SGU Episode 470

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SGU Episode 470
July 12th 2014
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 469                      SGU 471
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
Lewis Thomas
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Show Notes
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Introduction

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 Monday, June 30^th, 2014, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hey, how's everyone?

R: Super. I'm actually legit super, because I've been having this really sluggish laptop. And before listeners might be concerned, I'm not leading into a plug for anything, I swear to God. My laptop has been so slow. It's a couple years old now. And so I'm really proud of myself. I completely wiped it clean. I did a factory reset and then reinstalled everything. And now it's super fast. And it was so easy, you guys. I went to the store. I bought a four terabyte hard drive, external hard drive.

B: Nice.

R: Four terabytes for $150. What? Yeah, four terabytes.

B: I love science.

R: I have an old external hard drive from then that's lasted like six years now.

B: No, that doesn't happen. That just doesn't happen.

S: I've never had a hard drive last six years. External. My external hard drives, I basically count on them for two years.

R: Really?

S: Yeah.

R: I mean, I don't use it often. I plug it in to back up my computer, like that old one I was using for my time machine. Do your backups, people. It's important. Back up your stuff.

S: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just have internal hard drives for backup now.

R: Well, yeah, I didn't want, like I already had a backup, but I didn't want to rely on just the one time machine backup. So I got a new hard drive. And I did a carbon copy. Very easy. Use free software to do it. Made sure I could boot from that in case of a disaster. And then I just factory reset my laptop and moved my apps back over. And it runs like a dream now.

S: Cool.

R: Very happy.

S: I love, love having a totally clean install on my computer in front of me. Starting with that totally blank slate. It's so clean.

B: I never do, though, because I just don't want to reinstall everything I've got installed.

R: See, but it's easy if you have a carbon copy of your hard drive.

B: Well, there you go.

J: Bob, you should take an image of your hard drive when you first get the computer. And then you can just reuse that.

R: But it really is important, people, to back up your data and do it often. And it's actually very easy to take care of your computers these days, because I find it so satisfying to do this stuff myself. And I ran into a few problems, but everything was Googleable. And I worked through things step by step. I used Terminal to type things in Unix. It's very satisfying.

S: That's very exciting.

This Day in Skepticism ()

• July 12, 1895: Happy birthday to Buckminster Fuller! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

R: Oh, hey, happy birthday to Buckminster Fuller, though.

E: Is he a listener?

R: He may have been, had we started in the 80s. Did you know he lived until the 80s? I didn't even-

B: 83, yeah.

E: I loved the 80s.

R: Yeah, I didn't realize he lived that long. Yeah, he was born July 12, 1895. He is best known for his buckyballs.

E: I beg your pardon?

R: That's what the ladies at the bar say.

B: He also coined the terms spaceship earth, or popularized and or coined spaceship earth, ephemeralization, which is an awesome variation of that word, and synergetic.

R: Yeah, and he's actually probably best known for the geodesic dome. He was really interested in developing architecture that was as stable as possible. And so he built houses in the shape of a geodesic dome. And it was all the rage for quite a while. He designed the Montreal biosphere.

B: But I do, Rebecca, think it's important to note that he actually didn't come up with the idea of the geodesic or geodesic, actually, I'm not sure which it is. That was developed, it was created by Dr. Walter Baersfeld. But he's the one that popularized it in the United States. And more importantly, though, he's the first one to erect a geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no real limit. So that was a huge, huge thing.

R: Yeah, definitely. And I should mention that he didn't invent the concept of buckyballs either, but they were named after him. The buckyball being an allotrope of carbon, which is known as a fullerene.

S: Yeah, very cool.

News Items

Solar Freakin' Rebuttal (4:58)

• http://www.solarroadways.com/clearingthefreakinair.shtml

S: Do you guys remember the Solar Freakin' Highways?

R: The ones we talked about? Didn't we talk about them?

E: Those hexagonal tiles that you put together?

S: Yeah, they use these little pavers with these embedded solar panels and they planned an Indiegogo campaign to replace all of our highways and roads with solar panels.

E: Yeah, a couple of trillion of those and we're good.

S: They wrote a rebuttal to all of the criticism that they've been getting online. Apparently they were a little stung by the fact that there's an Internet and people are going to discuss their ideas and maybe in unflattering tones.

E: How dare they?

B: Someone's wrong on the Internet!

S: First of all, their Indiegogo campaign concluded and they reached 2.2 million dollars.

J: Wow.

R: Wow.

S: Raised 2.2 million dollars.

B: What were they shooting for?

S: One million, I think was their goal.

B: So, nice.

S: Good for them. But after reading their article called Clearing the Frickin' Air.

B: Haha, nice.

S: Now I despise them.

B: Oh, really?

S: Yeah, because it's...

B: Oh, I can't wait to hear this.

R: Oh, no.

S: It's the worst to respond to criticism. It is absolutely the worst. Let me just read you some bits of it.

B: Oh, yeah!

S: So they say:

"Most of the attention has been very positive, but as the campaign became more and more successful (and popular), the naysayers began coming out in force trying to grab some attention. They use non-scientific "facts", misquote and mislead, and sometimes flat out lie. They write unprofessional articles and create deceiving videos to lead people astray. We were told by the Indiegogo staff that this happens to every successful campaign, regardless of the invention.

"Haters are going to hate. Nothing we can do about that. One unscrupulous individual even took our viral Solar Freakin' Roadways video (by volunteer Michael Naphan) without our permission, and has used it to create another video, in which he has embedded deliberately misleading information."

And he just keeps going on like that. I mean, it's just like like are you new to the Internet?

R: Whining.

S: Yeah, the worst possible whining.

B: Wait, but he does address the major problems that people with it and deals with them scientifically, right? I mean isn't that what you're supposed to do? Right? Did he attempt?

S: Well let's see what he does.

B: Alright.

S: Well, first of all, a lot of people said a lot of things about the solar highways, including us, we talked about it on the show, and essentially we were saying "good for them, knock yourselves out, probably ultimately an impractical idea", and we named multiple reasons why. But then a lot of people said stupid things about it on the Internet, because it's the Internet, and that's the baseline. And they picked a lot of the dumbest things that people said about the panels, so they're picking the low hanging fruit but some of the things they said were, I mean. So they're not doing what they should do. They're proposing a major paradigm shift in the way that we build and maintain our road infrastructre as well as our energy infrastructure in this country and they raised over 2 million dollars to get going on that, right? So you'd think they'd be able to handle a little bit of criticism but what they're doing is not what they should be doing which is taking a very self-critical look at the potential limitations and roadblocks and difficulties with this, like really seriously considering the feedback. Instead, they're constructing a defensive, motivated reasoning, best lawyers' case for themselves and really giving short shrift to legitimate criticism. Some of the things they rebut are, the points were not very good, so they're picking, again, the bad points. One of the things is that they picked a stupid place to put solar panels, and one legitimate point is that the project didn't start by asking the question: Where should we put solar panels? It started by asking the question: How can we technically upgrade our roads? What would be the next generation of a high-tech road? Because we're still using the same basic pavement technology we had 100 years ago. So that's how the idea evolved, that's why, it's solar. So OK, I get that. That still doesn't mean it's a good idea. It still doesn't address the concern of, if we're going to build a solar infrastructure, that the roads are not the best way to do it. And they justify themselves in broad brush stroke, vague terms, without ever doing the math to justify their claims. They say that the whole idea is that we're going to build an infrastructure that's going to have a return on investment. OK, show me at least a back-of-the-envelope calculation that tells me that this is going to be a return on investment. And how long is that going to take, and what's going to be the lifespan of these pavers and are they actually going to pay for themselves at some point? Meanwhile they're giving just totally pulled-out-of-their-butts speculation. It's a sales pitch, it's not serious investigation of the claims that they're making. And then they, a lot of their responses are tangential which means they're just grabbing at straws to defend themselves. So they say,"False Claim: Solar Roadways is going to cost $60 trillion dollars" OK, that figure is surely not accurate, I don't think it's based on anything. But then, again, they never address how much it's actually going to cost. They don't say how much it's going to cost.

R: Just: not that.

S: Yeah, just not that. We don't know what it's going to cost, but...

R: Three times, maybe, but not that.

S: And then they try to compare it to asphalt. So they give all these statistics on how much it costs to build and maintain our roads, which has absolutely nothing to do with what they're claiming. So they'll say, for example, that the department of transportation is spending 20 billion dollars annually to build new roadways. Irrelevant. And 16.5 billion annually repairing and preserving the other 99% of the system. OK. That's not a lot, whatever, 40-50 billion dollars a year for the whole country? That's not as much as we should be spending.

E: In a multi-trillion dollar economy.

S: That's nothing. So he's trying to say "oh roads are so expensive" and he says, the false claim is that we can't afford to heat roads and then they just give statistics on how much it costs to remove snow from roads, whatever, we spend 2.3 billion dollars to remove snow and ice and repair damage from snow and ice, and there are accidents from it. OK, but you're not comparing it to anything. You're not telling us how it's going to cost to heat the roads. They're just throwing facts out there as if it makes their points. But I haven't got to the worst one.

J: Uh oh!

B: Jay.

S: This is the one that made me, really...

B: Dry heave?

J: Very angry, Steve?

E: You don't like Steve when he's very angry.

S: I got a little verklempt when I was reading this. So they say, "False Claim: Glass is softer than asphalt". First of all, I don't know who the hell said that. But alright, anyway, let me read it "Not even close. This is called the Mohs Hardness Scale, which is used to define hardness in materials science. It lists materials from the softest to the hardest, 10 being diamond." Then it gives the Mohs Hardness Scale. We've talked about hardness and toughness and tensile strength and all that stuff on the show before. And then they show that glass is actually harder than steel. It's not harder than hardened steel, it's harder than really low-grade steel.

B: It's also much more brittle.

S: Duh. They totally confuse, and this is why, this guy is not a structural engineer, he's an electrical engineer, and he completely botches this. He says glass is harder than steel so don't tell me that glass is softer than asphalt. But the thing is, you don't want your roads to hard. You want them to be pliable. You want them to be soft.

E: Right, because the ground moves.

S: Right, because the ground moves. You want something that's relatively soft, but that's strong. It's not going to break easily, and you definitely don't want it to be brittle. Glass may be hard, but it's really brittle. It shatters. So it's the difference between hardness and strength. And the way they write this article, this guy has absolutely no idea what he's talking about, or he does, and he is just being deliberately deceptive. Either, one is one is worse than the other, neither one is a reasonable defence. Really? Really? You're going to bamboozle us with the glass is harder than steel argument, completely ignoring the fact that we're talking about other properties? The bottom line is that glass doesn't have the physical characteristics that are optimal for a roadway. It's the opposite kind of property that we want. We don't want something hard and brittle, we want something soft and strong. It's the exact opposite. Now he does make the point that it's going to be tempered glass, and tempered glass is strong, it's a lot stronger than glass, and that's the only thing that makes this even semi-reasonable, but even still it doesn't address the real criticism is that tempered glass is actually not, it's too hard, it's not very pliable, and he hasn't demonstrated that this kind of system would be appropriate for roadways that are going to heave and need to give. So completely side-steps the actual criticism with the shenanegans about hardness. Totally disgusting. I was really, reading that, I was like oh my goodness, this is utter nonsense.

R: That's so disappointing, because even though we were critical of them, I was rooting for them. I wanted this project to succeed so any criticism that I had of them would have been the most constructive possible.

S: Right.

J: I totally agree Rebecca, now that we've found out that there's a lot of BS built into this, the whole thing just sucks.

S: Yeah it makes it seem like these are not the people to push this project forward. You need people that are going to really try to pick apart their own project from every angle and really look for the constructive criticism and be mature enough to just look past the immature stuff on the Internet and try to focus on the best criticisms that were levelled at them or just picking the worst or just completely sidestepping the legitimate issues with just deception. It was very disappointing.

R: And you know, this is just a case where this is something where, they're not just going to succeed if they happen to be right, they're still going to need to win over a lot of people, especially a lot of people in government and large industries, in order to make this happen. So if they've got any hopes of doing that then they're going to have to address these issues head on, like nobody's going to listen to it.

S: No. But Rebecca, haters are going to hate, so what are you going to do.

R: Haters do hate.

S: What a way to dismiss criticism.

R: I know.

S: Oh, it's terrible.

R: Don't get me wrong, I like a good hater's going to hate joke, but this is neither the time or the place.

S: It's inappropriate. Very disappointing. Alright, let's move on.

Slower Light (16:58)

• http://www.theskepticsguide.org/closest-supernova-may-prove-light-is-slower-than-we-think-or-something-else

S: Bob, I understand the speed of light is not as fast as we thought it was.

B: Well, we shall see. So, yeah, basically, that's the news item that's been all over the place. A physicist has claimed that our widely accepted value for the speed of light in a vacuum is wrong, and it's really slower than we think. And this heretic, or visionary, perhaps, is physicist James Francis from the University of Maryland, and he's writing about this in the New Journal of Physics. And I did a cursory look at that. I'm not terribly familiar with it. I did a quick look. Seems okay. Seems fine. Some of the people involved seem like they should be on the up and up. Basically, it all started in 1987. You guys remember the big science news that year? Of course you do. It's integral to this news item. So that was the year we detected the closest supernova in 383 years. It was the first time that modern astronomers had a super real close view of one, relatively speaking. And yeah, it was a big deal. Supernovas just have not been happening nearby for way too long. There's about 30 supernovas per second in the observable universe, which I think was an awesome number. But there's only one per century on average in each galaxy. But we're talking over four centuries since we had one that we were able to detect. So we feel, or astronomers have felt pretty gypped that they haven't seen one statistically that they should have seen, at least three or four. And even though this one wasn't even in the Milky Way, it was in the next best thing, though. It was in the nearby dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. I always love that name. And that's only 160,000 light years away or so. And that's only about twice as distant as the most distant Milky Way supernova could be. So that's still very, very close. So the first indication that a supernova has happened is not actually looking up into the sky with your eyes or an optical telescope and seeing a star brighten. The first hint is really the detection of these ghost-like particles called neutrinos. We've talked to them before, and I'm going to mention them again. They have no electric charge. Neutrino, in fact, means little neutral one. So they can go through everything, even light years of lead, without any interaction at all. I think the figure was 50% of neutrinos can go through a light year of lead without any interaction at all.

J: But when I visualize that, just real quick, I hear things like this all the time. But are you saying that this thing is a lot smaller than an electron?

S: It's not that it's smaller, Jay. Just it doesn't interact with matter very much. It interacts so weakly that—

B: Right. It has to be a direct collision. And it is incredibly tiny, so that's obviously incredibly rare. So yeah, it has to be. So it only interacts through the weak force and gravitationally, so it's not going to interact electrically. So that's the reason. Jay, in fact, there's 65 billion neutrinos going through every square centimeter of your body, assuming it's perpendicular to the sun, of course, right now. Do you feel that? So for that reason, once a supernova begins, when the core collapses, then the neutrinos are created. And how they're created is kind of cool, too. The collapse squeezes together protons and electrons and creates a neutron. And of course, there's a little extra neutrino in there that goes flying out. So neutrinos are the first particles to leave the scene of the crime. The core collapses and bam, they're out. They're gone. So and it's even cooler than that. Did you guys know that neutrinos carry away 98% of a supernova's energy? 98%. So imagine how many neutrinos we're talking about.

E: Imagine if it didn't carry that energy away and it stayed there for the supernova explosion.

B: So the point is, though, that the photons interact with matter much more than neutrinos do. So their final departure is delayed by a lot. So as a result, the neutrinos arrive first. They get here before anybody else. And that's even though they have a tiny bit of mass and they don't quite travel at the speed of light, they're so very near to no mass that it doesn't make that much of a difference. So we first detected, even though we didn't know about it until we went back to the detectors, we first detected a burst of neutrinos on that day in February in 87. So theory says that after that neutrino detection, we should see the visible light from the explosion about three hours later. But that's not what happened. We detected another neutrino burst 4.7 hours later, which is very odd. Theory doesn't really say much about that. But then that second burst of neutrinos that was followed by light three hours later, just as we would have hoped. So astronomers were kind of like in a bind. Why are there two neutrino events? Short story short, they decided to conclude that the initial burst was an anomaly, probably unrelated to the supernova. And that's fine. I could totally handle that. But physicist James Franco, he looks at it differently. He thinks that the odds of the first burst being a coincidence is one in 10,000, which he thinks is way too high. So he wants to know why light took 7.7 hours to appear after the initial, that very first neutrino detection. It should have been three hours, but it was 7.7. Why? So and he claims the reason, the answer to that question is because light travels a little more slowly than we think.

S: But Bob, isn't that just trading one anomaly for another? Then where did the second neutrino pulse come from?

B: Yeah, exactly. And I went through a lot of his original paper, and I read a bunch of horrifically nasty, inaccurate, misleading press releases, and they were bad too. So yeah, you're right. To me, that's the elephant in the room, dealing with that. If you're going to deal with this closely, you got to think about that, I think, very much. So but the way he resolves this, though, is he invokes a long-known quantum phenomenon called vacuum polarization. So when this happens, a photon of light splits into a positron and an electron pair, and then they quickly recombine. Now, the effect is really tiny, and you wouldn't really notice it. But if it happens often enough over vast enough distances, it could have an impact on the overall average velocity of light that could account, he claims, for the extra 4.7 hours. So that's his claim in a nutshell. But now the impact to science would be considerable if he's actually correct. Many of the calculations that astronomers have performed over the years involving the speed of light would have to be recalculated. Many theories that have been developed based specifically on observation and the assumption of the old, faster speed of light, they'd need to be changed or dumped in the trash. So there'd be a lot of rework that would need to be done. So at the bottom line this is one paper. It's way too early to even think about recalling textbooks or anything like that, or to even get nervous or even excited. There's lots of alternative explanations that would have to be dealt with first, as usual in science. Perhaps the core of the star collapsed in two stages. That would explain a double tap of neutrino releases. So some speculate that the stellar remnant that's there now is not a neutron star, but maybe it's a quark star, which is very theoretical and has never been detected. Maybe the physics of a quark star would permit somehow two neutrino releases. I don't know. Maybe it's something totally mundane and boring, like something in space messed with the average speed overall, like dust. So, or it could just be a dumb coincidence after all. And that very first burst came from somewhere close by that seemed like it was from the same spot for who knows? Having one data point really sucks sometimes. So let's hope that we have a really nice, close, but not too close, close-ish in our near future.

R: Bob, if this guy is right about the speed of light, how many seconds should I be counting after lightning flashes to figure out how far the storm is?

B: You might need a supercomputer to help you out. But I think you can comfortably ignore that, Rebecca.

R: Okay. Thank you.

S: Now, Bob, this quark star, I hear they have really great Romulan ale there.

B: Nice. I miss Deep Space Nine.

J: Speaking of Deep Space Nine, I just read last night that the actors were really upset that they canceled Star Trek The Next Generation because the TV show was doing phenomenally well in its seventh season and the studio decided to stop it so they could start doing movies.

B: I remember specifically reading about that when they closed the show, and that's essentially correct. The show was still very popular. They figured, all right, we're going to end it here and we're going to go to the movies. And that didn't last very long. And I think one of the big problems, Jay, it was expensive as hell.

S: Though the real problem was the movies sucked.

B: No, no.

S: It's because they never got good writers for those movies. That's why. But now we have the reboot, which also has terrible writing.

B: The first one was awesome, though.

S: First one was nostalgic. The second one was a scientific disaster. But I'm hoping, hoping that they're going to rescue it in the third one. But, you know.

R: Yeah, because why not?

S: Yeah, because why not hope?

R: Yeah, that's all that's left.

B: Don't cost nothing.

S: Right. We'll see which reboot sucks the most, Star Trek or Star Wars.

E: Oh, gosh. I'm dreading it.

Orion Capsule ()

• http://www.theskepticsguide.org/orion-capsule-gets-one-step-closer

S: All right, Jay, what's the skinny on the Orion capsule?

J: I found out a lot of really cool stuff about it. But I found out about a lot of other things, too. I wanted to go into the history of manned spacecraft. And there's a lot of really cool facts in there. And as I was reading through a lot of different pieces of information, I started to count, like, how many missions there are. Right now, there are four orbital spacecraft. Or should I say, these are space programs that are functioning today. The Soyuz and the Shenzhou. They are, they're both of these have manned spacecraft. And they also have other vehicles that go with it that build like the launch vehicle and all that stuff. There are two space stations as well, the International Space Station and the Tiangong, which is, which is China's space station.

S: Weren't they both destroyed, though, when the Russians shot one of their satellites out of the sky?

J: No.

S: Oh, that was the movie Gravity.

J: During the space race between Russia and the US, there were many, many space programs going on. I counted seven. And there were also four now defunct space stations and two suborbital ships. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot to me. It really isn't. I mean, even though the US had quite a bit of different missions that were happening, happening relatively consecutively. But overall, not that much, right? Right now, there are 17 orbital spacecraft in development and many more suborbital in the works, which, what does that show you? That we're seeing this precursor to a new space age. And I am really excited about it.

B: Wow, that many?

J: Yeah. Not too long ago, we reported that on the show that there were many new space centers that were being built around the globe. And a lot of these big companies are preparing for this imminent new economy of outer space travel and business and everything. It's going to really, really explode in the next decade. Now, if you also remember a couple of episodes ago, I talked about the Dragon V2 manned space vehicle, which I like even more now than I did when I reported on it. NASA has also been working on their own latest and greatest, and it's called the Orion, like Steve said. So here are the quick facts. It's being built by Lockheed Martin for NASA and Astrium for the European Space Agency. So I think the same blueprints are being used and being built by two different companies. The reported use of the spacecraft is manned missions to the moon, to nearby asteroids, and to Mars.

S: All right, Jay, let's see. I tried to figure this out when I was researching this myself, because the Orion is a deep space capsule, right, as opposed to, say, a low Earth orbit capsule like the Dragon. And they say that it could house up to four astronauts for three weeks, but one of its potential missions is a mission to Mars. Yeah, how do you get to Mars and back in three weeks?

E: So how's that going to work?

S: I couldn't find anybody discussing exactly how that would work.

J: I think I have the answer. Steve, I think what you're being confused about is that the actual space capsule where the astronauts launch in, that vehicle is not the vehicle that they would do a long duration travel in. They would actually go into a second vehicle. So they would shut down the, what do you call that, command pod?

S: The crew module is what it's called, labeled.

E: The bridge.

J: They would shut down the crew module, and that crew module can be dormant for up to six months. So they shut everything down. I don't know if they completely power it down. I'd imagine that they do, though. And then they crawl into the back and they go into the larger living space, which will be the long range vehicle that they end up doing the scientific experiments in and all that stuff as they're traveling to wherever they're going. Then they turn the capsule back on and they go back in when they have to do anything that I guess that has to do with orbiting the planet and that type of activity.

S: Yeah, so that's what I figured. They'd have to be another piece to the vehicle that would be equipped for months of travel, not just weeks.

B: Absolutely. But Jay, my first knee-jerk reaction to that, to what you said, is you mentioned a spaceship and Mars. My first thought is, well, what do you do about cosmic radiation? People will get cancer. It would be horrific unless you have a solid plan. Do they have a plan to deal with that? Have you come across anything?

J: I think what the actual plan is, Bob, is that the astronauts will die after about a month and then they don't have to worry about running out of food.

B: Oh, okay. That makes sense then.

J: The other module, the living quarter module, would be the one that's shielded and has all the protection.

S: Yeah, but to be clear, we don't have that now. I'm not even aware of actually specific plans for that, a design or anything. I haven't even seen an artist's conception of what that would be. The Orion is just really to get us to the moon and nearby asteroids and then may one day be part of a bigger system that's designed to go to Mars. But they kind of just throw Mars in there as if Orion could do it, which I think is a little deceptive.

J: Now, Steve, how many crew did you read?

S: Four.

J: Well, I read two to six, and I think that there is a little bit of confusion between how many will be in the actual command module versus the supply module. I think that the actual capsule itself can launch four, and then they can have up to six people in the entire ship when they have all the pieces together.

S: Yeah. Okay. But doesn't the Orion refers to the capsule?

J: I think you're right. Yes, I do.

S: The whole launch system is the Space Launch System or the SLS.

J: Yeah, that includes all the engines and everything.

S: Yeah, right.

J: Of course, that gets shed on the way up. So yeah, talking about the SLS, this is a pretty cool system as well. First off, it's really much, much stronger than anything, much more powerful than anything the US has ever built before. And also, they're planning on being able to make improvements with it to make it even stronger without, I think, making large-scale modifications. I think that they know that there's a path to increase that power of that launch vehicle. So not a lot of information out there right now. So a lot of this stuff is really a couple of sources and that's it. So they're going to do an unmanned test December of 2014. And then they're planning that the first manned mission will be in 2020. And did you guys know that the actual command module looks like the old Apollo space capsules?

S: Yeah, it really does.

J: Yeah, very similar. Well, they said there's a reason for that. And that is because-

B: Aerodynamic?

J: No, they wanted to pull on design concepts that were already tried and tested. So a lot of the systems that functioned already, they're like, this works. We know that if we build it like this, it's going to work. So they're using some of the historical missions and everything to help them make this even safer. And there's a lot of safety built into this module as well. There is an emergency mission cancellation feature. And right now, they're testing the parachutes. And they're pushing very hard to make sure that this thing is the safest US built anything. I said before that they were saying that this capsule supports longer missions. They were saying it's a max of 21 days with the capsule functioning and up to six months with it being dormant. So I think that is plenty of time, depending on when they launch. Usually, they would time to get someone to Mars, say, that they would do it where by the time they get to where Mars is, it'll be at its closest that it gets to the Earth. And you could do that in six months. Now, there's other features. It has a glass cockpit. And what that means is it's an all digital control system. And they're saying that this was pulled from a Boeing 787. I think it's also the same type of system that the Dragon V2 is using, where it's really just the touchscreen.

S: Yeah, I mean, why not?

J: The ship also comes with an auto dock feature, which means that it doesn't actually have to be manned in order for it to dock, which is-

S: Oh, I thought you were talking about a holographic doctor.

E: Yeah, state the nature of your emergency.

J: It also has improved waste management, which I think is NASA's way of saying that the capsule won't smell like farts all the time. And that's true, by the way. The air filters did not filter out the fart smell. And from what I heard, that when those doors opened up and when they were extracting the astronauts from the capsules in the ocean, whoa.

S: So imagine on your resumes that you built the fart filtration system for the Orion spacecraft.

J: I could use one of those in my bedroom. One thing I did read is that the ship's systems can be upgraded. Systems like propulsion, life support, the avionics, and the thermal protection can all be upgraded. They said that some of it is reusable. And I laughed when I read that because they're like, yeah, we could take some pieces off of what comes back and reuse it. It's like, just let the V2 kick your ass. The Dragon V2 is 100% reusable.

S: But they have different purposes. I mean, this is like what NASA's been saying. We're going to do the experimental stuff, the deep space capsule. We'll let private industry do the low Earth orbit stuff that we've already perfected. I see what you're saying, though. I do think that the V2 had some slick features that the Orion seems to lack. So, Jay, there's been some criticism of the Orion program. I know, like, Phil Plait, for example.

B: Really?

S: He's skeptical of the... Because, well, it's just that he thinks it's going to go long and over budget, and it's going to suck all the financing out of NASA, and we're going to have nothing to show for it.

J: Well, I think Phil is referencing the fact that there's been a couple of cancelled projects which keeps borrowing from the previous one, right? So the Orion is actually... I think it's the third project that's been started since the space shuttle. They cancel it, and then they have all this technology and stuff, and then they're like, okay, let's start up again, and they start planning again. It really is, I think, just a massive lack of funding and attention being paid towards the NASA projects, but the scientists keep pushing hard to have active projects going and to get the whole thing started up again. It must be very frustrating to know that you're half funded, and then you have to change your project to fit the funding.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B: You know what else is frustrating? It's 2014, still messing with chemical rockets. Is anyone even looking at nuclear engines? I know there's a huge problem in the moratorium with that kind of stuff, and this kind of technology, but can you imagine...

E: There's a ban on nuclear stuff in space.

B: Six months to get to Mars. You could slash that unbelievably with a nuclear engine. You could even refuel on Mars. I mean, there's just so many advantages, and I just got to throw that out there yet again. It's like, why isn't anyone taking this seriously?

S: But we are building warp drive, or we're designing the warp drive.

B: We're making pretty pictures about it, yeah.

S: So Jay, you didn't say the news item, the reason why this is in the news, the Orion.

J: Why is it recently in the news?

S: Because they just passed their...

B: Parachute, yeah, parachute.

S: So they dropped it from 35,000 feet, allowed it to free fall for 10 seconds, and the parachutes deployed and worked fine. So that was a very important test, yeah.

J: I didn't think much of it. Like, okay, they're doing testing. They did the water test recently. They've done lots of tests recently.

S: It was a pretty big milestone, so it was good. That's why it's in the news. That's why it's on the news item list. But yeah.

UFO Sightings ()

• http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21605918-everything-you-need-know-about-ufos-0

S: All right, Evan, I'm looking at a graph here of UFO sightings throughout the course of the day. Tell me about that.

E: So here's how it works, okay? You start off at like 8 in the morning, and you got your UFO sightings. A few maybe. And then as the morning goes on, it peaks, goes up a little bit and a little bit higher. And then we start to head towards dusk. And here's where they go even a little bit more higher. So we're at now, what, like 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock in the evening, p.m. And that's where the sightings really do start to increase. And they continue to increase. And they peak, they peak right about at the 11 o'clock. No, at the 9 o'clock hour, at the 9 o'clock hour. And as somebody from, well, the economist.com put this together for us in a nice graph, those happen to be between 5 o'clock and 11 o'clock, the drinking hours. And it seems like UFO sightings, as reported, seem to maximize around the drinking hours of the day. See, and when you go to sleep at night, that's when it tails back off to the numbers that you would see at 8 in the morning again, which is interesting. And thanks to our friends, can we call them friends? At the National UFO Reporting Center, who have cataloged almost 90,000 reports of UFO sightings since they've been doing this since 1974, collecting data on it. And this is how it pegs. This is how it turns out. Now, I don't know. You know, it's I guess it kind of does make sense. You know, those are the hours when it's evening and most people are still awake.

S: Yeah. I mean, it's it's begging the question to call that the drinking hours. You know, it's it's the evening when people are awake. That's it. You know, during the day.

R: Honestly, if you're going to be honest, I would call the drinking hours like 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., you know.

E: I know some people who call the drinking hours 10 a.m. to 4 to 5 p.m.

R: But yeah, I mean, it's the lighting is bad. Yeah a ripe time for people to see satellites and the moon in a weird way. Yeah, it's not necessarily booze.

E: There's another graph that accompanies this, and I found this one to be kind of interesting. Sightings per 100,000 people, state by state going through the 50 states of the United States. Washington state had the most sightings per 100,000 people, more than 50 out of 100,000 reported UFO sightings. And also it looks like Montana and Vermont were close behind, 40 to 50 sightings per 100,000 in each of those states. And of course, those are all northern border states. And you do see kind of there being more activity along the northern border, but not for all of it. Sort of in the middle section of the country, not as much. There's just as much in Minnesota as there is in Texas, per se. But if you look at the map a little closer, what I noticed is that look at the rocky states, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona. There seems to be more reportings around the Rocky Mountain states. So I don't know. Do you think elevation might have something to do with it?

S: No, I think Air Force bases have something to do with it. I think that there's more UFO sightings around Air Force bases.

E: And of course, the United States, a lot of federal land out in those regions, big swaths, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of miles in which it's just run by the federal government. And that is where they have lots of bases. They do test experiments. They launch rockets. They do all kinds of stuff out there. So I suppose you are more prone to seeing things that you don't usually see at night in those areas.

R: I'd also love to see this data compared to dark sky areas in the United States, because I suspect that the less light pollution there is, maybe the more sightings you have, because people are actually able to look up at the skies and do so more often. I don't know.

E: Going back to the drinking hours, Steve, you know what that reminded me of? It reminded me when Ed Warren, he told us that paranormal activity by demons and ghosts peaks at 3 a.m. because, well, he thought he was a demonologist, so he must know. He said at 3 a.m. was the peak because that's an insult to the Holy Trinity, right?

S: Yeah.

E: Or perhaps it's the fact that at 3 a.m. people are sleep deprived, have woken up, and they're groggy, and they have other similar compromised physical states that would allow you to sort of hallucinate lots of different things going on at 3 a.m.

R: 3 a.m. is an insult to the Holy Trinity?

S: Yeah, because you know, three.

R: Because it's three?

S: Yeah.

R: The Holy Trinity, I feel like, has a better self-esteem than normal.

S: Yeah, they're very sensitive, aren't they? Another Ed Warren analogy was calling any cold spots in the house, we call that ghost cold.

R: Ghost cold?

S: Yeah, it's ghost cold. Yeah, because that's, again, begging the question. Calling it the drinking hours is assuming the cause, which is not really not fair. It's just like calling cold ghost cold. You're kind of assuming.

R: I'm cold. Can you turn up the heat? Well, are you cold, or are you ghost cold?

E: So the running joke is any time something's either cold or wet, that's ghost wet.

S: That's a ghost light.

Facebook Experiment ()

• http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28051930http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/did-facebook-and-pnas-violate-human-research-protections-in-an-unethical-experiment/

S: So guys, we have 234,000 likes on the SGU Facebook page.

B: Wow, what steady progress. Fantastic.

S: If you haven't checked it out, check it out. We've been posting lots of articles and stuff on there. It's been very active, and we definitely need our listeners on the page to keep, bring some balance to the force. I mean, the comments.

B: Please, please.

R: You know, if only we could take all of those people and conduct some sort of massive experiment on them.

B: Nice.

S: In secret.

R: In secret.

E: That would be unethical.

R: Publish the study and then sit back and wait for everyone to say good job.

E: That never happens.

R: Well, almost never, except for every couple of years with Facebook. So yeah, Facebook recently got in trouble for doing exactly that. They conducted a massive experiment. Not Facebook themselves. You know, Mark Zuckerberg, as far as I know, was not going through this data. They got several scientists to basically they adjusted the news feeds of about 700,000 users in order to test the hypothesis that emotions are socially transmittable over social networks like Facebook.

E: Like a disease.

R: Yeah, like a disease. And what they found was, yes, they are. Basically, what they did was for certain users, they only showed them negative updates from their friends, or at least they heavily biased their news feeds in favor of negative posts. And for others, they heavily biased their feeds in favor of positive posts. And yeah, what they found was that the people who were exposed to more negative updates tended to update their own statuses with more negative things. And the same happened with the positive. Those people tended to be more positive. So basically, Facebook was manipulating, secretly manipulating the emotions of hundreds of thousands of people online without telling them or anyone else. And nobody knew about it until they published their paper. And once that happened, the internet got very, very angry.

E: Leading to more negative posts.

R: Yeah, that was about as negative as it got at that point. People criticized them for doing a psychological study without informed consent from subjects. But Facebook argued that they did have consent because if you are on Facebook, in order to use Facebook, you sign an agreement that basically says Facebook is allowed to do whatever they want with your data. And so they claimed that that protects them. And I should mention that they also say in their defense that no humans were actually looking at the individual status updates. They created an algorithm to determine whether or not a post was positive or negative. So that was their other kind of defense. Some people aren't buying it, though. James Grimmelman is a legal scholar who wrote at the laboratorium.net website that he thinks that they actually did do something illegal, because they employed a few scientists who are federally funded, that makes them subject to the federal policy for the protection of human subjects, which is also known as the common rule. And there are several things in those guidelines that Facebook clearly did not do. So the first thing that is required is you have to give a statement that the study involves research and explanation of the purposes of the research and the expected duration of the subject's participation, a description of the procedures to be followed, and identification of any procedures which are experimental. The second one, you need to give a description of any reasonably foreseeable risks or discomforts to the subject all of these points that actually add up to the informed part of informed consent, as opposed to the scrolling to the end and clicking I accept version of consent. So it seems like it's up in the air whether or not they actually did something illegal. What's not up for debate is whether or not they've, this is the first time they've done this, which I found quite surprising. They did a similar experiment back in 2010. nd it got pretty much no attention. But in this study, they wanted to see whether or not they could manipulate people into voting. And so they made small adjustments to banners that reminded US citizens to vote. It included two groups of 600,000 users each. And they found that an extra 340,000 votes were cast as a result of the messages. So according to their own data, they were actually incredibly successful at persuading people to vote just by tweaking these polls that they were showing US Facebook users. So this apparently isn't a unique one off sort of study for Facebook. They've been dealing with this data for quite a long time. And it seems like they will continue to do so unless something particularly negative comes about from this most recent uproar. As of right now, I haven't seen anybody actually lodging formal complaints or anything or suing them. But I don't think it's out of the question that Facebook users might band together and do some sort of class action thing or who knows. Because it definitely seems like it's in this sort of gray territory where maybe we do have to have that conversation about how much consent, how much information do you have to give subjects when you're using massive amounts of data that come from social networking. So this should be interesting to see how this plays out.

S: Yeah, this is a fascinating subject. David Gorski also wrote about it over at Science-Based Medicine to give you a researcher's view on this. And it's a couple of the nuanced points that he brought up. So first of all, because this was not just like Facebook doing marketing research, right, you could sort of spin it that way. You know, like, well, you don't have to get research approval or informed consent doing marketing research. Like even we, in a very limited way, we're tracking the response we're getting to different types of posts and we're using that information to craft further posts. You know what I mean? So that's just very basic kind of marketing research. So that's – I don't think there's any problem with that. But this was different. This involved actual psychology researchers, some of whom were at universities getting federal funding. And the rules definitely apply to them. So one thing you need to – you need to get IRB or Institutional Review Board approval. And they did get some IRB approval, but I don't think they got IRB approval at every institution that they were affiliated with, which they have to do. So there's some issues there. And that could be – that's flat out illegal. You know, if they didn't get IRB approval, that's like – that's kind of a black and white issue. The other thing is that IRBs can waive the need for informed consent. They could say, yeah, you don't need informed consent to do this research, but you have to meet four criteria. The research has to involve no more than minimal risk to the subjects. Okay, I could buy that. The waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects. Okay, I could buy that as well. Three is the research could not practically be carried out without the waiver or alteration. I don't buy that one. And four is whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation. That did not happen. So three is questionable. They did not adhere to four. One and two, they probably meet those criteria. So all Facebook would have to do would be to have one of their bots choose people at random or whatever, and then at some point you get a little pop-up window that says Facebook would like to conduct to track some information about your use and your behavior and give the information that you would actually need to have an informed consent. If you agree to this, click yes just get actual informed consent from people. How hard would that be? And then after the experiment's all over, you send them a message saying you were, your behavior was tracked as part of this research that's going to be published. You give the kind of post-experiment information that we typically give to subjects of covert psychological experiments. So it actually would be possible to completely do this above board and I think meet all the ethical requirements. So they should just do that. I think that Facebook is thinking of this as if it's just benign marketing research and not as if this is a psychological human subject research and you have a completely different standard that you have to adhere to. And it was really the researchers and the IRBs. It was their job to do that. So they failed to really execute this the way they should have.

R: And I think it's important to point out that in addition to the difference between marketing research and an actual psychological study done by government-funded scientists, there's also, I think, a difference between a study, a passive observational study and one that manipulates the subjects. And this is obviously the latter and I think that's why they've stepped in it so much this time. You know, the voting one probably went under the radar because the end result of convincing more people to vote isn't seen as nefarious. You know, if anything, it was, oh, OK, well, that's interesting. And it does have direct relation to marketing data. But yeah, in this case, they are directly manipulating the emotions of their subjects. And that's the point where someone involved in that research should have stepped back and said, maybe we need to be a bit more thorough about our informed consent.

S: I mean, the bottom line is if people feel creeped out and violated, you probably did something wrong.

R: I think that's a good rule in general.

S: I mean, that's a good smell test. And that's the whole point of the IRB and the rules are to protect people from feeling violated by psychological research. And of course, all human research. So yeah, I think it's a good lesson. And I think the social media is a huge resource for social and psychological research. And we should use it. But let's do it correctly. You know, let's not poison it by doing it like this. You know? That's it for the news items.

Who's That Noisy ()

• Answer to last week: PC fan error

S: So Evan, you know what that means. It's time for Who's That Noisy?

E: It is. So what we can do is go ahead and play for you. The noisy from episode number 468. Here we go. As a reminder [plays Noisy] what we wanted you to guess was what made, what generated that music.

S: Was that a nose flute?

E: There were a ton of suggestions as to exactly what that was. And some of the more interesting guesses were, oh, for example, a yogurt making machine, a Simon Says toy, a buzzer to an apartment in Budapest. Apparently, someone lived there and had that as their apartment. An Omni music box from an ice cream truck. Someone else guessed a garbage truck. Someone guessed one of those pocket quarterback games from the 1980s. Remember those things? And someone else said it was a calculator. Yeah. Little pocket quarterback. I love that game. What you had to have happen was you had to have a fan failure on a PC. Here's how it reads. Right from Microsoft.com, their support. During normal operation or in safe mode, your computer may play Fur Elise or It's a Small Small World, seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system biases developed by Award slash Unicor from 1997 and on. Isn't that cool?

S: That's a warning noise that your fan has shit the bed.

E: That's right. That's basically what that is. There were a few people who did get it correct, though, and this week's winner is Jesse. Now, Jesse did not provide a last name, so he or she is this week's winner. Congratulations, Jesse. I have your email address, so I'll reach out to you if you are, in fact, the winner of the grand prize at the end of the year, which will be to join us for a round of science or fiction early in 2015. And a big thank you to Martin Belcher, who suggested using this as a Who's That Noisy. It was an excellent suggestion. Thank you.

S: Yeah, cool.

E: And brand new hot off the presses this week's Who's That Noisy? [plays Noisy] If you know who that voice was, let us know. Send us an email in WTN@theskepticsguide.org or go ahead and post it on our forums, SGUforums.com. Look for the sub forum called Who's That Noisy. Good luck, everyone.

S: Thank you, Evan. Thank you.

Questions and Emails

Question #1: TDDCS ()

Hi crew,DIY trans dermal direct current stimulation - what gives?It seems that there's a popular movement emerging - people are building their own DIY stim kits, and a few companies are marketing them. However, the way it's presented has multiple characteristics of pseudoscience. I understand there's some serious research underway... but is it really such a good idea to build an at-home kit to send currents through your own head? I feel the obvious answer is hell no. With a side of no, seriously.If only someone knew a neuroscientist who could comment...Love the show, etcGareth in Sydneyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulationhttp://www.diytdcs.com/ 'Become a tDCS expert in only a few hours!' - wtf?http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/specialty_areas/brain_stimulation/tdcs.html

S: All right, we're going to do one email this week. This one comes from Gareth in Sydney. And Gareth writes, hi, crew. Do-it-yourself transdermal direct current stimulation. What gives? It seems that there's a popular movement emerging. People are building their own DIY stim kits and a few companies are marketing them. However, the way it's presented has multiple characteristics of pseudoscience. I understand there's some serious research underway, but is it really such a good idea to build an at-home kit and send currents through your own head? I feel the obvious answer is hell no with a side of no. Seriously.

R: What could go wrong?

S: If only someone knew a neuroscientist who could comment. Love the show, etc. Gareth. Thank you, Gareth. So yeah, it reminds me of you guys. Any of you guys ever watch Wallace and Gromit?

B: Of course.

R: Yeah.

E: Yes.

S: Yeah, doesn't he sound a little bit, just a little bit of harmless brain alteration.

E: That's right.

B: I love it.

S: So yeah, transdermal direct current stimulation. This is a technology that has been developing for years. It's part of a broader category of neurological interventions that involves different kinds of stimulation, either with alternating current or direct current, either superficial or deep brain, transdermal or transcranial, or using magnetic stimulations, all different kinds of ways that you can use some kind of electrical magnetic energy in order to directly stimulate the nervous system. There are a few proven applications, such as vagal nerve stimulators that help abort seizures and deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease, for example. There is some pretty good early research on using stimulation, either magnetic, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or even transdermal electrical stimulation for migraines. There was a recent device that actually gained FDA approval, the Cephaly device for migraines, although I was thoroughly unimpressed with the research. I was shocked the FDA approved it. But this is an interesting way to manipulate brain and neurological function. It's all totally plausible and interesting, and the research is building nicely. But we're at the stage where while we're still nailing down some of the basic concepts, there's a lot of translational research going on where we're figuring out exactly what kind of stimulation and what frequency and what location and what intervals, etc., etc., producing what clinical effects. Because you could use electrical stimulation to either increase the firing of neurons or decrease the firing of neurons. And of course, there are all kinds of different modules and networks and parts of the brain that you could be stimulating for different indications. And we have to sort all of that out and show that these interventions are safe and have some specific clinical effect. So while this is an emerging technology, still pretty thoroughly in the research phase except for a couple of proven applications. So of course, people are exploiting it. You know, they're making claims that going well beyond where we are with the research. Already marketing devices or do-it-yourself now home kits with claims that are not have not been demonstrated with actual published research. Really isn't a lot of clinical studies it's we're just translating to the clinical studies now really. So this is I liken this to, for example, the stem cell clinics in China and other places, where yeah, I mean stem cells are a very promising area of research, but it's just premature. They're trading on the premature hype of an emerging medical technology. I wouldn't recommend any at-home brain stimulation. I would be very careful about any devices that are making claims. I would do it only under the, at this point in time, I would seriously only do any kind of electrical stimulation under the supervision of a physician who is familiar with neurology, hopefully, the technology, the research. I would be very cautious at this point in time. It's still very preliminary. But I'm hoping that this is going to continue to progress. I mean, I'd love in 10 years, 15 years, something like that that we'll have a host of further devices like this. I mean, I'd love to be able to slap a headband on somebody and turn their migraines down. You know, that would be awesome.

Science or Fiction ()

Item #1: Researchers find that a mutation in a skin protein not related to pigment has a greater effect on Vitamin D levels than does melanin. Item #2: A new study finds that cats and elephants, and all animals intermediate in size, empty their bladders in the same amount of time, regardless of volume. Item #3: A new study finds that cats and elephants, and all animals intermediate in size, empty their bladders in the same amount of time, regardless of volume.

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

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts too genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have another theme this week.

R: Oh, for fuck's sakes.

S: But it's kind of just the theme is biology. It's kind of a broad theme, and it's three news items. So it's just really this regular show, just regular Science or Fiction, just as they all happen to fall within the biological realm.

B: Thematically clumped.

S: Exactly. Thematically clumped. Exactly. Here we go. Item number one, researchers find that a mutation in a skin protein not related to pigment has a greater effect on vitamin D levels than does melanin. Item number two, a new study finds that cats and elephants and all animals intermediate in size empty their bladders in the same amount of time regardless of volume. And item number three, scientists find that male mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite are more likely to mate with a female. Jay, go first.

J: Okay.

E: My goodness.

J: All right, so you say this one about the vitamin D, that there's a mutation here. Yeah, I don't see any reason why melanin has to be the only component in the mix when it comes down to the production of vitamin D. The thing that sucks about this one is it kind of goes against everything I've ever learned about what happens when your skin is in sunlight. I'm not sure about that one. The second one about animals, mammals emptying their bladders. All at the same time. I mean, I would imagine that if you have a very small balloon with a small opening or a big balloon with a big opening and you squeeze them it takes about the same amount of time for a bigger volume of liquid to empty a relatively bigger hole, right? So I can see that. Yeah, kind of. I think it's kind of funny to think that a whale and I pretty much have the same experience when we go to the bathroom time-wise. And I did see a guy that used to work for my dad that drank a lot of beer and he peed for about three minutes.

B: Stan?

E: Oh my gosh.

B: That's awesome.

J: But I can at least make some sense of the bladder one. Scientist, this last one here about the male mosquitoes. Okay, so a mosquito gets malaria. He's crazy and he wants to have sex. That one makes sense to me on some insane level as well. So I'm just going to say the vitamin D one is the fake.

S: Okay, Evan?

E: So the vitamin D one, I don't know, but it's a mutation in the skin protein. So maybe that that's certainly the key here. But could a mutation have a greater effect? I mean why not? Some mutations are good for us. And okay, cats and elephants. They empty their bladders in the same amount of time, regardless of volume. So you have a huge bladder, you got this little smaller bladder, but they empty in the same amount of time. Let's see, two objects fall at the same rate. That was the experiment that they did when they dropped the things off the tower. Maybe that's right. And then mosquitoes carrying malaria are more likely to mate with a female. There must be something in the malaria parasite that is an attractive force. Maybe it's giving off some sort of pheromone or something. I know that the female mosquitoes bite people. The males don't, something like that. I don't know if that's relevant. I think I'm going to have to go with the mosquitoes one.

S: Okay, Rebecca?

R: Yeah, for me, it was between vitamin D and the mosquitoes. The bladder emptying. Yeah, so long as the... I have a question, but... So you're saying that the study finds that all animals between the sizes of cats and elephants, all animals empty their bladders in the same amount of time.

S: That's the conclusion of the study. But of course, they didn't look at 10 million species. They did all the animals that they looked at in the study.

R: See, it's a bit of a tricky point because I don't think that they would conclude that all animals, based on the study, I think they might conclude that all mammals... I'm going to say the bladder emptying one is the fiction because I don't think that the conclusion of a study like this would say that all animals would empty their bladders in the same amount of time.

S: Okay, and Bob?

B: The protein pigment. Yeah, I could see that. I don't have too much of a problem with that. It's pretty interesting, but I can't think of anything wrong or especially right about it. The mosquito one, I don't have too much to say about that one. I'm just not... I'm not seeing any... I know that parasites can cause bizarre behavior. I'm trying to see what the benefit would be of making the males horny. But Rebecca, that's a great catch. Yeah, I think that is a huge difference between the animals and mammals. I mean, I could see selective pressure to make it such that you're not peeing too fast, which would be difficult, or too slowly because you are kind of like, not helpless, but kind of maybe perhaps off your guard when you're doing that. So it's kind of like coming to a sweet spot of how forceful you want to make it and how long you want to wait. But all animals, that, yeah, that might change it for me because that is a little too... Yeah. All right, I'm going to go with that one because I think that's fiction as well because of that word.

S: Okay, so we are spread out among all three. So I guess we'll take them in order. It doesn't matter. Item number one, researchers find that a mutation in a skin protein not related to pigment has a greater effect on vitamin D levels than does melanin. Jay, you think this one is the fiction and this one is science.

R: Hurray.

S: Sorry, Jay.

J: Curses.

S: So this is one where the press release and the reporting was terrible and I didn't understand what the hell was going on until I went back to the original study.

B: Yeah, I can relate to that.

S: Yeah, so and obviously they're related, but the thing that the press release was trying to make it seem like people evolved, like they didn't evolve lighter skin in order to compensate for the lighter ultraviolet intensity in northern latitudes when the study doesn't conclude that. That's not the conclusion of the study. So this is what the researchers found. So obviously the background here is that the closer people live to the equator, the more melanin they have in their skin, the darker they are in order to protect themselves from the intense sunlight and the ultraviolet radiation. But we also need the UVB light in order to make vitamin D. And so the farther away from the equator you get, then those populations evolve lighter and lighter skin in order to, because they don't need as much protection, but they do need to be able to make the same amount of vitamin D from the lower levels of ultraviolet B, right? So that's sort of the classic model of how that works. So again, the press release was making it seem like that's called into question, but the study really doesn't do that. What the study is showing is that there is another skin protein, which is called filigrin or FLG. And filigrin is also an adaptation to hotter, brighter climates, but it protects the skin from drying out. So it's kind of a protective barrier for the skin. So it's not really protecting it from ultraviolet light, it's protecting it from moisture loss. That protein absorbs a lot of ultraviolet radiation and therefore it also prevents vitamin D formation. And what the researchers found is that in Northern Europeans, who are the fairest of them all, right, have the lightest skin, that about 10% of them had mutations in the FLG gene, which reduced their levels of filigrin, which both made them more susceptible to dry skin and ectopic dermatitis, but also allowed them to make more vitamin D and they in fact did have higher vitamin D levels. So it actually correlates with higher vitamin D levels. And they did say it does correlate better than melanin levels do. You know, that can't be the adaptation to higher latitudes because it was only 10%, of the population, you know what I mean? It's just that this mutation is more prominent in Northern Europeans. So the selective pressures against it, I guess, are lower because it's offset by, you get the little bonus of higher vitamin D levels, but it also does correlate with higher risk of dermatitis. And it's not a pigment protein, it's nothing to do with pigment, it's just a non-pigment based mechanism that sustains higher levels of circulating VD3 in Northern Europeans. All right, let's go on to number two. A new study finds that cats and elephants and all animals intermediate in size empty their bladders in the same amount of time regardless of volume. Bob and Rebecca think this one is fiction, Jay and Evan think this one is science. And this one, so what's interesting is that an elephant has a bladder that's 3,600 times larger than a cat's. 18 liters versus 5 milliliters. But both of them take 20 seconds to empty their bladder. That's what the study found as well as all the other animals investigated in the study over about 6.6 pounds urinate in the same time span. So this one is science.

R: It is not though.

S: You threw me a curveball because listen, the authors did only look at mammals, but they didn't limit their conclusion to mammals because it has nothing to do with mammalian biology. It has to do with physics.

R: Well, it has to do specifically with the urethra.

S: Yeah, but it has nothing to do with the difference between mammalian and non-mammalian anatomy. So it's not clear how far you can extrapolate this.

R: And also they only found that most mammals they tested came within, and it wasn't 20 seconds. It was like 23 or something like that seconds. And it was give or take like 10 seconds.

S: That's all the animals they looked at. I'm just saying they specifically say the cat and the elephant both pee in 20 seconds. But I have to encapsulate the study into one short sentence so I don't always capture all the nuance. Because no, I'm not going to parse it that finely in order to make something a fiction.

B: Because I would have picked three.

R: Yeah.

B: Just saying.

R: I would have too. Yeah, I definitely would have.

S: No, you would have picked one.

R: I would not have.

B: Oh, no, no. No, I would have picked three because I read a similar article that I think you twisted.

S: Yes, that's correct.

B: I'm pretty certain at this point.

S: We'll get to that. We'll get to that.

B: Yes.

S: All right. But let me tell you what the study found that, again, it didn't really have anything to do with mammalian anatomy. It simply was that the old notion was that bladder emptying was largely about pressure from the bladder squeezing the urine out. And what these researchers concluded, and they did this by observing animals as well as doing some experiments, they found that it has to do just with gravity. It's purely a function of gravity and, as you say, the length of the urethra. And that in the animals that they investigated, that the bladder emptying time was relatively constant because the bigger the bladder, the longer the urethra. And the longer your urethra, the faster the bladder would empty in terms of volume per second. And so they all tended to average out to be about the same. They do speculate that there may be evolutionary pressures which were causing that to happen because if it takes too long to pee, an animal is vulnerable while he's peeing, so there would be evolutionary pressure to empty your bladder relatively quicker no matter how big you are. They also did say that below about 6.6 pounds that animals do empty their bladder much more quickly. So like a mouse would empty its bladder in about two seconds. And they say that bats can empty their bladder in a fraction of a second. So for smaller animals, it doesn't hold up. But everything between, again, the cat to the elephant size that they looked at was about the same. So guess if I'm being generous, I'll give this one to you guys.

R: We'll take a half a point each.

J: Do I get the half a point too?

E: We're doing half a point?

S: Because you were entirely wrong. So number three, scientists find that male mosquitoes carry the malaria parasite are more likely to mate with a female. That one is the fiction.

B: Wait, real quick here.

S: What did you just say? I mean, are you just joking or what? Let's get something concrete going on here. What does that mean?

E: It means cats and elephants could be the same.

S: I'm taking your protest on your advisement. I'm giving you a half a point is fair.

B: All right, people, I have a couple of people actually charting all this just so that they know. OK, we're good.

E: Half points?

B: Whatever. All right, what were you saying, Steve?

S: So the mosquito one is fiction. Lots of things that make this one fiction. Bob, you're right. I did base it on a study.

B: I knew it.

S: The study showed that mice who are infected with malaria give off a stink that attracts mosquitoes. So the malaria parasite is trying to induce mosquitoes to feed on it while it's in the most transmissible or infective stage, which makes perfect adaptive sense, right? It's maximizing its chance of being picked up and spread to another victim. Not sexually transmitted wouldn't really make any sense. There really wouldn't be any adaptive benefit. And it's the female mosquitoes who feed, who would pick up the parasite in any case.

Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

'The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.'— Lewis Thomas

S: All right, so, all right, Jay, do you have a quote for us this week?

J: This is a quote sent in by Nancy Agland from Sydney, Australia. "The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music." Anybody ever hear of Louis Thomas?

B: Yeah, maybe.

J: He's the author of a book entitled The Medusa and the Snail. That is Louis Thomas!

S: Thank you, Jay. So this is the episode that comes out while we're all at our various conferences. So we have nothing immediately to promote. But we do have later in the year, Dragon Con in Atlanta in September. And then we'll be in Sydney, Australia in November and in Auckland, New Zealand in December. There are details on the SGU website. In fact, there is a new page on the SGU website. It is the Science News page where we are putting up science news items because we needed a place to put all the stuff that we're feeding to our Facebook page. So check it out. Just go to the home page and then click on the Science News tab or link. You'll get taken to that page. And one of the things that we'll have there are further details on announcements. So all of the details on our trip down under is in a post on the Science News page. So take a look. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

R: Thank you, Steve.

B: Surely.

Signoff

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

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.

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