineal, but they're not thoracic unless you're one of the rare mutants who has a topic thoracic kidney, but that's an anomaly. But anyway. So, OK.

B: The first line.

S: You might think, yeah, the first six words, you know. That doesn't bode well. So you might think that, seven words. You might think that that's being nitpicky, but peer review is all about being nitpicky. That's the job of peer review is to pick every nit you can possibly find in the paper.

E: You want it to happen that way.

S: And so not only and this is not a one-off. He refers to the kidneys as thoracic organs throughout the paper. You know, that, I mean, that's a pretty big, that jumped out at me. Like, wait, whoa, wait a minute. Kidneys are not thoracic organs.

C: Yeah. That's like, what?

S: And so how the hell did that get past peer review? So that tells me that the peer review process for this paper was shit, which you knew anyway because this paper was published. But also this guy's got some serious holes in his knowledge, you know.

C: What journal was it published in? Is it a biology journal?

S: No. It was what we would call a throwaway journal.

C: Okay.

S: Yep. Science of the Total Environment. Never heard of it before.

C: No, me neither.

E: That could be anything.

C: Yeah.

S: So the other thing I did was I looked at the references, right? Something that a peer reviewer should do. You make a claim and then you have references after that claim. You look at each reference and say, do these references support the claim they're being used to support? And the short answer is no. These were links to pathology papers about lungs and kidneys in COVID-19. They don't make any mention of anything that could be even generously interpreted as silicate glass like deposits or iron oxide like deposits. I read through the pathological description. I don't see how you make that leap. That's a huge leap. And the word like there is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What does it mean to be iron oxide like? And that's something that I find a lot in pseudoscience as well is that they use like in order to make these massive leaps from A to B. Oh, the pathology is superficially similar to this other thing. So I'm going to say it has the same cause as this other thing meaning- So that's how we link geological forces with a disease, right? And how does he make that connection with magnetic fields? And how does he make that connection with this ridiculous? Then he goes to this epidemiological analysis where he says that the virus COVID-19 is following magnetic minima. Really? You would think the world's epidemiologists would have noticed an anomaly in how this virus is spreading around the world and how their models of it. I mean, so again, it's like one of those things where there's probably a hundred things wrong with this paper if you really go point by point by point. He's just making these ridiculous leaps one to the next. And he justifies it all by quoting quantum mechanics. It's all quantum schmantum. You don't understand it because you're a bigot, you know?

C: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

S: I mean, seriously? So if he wanted to convince the world that he is a crank, mission accomplished.

B: Well done. Well done.

C: The race thing is pissing me off right now too, Steve. Like, it's pissing me off because he's delegitimizing the legitimate claims that are made by so many unfortunately hardworking scientists who are undermined simply because of the color of their skin. And he's basically trying to lump this in with that, which actually just waters that down instead of bolstering his case.

S: Right. Right, right, right. Yeah, you don't jump to that, you know? It's also just like it's a non-answer. You didn't actually answer the objection to your claim. It's distraction and misdirection.

C: He did it before there was an objection to his claim.

S: He pre-distracted from it. Yeah. But yeah, it's good to recognize the behavior of pseudoscientists and the behavior of cranks. And this is an extreme example. It was kind of fun to talk about. But you see more subtle versions of this in even more mainstream science not just in the extremes. But we like to discuss the extreme examples because it helps you really fully wrap your head around the phenomenon. Then you recognize it in its more subtle forms. All right, Cara.

C: Yeah, sorry.

Right to Try and COVID (26:36)

• Beware Political Hype over the ‘Right to Try’ COVID Drugs

S: Cara, you're going to talk about another COVID-19 related topic, but it's really about right-to-try laws.

C: Absolutely. So you may or may not have heard this label, right-to-try. It probably was in your newsfeed a lot two years ago when a federal law was passed. It may have come back up when you heard about Trump's COVID diagnosis and people started to talk a lot about access to drugs that aren't yet FDA approved. And so I came across an article in Scientific American that was actually written by a researcher who did a study on right-to-try named Jeremy Snyder. And then sort of at Steve's recommendation, I dug deeper into some of the pieces that David Gorski has written over on science-based medicine about right-to-try legislation. And he has gotten so deep into the minutiae of how these laws were passed. What were the sort of lobbying efforts behind them? What do they actually do? What don't they do? So there's a lot to unpack that we won't be able to do today. So I'll just start this by saying if you want to know more about right-to-try, I definitely recommend reading David Gorski's pieces on this because there's a lot there. Too much for us to be able to get into. So obviously, right-to-try when it comes to COVID, I think has become a very, not even become, it has always been a very political topic. But at its core, I think what ends up happening is that there's a genuine want or a genuine motivation to help people who are very, very sick that gets conflated, unfortunately, with a political ploy to weaken the FDA. And that's really what most experts have been able to gather from studying right-to-try legislation in its entirety. So this has been, the idea of a right-to-try law is a law that basically says if you are in a certain position medically, and most of the laws, and specifically the federal law, point to having not a life-limiting illness, but I think they specify that it's a terminal illness. But the definition around that is a little loosey-goosey. So that's kind of complicated. But basically, you are dying, or you are so incredibly ill, and everything else you've tried hasn't worked. Why not give you the opportunity to try something that's not yet FDA approved? So that's sort of how it's often presented. And I think when it's presented that way, right, to all of us, that sounds like a good thing.

E: Reasonable.

C: Yeah, it sounds really reasonable.

E: Not unreasonable.

C: But once you start to understand, A, who drafted the law, this is an ALEC-drafted law, which means that it's been backed by the Barry Goldwater Foundation. It's been developed by a lot of these kind of far-right conservative think tanks. And when we've seen quotes from some different politicians that have been pushing this legislative agenda, it's been very clear that the idea here is, yes, about giving patients potential access, but even more so about limiting the FDA's role in determining which drugs should and shouldn't be accessible to patients. Because one thing that's often not talked about when right-to-try legislation comes up, and right-to-try just historically so that you know, and around 2014 is when these bills started to pop up everywhere, and they were draft copies of bills that were authored by ALEC that you started to see in multiple states. And over the next several years, I think something like 40 states adopted these laws. They were actually pretty non-controversial, or seemingly, ostensibly non-controversial, because even though they were backed by these hardcore conservative think tanks, they actually had a lot of bipartisan support. In 2018, Trump actually signed the legislation, and it's a bill that, like most bills, got passed back and forth between the House and the Senate, got all these things appended to it, got changed in a lot of ways. And the ultimate right-to-try bill that was passed into law in 2018 is at the federal level. So the ones at the state level don't have much teeth, because the FDA still stood as it stood. But now that this has passed at the federal level, it has teeth. It has a real potential, and that potential, again, many experts say, it has a potential to do harm. So when we unpack it, we look, we notice that there are two real pathways to getting experimental drugs, other than traditional pathways like being involved in a legitimate clinical trial. There are two pathways to get experimental drugs if you are very, very, very ill, like gravely ill. The first one is the FDA's expanded access pathway, which has been around for quite some time. And the former head of the FDA has been quoted multiple times as saying that 99% of people who apply for expanded access to drugs receive expanded access to drugs. So what this is saying that an individual is very ill. There's a drug on the market that has gone through phase one clinical trial, and it's a registered experimental drug. But it either has not yet gone through phase two. They've been applied, but they haven't gotten there, or they're in the middle of phase two. So it's not available on the market yet, and we still don't even know if it's safe and effective. All we know is that in like, and Steve, maybe you can help me with this. But I think what I gathered from a lot of the readings we've done historically, but also from what David Gorski was writing, is that in many cases, a phase one is like maybe 30 people. And they're just trying to figure out if there's not something so horrible, like the toxicity isn't so bad that they can't move forward.

S: Yeah, it's a safety study, but they'll also do a bunch of standard things like check an EKG, check your kidney function, and check your liver function, your white cell count, things like that. So it's just a standard battery of safety testing in usually healthy controls.

C: Right. So we don't know yet if it's actually doing what it maybe did in rodents or whatever it was tested on to be effective. And we also don't even really know if it's fully safe. We just know that in this first phase, with this small group of healthy people, it made it through unscathed. One thing that David brings up, which I think is important, is like, let's all remember thalidomide. This is what happens when the appropriate clinical phases when the standards that we've put into place to protect people aren't followed to the T. And so the reason I say this is because if something has only passed phase one trial, that does not guarantee that it's going to cure the disease. It does not even guarantee that it's not going to make a person worse. It doesn't guarantee much of anything, which is why drugs can't be marketed until they've gone through all the phases. So let's remember that. So the idea here is that if somebody wants to seek expanded access, that they would put in a request to the FDA to say I am X person. I am very, very ill. I want to take this drug that, let's say, Pfizer is working on right now because I think it could help me. And apparently, 99% of those requests have historically been granted. So in essence, a lot of people first argue that right-to-try legislation is redundant because it's kind of solving a problem that doesn't exist. Because people who want expanded access are already able to get expanded access if they are gravely ill. The issue with right-to-try and the major difference between expanded access as it stood and right-to-try as it passed in 2018 is that the FDA is taken out of the equation. And, of course, this is represented often as the FDA is a bottleneck. This is keeping people from getting the access that they need. But now there's literally no regulatory control.

S: Yeah. I mean the quickie version of this is that this is a deceptive legislation that was promoted by Quacks so that they can promote their fake treatments and do it under the guise of this is all compassionate care to patients. Like, well, no, that already existed. As you say, it was a non-problem. So it bypassed the FDA by duping ignorant legislators. And it worked.

C: Right. So you've got the Quacks who are saying, OK, if there's a way that I can get my non-proven treatment because, yes, it's expensive. And, yes, it's intense to register a drug, to go through a phase one clinical trial, and to register for a phase two. But it's still easier to do that than to keep going. Right?

S: Yeah.

C: And it allows a pathway for, like you mentioned, Quacks to be able to potentially, and we're saying this as potentialities because it's still really new. So we don't know ultimately what all the downstream effects are going to be. But to be able to kind of successfully get their drugs in the hands of individuals. But what it also does from a more kind of, I think, nefarious political perspective is that it opens the door to weakenings of FDA regulation.

S: Totally.

C: And that is a really scary thing as well downstream. So not only do you have new places for Quacks to get into this business, but you also have the potential that in the future the FDA's control. Which, again, prevented thalidomide in America. Like the FDA has done so much good. I'm not saying there haven't been problems. But if we did not have a Food and Drug Administration, there would be so much illness in this country.

S: Well, we don't have to guess what that would be like. That's what we had.

C: That's what we had.

S: It was the Wild West.

C: It was the jungle.

S: That's what we have now.

C: We've read that book.

S: That's what we have now with the supplement industry.

C: Totally.

S: And again, it's just a 90 plus percent con.

C: Totally.

S: It's mostly nonsense.

C: And then the amazing thing from all of this is that when we heard President Trump sit down to sign the legislation, he's quoted as saying that this is going to help thousands, he actually said thousands of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people. And of course, there's the photo op and there's the people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy sitting there. And there's these individuals who really are in some ways, depending on the genetic variant of their disease, out of options, who want to be able to maintain hope. And they're kind of used as props. And unfortunately, he's saying this is going to help so many people. And you've got people on both sides of the aisle being like, this is amazing. This is a triumph. And the question now is, two years later, how many people has this helped? And it's a really hard question to answer. Some people have estimated that the numbers are in the single digits. Some people estimate that the numbers are in the double digits. And when I say have helped, maybe I shouldn't have even framed it that way. How many people have had access to this pathway? Because there's still no valid and reliable outcome that these people have gotten better.

S: So the answer may be zero.

C: The answer may be zero. And so the study that in the Scientific American article, which is pretty fascinating, and it's limited, and the researchers say, of course, this is limited, is they published a study just in October in regenerative medicine, where they were like, how many people, we don't have the FDA's numbers. I don't know if they have access to this information since they're kind of cut out of it. So they were like, what's a way for us to sort of gain some understanding of this quantitatively and qualitatively? And so they went and looked at GoFundMe campaigns. And they searched all the GoFundMe campaigns that they could find between the passage of the law and when they wrote the article, so about a two-year span, that mentioned right to try, compassionate care, or expanded access. They looked at those three words. And some of the outcomes of the study are pretty interesting. One, they found that it's actually really murky how people conceptualize these pathways. So they might be conflating right to try with expanded access, with compassionate care. Like all of these terms have become the same thing in the minds of a lot of individuals, even though they're distinct pathways. When they could point out the difference between right to try and expanded access, they actually found 29 GoFundMe campaigns that only referenced right to try and 26 campaigns that only referenced expanded access. But two of the campaigns referenced both, sort of like together. They found that 21 of the expanded access-related claims described being approved to receive the access. So they said we were able to get the drugs. Only one of the right to try-related campaigns said they were able to get the drug. And then, here's the kicker. Part of the right to try legislation included the fact that the government could not set the price, that the government was not responsible for paying for the drug. So this was a direct negotiation now because the FDA is out of the picture. This is a direct negotiation now between the individual and the drug company, which means that some drug companies gave the individuals the drugs for free. Many others did not. And since these were experimental drugs, the prices were amazing. They said that direct costs related to the desired experimental products ranged from $15,000 to $700,000 for treatment. They also looked at indirect costs like travel, hotel stays, and things like that. But the direct costs ranged from $15,000 to $700,000.

E: It removes most candidates, I would think.

C: It also, I think, really undermines the claim that this is about getting access for people. Because the problem is obviously not a problem of the drugs not being available. The problem is a problem of a lot of affordability, a lot of institutional problems with managed care. I think that a lot of people looked at this legislation as a triumph saying, we're going to make it easier for people to get the drugs they need when really this was a smokescreen.

S: Yeah.

C: And that's what's so frustrating.

S: It's about the ability of con artists to sell their snake oil to vulnerable populations without the FDA getting in the way.

C: Yeah. And potentially about, and there's no proof that this has happened yet, but it's something, it's again a loophole that could be utilized, about drug companies emptying backlogs of drugs that have been shelved because they only passed phase one but didn't continue the trial process. They could potentially now have a new market for these drugs. And that's dangerous.

S: Yeah, totally. It's like the healthcare freedom laws. Healthcare freedom, that sounds like a good thing. Nope. It's about the freedom of, again, charlatans to sell fraudulent treatments and products without regulation. It's all about their anti-consumer laws, their anti-consumer protection.

C: Totally.

Earth-Sized Rogue Planet (42:24)

• Earth-Sized Rogue Planet Discovered

S: So Evan, I understand that scientists have found an earth-sized rogue planet. Tell us about that.

E: They sure did. Rogue exoplanets are cool. But do you know what's cooler? Rogue exoplanets.

S: Much cooler.

E: They are literally cooler because these are planets that do not currently orbit any other bodies, such as suns or other planets, and because of the absence of a sun to revolve around, they are cooler and cooler. So there's that. Scientists estimate that there are tons of rogue exoplanets just waiting to be discovered. Computer simulations suggest that there are at a minimum 50 billion rogue planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Here's the maximum. Here's the maximum estimate. They put the number at 100,000 times greater than the number of stars in the galaxy.

S: Whoa.

C: What? Wow.

E: So if we have an upward of 400 billion stars in our galaxy times 100,000, that's 40 quadrillion. Right, Bob? Sounds about right.

B: Something like that, but it's a lot of planets.

S: Yeah, that is an extreme estimate. So somewhere in the middle lies the truth. But ultimately it's the size of the planet or what astronomers decide the minimum size of a technical planet can be. For example, let's say it's Pluto. Anything Pluto-sized and larger would be planets, and anything smaller than Pluto would not make that count. But as Steve said, the news this week is our first discovery of an Earth-sized exoplanet. Direct observation. Think about it. Something as small as the Earth out there in the cosmic ocean without the benefit of a star to find it. It doesn't emit its own light. It's not transiting across the plane of a bright star. It's not reflecting any light from its sun. Scientists can now detect these relatively small objects. So this credit goes to an international team of astronomers, including Przemek Mroz, I hope I pronounced that correctly, who is a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, and Radoslaw Poleski from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw. So they and their team have spotted what they believe to be a free-floating planet, an FFP, with a size and mass somewhere between the range of Mars and Earth. And it is rogue. It's an orphan out there. It is wandering our Milky Way galaxy all by its lonesome. And Bob, do you know what the technique was used for spotting it?

B: Did Q come and help?

E: Oh, that's a good guess.

B: How do you find a planet that's not transiting, it's not gravitationally?

S: Come on Bob, you know.

B: Lensing? Lensing?

S: Yes!

J: Good job, Bob.

C: Yeah!

E: Free-floating planets are too faint to be observed directly, so we can detect them using gravitational microlensing via their light-bending gravity. And that's what Radoslaw Poleski said. He was quoted in a very fine article that I picked up at zmescience.com, and Steve also informed me that he had blogged about it as well, so I read that too. So microlensing events are right now the only way of spotting these tiny rogues. Microlensing occurs when a lensing object, such as one of these FFPs or perhaps a star, passes between an Earth-based observer and a distant source star. The gravity of the object can deflect and focus light from the source. So the observer will measure a short brightening of the source star, which is called gravitational microlensing event. Very cool. By measuring the duration of these events along with the shape of its light curve, astronomers can estimate the mass of the lensing object. So in this particular case, the Earth-sized exoplanet's microlensing event lasted only 41 minutes. And that is apparently the shortest event yet discovered. By comparison, the majority of observed events as a result of microlensing last several days, like when one galaxy goes in front of another or something like that. Or very large star-sized objects have a longer period. But microlensing events attributed to free-floating planets usually last barely a few hours, something like a Jupiter-sized planet. But in this case, it was only 41 minutes, so it had to be very, very small. The rogue exoplanet has a designation. It's OGLE-2016-BLG-1928. Why does it have that designation? Because it was found in data collected by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, OGLE. Ogle? Ogle, I guess. It's a Polish astronomical project based at the University of Warsaw. And OGLE is also famous for having previously discovered the first ever recorded free-floating planet in 2016, which was closer in size to Jupiter. So we are finding the small ones. We're finding our distant cousins out there.

S: So the good thing is with the microlensing technique, because obviously these are rare one-off events.

E: You get one shot only, and that's it. You miss it.

S: So they're looking at millions or even hundreds of millions of stars simultaneously to try to pick up on these events. So once we get enough data under our belt, in terms of like we've been looking at this patch of sky for this long, we've seen this many microlensing events, we could start to do calculations about how many rogue planets there are in the galaxy. So maybe narrow that range a little bit, you know.

E: That would be helpful.

S: Yeah, 50 billion to quadrillion.

E: 40 quadrillion.

S: Yeah. Yeah, I mean again, we don't really know. But I think that the more informed guesses are that there's probably a few planets per system end up being rogue planets. But that could be anywhere from 2 or 3 to maybe 10 or 20. Something in there seems to make sense, right? Because these are just planets from the early life of a stellar system that get flung out of the stellar system into interstellar space. So how many planets can there be? I certainly don't think there are 100,000 planets in an early stellar system, almost all of which get flung out and only like 10 get left behind. That seems ridiculous. But maybe there are 20 or 100 even and then you're left with 10, something like that. Something like that would be, I think, a lot more plausible. But we'll see. I think this observation will give us some hard data to feed into our models and then we'll get a more accurate estimate. But it's just amazing to think that there are at least tens of billions of rogue planets just roaming around the galaxy, you know.

E: Just our galaxy alone.

S: Yeah.

J: You ever think about, like, would it be possible in any way to wrangle one and put it in orbit around a star?

E: Capture?

S: A planet?

J: Hey, man.

C: Just go wrangle a planet.

E: That's pretty high tech, right, Bob?

J: Look, my imagination can go there.

E: Level IV Civilization.

J: I'm not saying it's possible. It's just a cool thought, though. Like what would it take?

C: It'd just be a cool sci-fi movie.

B: You'd probably use gravity. But, I mean, it's still, I mean, at first you got to find it and then you got to go to it. Just going to it could be, oh, we got to travel how many light years or whatever. I mean, that's probably the hardest part.

E: Wormhole next door.

S: But it would be a great place to put a secret base, right?

E: Oh, sure.

S: Because it's hard to see.

E: Could not detect that thing.

S: Right? I think it's an underused device in science fiction. Not without precedent, but just underutilized.

J: Right. You'd need, like, a super reliable fusion reactor or something.

S: Yeah, of course. If you're colonizing a rogue planet, you probably have fusion.

Forest Regrowth (50:21)

• Is It Better to Plant Trees or Let Forests Regrow Naturally?

S: All right, Jay, tell me about planting trees in order to capture carbon. What's the best way to do that?

J: Well, the question is, is it better to plant trees, like humans or doing it where people decide how many trees they want to plant and to reforest an area? Or should we just let the trees grow back naturally, right? You know, they drop seeds. Those seeds germinate and they grow on their own. So the bottom line is we all want more trees, right? Most people think that more trees, the better. There's a lot of science behind why we should love and respect trees. One of them, of course, is to help fight climate change. But there's a lot of other important reasons. So nations around the world have promised to plant trees and a lot of them are doing it. A lot of nations are actually planting trees. The top two right now over the last year, China and India, China, 2,400,000,000. India, 2,159,000,000. That's a lot of trees when you think about those numbers and how much acreage that they can cover. Organizations like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, they've asked nations to be a part of planting a trillion trees collectively. The U.S., for example, has promised to plant 855,000,000 trees. This will be inside of 2.8 million acres. The European Union this year also promised 3 billion more trees. The Bond Challenge and the Paris Climate Accord in 2015 set targets to reforest over 850,000,000 acres through planting of new trees. So there is a lot of new tree activity going on that people are doing and governments are doing. So what's the problem? Because this all sounds really good. But when we talk about planting trees, the details actually do really matter here. It's not just as simple as going out and planting a whole bunch of trees. Researchers are concerned that in order to replant hundreds of millions of acres, we could end up with something called a monoculture. If you don't know what that is, it basically means one or very few tree species or varieties of trees being planted. This can actually be a big problem because you could plant trees that are native or not native to that area. If you don't plant native trees, that doesn't interact well with the other plant life around there. It also doesn't interact well with the animals that live there that rely on the trees. So it is a major concern. To put it simply, many experts are saying that they think that they should leave land alone and let it do what it does best. That's the way several scientists have put it. Susan Cook Patton, who is a senior forest restoration scientist at the Nature Conservancy, published a new study in Nature. It was co-authored by researchers from 17 different environmental organizations around the world. In this study, they estimate how much carbon can be accumulated by allowing the forest to grow naturally versus if we do it, if humans do it. Their study details, could a forest grow back on its own and how much carbon would it capture? They took approximately 11,000 different carbon uptake measurements from forests that are currently regrowing right now. The information was taken from 250 different studies around the world. In short, the study found that the biodiversity is much better in a naturally grown forest than it is if it was planted by humans. And more importantly, the naturally regrown forest can capture more carbon, which is surprising. And it can do it much more quickly than a human-planted forest. And like, wow why is this? Well, there's a lot of factors. But as climate change speeds up, forest carbon capture rates can change as well, right? So as the temperature of the earth increases, it could actually snowball and go faster and faster. Now, some forests will grow slower with the temperature change and die out. But there's other forests that will actually benefit from it. And they'll benefit because there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for them to use. You know, they call this, some people call this a regreening, which basically means that these types, certain types of trees in certain areas and certain biomes will really take advantage of that extra carbon dioxide and grow crazy fast. So the study located approximately 1.67 billion acres that could be used to let forests regrow on their own. Cook Patent gives estimates that natural forest regrowth could capture 73 billion tons of carbon from now to the year 2050. And to put that into a focus for you, this approximately equals seven years of current industrial emissions. So this, the author of the study said that this is, in quotes, the single largest natural climate solution, which is that's pretty impressive. This study is very important, though, because it adds to the existing body of knowledge. You know, previous studies, they're only talking about humans planting trees. But now we can add in governments can take this data and they could use it to help them decide what will be best for their region. You know, this isn't a universal answer. In certain circumstances, like, for example, if the soil is bad and they have to do something to help the soil or maybe they're planting trees specifically for soil that's gone bad, that's one thing. But for the vast majority, it does seem like, though, letting the forest regrow on its own is the right thing to do. And it does feel kind of counterintuitive, right? Like you just want people to get in there and fix the problem. But they're really saying that we should just let it go. Now, let me give you some facts here. I thought that you guys would find interesting. 200 years ago, the United States pretty much deforested the entire eastern part of the country, like down to almost no trees. A large percentage of those trees have grown back on their own since then with no human intervention. And I already had known this fact. I mean, I'm sure like most of us who grew up in Connecticut you probably have heard about that. You know, they locked the hell out of the eastern seaboard. But we have forests here.

S: Connecticut was mostly farmland 200 years ago. And the telltale sign of that is when you see stone walls in the middle of a forest.

J: That's right.

S: Why are they there? Who built a stone wall through this forest?

E: Why would they do that?

S: It was the edge of a farm 200 years ago, and then a forest grew up around it.

J: I love that. Don't you love seeing a stone wall like it's falling apart?

E: Oh, yeah. They're all over.

S: Guys, you guys remember this? I remember Dad pointing out when we were watching the movie The Last of the Mohicans, which is taking place in the—

E: 1500s?

S: No, it was like the early 1700s. Yeah, it's pre-Revolutionary War, but it's like early 1700s. They're running through the forest and there are stone walls is like those would not be there.

J: That's right.

S: You couldn't have that without deforestation and reforestation, which could not have happened by that time period. But, of course, what are they going to do for the movie? Because they could have chosen places where you couldn't see the stone walls.

E: Before CG and all that.

J: All right. So listen to these facts. I'll leave you with these to think about as you're trying to go to sleep tonight. 80% of the world's plants and animals live in forests and are dependent on forests to survive. One in five people globally depend on forests to earn their living. 20% of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere are the result of tropical forest destruction. Trees are essential to a healthy water cycle. They collect water in their roots and they release it into the atmosphere. Think about that. That's huge. So trees really are we can't live without them. And this study brings into sharp focus the fact that maybe we shouldn't be pushing so hard to plant the trees. What we need to do, and this is really important, is do nothing. Think about it. It doesn't cost any money. You just have to get local governments to say, we're going to section this land off. You can't go on it. And they do nothing. They don't have to spend money having people do it, buying the trees, planting the trees, nothing. You just leave it alone. Leave it alone and let it go.

S: Anyone who lives near woods knows how relentless the woods are in expanding their domain.

B: Just in a few years, what happened?

S: It's constant. You're in a constant war to beat the forest back from your yard.

J: And good, right? We're lucky.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Thanks, Jay.

Lava Growth (59:01)

• Supersonic winds, rocky rains forecasted on lava planet

S: So, Bob, everyone's talking about an Earth-sized rogue planet. You're going to tell us about another exoplanet that's unusual.

B: Yes, and also happens to be Earth-sized, but that's kind of irrelevant. Yeah, researchers simulated the weather and environment on a recently discovered lava planet that could just be the most inhospitable planet we know, with supersonic winds, lava oceans, and rock rain. OK?

E: Other than that.

B: This is a study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. And we've discovered how many? Where are we now with exoplanets? 4,000, 5,000? Way up there. We've discovered all types. Gaseous, rocky, tiny, rogue, huge, ice balls, and lava planets. But I just love that the sound of that just sounds like so intriguing. Lava planet. So let's talk about K2-141b. Yes, I know that name sucks. This is an Earth-sized exoplanet. It's 200 light years away. Detected a couple years ago by the Kepler Space Telescope. And let me tell you, this is one hellish place. First off, it's tidally locked, which means, of course, tidal forces basically stole the angular momentum from the planet. So it keeps one face to its sun. It's kind of like what happened to the Earth-Moon system. The Moon is tidally locked to us, and we'll be tidally locked to it in the distant future. But it's so close to its parent star that two-thirds, not one-half, is permanently lit. Imagine how close you'd have to be to be two-thirds lit and not half. The far side is minus 200 degrees Celsius, which is cold enough to freeze nitrogen. The near side is 3,000 Celsius or 5,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Do you know how hot that is? That not only melts rocks, it vaporizes it as well.

E: Vaporized rocks.

B: So this, of course, means that there's vast amounts of magma. The oceans there, they say, are probably, get this, a magma ocean more than 96 kilometers or 60 miles deep. 60 miles!

C: It is a literal hellscape, you're right.

B: I mean, our ocean is what? Mariana Trench, what, six, seven miles? I mean, yeah, this is almost 10 times. And then you've got the supersonic winds that range over 5,000 kilometers per hour, which is 3,100 miles an hour. That's four times the speed of sound. I mean, what the hell? What is this place? And with that level of heat, simulations show that K2's surface, ocean, and atmosphere are all made up of the same thing. Rocks. Everything. It's like basically vapor rocks in the air around some of the planet. You know, melted rocks and what else is there? And I guess some parts of it might be rocky. I can't imagine. There's much of it, though.

C: You said it rains rocks.

B: Yeah, so listen, I'm getting to that. That's the icing. So you'll notice I said atmosphere. So with ambient temperatures over the 3,000 degrees Celsius, rock vaporizes, like I said, and that forms areas where vaporized rock is essentially the atmosphere. So the icing on the cake for this planet, as if it needs it, is that the simulations show that the rock vapor can undergo precipitation just like water does on Earth with the water cycle, right?

J: So it rains rocks.

B: Well, yeah. So here's how it happens. So here on Earth, we all know this. Water evaporates. It rises in the atmosphere. It condenses and falls as rain. Then it kind of gets back to the ocean one way or the other where it'll evaporate and the water cycle starts again. Well, that happens on K2 essentially as well. It's sodium, silicon monoxide, and silicon dioxide. They're picked up. You know, they kind of are like in the air from evaporated rock, and they're picked up by the 3,100-mile-per-hour winds. They're brought to the cold side of the planet in the simulations. They haven't observed this yet, but this is what their simulations are saying is probably happening. It's brought to the cold side of the planet, and then once it condenses there, it essentially rains rocks, right? I mean, I don't know how big they are, but it's still not a fun day with raining rocks. And then the currents, apparently the currents will probably bring that back to the hot side, and the process will start all over again.

S: What currents? Like the lava currents?

B: Yeah, because I guess they were talking about it. They weren't very clear. I tried to find it in the paper. I couldn't quite find a good discussion about that. But I guess even though it's very cold, it's still a magma ocean that's probably with a lot of heat, so probably kind of crusty up by the surface. But it does apparently move. Maybe there's some sort of these big magma tectonic plates. I'm not sure how it's going to – what kind of currents they're talking about. But they say that it could get back to the hot side and start this process all over again. But they said the return is slow, and they say that because it's slow, that could result in this precipitation process changing the surface of the planet and the atmosphere and the mineral composition of the entire planet. So over many, many years, probably millennia, you could see this weather resurfacing, changing the entire planet in significant ways. So that's kind of the crux of the story. But let me throw out here a missed opportunity. You remember I said I hate the name. Does anyone remember a planet in science fiction with a poisonous atmosphere, mostly lava surface, hundreds of light years from Earth? So it's not Star Wars. How did you pronounce that planet where Obi-Wan fought Anakin and what was that?

J: It's called Mustafar.

B: Yes, Mustafar. Very good, Jay. So it's not that planet. That was a pretty – that was kind of like a lava planet.

S: You could breathe on that planet.

B: Yeah, that was a paradise. That was a paradise. So come on, guys. All right, Star Trek, the Savage Curtain, Excalbia. That's exactly – that was described in the episode as having a poisonous atmosphere, mostly lava, hundreds of light years from Earth. That's exactly what this is.

E: Predicting the future again.

C: Oh, they called it Excalbia?

B: Yes.

C: Okay.

B: Much better than K2.

C: I think we should petition. Who do you petition for this, Bob? Is it like the Astronomical Union or something?

S: Whatever.

C: I think we should actually petition to call this planet Hell. It's just Hell.

B: All I'm saying is that someone needs to rename it Excalbia.

S: How about Hades.

C: Yeah, Hades. That's Hades. Legit. So what they need to do next, they're going to look at Spitzer Space Telescope data to get some – to see if their temperature benchmarks or their temperature estimates are in the ballpark. And then after that, when the James Webb Telescope launches in 2021, they could probably take that a step further and confirm if their bizarre weather predictions hold out as well. So we'll see what happens in the future, how accurate they are. But this is one cool planet. Definitely a top five exoplanet.

S: Yeah.

C: Well, yeah.

S: Yeah, this is an extreme one. Extreme exoplanets. All right.

E: A bit of extreme noisiness.

Who's That Noisy? (1:05:56)

• Answer to last week’s Noisy: Barcode scanners synthesizing sounds

S: Jay.

J: Yeah.

S: Who's that noisy time.

J: Last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] You hear that little – I love that.

C: I love this noisy.

'J: All right, guys. Any guesses from you folks?

C: I mean, did somebody use animal noises and like as the instruments and make a composition?

S: Are we supposed to guess the instrument or the mechanism that the sound was generated?

B: I love that. That was cool.

J: Anything. Whatever you got, throw it at me.

E: Is it K-pop?

J: No.

E: Is that K-pop?

S: Techno?

J: No. So a listener named Thomas, S-C-I-C-L-U-N-A, Scicluna? Skalulina? Skaluna?

E: Yes. All that.

C: Sure.

J: See? Cara wouldn't even try it. All right. He says, hi, Jay. Thanks for your hard work for the show, and I don't get to catch Friday night's live stream in the UK, but I always watch it later. And then he asked me if he could play an offline version of the game. I will look into that for you. I think this week's noisy is totally a plasma speaker. I've always wanted to make one since high school, but you know how it is with time. Yeah. So a plasma speaker. I listened to one. It doesn't really sound that much like it. I mean, it's not an insane guess, but it is like a... I'm not exactly sure what's happening, but apparently plasma is hitting something metal, and they're able to make it vibrate and make some noise, but provocative and interesting if you want to take a look at it online. All right. Here's our next guesser and listener. Don Chalice said, hi, Jay. First time guesser after listening from just after Rebecca joined the show. The music is a kind of one man band set up with a theremin being played along with a percussive instrument on a foot pedal. Usually theremin playing is pretty rough, but this guy nails it. Thanks for all the years of great work, Don. No, it is not a theremin. And it's funny. I have completely associated theremin with Cara now, so whenever I see that word, I'm like, Cara.

C: Yay, I love theremins. And that did not sound like a theremin to me.

J: No, it's not a theremin.

C: I've heard theremins played beautifully. They sound like the human voice, or they sound like an instrument. That's not a theremin, but that didn't sound like that to me.

J: Of course, Visto Tutti wrote in, and he was able to capture my attention with this one. He said, the musical instrument sounds to me like a didge. That's a didgeridoo. He says, you mic it up, and you can get a natural techno sound. I've heard people use didges for techno, but it is not a didgeridoo. This is what a didgeridoo sounds like. [plays didgeridoo sound]

C: Yeah, but I could see thinking that. If you were to use a didgeridoo to make techno music, parts of it would have sounded like that.

J: Yeah, if you sample it. If you sampled it, there's a crunchiness similarity, so Visto is not crazy. It's just that it isn't correct, but yeah, sure. I mean, it could be. I'd like to hear actually somebody try to do that, or maybe someone has, but I couldn't find an example of it. I have another guess here from a listener named Ian Mahouika. He says, hi, Jay. Long-time listener, first-time guesser. I saw you at the SGU live event in Seattle this year just before the craziness of COVID started. Oh, remember all those years ago.

C: Just as the craziness of COVID started.

J: Wild. Cara, wild.

C: We were in the thick of it. We just didn't know it.

J: We went and got ice cream with a friend of ours. Oh, my God. It was like the virus was there. We were all over those people. Gary Kazeel was with us that night.

C: We went out to dim sum. Do you remember that?

J: Yes, it was awesome.

C: Dim sum with like 20 people at our table, and we're passing around all this food.

E: Sharing plates, drinks.

J: He says, my guess is that this is music made by an array of old floppy drives, hard drives, modems, or other old computer hardware.

B: Oh, I've seen that.

J: Kind of like the Floppatron, which you could look up. So I've never played this one. I have never played this noisy even though it's been submitted to me a thousand times because I just think it would be like the easiest thing to guess. I think so many people would guess it right. But let me just play it for you just so you can hear what it sounds like. Now, this is what they're doing. They're taking hard drives from old like Apple computers and very early like IBM machines where you slide in floppy disk, and they make that cranking, grinding noise. What they're able to do is figure out a way to make it make particular sounds by making it read and write specifically, certain things, and it will change its tone. So you could write music with it. This particular one I'm about to play for you is about 50 or so, all stacked up on each other all together like an orchestra playing music. And here's an example. [plays Noisy] Right? Get the idea?

C: That is amazing.

J: It is, Cara. I've heard like you could play basically anything you want on these things. You could people, there's a lot of people that do it.

C: Yeah. It's almost like, I would imagine it would sound similar if you got a bunch of like dot matrix printers. Probably people have done that too, right? And write line by line music that way.

J: Yeah. You should look it up because people have done a lot of different stuff. You could probably find almost any older song on there that you'd want to hear. But there is always one person that can win. And there was only one winner because I always pick the first person as the winner. If you didn't know that, like it is a time based thing. Michael Pilsner wrote in this week's noisy is Iwata and his buddy using barcode scanners to synthesize sounds. Yes.

C: Cool.

J: They're called electronicos fantasticos. And they have modded a barcode scanner to read. Yeah, there's barcodes, but they're using other types of black and white imagery to make the scanner make certain types of noises. And they were able to hook it up with a proprietary way that they came up with to a speaker. So the barcode is basically reading what it sees. And it's translating that into sound. That's the end goal that they're doing here. So now that you know that. So this is what they're doing when you see the video of them doing it, which I recommend you do, because it's just insanely fun. They're just like wearing these funny referee shirts because they're black and white and they're dancing around. And they both have the barcode readers and like one guy's like just going, pushing his hand closer to the paper, pulling away closer to the paper. Another guy's doing a zip. You know, he's just moving the barcode across the thing. And they're making this type of music by doing that. And here it is again, now that you know what it is. [plays Noisy]

C: It's so fun.

J: They're producing the beat by moving their hands. I just have to get that little in there. Yeah, I love that type of thing. These guys also take a lot of old electronic equipment, like they'll take an old school TV and turn it into this wacky guitar where they touch the screen somewhere and they touch the neck of the guitar somewhere. And it just it changes the pitch and it's just doing all sorts of like 8-bitty, wacko music. It's just it's so Devo to me. Remember that band Devo?

C: Devo's like one of my favorite bands. Don't ask me if I remember it. I play Devo like every day.

J: But it's wacky like Devo.

C: It's like my favorite.

E: Devo.

J: It's absurd, you know.

New Noisy (1:13:52)

J: All right. I got a new noisy for you. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Barry Dolan. And here it is.

[pulsating sounds with some echoing]

It's pretty repetitive. I need you to tell me what is producing this sound. It gets a little weird, but it's a really cool or the origin of this is very interesting. I'll give you a couple of hints because I think this one's going to be hard. It is not a naturally occurring sound. It's definitely like something being translated. It is something that has wires hooked up to it. That's what I'm going to tell you.

B: All right.

J: I think you'll be very surprised. And I think because of other news items that have been coming out recently, that's another hint, you will be entertained by what is producing this sound. Anyway, if you have any ideas or you heard anything really cool, email me at WTN@skepticsguide.org.

== Announcements (1:14:56)

J: So listen, it's really not that far away, guys. We want to thank our listeners, our patrons for supporting us, especially during our time of need. And we are having our 4000 patrons celebration, which has which Steve a long time ago decided that's going to be a 12 hour live stream, nonstop, nonstop talking for 12 hours. And we are doing that on January 23rd. And when I tell you that you should be excited, you should, because it's fun. We you know, the 24 hour one was insane and it was such an early production for us. But we've done we've done others since then.

S: We know what we're doing now.

J: Yeah. We have a real studio. We have Ian. Ian knows what he's doing.

S: When we did the 24 hour show, we didn't know what we were doing.

J: There was barely there was barely live streaming.

E: Yeah. It kind of made it out there.

J: You can still see it. It's still on the Internet here and there.

E: It is?

J: Yeah. But the promo for-

B: That was the best. Come on.

E: It was a good promo.

J: Ian and I are actually rebuilding the interior of the studio to accommodate all the new things that we that we're working on. But that's really all we got to do. We're just going to reset up the studio again. But this will be like the final solution.

S: No, no, it won't. Please come on.

J: This will be this year's final solution.

C: Don't use the term final solution anymore.

J: I hate it. I know. I shouldn't say that. Let's try it again.

S: First of all, that term is verboten.

J: You're right. Sorry.

S: Second of all, none of the ultimate solutions to our studio has actually been the last iteration.

J: But they've all been ultimately cool. Yeah. You are, Steve, fine. You're correct. I'm sorry. I continue to, I like to work on things in continuation. I like to keep.

S: You know how many times Jay told me, I just need one more light, just one more light, and then we're good. Or this is like, and every single event, I just need one more light.

E: 14 lights later.

J: You can't have enough lights. You can't. There is always another use for a light. Anybody that deals with lights knows that.

S: There must be. There must be.

J: So the bottom line is we are not going to be stressing on the technology at all because this is a no brainer for us. We can really focus down on the content, the SGU, all of us here on the show. We have meetings scheduled to work on this. I've been already coming up with a ton of great ideas. But for fun, if you want, email us at INFO@theskepticsguide.org. And if you have any cool ideas or suggestions or whatever, send it to us because ultimately we want to make you guys happy. We want to give you what you want.

S: We're already booking people.

J: Yeah. People are already booked. 12 hours is going to go by so much faster than you think.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Correction #1: Bee Balls (1:17:52)

I was just listening to podcast #799 and your discussion on the murder hornet. Cara briefly mentioned the bee ball as a defensive measure honey bees can take. But that is incorrect. Only the Japanese honey bees can form the bee ball as a defensive measure to surround and cook the invading Asian giant hornet. The European honey bee does not and is therefore completely defenseless against the Asian giant hornet. That is why there is such a huge concern, as all the commercial honey bees in the US are the European honey bees. Here are some references: Japanese bees' protective behaviors; Meet the "hot defensive bee ball," one of the craziest tactics in the animal kingdom Love the podcast! Stay safe, wash your hands, and wear a mask.

– Albert from Seattle

S: Just going to do one email this week. This is a feedback on something Cara blurted out.

C: Oh, crap.

S: On last week.

E: I've done it too, Cara.

C: Whenever we blurt things out, we get so many emails. Oh, is this about the murder hornets?

S: Yeah. So this.

C: Yeah.

S: No, no, no. This is about the b-balls.

C: Yeah, the b-balls in response. That only Japanese bees can be b-balls, not American bees.

S: Hang on. Don't get ahead of yourself. This comes from Albert from Seattle. Albert writes, I was just listening to podcast number 799 and your discussion of the murder hornet. Cara briefly mentioned the b-ball as a defensive measure honeybees could take, but that is incorrect. Only the Japanese honeybees can form a b-ball as a defensive measure to surround and cook the invading Asian giant hornet. The European honeybee does not have and is therefore completely defenseless against the Asian giant hornet. That is why there is such a huge concern as all the commercial honeybees in the U.S. are the European honeybees. And then he gives us some references. So yes, Albert is correct that only the Japanese honeybees have evolved this b-ball defense against the Asian giant hornets. That's because their stingers cannot penetrate the giant hornet's armor. So I did some additional reading on the b-balls just to see how much we know about it. It's pretty cool. So as we mentioned previously on the show, the bees will swarm and surround the hornet and they'll vibrate their flight muscles, their wing muscles, and that generates a lot of heat. Do you know how hot it gets up to?

C: Oh gosh, I referenced this before. It was crazy. Like it was really high.

B: Hot enough to kill themselves.

S: 47 degrees Celsius or about 116 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's super hot. And it cooks their brain first, right? That's the most vulnerable part of the insect. But the question is, as Bob was alluding to, why doesn't that cook the honeybees themselves?

B: Because they have a higher... They can last a little bit longer.

C: Like they have a higher melting point like chocolate?

S: Yeah, the answer is we don't know at this point in time. But there are Japanese researchers who are trying to figure it out. They did identify a gene that gets turned on in their brain when the honeybees start the bee ball. So it doesn't initiate the behavior. And as far as they could tell, it does not confer any kind of resistance to the heat itself. They think that this gene may be related to when the bees know how to stop. So the interesting thing is that they don't just make it as hot as they can. They raise the temperature to a very precise amount.

E: Only as hot as it needs to get before they cook themselves.

C: Well, yeah.

S: So apparently there's probably a very narrow range where they will kill the hornet but not themselves. And so they hit that target very precisely. They get to 47 degrees.

B: That's awesome. I love it.

C: Yeah, it makes you wonder how many Japanese honeybees died in the evolutionary process of developing that.

E: Sure. Figuring that one out.

S: Yeah, but less than would die if they just let the hornets.

C: Exactly.

E: Yeah, the hornets would decimate. Absolutely decimate them.

Dumbest Thing of the Week (1:21:11)

• Magic Lamp

S: So anyway, Evan.

E: Yep.

S: We are going to do a dumbest thing of the week. We haven't done this in quite a bit. But this one I think probably deserves it.

E: Oh, this qualifies. Absolutely. Hey, Jay.

J: Yes, sir.

E: I have something for you. Here it is. It's an antique oil lamp. You know, it looks like one you'd find in a cartoon drawing of Aladdin.

J: Yeah, OK.

E: All right. Now here it is. All you have to do is rub it at the right time and a genie will appear from the lamp to do your bidding. Now, just give me $93,000 and don't forget, wait for the right time to rub it.

S: Which will be after I cash the check.

E: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

J: You know what that reminds me of, Ev? That reminds me of when – that reminds me in the office when Jim sold Dwight magic beans. Remember that?

B: Yeah.

C: Oh, yeah. And then he like really convinced him that they were magic.

J: Yeah. All right. So people have bought this, Evan?

E: Well, I mean that's – I mean this is ridiculous on its face. Who would pay $93,000 for a purported magic lamp? This is right out of a children's bedtime story or a 1960s US television sitcom maybe. Well, a doctor from India might do it and he did do it. He bought a magic lamp under the belief that rubbing it would produce a genie. You cannot make this stuff up. Well, actually you can because it's a work of fiction and steeped in popular culture. But you can't make up the fact that a person in 2020 would actually not only believe that such a thing really exists, but they would put down a small fortune in the belief that they've purchased a magic item. Right, Steve? That prevents COVID magic items.

S: I once sold somebody a magic item that had a binding phrase. You have to speak the magic words to make it work.

E: Yes.

S: The magic words were caveat emptor.

J: They bought it, Steve.

E: Oh, they bought it.

S: This is actually a true story. This is a true story. This was all part of a role-playing game, but not in the real world. But still, that was one of my favorite things I ever did. Yes, the binding phrase is caveat emptor.

E: I remember when you and Perry came up with that. That was classic. Well, here we are. Real life example. Out of India, two men who allegedly duped a doctor into buying an Aladdin's lamp for $93,000. And they even conjured up a fake genie to help sell it, help the scam.

J: Wait, wait. Whoa, whoa.

E: Yes.

J: Hold on a second. They had someone dressed up as a genie jumping around?

B: That's what I want. I want to see that image.

C: Wait, and they sold it to a doctor? That scares the shit out of me.

E: Yes. All fact. This actually happened. But they caught the men. They caught the con artists, the scammers. They've been arrested. Apparently, one of these men's wife was also involved in the fraud, but she's on the run. They're looking for her now. But it's actually worse than that.

S: I thought she got away on a flying carpet.

E: Yes. Absolutely. Yes. She clicked her heels three times as well. But you know what? It's actually worse than this story is reporting. The con artists negotiated a larger amount. Who knows? They didn't report how much. Who knows how much this doctor was willing to fork over. But I guess when they realized they had $93,000 in their hand, that was a good time to hit the road. So yeah. The doctor filed the complaint last week. And one of the men pretended to be an occultist and made a djinn. That's a D-J-I-N-N, which is, of course, a supernatural figure or a genie, as we like to say. And they had it set up so that apparently he appeared when the lamp was rubbed. I guess what? He stepped out from behind a door or something? I don't even know how that went. They scammed this guy good. They promised him it would bring him health, wealth, and good fortune.

J: But Evan, how do you even bring this up? How do you start that conversation?

S: All right. So here's the thing, though. Here's the thing. To us, this sounds transparently absurd.

E: Right.

S: But it really isn't any different than all of the psychic scams that go on in this country for similar amounts of money and more.

E: Oh, sure. Fortune tellers.

S: It's no different at all.

C: And it's the same thing. Yeah.

S: The lesson here is that, yes, the superstitions of another culture seem transparently absurd. But they're no different than the superstitions of your own culture, which may seem more reasonable or plausible or whatever because they're from your culture.

C: It's only because you're used to them.

J: Steve, let me just comment that right there. I hear what you're saying.

S: I'm not saying to skeptics. I'm just saying to the public at large.

J: Yeah. I mean, look, I'm a connoisseur of this insanity, like we all are. This one in particular, though, a genie. A genie.

S: That's what I'm saying. It really isn't. The only difference is your cultural familiarity with it. But if you grow up in a culture that takes the existence of chi for granted, you are going to be much more vulnerable to a chi-based con. If you grew up in a culture that took the existence of angels and demons for granted, then you would be much more susceptible to a demon-based con or, in this case, a genie-based con or whatever. You know what I mean? So again, it sounds like random and absurd when you're not part of the culture. But to somebody who is steeped in that culture, they're like, yeah, this is what's out there.

E: And clearly having a doctorate is not a prophylactic against this.

S: No. As we've said.

J: Could I just make one final point, and I swear I'll just leave this alone? If right from the moment you say, I'm willing to sell you a genie in a bottle for 93 grand, why would you sell a genie in a bottle for $93,000?

C: Because you can?

J: If you had a genie in a bottle, you don't need to sell it for $93,000. You don't need anybody.

S: Yeah, but you could come up with some kind of plausible BS for that. We've already used up our wishes, so it's of no matter.

E: Yeah, the genie wasn't paying off anymore for me.

B: Steve, I also agree. But the asymmetry, the little asymmetry that I see is the apparent lack of familiarization with special effects in movies. If you've seen even a few movies, that's not going to cut it. That's not going to cut it. So that's a little bit of the asymmetry.

C: Apparently it did.

S: But I will counter that. People fake hauntings. They fake seances with physical magic.

C: How's a genie that different from a ghost?

S: Yeah.

B: Yeah, but there wasn't any physical magic apparently. This is just a guy who wore a costume and stepped from behind. I mean, I would want my genie to come out of that damn bottle. And if he didn't and he were real, I'd say, for my first wish, I want you to come out of that bottle like a real genie comes out of a damn bottle.

E: I hear you, Bob. I hear you.

B: That's part of the experience, and I want to experience that.

S: But, like, Evan, we investigated DeHartma, right? Same thing. No different. The same level of sort of physical presence, you know?

B: Not the same. Not the same thing. I don't know, Steve.

J: I don't know, man.

S: It's the same thing.

B: It's a genie coming out of a bottle and a guy doing a kooky accent.

E: But, Bob, if you had a disposition towards really believing that genies could come out of bottles—

B: No, I buy all that.

E: You would be—

B: I stipulated that at the beginning of my comment. I stipulated all that.

C: Bob, I love you so much.

S: Bob, come on. It's magic. You throw down the powder. You get the little puff of smoke. The guy—

B: I'm done here.

S: The misdirection, whatever.

B: I'm done here.

C: Bob, this is why you get paid up front.

J: There is no way, though, for me to run this in my head like a movie and have it be serious in any way.

E: Right. Other than a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

J: Right.

E: Correct.

C: Yeah. That's because I think the genie in the bottle to us is like a total trope. It's I Dream of Genie. It's Aladdin. These are our cultural references to it. It's not that deeply entrenched in any sort of historical culture for us.

S: Guys, you've got to remember, so the magic is mostly mental, right? The physical trick is incidental almost. It's all about the psychological manipulation of the audience. And so this guy was manipulated. So you're focusing on, well, how convincing was the—was there a full floating torso? Whatever. But that's not the point. The point wasn't how convincing the special effects were. It was how effective was the psychological manipulation.

B: To me it's all about the special effects.

C: How good was the con man?

E: They may have built it up over weeks.

S: How good was the con?

J: I'm feeling sorry now for the guy. I mean, I wish you didn't take it there, damn it, because I just want to laugh at this.

S: I want to laugh at him.

J: I got you.

C: Goddamn empathy. Getting in the way.

E: We're not blaming the victim. We do not blame the victim in these cases.

S: That's right.

E: However, this still does qualify as the dumbest thing about it.

J: Yeah. It is.

S: All right. Let's go on to science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:31:13)

Answer	Item
Fiction	2000+ known craters
Science	Largest is oldest
Science	Largest diamond dep

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Bob	Largest diamond dep
Evan	Largest diamond dep
Cara	2000+ known craters
Jay	2000+ known craters

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Theme: Impact Craters
Item #1: The largest impact crater on Earth, Vredefort Crater, South Africa, at 300km wide, is also the oldest, over 2 billion years.
Item #2: The largest single diamond deposit in the world was formed by a meteorite impact, and contains a greater volume of diamonds than all other deposits combined.
Item #3: There are over 2,000 known impact craters on Earth.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is impact craters.

J: Oh, my God. Who the hell knows anything about impact craters?

S: That's a good question.

C: Lots of people. I have like three friends who study them for a living.

S: So I know who's going last.

C: I don't know anything about them.

S: Well, I came across a – when I was researching for science or fiction, researchers published a compendium of impact craters. So I'm like, okay, I'll just make that the theme and come up with three cool stuff about impact craters and that's my science or fiction. So are you ready to learn about impact craters?

J: Do it.

S: Here we go. Item number one, the largest impact crater on earth, Vredefort Crater, South Africa, at 300 kilometers wide is also the oldest, over two billion years. Item number two, the largest single diamond deposit in the world was formed by a meteorite impact and contains a greater volume of diamonds than all other deposits combined. Item number three, there are over 2,000 known impact craters on earth. Bob, why don't you go first?

Bob's Response

B: God, the largest impact crater, 300 kilometers. I don't know. Sure. I mean, damn. All right. I'm not sure. The diamond deposit, let's skip that one for now. 2,000 known impact craters. 2,000 seems a little high because with weathering and all, they don't last very long. But what's getting me is the diamond deposits. Yeah, that's just like – that's an anomaly. That's too much. I'll say diamonds fiction.

S: Okay. Evan?

Evan's Response

E: I think the diamonds is fiction as well. We've talked on the show before about diamond formation. It has to happen pretty deep into the earth and under extreme pressure. Now, if you're going to have a single impact with that volume of pressure creating more diamonds than all other deposits combined, I don't know that that math adds up. That's why I think it's the fiction.

S: Okay. Cara?

Cara's Response

C: What if it was like a diamond meteorite? Like if a whole rock full of diamonds impacted the earth, that would be a massive diamond deposit. Because in other places where they have to form due to pressure and do – like everything else has to line up perfectly. But a single deposit would be a lot, I would think. I don't know. The one that's really getting me – I mean and I have no idea where the biggest one was. Like literally, Vredefort Crater, South Africa, this is all new information to me. So maybe that's science. Maybe that's fiction. The one that gets me is the one that you already pointed out. I think it was Bob. 2,000 seems high. That seems like a moon number. And like the moon and the earth look very different. And it's not just because we got like trees and water. We're not covering up a moon-like surface. The earth is literally smoother than the moon. So I don't know. To me, yeah, I think that one's a fiction. I just don't think the earth has that many craters.

S: Okay. Jay?

Jay's Response

J: Yeah, the first one about the largest impact and it's the oldest 2 billion years ago. You'd think, yeah, that's a really long time for a crater to exist. But because of the size of the impact and I vaguely remember something about this. I don't think that one is the fiction. The second one here about the diamond deposit. I would think that I would have heard about this by now. But that always doesn't serve me well with science or fiction. Are people mining it? I don't know anything about that. But this one about the last one though. So there's 2,000 known impact craters on earth. The one thing about earth, the surface of the earth is changing all the time. I don't think there's that many craters. I just don't think there's – if there was that many, I think that we would be able to access them a lot easier. I would have come across one in my life in all the places I've been. 2,000 is a lot. And they can't be small because no small crater would survive. Right? It has to be big. That one is the fiction. I agree with Cara.

S: All right. So we got an even split.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: But you all agree on the first one. So we'll start there. The largest impact crater on earth, Vredefort Crater, South Africa, at 300 kilometers wide. It's also the oldest, over 2 billion years. You all think this one is science. This one is science. Cara, you can't read me. You should know that.

C: I can never. I'm so like –

S: I always fake you out.

C: I'm so gullible. Yes. No. Oh, God.

S: Oh, no. Yeah. So yeah. Jay, you're right. The oldest one would have to be big because if it were smaller, it wouldn't have survived that long probably because of the weathering. But this is a huge one. The meteorite that caused it was probably between six and nine miles or 10 to 15 kilometers in diameter.

E: That'll kill you dead.

S: Big boy. Big boy. Now, so that's 300 kilometers wide. The next biggest one is only 70 kilometers wide.

B: Oh, wow.

S: Which one is that? What's the –

C: Is that the one in South America?

S: Yeah, the Chicxulub crater.

E: Chicxulub.

S: Slightly more famous one coinciding with the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. And then I haven't heard of most of the other ones in the top ten list. But –

B: Well, Steve, which extinction event did the 300 kilometer one –

E: 2 billion years ago?

S: Nothing. It was 2 billion years ago.

E: It was nothing.

C: Everything was tiny.

B: Well, there could have been some microbial life.

S: Yeah.

C: No, but the microbial life probably wouldn't have been as affected by it.

S: Number 10 is in the US. You guys know which one that is?

E: The one in –

B: Arizona. Arizona. It's a mile wide.

S: Meteor crater.

C: The Grand Canyon?

S: Meteor crater.

C: Oh, meteor crater. I've been there. I've hiked it.

S: It's 1,200 meters in diameter.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right. Let's go to the second one. The largest single diamond deposit in the world was formed by a meteorite impact and contains a greater volume of diamonds than all other deposits combined. So I guess the question is when you consider this one versus number three, there are over 2,000 known impact craters on earth. So obviously one of those is the fiction. How do you think about the 2,000 figure? Because like the earth has been –

B: Underwater. How about underwater?

E: Yeah, there's –

S: Yeah. And even though –

E: I was thinking that as well.

S: Yeah. Erosion does wear away craters. But everywhere? Are there any parts of the world where there wouldn't be so much erosion?

J: I can't think of it.

B: The poles? How about the South Pole?

C: But even if that's the case, I just think the number still wouldn't be that high.

S: Yeah.

C: Like I think some probably survive, but it wouldn't be 2,000.

J: But I think we've been hit by a ton of things.

C: Oh, yeah. There's just no evidence anymore.

E: Yeah, but what's the smallest crater, I mean?

B: More than the moon.

C: Yeah, but they stick around on the moon. That's why it's like it looks like it does.

S: All right. So-

E: Micro-craters.

S: The largest single diamond deposit in the world was formed by a meteorite impact and contains a greater volume of diamonds than all other deposits combined. Bob and Evan, you think this is fiction. Jay and Cara, you think this is science. And this one is –

B: Say it.

S: Science.

E: What?

C: Yes!

S: That one is science.

C: No way.

S: So Cara, you were right for the wrong reason. So the meteor wasn't made of diamond. These are impact diamonds, right? It's made by the heat and pressure of the impact.

C: Oh, cool.

J: I didn't think of that.

B: Yeah, I could see a meteor being loaded with vibranium but not diamonds. Come on.

C: So it must have just been like an enormous meteor.

S: So this is in fact the fourth largest crater in the world, Poppegai Crater in Russia. We actually mentioned this on the show, I think, a few years ago because I recognize this site. So this was about 35 million years ago. This is an 8-kilometer wide, probably stony asteroid creating a 62-mile or 100-kilometer wide crater. 100-kilometer wide crater. But here's the interesting thing. If you think about the impact of the meteorite and the pressure wave that would come out from that, there's a certain sweet spot where there's just the right amount of pressure to form diamonds but not so much that it would just throw things up and rip it apart, right? And so from the point of impact, there is basically a hemisphere of diamonds at that distance.

B: Right. Equidistant.

S: Yeah, right? Can you guys imagine that?

J: Sure. I can.

B: Imagine it. I want it.

S: But that hemisphere… Yeah. Let me find the…

E: Not that one, it hits.

B: It would be like semicircular. I mean, it would be like a spherical shell underneath the ground and all around at equidistant from the impact point.

C: So would it just be solid? I mean, it would have all broken up though.

S: Well, the question is how big would the diamonds be, right?

C: Right. Like the individual diamonds.

S: Individual diamonds. But it would be embedded in the brachia, be embedded in the material that was left behind. But it doesn't form out of anything that's there. It only forms out of graphite that's there. So you have to have the right conditions, a big enough impact, the right kind of substrate. So essentially, there's this hemisphere of diamonds that was formed out of the graphite that was in the ground in this location. So think about the volume. And so the distance is at about a distance of 12 kilometers. So you have a hemisphere that's about one to two kilometers thick with a 12-kilometer radius. Think about that. That's why that volume is massive.

B: That's a lot.

C: Wow.

S: That's a massive volume of 1,600 cubic kilometers.

C: Jesus.

S: 1,600 cubic kilometers containing these impact diamonds. Now, are these diamonds useful? Are they being mined? What can you do with them? There's basically two kinds of—

B: They're probably crap.

S: There's two kinds of useful diamonds. There's gem-quality diamonds. And there's industrial diamonds, right? Industrial diamonds don't have to be pretty. They just have to be hard.

E: You're just cutting things.

S: Gem diamonds need to be pretty. What makes a gem diamond pure—

B: Lack of inclusions.

S: Yeah, but also—

C: Yeah, like organizational structure.

B: And color.

S: Yeah. It gets—

E: Clarity.

S: They're made slowly over time. So these impact diamonds are never gem-quality because they're made instantly.

C: Gotcha.

S: As Evan was alluding to, the gem diamonds are made deep, deep in the earth and are brought up by volcanoes. And so diamond deposits occur around volcanoes. But impact diamonds occur around craters. And now impact diamonds would be good for industrial use, but we are so good at making fake ones now.

E: Make your own.

C: So it's not even worth it.

S: It's cheaper to just make fake industrial diamonds than to mine these diamonds. And so there's no—at this point, there's no plan to mine them because they're not worth it.

C: But that's cool because then is it like a heritage site or is it like a tourist attraction at all?

S: I guess so. I don't know.

C: Yeah. To be able to visit something like that and it be relatively intact is actually kind of an amazing thing.

S: Yeah. Yeah. But let's think of that 1,600 cubic kilometers of diamonds.

C: Of useless diamonds.

S: But they're useless. Yeah. It's like good news, bad news. But it's only useless because we're so good at making the fake industrial diamonds.

C: We're pretty good at making the fake gem ones too.

S: Yeah, we are.

C: And that's a very ethical way to go with your diamonds.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All this means that there are over 2,000 known impact craters on Earth is the fiction. But how many do you think there are?

E: 200.

C: 200. Yeah. I was like, what order of magnitude?

S: I did the order of magnitude thing.

B: 200,000.

J: I would say—

E: 20,000.

S: It's just over 200. Just over 200 is the answer.

J: 200, yeah.

C: I would say exactly.

E: 100 stolen.

S: If you look up resources, the most resources say 170, 180, 160. But the compendium, the new compendium is the most thorough one and they document over 200 known impact craters.

E: Yeah. So they just got to find more and then Bob, you and I will be right. Well, not right. But they'll be wrong.

S: And Cara and Jay, you followed the logic that I expected. It's like, yeah, it's 2,000, probably too high because craters erode. They would have to occur—they would have to be big enough that they could survive the erosion or they would have to be in a place where it would be minimal for a very, very long period of time.

E: Well, I was thinking what constitutes a crater? I mean could something falling out of the sky tomorrow that's a foot wide or something make a little impact crater? Boom, there's your—

C: But then it would go away so fast.

S: Yeah, it would go away. If it was so small, it would go away very, very quickly.

E: Yeah, but if you had a lot of those, you could see it getting to 2,000. I don't think it's unreasonable.

S: But the key word in there, Evan, is known. Known. So this is like—

E: Yeah, identified.

C: Documented, measured.

E: So a lot of it went away. It was known.

B: Small craters are probably lame.

S: The other important one is are, meaning they currently exist.

C: And impact crater, right?

S: Yeah, right.

C: Like you're using the term impact crater over and over, which means it was, I assume, impacted by something out of the planet.

S: So there are three kinds of craters. And impact craters are one. There are also explosive craters and volcanic craters. So yeah, these are by rocks impacting the earth, rocks or comets. So yeah, that was a fun one, I thought.

J: Yeah.

E: Yeah, it was until I got it wrong.

S: Maybe perhaps a bit tricky.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:44:03)

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
– Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), American anthropologist

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

E: This week's quote comes courtesy of listener Scott from Toronto. Thanks, Scott. And here's what he said. He just finished Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston, whom I've not heard of before. Some follow-up on her life reveal an amazing woman and a broad intellect. And here's a quote from her in a letter. "I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions." That's a good quote.

S: I like that image, the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

E: Yeah. Zora Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. Born in 1891, died in 1960. She portrayed racial struggles in the early 1900s American South and published research on hoodoo, which is like voodoo, only based out of Africa. Yep. And she wrote novels, she wrote plays, and essays, more than 50 of them.

J: She wrote her essay?

C: Of course, Jay.

S: I do like that quote. Okay. Well, thank you, Evan.

E: Thank you.

S: We'll see you on the Friday livestream.

B: I'll be there.

E: It will be Friday.

B: I'll be there.

E: Yep. Friday's around the corner. Yesterday.

S: Yeah, yesterday. And, even better...

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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