SGU Episode 772

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SGU Episode 772
April 25th 2020
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SGU 771                      SGU 773
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
Quote of the Week
Induction, analogy, hypotheses founded upon facts and rectified continually by new observations, a happy tact given by nature and strengthened by numerous comparisons of its indications with experience, such are the principal means for arriving at truth.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, French naturalist
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Show Notes
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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, April 22^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: Let me out.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening, folks. Hey, Jay. You okay?

J: I'm not enough. I'm not enough.

E: Jay's tapping out.

B: Every now and then, Jay calls me in the morning. He's like, Bob, I'm done.

J: I know. I'm over it. I want out. I'm not so done that I'm willing to go to a we're done rally and wear a firearm on my hip. I'm not ready for that.

C: That's good. Not that done.

J: No, but I'm just getting very, boy. This is – I couldn't imagine like being on a six-month spaceship mission to Mars.

S: I pretty much guarantee I couldn't do that. Being in a capsule for three months.

C: I think I could do it. But here's the thing. Here's the difference. You'd be – could you be in a capsule for six months versus being in a capsule for six months with your children?

J: Yeah.

S: Yeah. Definitely the company would matter.

E: Sure. Oh, yeah.

B: To what extent?

S: I would want VR.

B: Yeah.

J: Yeah. VR would have to be critical.

E: VR, AR, absolutely.

B: It's such a no-brainer, right? I mean it's an obvious thing.

S: But even still, I get antsy. I just need like – I need the perception of freedom of movement.

J: Do you guys actually – does your skin actually get a little itchy?

E: Sometimes when it –

B: Yeah, you need some cream, dude.

J: No, I mean –

S: It's getting mentally itchy.

J: I'm definitely getting like that antsy like itchy thing going on where I'm like, oh my god. I just want to get out. I just want to –

B: Oh, wow, dude.

E: You want to shed your skin.

B: Yeah. You're a few months ahead of me.

J: Well, but keep this in mind. I have two children in the house.

S: Two adorable children.

J: Yes. But no, they're high energy.

E: They are in close proximity.

J: Crazy outgoing.

S: High energy is a good euphemism.

J: Outgoing like nobody's business. The second you turn your back, they're doing something and one out of three times, it's bad. You know what I mean? So it's like –

E: Two kids. One out of three. It's one out of six. OK. I got it.

J: So one out of three times, you just have to – you can't turn your back on them. It could be something like they grab an iPad and you don't want them to be playing Minecraft. OK. You know what I mean? But the next thing could be standing up on a mantle. You know what I mean? You can't do that.

S: Drinking bleach. There's all kinds of things going on.

E: Yeah.

J: So did you guys hear – I read a news report that more people are getting poisoned at home because of cleaning products.

C: Yeah. That was one of my pitches for the week. We got something more interesting. But yeah. I think it's what? Like 30 or 40 percent increase in poison control calls.

E: I'm sorry. The consumption of cleaning products?

C: No, it's a lot of things. It's like people are getting – it's just more poison control calls since we've been quarantined.

S: Yeah, because people are at home. There's cleaning products.

C: People are at home and they're paranoid. So they're like using cleaning products in ways they didn't – like some of the calls are because somebody would have poured like bleach and vinegar together or like –

E: Oh, the bleach ammonia.

S: You can't do that.

C: So they're mixing things or, yeah, they're consuming them or they're using them like as hand wash and not realizing that, yeah, at a certain point, you're actually going to get poisoned by ingesting these products, whether it's in your mouth or through your skin.

B: Or maybe it's like that Bugs Bunny episode, Jay, remember, with the two castaways and they look at each other and they see a hamburger and a hot dog?

E: OK. I don't know if we're quite there yet.

S: But this is what we're seeing more generally, that the public is getting restless and we're starting to see protests against the lockdown. Unfortunately, this is the time when we need calm, competent leadership from the top. And we're also starting to see like the emergence of a lot of narratives from certain parts of the media. I wrote on Science Based Medicine today about the narrative that, hey, this is just a bad flu season and we don't lose our minds every season with the flu. And so that analogy is horrible. It's wrong on many layers. Just very, very quickly, again, you can read my Science Based Medicine article for all the details. But let's run the numbers first while we're doing that. So worldwide, 2.6 million cases, 183,894 deaths. And if you look at just completed cases, that puts the death rate at 20% or the case fatality rate, 20%. So a lot of people are quoting studies showing that there's a lot more asymptomatic cases out there than we thought. And therefore, the mortality rate may be as low as 0.2% or 0.35%, which is still more than the flu, two to five times what the flu is, but down a lot closer. But I think both ends of that spectrum are very, very deceptive. The actual number is probably somewhere between 3% and 5%. But as we said multiple times, we won't know till it's over. We could look back. We're underestimating in many ways. We're overestimating in certain ways. I point out in my article that just by expanding the denominator doesn't reduce the deaths. You know what I mean? It doesn't mean you're less likely to die if you get diagnosed with COVID-19. It just means that there's a lot of people who have it that we didn't know had it. It doesn't actually minimize the mortality and morbidity from this disease. Again, we won't really know until it's over. But again, the big thing that the flu analogy misses is that, yeah, a typical flu season like in the US, for example, kills between 12,000 and 61,000 people. But that's over the course of typically around six to eight months. Right now in the US, the last number that I saw were over 40,000 total, 46,500 as of this recording. But that's over two months. And the curve is still trending generally. It's up and down, up and down. But it's still trending up. It's certainly not going down. You may be flattening in places, whatever. But it's certainly not on the way down yet. And this is overwhelming our resources. We've spoken about the fact that in some hospitals in New York, they have two patients per ventilator. That's a pretty extreme step. We're running short on PPE. We don't have enough testing to go around. At my university, I haven't been personally called yet, but some of my fellow neurologists have been called to cover medical floors. That's a pretty extreme measure when you're doing stuff like that. You're having to rejigger the workforce to try to cover at least not optimally, but at least reasonably.

C: Oh, they're pulling last year meds, like people who are still in med school are like working as if they're residents now, or sorry, as if they're interns now. They've had to accelerate that. And nurses too.

S: Yeah. And this is with extreme physical distancing. Imagine what it would be like if we weren't doing anything.

B: Like Sweden.

S: Well, Sweden's an experiment. People bring that up a lot too. They're doing targeted isolation, not universal isolation, but it remains to be seen how that's going to work out.

E: Too soon.

S: It's too soon to say. There's indications that it may not be working out well for them, but we'll see exactly how they compare when all is over. And also, Sweden's not the United States. It's hard to compare country to country.

B: Yes, but if you compare Scandinavian countries, their curve is skyrocketing.

S: It's true.

B: Oh my God. It looks so much worse than any other line, any other country in that area.

S: Yeah. Overall, we can't see this general trend across the world that the countries that had physical distancing earlier and more extreme will have a flatter curve. And those who were late or very soft in their requirements are having more cases. So we can't really, again, there's been a wide, massively wide range of modeling. How many deaths would we have had had we had no physical distancing? That's an impossible question to answer because there's so many. It's like, Bob, as you like to say, for a chaotic system, it's extremely sensitive on initial conditions. So the assumptions that you put into the model because diseases spread exponentially has a dramatic effect on the outcome. And so it's hard. We'll never really know. But just think about it. I mean, we're approaching 50,000. We're approaching sort of the upper limit of the worst flu season. And we're just still kind of in the early stages of this, maybe getting to the middle of it. And this is just the first wave. There may be more than one wave. And this is with all the precautions that we're taking. I mean, come on. There's no comparison to the flu, unless you want to compare it to the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed 50 million people, at least around the world. So the comparison is stupid in two ways. One, this is no flu. This is a lot deadlier, causes a lot more morbidity, overwhelming our medical system a lot more than the flu season. And two, a bad flu season is bad. So even if you're correct, what are you talking about? Yeah, we're only going to have millions of deaths. That's what a quote unquote bad flu pandemic is like. So it's kind of a dumb narrative, no matter how you look at it. But it's just a way of justifying saying, we want to ignore the experts and the scientists and we want to open up the economy before we really should, which also isn't going to work. And economists are saying that. Economists are like, no. If the best thing to do for the economy is to shut down this virus, if you prematurely relax the laws to keep people for physical distancing, first of all, people aren't necessarily going to listen. Just because the powers that be say, yeah, it's OK if you're to risk your life now and go back to work. You think people are going to do it? Well, you know, we don't know how, you know, some people statistically how that's going to pan out. But it's not going to really get us back to anything resembling normal. It's just really going to- And if that causes a second wave, that hit on the economy will be far worse. So even from an economic point of view, a purely economic point of view, the best thing to do is to aggressively address this pandemic to minimize it as much as possible.

C: Well, yeah.And they did post hoc analyses, at least in the US, of different management strategies for the 1918 flu pandemic. And they found that, by and large, economies that stayed shut down longer, like states or cities, major cities, that stayed shut down longer and had social distancing measures in place for longer, they actually had a better economic recovery.

B: Wow.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, yeah, we need the discipline to accept short-term pain for long-term benefit. And we just got to do it. We got to suck it up, Jay. You know, even though you're stuck in the house with your two adorable children who are driving you crazy you just have to suck it up.

J: Well, I am sucking it up. I would never do anything.

S: I know. I know. I'm just using you as a funny example.

B: But Steve, as another example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, I read an article that was talking about China and that there was some evidence, whatever, who knows if this is absolutely true at this point. But they waited. China apparently waited six days. They had solid evidence that there was human transmission going on. And they waited. After they knew that internally, they waited six days before they announced it to the world.

S: And those were big six days.

B: That was the biggest six days in this entire mess, because I read that if they had announced it at that point, six days earlier, that could have whacked off two thirds to 75 percent of the ultimate infections that resulted from that. And that's so that's probably the most extreme example of that sensitive conditions in this scenario. Oh, my God. Six days, man. But what made it worse? And you think it's hard. You know, you think, oh, damn, how could they do that? But I think it's even maybe even a little bit worse for the countries afterwards that that knew full well what they were dealing with, that information that China didn't have at that time. But they knew full well that what was coming, that this was a potential pandemic and it could be horrific and other countries delayed similarly as well. So I think there's a lot of blame to go around. It's a lot of blame.

S: Yeah. Yeah. So one other quick follow up. This one about the hydroxychloroquine hubbub, you guys remember this? So there was a new study, a VA retrospective study, so not randomized, but they had three groups. They looked at their patients retrospectively, those who got hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19, those who got the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and those who got nothing except for all of them getting, of course, the usual standard of care. And they found no benefit from the hydroxychloroquine. However, the death rate in the hydroxychloroquine group was twice that in the nothing group.

B: Whoa.

S: It was like 22 percent versus 11 percent. But there was no difference in going on a ventilator. You know, again, it wasn't randomized. You could say, well, maybe the people who were sicker got the hydroxychloroquine. So it's not the last word. It's not definitive. But as preliminary evidence goes, that's pretty discouraging. The evidence is really moving rapidly against hydroxychloroquine. But again, we won't know for sure until we have a randomized controlled trial.

C: I think what we do know for sure is that we shouldn't be publicly promoting people to

S: Of course not.

C: That's the scary thing. It's like equal and opposite to the message that is being put out by a powerful world leader.

S: You should only be taking this as part of a clinical trial. That's it.

C: Yes. There you go.

S: But that's not what's happening.

C: No.

S: Because of reckless messaging.

C: There you go.

E: Jay. Jay, I just sent your family, your kids, a box of noisemakers that should be arriving tomorrow.

J: Oh, great.

E: Horns and other things.

S: My dog will chew it up, Evan. He'll just destroy it.

E: Oh, we're going to talk about the dogs now. We'll do that next week.

S: All right. Let's move on with some science news.

Science: the Endless Frontier ()

• ScienceAlert: For 75 Years, The US Had an 'Endless Frontier' of Science. Now It's Coming to an End

S: So, Jay, I understand that we are experiencing the endless frontier of scientific progress.

J: No, we're actually not, which is the sad point.

B: What?

J: Yeah. I have never heard of this. And I think you'll find this to be really, really cool, but ultimately a slightly depressing news story. So the United States has a history of being a leader in science and technology. And it's just simply the way that it's been. And it's largely because the government has been pumping in incredible amounts of money into science and scientific research for a very long time. Now, this goes back to 1945, where a document was created by a man named Vannevar Bush, who was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development back in 1945. This document was called Science, the Endless Frontier. And inside that document, it was outlined, in short, how incredibly important and significant science is and how much it needs to be woven into the fabric of our culture. And the document actually made some serious headway. Now, since the document's creation, scientists have been able to successfully secure federal funding for their work. It also helped foster communication between the government, industry, and academia. And the concept of American research universities and the National Science Foundation were born out of the writing of this document. So it really had a profound impact. Now, recently, there's been a noticeable decay of the system that had been established after the paper was published. The government research funding has been steadily going down over time. And some scientists need to – legitimately, they need the time to invest in projects that could take decades and possibly lead to nothing, right? So in recent years, there's been more of a focus on short-term results because the government wants the success and the money and the prowess of having legitimate things that can be turned into useful items and also make money and help the economy. But meanwhile, the government is cutting scientific funding and cutting the scientific advisory panels. And that's really bad. So the reality is that these changes will have a significant effect on the United States' geopolitical standing. Now, I'm not sure – of course, I couldn't research every country and what their standards are or whatever. But we're talking about the United States because the United States – the technology that the United States has created and does create and is a part of, it is part of a global effort. It is part of the global scientific community. It's not something that is completely restricted to the United States. So on the 75th anniversary of the report, a symposium was organized that included the National Academy of Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Kavli Foundation. So at the symposium, all of these companies and organizations and foundations got together and they discussed scientific research in the United States, past, present and future. And I think most importantly, they were talking about how to move forward. That's why they wanted to have the symposium to really try to solve this current problem that they're seeing. So keeping in mind that some of the brightest minds, science and the government and academia and business and philanthropy, all of them were present at this meeting. So people who attended the symposium agreed that the United States needs a long-term federal science plan that should have both a practical and aspirational goal or multiple goals. So the attendees agreed that the level of federal funding was not adequate, right, the current level of funding, and that it takes a lot of time to develop new technology that can find its way into the market. So meaningful ideas that are complex and would take a long time to commercialize are currently being dropped because investors want a faster return on their investment, of course, and they also don't want their money being tied up in something that takes a really long time. Well, unfortunately, science takes a long time. Now, let me give you an example of one of these lofty goals, a fusion reactor, right? How long have we been working on fusion technology? How much longer will it take? How much money has been put into it? How much of that money has been subsidized by the government? Who will reap the benefits? But I truly believe that we'll get there. It is an engineering problem at this point.

B: Absolutely. And we're getting closer. I mean, it's tangible. We are getting closer. It's really...

J: But at its core, Bob, the fusion reactor concept is one of those ideas of first, let's be fair, the fusion reactor idea is legitimate, right? But there were thousands of ideas that seemed just as juicy that ended up being not feasible. The fusion reactor is feasible. But now that we have it in view, we have to look back on the history of the fusion reactor and go, well, all the time and energy and money and promises that were made and everything. And right now, we're just seeing the potential of it actually coming into being at some point.

B: Right, Jay. Jay, as of right now, I'm looking at a Wired article. The title is Fusion Energy Gets Ready to Shine, Finally. I mean, it's really... The progress is really palpable.

S: Yeah, but haven't we been reading that for 20 years?

B: Yeah. Yeah, but this is Wired.

J: You get the point. But the point being...

S: The thing with fusion, though, is that it's not that whether or not we can make it happen, it's whether or not it's going to be cost-effective. You know?

E: Of course. Scalable.

S: Scalable, cost-effective, pragmatic, all those issues, not just the physics.

B: Yeah, but it's also like cancer research, Steve. It's like people want the big sweeping leaps in technological development, but we've been making baby steps for years.

S: There's a difference, though. The difference is every baby step you make in cancer research increases survival a little bit.

C: It helps people.

S: Every little advance you make in fusion research doesn't get you anywhere until you cross that threshold where you could make more energy than it costs to put in and you get more value out than... It has to be energy-effective and cost-effective. Until you cross that threshold, all those baby steps don't add up to anything except more money spending on research.

J: But that's not true, Steve. No, not completely. And I think a lot of technologies get developed, supportive technologies to help make magnetic field manipulation and things like that. Plasma containment is not just for fusion reactors. There's lots of reasons.

B: Good point, Jay. That's a good point.

S: The spinoff argument is complicated because you have to also compare that to what if we spent that money directly on research. Yeah, there's the opportunity cost. We don't know if it's actually research-effective to be doing it through the back door. It's kind of like the space travel arguments, like, oh, all the spinoff technology. Yeah, but what if we spent that money on research?

C: I feel like that's a worthy argument if we're in the babiest stages of technological advancement. If we're doing basic science for the first time in this field or something, yeah, all sorts of shit is going to spin off that we wouldn't know how to dedicate those funds towards direct research.

B: But it's also return on investment. If we have a working fusion reactor like artificial intelligence, put the time, put the effort in because the payout is going to be gargantuan. It's like making enough ventilators and having enough PPE for a pandemic that may never rise. When it comes, it could be horrific, so you've got to be prepared. So it's similar to that. The payout for these technologies is too great to ignore.

C: But I am wondering if what we're arguing about right now has anything to do with your news item, Jay.

J: Well, it doesn't, but it's okay. It is like a microcosm of this idea, though, because people in government are having these discussions and saying, is it worth it? Should we do it? What's the point? How much should we be willing to pay something forward in order for it to be of value? So just to bring it back to what I was talking about, this idea of investing in these technologies and having it cross into academia and cross into big industry and all of that, it's very similar to the idea of a record label signing 10 bands with only the expectation of one of the bands making money, right? That's what they do. That's what historically they used to do. They'd sign 100 bands and they'd be like, God, if two or three hit, we're golden. And that's what scientific research is like. There's a lot of scientists out there following rabbit holes, unfortunately, that end up not going really anywhere. But the point is you have to do that in order to find that piece of gold. You have to be willing to spend money like that in order for us to do things that can turn into these huge accomplishments. So anyway, so from the year 2000 to 2017, the United States spent 40% less on R&D, right? We had a 40% drop in R&D from 2000 to 2017.

E: You mean as compared to what, like the net, the GDP of the country? What's the ratio there?

J: I think it's just raw dollars from the year 2000, from the year 2017, the U.S. is now spending 40% less money on R&D. Conversely, China went from 5% to 25%. And the other thing that the symposium concluded was that the United States no longer is adequately coordinating the connection between academia, industry, and federal research, which is bad, right? Because these different groups represent different, much different intentions and ideas and they bring different things to the table. But when they work together, and historically in the United States when they work together, a very important thing can occur, which means much more scientific research and much more latitude for scientific research. So the global competition though is a big issue here. One, you actually want it. And two, you don't want just one country dominating. You want multiple countries being able to spend this type of money and you want them to work in coordination with each other because we have like the U.S. sending industry to China helped China tremendously. And then there's been this natural progression of sharing of technology and information and everything. We should be moving in that direction. So the problem here is that when one country shrinks away, it has an impact on all the other countries now. It's not siloed like it used to be 60 years ago, 70 years ago when this started. This steady decline that the U.S. is showing, it presents a real problem because there isn't a quick fix to it, right? You can't just snap your fingers and reallocate 40 percent of those dollars back into the system. It would take a lot of time. It's going to take the will of a lot of people. And you also – when a country loses its steam, like a perfect example is when President Bush Jr. did not want to have any research done for what? It was the – it was the stem cell research, right?

C: Embryonic stem cells. Yeah.

E: Yeah. He wanted to drastically limit it.

B: Presidential lines.

E: In unreasonable ways, right?

J: Yeah. So when that happens when people – when organizations that exist are disbanded like the response teams to dealing with viruses like COVID, you can't just snap your fingers and make it all come back when you want it there. It takes time.

S: Yeah. I think one way to look at it is we shouldn't think of it as spending money on scientific research. It's investing money in scientific research. So there are certain things that are investments, not spending, and you have to think of them completely differently. I think that's been the problem in the last 10, 20 years is that we're not investing in lots of things the way we should be because in the name of decreasing quote-unquote spending. But it's short-sighted. It's very short-sighted. All right.

Bizarre Bacteria ()

• Universe Today: An ocean floor bacteria has been found with a totally bizarre metabolism

S: Cara, tell us about these bizarre bacteria.

C: Ooh.

E: Ooh, bizarre-teria.

C: So here's the cool thing. These aren't new. These weren't newly discovered, but some of their metabolic activity has been fleshed out and turns out that what has been kind of theorized as a possibility and even as potentially a strategy for early life on this planet has been found to be in existence in a particular organism called Acetobacterium woodi.

S: Woodi?

C: Woodi. I'm pronouncing it right. W-O-O-D-I-I.

E: Woodi. I went right to the police.

C: Would you say that's woodi? Or is it woody? I'm going to go with woodi. I'm going to say woodi. So it looks like these were, the genus was named in the 70s. And we've kind of long known that Acetobacterium is a eubacterium that is capable of making acetic acid. And this is through a type of metabolism called anaerobic respiration. So I'm going to back up for a second and talk about, like way back to biology class, if you guys remember, aerobic versus anaerobic respiration.

E: Yeah, yeah. Let's hear it.

C: So here we're talking about respiration, which is producing or taking sugars and generally downstream making cellular energy. And so these are not organisms that make their own food. So we're not talking about, but we're not talking about plants here, right? We're not talking about organisms that make their own food.

S: No photosynthesis.

C: Yeah. We're talking about organisms like bacteria, animals fungi that are going to produce cellular energy. And they're going to do it usually from sugar. That's really usually where it starts, but from kind of these like organic molecules. And ultimately it can happen in an aerobic or an anaerobic environment, right? We're used to aerobic respiration because it's what we do. We breathe. And through breathing, we're able to produce the, through breathing and eating collectively, there's a chain of these really interesting metabolic pathways. And ultimately we end up with energy in the form of ATP, cellular energy. Now there's other organisms and you know them because you've worked with them before that thrive in anaerobic environments and they will, they don't utilize oxygen in that metabolic pathway. You probably know about them from things like lactic acid and ethanol fermentation. So you've got your organisms that ferment in low to no oxygen environments and produce alcohols. That's how we have the things we drink. And you have the organisms that ferment in low oxygen or no oxygen environments and produce the types of acids that are required for like cheese making, that are required for baking. So we're pretty comfortable with this concept, right? A lot of bacteria is anaerobic. Now this, what ends up happening oftentimes is that when fermentation takes place in these low to no oxygen environments, there is a byproduct that's produced. That byproduct is hydrogen. And when you produce too much hydrogen, it can actually be toxic to the organism and it shuts down fermentation. And ultimately that bacteria is going to die if it can't keep fermenting. So they've developed something that you mentioned a second ago, Bob, this idea of symbiosis, but it's a more specific type of symbiosis called centrophy. And centrophy is a really, really cool process. It translates to like eating together or cross free, cross feeding. So in centrophy, you've got these organisms where one species lives off the byproducts of another species and it becomes this symbiotic relationship. And so oftentimes you'll see that with anaerobic bacteria, as they ferment and then they produce hydrogen as a byproduct, there's another organism that actually eats the hydrogen, or at least they live in a hydrogen rich environment. It helps them with their metabolic processes, right?

B: So is that kind of like the human centipede? Forget I said that.

C: Gross. I don't know how the human centipede closes. Does it close on itself or is it an open-ended chain?

B: No, open.

C: Okay. Then I don't think so. This needs to be a circular.

B: I had to say.

S: Well, it's like plants and animals we exhale CO2 and the plants exhale oxygen, right?

C: Totally. But imagine it instead of being like in a macro ecology, it's more of a micro ecology. So these organisms are living within close proximity to each other. And if one of them can't do what it does, the other one's going to die. It's kind of like, remember we talked about corals and then the organisms that live inside of corals. And when the corals start to bleach, the organisms leave and then the coral itself is going to slowly die. And so you're going to see this kind of thing happening a lot of times with anaerobic bacteria. Okay. We got that. That makes sense. But A. woodi is weird and cool because it turns out it can do both. It can either produce the hydrogen as part of its aerobic fermentation process, or it can utilize the hydrogen as part of its respiratory process.

E: It can control that?

C: So it can switch back and forth.

E: As needed.

C: As needed. So not only can it live in an area where there's not enough oxygen and it's going to undergo fermentation and produce a bunch of hydrogen, then it can switch over and live in a hydrogen rich environment. And we've never...

E: That's a nice advantage.

C: It's a huge advantage. And apparently we've never found evidence of that before. It's been theorized. And there are whole organisms that we've theorized to have that capability, but we haven't been able to study them in such a way to understand how they've worked. And so now I think researchers are starting to see that maybe the theorized ancient bacteria that probably very likely lived on extraterrestrial meteorites, that probably very possibly lived in these extreme... Like they're extremophiles in these extreme early earth environments. Even some of these archaea early on, they might've been able to switch back and forth. And that metabolic capability would have given them the ability to have an advantage to be able to ultimately evolve.

E: Yeah.

B: Yeah, Cara. In fact, I thought... I just assumed when I heard about what this bacterium could do, I just assumed it had to probably be archaea because typically when I think of that, I think of bizarre metabolisms. But this one clearly is not archaea. It's bacteria.

C: No. It's a gram positive bacteria.

B: Yeah. It's bacteria. And that's probably because of the... One of the main differences between bacteria and archaea is the cell wall itself. So this one's probably, it's clearly a bacteria, but it was still a little surprise because it usually I think, oh, crazy metabolism, got to be archaea because typically they're the more ancient and more wildly diverse extremophile type organisms.

C: Yeah. And the cool thing is when I actually was reading about this, I decided to read more about Acetobacterium, the actual genus or yeah, it's the genus and then the species specifically what I started to look into it. And the first reference that I saw in Micro Wiki was talking all about the kind of sources of the name Acetobacterium woodii. And I think it was first found in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in a black sediment. And the name Acetobacterium is acetum, which is vinegar, right? We've heard of acetic acid and bacterium because this is an acetogen. It's an anaerobic bacterium. There are aerobic bacteria that do this as well, but this specifically is an anaerobic bacterium that predominantly makes acetic acid as its byproduct. And so it's been well known because it has applications, right? We often think about, we know about bacteria that we can utilize in industry quite a lot. Like that's a big way for us to have done a lot of research on them. And we can utilize that because it's going to be producing acetic acid, which is vinegar. It's pretty interesting. Right? But this bacterium, as you said, Bob, it's not an archaebacterium, what we used to call archaebacteria. Now we call archaea. It's a more kind of genetically newer organism, Acetobacterium or phylogenetically newer, I should say Acetobacterium, but it has what we think are the key metabolic processes that would have been required in much more phylogenetically older archaea. And it's opening up the reason that one of this, these write-ups was actually published in universe today, which sounds like, why are they writing about bacteria is because of its astrobiological and capabilities, right? Like this would be the first direct evidence that bacteria can be more flexible than we even thought. And bacteria are pretty flexible as it is. This could not just talk about the origin of life on earth, but potentially life on other worlds.

J: Wow.

E: Yeah. Super bacteria. Nice.

C: So I don't know. It's super interesting. I think the answer, if you're a biology student, I feel like I've said this on the show before, if you're a biology student and you have an exam coming up and the question says, this type of organism always does this or never does this, the answer is probably false. It's probably false because there's so many cool exceptions.

S: All right. Thank you, Cara.

UV Light and Covid-19 ()

• BBC News: Can you kill coronavirus with UV light?

S: So I got an interesting question that I did somewhat of a deep dive on, and that is, can UV light kill the coronavirus, kill COVID-19 virus?

C: Right. We talked about this a little, right?

E: Let me guess. It's complicated.

S: It's complicated. But you're going to go into it in more detail.

B: Yeah. iPhone, yes, it can.

S: The short answer is that, yeah, ultraviolet UV range EM radiation light does have antibacterial and antiviral activity. It's just a way of delivering lots of energy, and it's in the range of the spectrum that can actually do damage, right? It could do damage to DNA and RNA. That's why-

B: So UVA or UVB?

S: There's also UVC, which is shorter wavelength, higher energy, really dangerous, right, UVC to your skin. You don't want to get exposed to it.

B: Yeah, but it says here, Steve, all UVC and some UVB are absorbable as ozone.

S: Yeah, that's right. That's right. UVC-

E: That's why we don't fry when we walk outside.

S: That's why we don't fry when we walk outside.

B: And get cancer. And get cancer.

S: Well, eventually you do, right?

E: In two seconds.

B: Without that ozone, we'd be effed.

S: Yes, you'd be effed. Because the UVC damage does in seconds what UVA does in hours, right, of sun exposure. It's a lot higher, a lot higher energy. It's basically anything between 220 and 280 nanometers, or 200 to 280 is UVC. All right. So the question is, can we exploit this ultraviolet light as a way of killing viruses? And the short answer is, yeah. We already do it. Right? Hospitals do it. Other places do it.

C: Yeah, we did it in my old lab.

S: Yeah, you could do it under a hood. Like, I want to just kill everything in this area. Just bombard it with UV light, and it will destroy bacteria and viruses.

C: Yeah, we had a UV, and fungus too. That was really important to us because we get fungal infections. So we had a UV light in our hood, but we also had an overhead UV light in the clean room part of our lab. And we would run it overnight. But we also had to put in an ozone filter because UV puts off a crapload of ozone. And that's really dangerous to breathe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you don't want to breathe that. And so you can have these charcoal filters that you put in next to them so that you can absorb some of that excess ozone.

E: So are we sterilizing utensils with this? Is that what you're saying?

S: You can.

C: Well, you would sterilize with an autoclave though, right?

J: Sterilize.

C: Because that's just faster and more effective.

S: Yeah, you could also sterilize with heat.

Starlek unit re-initializing. Seek. Locate. Exterminate.

C: Okay. Bob wins 15-year-old award. In most labs and medical facilities, you're going to sterilize in an autoclave because it's like a pressure cooker. It's heat under pressure. And it's really hot. Because the problem with UV light is it can't get underneath things. It's only going to sterilize what it's bombarding.

S: The surfaces. Right.

B: Straight line.

S: So when it comes to sterilizing things, right, fomites, remember the word fomite, Cara?

C: Yeah.

S: So it does work. But because UV light can also be damaging to eyes and to skin, it really should only be used by people who know what they're doing, right? By people who are trained and are under the proper conditions.

E: We learned that in that Star Trek episode where Spock had the thing stuck to him.

S: Yeah, but he didn't have to throw the whole spectrum at him.

E: Exactly.

S: And that actually is relevant to the news item that I'm talking about.

E: Hey!

S: It turns out... All right, so there's UVA, UVB, and then UVC, which is the higher energy, more damaging. It gets filtered out by the ozone. But you can produce UVC to kill viruses and bacteria in settings that are safe and that are controlled. But not with people, right? You don't want to shine it on your skin to disinfect your skin because you're just going to give yourself a massive sunburn in a very short order. It's dangerous. It'll, quote unquote, fry you. So don't do that.

B: Can you carry around a UVC flashlight and just shine it on a surface before you touch it?

S: So you wouldn't want a UVC flashlight. That's like the very definition of hazardous, right?

E: That's a loaded gun, basically.

B: I'll be careful. I'll be real careful.

E: Oh, sure.

S: You know, I think it's best in controlled settings. It's really good in hospitals because we have a massive problem with drug-resistant organisms in hospitals. And one of the advantages of using light, just directly transmitting energy to them and breaking them down, is that it's really hard for bacteria or viruses to evolve resistance to it. So it may be, in fact, resistance-proof.

B: I don't know, man. You may be accelerating their evolution and they're going to be immune to UVC.

S: You can't use it inside a body once you're infected. It's of no use. And you can't use it on your... You can't expose skin to it. However, a couple years ago, there was a study, although this was in mice, that looked at far UVC. So now we're talking down into the 200 to 220 nanometer range, or 222 specifically. They used 222 nanometer frequency specifically. And they found that, for some reason, that frequency does not penetrate the skin very well.

C: Hmm. That's cool.

S: Yeah. But it does still interact with viruses and bacteria very well.

B: So that's the shortest end of the UVC part of the spectrum?

S: It's called far UVC, which is a little bit counterintuitive.

E: Is that a sweet spot?

S: I guess it's just a matter of whatever. There's something in our skin that filters out that frequency. So again, maybe using a specific frequency rather than throwing the whole UV spectrum at it might be able to still kill bacteria and viruses, but cause less damage. But this has not been tested in people.

B: Interesting. It has not been tested in people. It's been tested in mice and it's been tested in aerosolized flu. It was also found to be effective in aerosolized flu. There's also the method of using these specific frequencies, either even infrared frequencies or other frequencies of light, that just finding ones that particular bacteria or viruses are particularly sensitive to, or you treat them with a dye that absorbs that frequency. You tag them with a dye that absorbs that specific frequency, and then you use that frequency of light to kill the bacteria and the viruses.

B: Yeah. They do that on people, right? You could do that with a dye.

S: Right. You could do that. Yeah. Similar idea. That's the state of the science here. This is actually a thing. It works, but it's more for industrial hospital use than your home, mainly for safety issues. But having said that, there are tons of products you could buy online. Like I just said, Bob, UV flashlights or little boxes that produce UV light. These have become much more common because of the availability of LED UV lights, even LED UVC. So then they're being sold basically like, put your cell phone in here or your money clip or whatever, and it will sterilize it for you.

C: Or your toothbrush.

S: Or your toothbrush. Yeah. It could work. The thing is, I just don't know because I don't really see any objective scientific studies of specific products. One question is, is it doing what it's saying it's doing, right? Is it just shining a blue light?

E: How do you verify that?

S: So you have to just technically verify that it's producing the frequency that it's producing. But otherwise, the thing that I couldn't find on the products that I looked at, they always give the nanometers of the frequency, but not the intensity. So I wonder, because the UVC lights that were studied, that I talked about, cost $1,000. And so can a $50 box you buy on Amazon do the same thing that this $1,000 light is doing?

B: Sure. But it takes a month.

S: Well, yeah. I wonder. Well, yeah. But the thing is, if it takes a long time, it doesn't help because the viruses will be dead in two, three days no matter what the condition is. The question is, can it accomplish in minutes what would otherwise take hours or days? So it probably does increase the rate at which the viruses break down. But does it function as advertised? Who knows? That's the thing. Because they're very squirrely. They don't come right out and say, this is the intensity of the light that's being produced, like the wattage or whatever. Just here's the nanometer. It's a blue light. You put the thing in a box, and it works. So it could work. I would just like to see specific products tested against specific bacteria and viruses with some actual objective data, not in-house kind of promotional data, but some objective scientific data. So I think with these cheap boxes that you buy at home or lights or flashlights or whatever, I just think the jury is still out. So it's plausible. Theoretically, it could work. Can't vouch for specific products. And of course, I'm always worried about the false sense of security. I don't have to worry so much about my fomites, because I put them in the UV box for a short period of time.

C: It's the mask. Yeah, the mask and all over. Steve, do you know what I use my UV flashlight for?

B: Yeah, you have one.

C: Of course, I have a UV flashlight.

B: I know. I know what you use it for.

E: Is it UVC?

C: No, it's not UVC.

B: Vampires.

E: OK.

C: No.

B: Oh, man. You're missing the boat.

C: But close. Not really. I use it when I go camping in the desert to look for scorpions. Because they glow under the UV light, and it's freaking awesome.

J: Do you ever see any?

C: Oh, yeah. All the time.

J: Do you scream? I would scream.

C: No. I love it. So cool. But you're like, wow, that's really close to where I'm sleeping. And then I also use it to see if I did a decent job cleaning up the pee stains from my dog if and when he pees in the house.

S: Yeah. And you never do.

C: Yeah, you never do. But you can see old stains.

B: Don't shine that in your bedroom.

C: Yeah, exactly. Because any time you get a puppy, the puppy pees on the floor a lot in a very particular part of your house. So you can sometimes find spots you missed by shining the UV light in there.

E: Or that trunk of the car where we got rid of the body.

B: Whoops.

C: Yeah, that's true. It doesn't do a very good job of discriminating the type of fluid.

S: Final word. There's no data yet on any of these products or any frequency of UV light against SARS-CoV-2. So that's too early for that. So we don't know if this will help.

Diamond Energy Storage ()

• ScienceDaily: Diamonds shine in energy storage solution

S: All right, Bob, tell me about this new Diamond Energy Storage. What's that all about?

B: Yeah, so Dense Energy Storage was in the news this week. But it's not about conventional chemical batteries like lithium ion. It's about mechanical energy storage using a new type of material called the DNT or Diamond Nano Threads. This is from researchers at QUT or the Queensland University of Technology Center for Material Science. This is based on their recent experimental results and first principle calculations. They think DNT can surpass lithium ion batteries in energy density and also be used for many, many other applications. So this story kind of starts with this whole idea of carbon nanotubes, CNT. We've talked about that on the show. It's been in the news for many, many years, right? We've all heard of those. And the carbon nanotubes are essentially allotropes of carbon, right? That means that it's a regular old carbon atom, but in a new type of arrangement or configuration that gives it different properties. That's opposed to a chemical isotope, which is different. That's an element that has an equal number of protons, but a different number of neutrons in the nuclei. So a big difference there. So to visualize a carbon nanotube, imagine a straw. Imagine you've got chicken wire and you're going to make a straw because it's hollow in the middle. There's nothing in there. So that's kind of like what a carbon nanotube is, super, super tiny in the nanometer realm. We're talking a billionth of a meter, really, really small. If you're going to use them, you're not going to use one little tiny little fiber you're going to use or thread, you're going to make them, you're going to bundle them together in fibers or bundles. And this has long been considered a wonder material like flubber, right? Remember flubber? But instead of bouncing like crazy, CNTs are essentially what they call like these multifunctional nanotextiles, incredible properties. No matter how you look at it, mechanical, chemical, physical, they're all off the hook. Very, very promising and far superior to traditional carbon or even polymetric fibers. Seems much, much better. But sometimes though the mechanical properties were hard to control for carbon nanotubes. Sometimes they would flatten and you'd have properties that were kind of like all over the place. You weren't sure what to expect for some of those important properties. So that led relatively recently to DNT or these diamond nanothreads. And that's essentially a new type of super thin one-dimensional carbon nanostructures. They're similar to very thin carbon nanotubes, but denser, more akin to diamond, which is where they get their name. But another key difference though is the surface. The surface is treated differently so that the different threads interlock, but still maintain those thread-like shapes and the amazing mechanical properties that they've discovered, including this high mechanical energy storage density. So Dr. Hafezan's team found the bundle of nanothreads has an energy density, which is basically a measure of how much energy it could store for its mass, was 1.76 megajoules per kilogram. Now that's just a number I'm throwing at you, but that's four to five orders of magnitude higher than a steel spring and up to 300% greater than lithium ion batteries. So that's a big improvement, three times better. If you're trying to figure out how you're going to actually extract energy from this, Dr. Zahn had a decent analogy. He said, similar to a compressed coil or children's windup toy, energy can be released as the twisted bundle unravels. So that's a good way to kind of envision what's going on at this nanoscale. So why even choose mechanical storage over chemical storage? I mean, what's the advantage besides just the energy density? What's cool about it? Well, one big advantage is really just pure safety. Think about it. You've got chemical storage like lithium ion batteries. They use electrochemical reactions to hold onto and release the energy, right? But at high temperatures, and we've all heard stories about this, at high temperatures, they can explode. Phones have exploded, laptops have exploded. I don't want those things exploding. That's pretty nasty. And even at low temperatures, they can just stop functioning. And then another problem with those kinds of things are that when they fail, they could leak, and you got some weird chemical leaking all over the place. So mechanical energy storage systems like DNT don't have those risks, and it can make them an ideal power source for some applications. And these are applications that we're going to see increasingly in the future, namely using them as a power source within the human body. We already have electronics in the body like pacemakers that need batteries. These things need to be powered. I wouldn't want a regular battery inside of me. But biomedical devices that are implanted are just one potential use of DNT. Anything, anything at all that could use a microscale power supply could benefit. Tiny robotics, electronics are two big, huge examples, but also they're talking about things like power transmission lines, aerospace electronics. It's huge because they're so small and so powerful. That's exactly what you want for aerospace applications because you need something that's super light because you could save tons and tons of money. It's like what? It's still like what? 10,000 pounds, $10,000 per pound to put something into orbit? Just crazy, crazy numbers. But you could also use them for intelligent textiles, structural composites like building materials. The potential applications are just vast. DNTs, to me, certainly look very promising, even more so in some applications than the performance seems better than carbon nanotubes. But keep in mind, this research was based on a lot of what they call in silico studies that's done in the computer and in simulation. And sure, these simulations are based on theories and solid mathematics, but still there's no replacement yet anyway to actually building the actual devices that this research says is so promising. As usual, we're going to have to wait and see, but still I'm pretty excited about this. And it's not just because nano is in its name. I think even if it had a different name, I think this would look very promising and really cool. So keep an eye on it.

S: But to be clear, no one's built one of these things yet.

B: Nope. That's the next step is to actually power these, to control the power that goes in and then the power and the energy that comes out.

S: So just to make a little fuzzy on just exactly how you translate the mechanical energy into electrical energy, do you have to couple it with something that's going to make that conversion?

B: Yeah, exactly. And that's part, and that's the next big step. So that's the next big challenge for them. And that's something that they're going to be working on. This is mainly based on their simulations and the math and some experiments. Basically what they have come away with is that this material is ideal for these types of fiber applications, these bundles of fiber applications that they wanted to do with carbon nanotubes. It's really an amazing material for these applications. So the next step is, all right, let's try to get all the things that would go now around it in order to actually use it as some sort of energy storage device. And they don't see any major hurdles. Of course, it's going to be pretty damn complicated, but it's not something like fusion-level complication. This is something that I don't think is going to be too amazingly, horrifically difficult. But hey, who knows? We'll see.

S: Famous last words.

B: Yeah, right. But that's the next step anyway.

S: All right. So a couple more questions. Any data on charge-discharge cycles?

B: Nope. Nope. Didn't come across anything like that in my research.

S: There's so many potential deal-breakers in any kind of energy storage system. And then the other thing is, you say three times the energy density, but if you then include the converter, the power converter, you have to go to Taji Station, right, Jay? Yeah, power converter.

J: You didn't let me do it, huh, you bastard?

S: What does that do to the energy density if you include that component of it? Does that just wipe away all the advantages that you get?

B: I don't know at this point. I'll get back to you, maybe in a few years when they come back with more research. All these things where this stuff can fall to its knees. So yeah, absolutely. That's why I try not to get too excited, especially when it comes to battery storage, because I've just written-

E: Full concept.

B: Every month, like, oh, look, another battery breakthrough. Yeah, I'm going to-

S: Every day. Every day.

B: Right. Right.

S: You know, I'm going through my news items for science or fiction. I come across at least three or four battery and solar cell news item every time.

B: Yeah.

J: It's encouraging because it means that so many companies are working on this stuff.

S: Oh, yeah.

J: You know, I love that.

B: Yeah. And that's true, Jay. But it's not very often where we come across something that's completely new. I mean, it's not even chemical storage. This is like mechanical storage, which is interesting. And like I said, there's so many benefits, especially with the safety. If I'm going to put something like that inside of me, I'd rather it be mechanical storage than chemical.

S: Right, but as we say, so many potential deal-breakers until you have an actual application.

B: Absolutely. No disagreement here.

S: You never know. Never know.

Reproducing Cactus Coral ()

• The Florida Aquarium Makes History Again! (scroll down the website to read the press release)

S: All right. Evan, finish us off with a happy news item about reproducing cactus coral.

E: Yeah. Very cool one. It just came out today. Now, Cara, you had some bad news the other week about our planet's coral reefs, specifically the Great Barrier Reef of Northern Australia. That was a very, very sad news item.

C: It was.

E: It's dying. It's dying. And to counter that, a bit of good news about coral reefs.

S: Good news, everyone.

E: We have the Florida Aquarium, which is in Tampa, Florida. And they announced today that they've made a breakthrough discovery, one that could eventually save our planet's dying coral reefs. Let's hope. They successfully reproduced ridged cactus coral for the first time in human care. They used some rescue coral. This was coral rescued by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the NOAA Fisheries. They're hoping to learn more about coral reproduction, the ultimate goal being the replenishment of the cactus coral reefs in Florida, which experienced a disease outbreak since 2014. Now these scientists are caring for the rescued adult coral colonies to breed and reproduce them in hopes of someday restoring the reefs, especially once the disease has finally gone. Now with today's announcement, we know that these wonderful scientists have learned for the first time about when ridged cactus coral reproduce and what their babies look like. Whoever thought of like baby, baby coral. I think that could become a song like that shark song, right?

C: No, God, don't get that in my head.

E: This is new to the researchers. They didn't have much information about this particular coral's reproduction. There were no photos. There were no videos that had existed before this particular study, but now they have it. And just this month, it's been amazing, amazing results. So quickly about the ridged cactus corals. They are a brooding coral, which means they reproduce. What they do is they send out the sperm. Sperm goes out, not the eggs. The eggs stay with the coral itself, but the sperm gets released into the water, right? And the eggs are then fertilized and the larva development occurs inside the parent coral, which is sweet. Then the parent coral spits out the larva. You're done here. You go find a place to live. And the larva, they swim until they find a nice little resting place and they settle down and then they grow. So they say that the next steps will involve learning how far the larva travel. And they say it's important because knowing how far they travel will shed light on how mixed coral reef populations, or how mixed the coral reef populations really are. The scientists told the news agencies, I saw an article at CNN about this, that they began giving birth or witnessing this birth in early April. That's just two weeks ago. And so far, 350 larva have been witnessed in just a couple of weeks. So that's really, really cool. And it's all part of restoring what's called America's Great Barrier Reef.

J: America!

E: Yep. Which is at the southern tip of Florida, starting on the Atlantic coast on those three counties like Dade and Broward and Palm Beach, basically extending down and through the entire Keys all the way out to Key West. So that is our Great Barrier Reef, as it were. And I believe it's the third largest reef bed on the planet. But it's dwarfed in comparison to the actual Great Barrier Reef out our friends in Australia. This is a nice step. And if it turns out, we learned much more about this, we can try to save coral all over the place, hopefully, through what they're learning here.

S: Yeah. And again, the idea is just simply to breed the coral and then plant them in the wild.

E: That's right.

S: That's the idea. It's not that simple.

E: Well, right. It's a simple idea, but let's see what it takes. I mean, I imagine there are predators eating that larva as well. You would have to produce an awful lot.

S: Yeah, that's cool. We'll see how that pans out.

E: Yeah, exactly.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

Who's That Noisy? ()

• Answer to last week’s Noisy: _brief_description_perhaps_with_link_

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

J: Guys, last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] Okay. So you heard four distinct sounds. You may or may not have heard these types of sounds before.

E: Mm-hmm. Some may have heard them more often than others.

J: Yeah. Yeah, sure. But there's something different about these that you might not know. All right. So apparently you guys have no idea.

S: So are they what they sound like?

J: Let's turn it over to the people who listen to this show and see what they think. So Tara Phan-

E: Yes.

S: All right.

J: Tara Phan wrote and said, hi, I have a long time listener. First time guesser of the Who's That Noisy this week is what happens when you ask Alexa, can you fart? And she presents you with a wide variety of farts, both the type of fart and the playing match sound.

B: Yeah. I've tested that.

J: Another listener. That's not correct. Mostly. Partly.

S: That's no Alexa farting.

E: It's Siri.

J: Visto Tutti, my Roman warrior, has written in. And he said this week's noisy is a farting fish communication. Yes, like eight-year-old boys, some species of fish communicate using flatulence. The herring fish is renowned for this style of communication to aid in maintaining the show's cohesive structure and hierarchy.

C: Really?

J: Yes.

C: That's awesome.

B: Jay, did you see the movie Treasure Planet?

J: Yes.

B: In that movie, if you remember, which is cool because it was like a pirates in space, which of course I loved. But in that movie, there was an alien that communicated by like fart-like sounds. And one of the character nobody could communicate with him. And one guy's like, I could talk with him. I speak flatula. I love that line.

J: I was thinking about like a gun, like a fart gun called the flatulator.

B: I got one for your son.

J: Thank you.

B: And if he ever doesn't want it, I want it back.

E: Are you kidding? It sits on Jay's desk. It has its own mount.

J: I've installed it.

B: It's installed internally.

J: Another listener named Evil Eye.

E: Evil Eye!

J: Yeah. He's a very long-term listener of the show.

E: That guy's got whiskers on him.

J: You know, I look at him on Facebook quite a bit because he comes up with funny stuff and he seems like a really good guy. He's definitely a long-time listener. He said, I hear something that can happen on the radio quite often and it sounds like farts but is usually the host moving the microphone boom to adjust the arm to their face or the office chair moving. And my response is that's what Steve wants you to believe. Yes. But that is also not correct.

C: Got a little chuckle out of Steve there.

J: I have two winners this week because people wrote in at almost the same exact time with the correct answer. First person is Chance Duncan and he said, hi, Jay Bob. This week's Who's That Noisy sounds like Elon Musk's attempt at providing some, let's say, lowbrow humor. All right. So what is this? The second person that wrote in, his name is Eric Harris. He had a very good explanation. He said, I recognize this week's noisy. It's Tesla's emissions testing mode. They put into their Model 3 cars in late 2018 and later incorporated into the Model S and X. It's a silly gimmick, but my wife insists that it's one of her favorite things about the car. You can pinpoint the fart sound to whichever seat in the car you want and you could either have it pick a random noise or choose from a selection.

C: Oh, that's funny. It's like a whoopee cushion mode.

J: Yes. Yes. So the guy who sent this in, Michael Bukowski, said there's a boring fart, a, what is this, a neurostank, ludicrous fart, falcon heavy, and short shorts ripper.

C: Falcon heavy.

F: So I'm not going to replay those because I can tell Steve wants me to move on. So I have another, I thought it was funny, Steve. Come on. It's a car and it makes fart noises.

S: It's a car farting. Got it.

B: You own one, Steve?

E: Well, isn't the German word to travel, fart, or that's a conjugate of the verb to travel?

C: Oh, like F-A-R-T.

S: Yeah.

E: So when you say car and fart, that's kind of a, they go together.

S: So I remember when I was, when I was in Vienna, a book, a German book that was popular at the time, it was on all the bookstores and the airports and everything, was something like der Uberfart. Some German listener could translate that for me. I think it was like the crossroads or something like that. And I tried to figure out what that meant, but just to an American, it's like Uberfart. It was, to our 15 year old selves, very humorous.

J: Look, I'll cross that line here and say, farts are funny even when you're an adult. Okay.

C: I agree.

New Noisy ()

J: So moving on, moving on, Steve. Now I'm giving my listeners a fair warning. This is one of those loud and irritating noisies. So I'm going to count to five and give you a chance to quickly lower the volume. Pause. Do what you got to do. This one is not nice. Ready?

E: Uh-oh.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

J: I mean, what is that? What the heck is it?

C: I don't know.

J: That was sent in by a listener named Rob Arbon. Yeah. So you hear some voices in the background there. I'm not talking about the voices. Forget about those. It's just the noise that you hear. I'd like to know. You can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org, of course, with any suggestions for noisies and if you have some good guesses or if you'd like to tell me just how you're doing out there. How are you doing, SGU listeners? You're holding up okay?

Announcements ()

S: Well, Jay, we can mention that every Friday at five o'clock Eastern Daylight Time, we are doing like a typically like an hour and a half long stream open to the public. It's kind of like a second episode of the SGU but live. We do talk about current events, news items, and then the bulk is answering questions. So we will be doing that just every Friday at five o'clock Eastern Standard Time until further notice. So how do you get to that, Jay, Facebook, YouTube, our homepage?

J: You can just go to theskepticsguide.org and we'll have a link for it on our homepage in the upper navigation. We'll put something pretty obvious for you. Yeah, we love doing it. It's fun. It lasts about an hour and 15, hour and 20 minutes. We also veer off topic and you can look into our private offices and things like that. We also just really appreciate anybody that shows up. We had over 1,000 people that came last week. It'd be a lot of fun.

C: Wow. Really?

J: Yeah.

C: That's awesome.

J: I don't know what the numbers are. I know that at any given time when I checked, we're averaging over 1,000, which is great.

C: That's awesome. That's really great.

J: The people that are watching are having a lot of fun talking to each other. The banter is actually – I was reading back on some of it and it's really funny.

E: It is fun. It's fun to read back, yeah.

J: Now, Evan, talking about fun because I know you like to have fun.

E: I do.

J: There is something called NECSS.

E: Yes.

J: That is the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism. We've been doing this for a very long time, what, 12, 13 years? And because of COVID-19, we bring to you a very special episode of NECSS 2020, which is called NECSS 2020 Livestream. We are livestreaming the conference and we would love for you to go to NECSS.org, N-E-C-S-S.org to sign up. All the details are there. We also have announced that we will be having an in-person conference in 2021 in Atlantic City. We are still, of course, working on the details on that because it's so far in the future. But that conference and the digital conference happening on August 1st are going to be quite different than other conferences we've had. We've shaken up the entire idea of what a conference is and we wanted to try different formats to see what works best. And I'm telling you that from the last meeting that we had, the executive committee meeting that we had for NECSS, we have some really cool ideas that I can't wait for the day now. So I'm really excited. We'll be announcing speakers very soon and any more details that are relevant that you need to know. But right now you can sign up on N-E-C-S-S.org and if you do sign up, you will also be helping us fund the 2021 conference. So please do consider joining us. What I recommend is that you grab a couple of friends, you buy an entrance to it, you grab some snacks, maybe some lunch and some drinks, and you sit there together and enjoy the conference together.

C: If you're allowed to by then.

J: Right. Yeah, we'd better be. By August 1st, please. Oh my God.

S: You know that if everyone is siloed in their own containing bubble.

C: Yeah, you can also have like a Skype window or a Google Hangouts or something like that window open. So you can be like watching the conference and engaging, but also like talking to your friends. Could be fun.

S: And we're going to have a VR space too. So you could basically enjoy the entire conference from within a virtual space. Like our plan is to have the conference like displayed on a monitor within the virtual space and you could walk up to it and listen to it or you could walk away and talk to other people or whatever. We'll see. We'll see how it works out. But that's our plan for now.

C: Pretty cool.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups ()

considering using block quotes for emails read aloud in this segment

Question #1: False Negatives ()

Subject: Should we be worrying about false negatives for Coronavirus testing?

Message: I've been seeing claims on Facebook where people state that COVID19 testing is "30% inaccurate," is just a placebo, and that we should not even bother with it. No citations of course, but I think they are referencing this article: The Conversation: Coronavirus - How accurate are Coronavirus tests? I'd love to hear a more in depth analysis of the subject!
– Kyle Hall, Erie, PA

S: All right. One quick email. This one comes from Kyle Hall from Erie, Pennsylvania. Isn't there a song about Erie, Pennsylvania?

C: There's a TV show about it. Do you guys remember? It's like a horror show or something.

S: All right. He says, should we be worrying about false negatives for coronavirus testing? I've been seeing claims on Facebook where people state that COVID-19 testing is quote unquote 30 percent inaccurate, is just a placebo, and that we should not even bother with it. No citations, of course, but I think they are referencing this article. Let me give a link. I'd love to hear a more in-depth analysis of the subject. So when you're talking about a test, calling it like such and such percent accurate or such and such percent inaccurate is not really a technical way of describing the test. I know we've spoken about this before on the show, but I'm going to tell you again, because this is now very relevant as we're talking about. We need testing. We need testing. If we're going to transition from the sort of universal physical distancing to targeted distancing, that requires testing. And so that's why there's information like this spreading around like, well, how quote unquote accurate are the tests? So scientists, medical professionals don't talk about how accurate a test is. We talk about sensitivity and specificity, right? The sensitivity is basically the percentage of people who have the disease who test positive. And the specificity is the percentage of people who test positive who have the disease. So a highly sensitive test will pick up more people who have the disease. A specific test means that if you test positive, you're more likely to have the disease. Although that's not strictly true either, because in order to really interpret the predictive value of a test, you need to know not only the sensitivity and the specificity, but what else do you need, Evan? What else do you need to know?

E: Specificity.

S: Representativeness heuristic. What do you need? You need to know?

E: You need to know the thing you're about to say. The...

S: Anyone? What's critical?

B: What are the...

S: If I tell you...

B: What are the two...

S: If I tell you a 40-year-old woman tested, had a positive mammogram, and it's 90% sensitive and 90% specific, what's the probability that she has breast cancer?

E: Is it 90% of 90%?

S: The answer is you don't know. With the information I gave you. What is the information you're missing? The information you're missing is...

C: How many people took the test?

S: No.

C: 90% of what?

S: It's not... Yeah, it's not how many people took the test. It's what's the base rate?

C: Oh, I see.

S: What is the pre-test probability, right? How many 40-year-old women have breast cancer? That's what you need to know.

C: But we don't know that with COVID.

S: Well, we don't know that. You're right. But also, it will be different based upon which subpopulation you test. So are you testing just people who are symptomatic, or are you testing everybody? And that dramatically affects the predictive value, the number of false positives and false negatives. So if you're testing only a population of people who really probably have it, then your false negative rate becomes more significant, right? Because there's more potential for there to be a false negative test. There's more people who are actually positive. If you're testing a population that very likely doesn't have it, then your false positive rate becomes more of a problem, because then the potential for false positives is greater because there's more people who are actually negative. Does that make sense? And so if you're saying, like, with a test with this sensitivity and this specificity, if you test positive, what's the probability you have the disease? The answer is, it depends. It depends on what population and what the pre-test probability is. What percentage of that population actually has the thing you're testing for?

C: But the problem here is that we don't have that absolute number.

S: We don't. I mean, we'll have to try to figure out as best as we can from doing studies on subsets of people with definitive testing, as definitive as possible, and then trying to extrapolate to the general population.

C: Like, maybe the same group of people have been tested using five different tests.

S: Or we know clinically 100% that they have it.

C: Yeah, but we're never going to know that clinically, right?

S: Or you do a biopsy or whatever.

C: The problem with this is that you can have it asymptomatically. That's the whole point of needing these tests.

S: Yeah, but the point is you can still test it in people that you know have it, so that you at least know what the base rate is. And then you can, from that, try to extrapolate. But you're right. The hard thing is knowing for sure that somebody doesn't have it, to put them into that category. Because then how do you know they're not just a false negative of whatever test you're using? So that's where the quote unquote gold standard comes in. So you have to figure out, you use whatever the gold standard test is, no matter how expensive, invasive, difficult it is. You just want to get a population of people where we know, as much as we possibly can, who does and who does not have disease X. And then we can compare that against any new test that we want to use, the cheap, easy, quick test, to see how sensitive and specific it is. So OK. So saying 30% inaccurate doesn't really give us a good idea of what the false negative rate would be. What they said was that it was 70% sensitive. And so that's where they got that 30% inaccurate from. But that, again, you can't say that 30% of the tests are going to be false negative until you know what population you're testing and what the probability is. It actually could be higher or lower, depending on how many people have the disease. But here's the other thing, is that that 70% is not accurate. So I looked it up independently. And the tests that are out there are already like 95% sensitive.

B: Really?

C: That's good.

S: Yeah.

C: And when you say the tests that are out there, I mean...

S: Like if you're getting the current swab test like they stick the thing all the way up your nose that people are getting right now, that's in the 90-plus, 93, 95-whatever percent sensitive. So that's pretty good. That's 93%. You know, again, still, if you're testing, depending on the population you're testing, that could still be a lot of false negative.

C: And that's for active infection, yeah.

S: Yeah. Right. That's for active infection. That's you have the virus reproducing in your nasal passage, not you have antibodies because you were exposed a month ago. That's a different test. All right. So the bottom line of all this is that testing doesn't do the heavy lifting for you. And this is, again, something we have to really beat into medical students. And I always use medical students as my barometer, meaning that medical students start out as the lay public and they get beaten into physicians, right, into clinicians, metaphorically speaking, of course.

E: Wow. I hope so.

S: They go through the trial of fire and they come out the other way. They are forged in the fire of medical, whatever. So what I mean by that is you take just the naive assumptions that the general public makes and we say, no, this is how it actually works. So how it actually works is you have to put a test, any kind of laboratory test that you're doing into the context of the clinical situation. And that means clinically, how suspicious are you that that person has the disease you're testing for? And then physiologically, what is the base rate for that person of that age, gender, social situation, exposure, whatever, their risk factors? You take all their risk factors and say, all right, this is how likely they are to have it before we do the test. Now we're going to do the test with, it has a certain sensitivity and specificity. We get the result. Now we have a different number of how likely they are to have it after the test. But it's not 100% or 0% and it never is.

C: Yeah, it's just another piece of evidence.

S: Yeah, it's another piece of evidence that you have to put into clinical context. And at the end of the day, at the end of the day, a really strong clinical picture trumps the test. If somebody clinically has COVID-19, we're like, damn, this is like, this is COVID-19 and the test is negative. It's not like we're not going to treat them. You know what I mean? And you don't just say, well, the test is negative, so I guess I'll throw out all my clinical intuition out the window. It doesn't work that way because nothing is 100%.

C: And it's especially the case, right, Steve, with a disease like this where we don't even have a treatment. We just know what to do for supportive care.

S: Yeah, I mean, it may not matter in terms of if the treatment does not alter based on the test results. But then, of course, we say, well, then why are you doing the test? So you-

C: Well, but we're testing now for epidemiological purposes more than anything.

S: Well, right. We're just gathering data, so that's different. But if you talk about patient care, and again, this is also that question for medical students, you want to do this test, how is it going to affect your management? If you can't answer that question, you don't do the test, or you need to figure out how it is going to answer that question. Now, the answer may be, this will affect our guidelines in terms of isolation. We're going to isolate people who test positive and not isolate people who test negative. That's reasonable.

C: Or if there's a treatment that's actually very dangerous to give, you want to kind of be pretty sure that they need it because otherwise it could affect their liver or their kidneys.

S: Yeah, exactly. It might affect your treatment decision, or sometimes it's just prognosis, and that may be enough of a reason to do it. And then when we're either at academic centers or we're in the discovery phase of a new illness, we may do it just to gather data so that we know what the hell is going on. But the idea is with COVID-19 and with trying to have testing available, and I've heard some experts say, we need to be doing 5 million tests a day.

C: Yeah, they're basically saying we have to test the whole population.

S: Yeah, in order to really, really be able to work our way through the population so we know who can and cannot go out there in the world to relax things. But again, that kind of massive testing, then the false positive, false negative rate becomes really important. And more the false positive rate, though, than the false negative rate. When you're doing general screening of a broad population where most people don't have the disease, the false positives could easily become greater than the true positives, even when you have like 90 plus percent specificity. It depends. So that was a good and timely question. That was the quick version.

E: Next week, the long one.

S: The long one is go to medical school. All right, guys, it's time for science or fiction.

Science or Fiction ()

Answer	Item
Fiction	Drone delivery
Science	Rain to volcano
Science	Coffee & sensitivity

Host	Result
'

Rogue	Guess

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Item #1: Scientists have concluded that heavy rainfall triggered the Kīlauea volcano eruption in May 2018.
Item #2: A new study finds that drones are more energy efficient than diesel delivery vans in urban settings.
Item #3: Researchers find that drinking coffee (regular or decaffeinated), over the short term, significantly increases sensitivity to sweetness and decreases sensitivity to bitterness.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Three just random news items this week, no theme. Are you guys ready?

J: Yeah.

C: Yes.

S: I think these are all rather interesting. Item number one, scientists have concluded that heavy rainfall triggered the Kilauea volcano eruption in May 2018. Item number two, a new study finds that drones are more energy efficient than diesel delivery vans in urban settings. And item number three, researchers find that drinking coffee, regular or decaffeinated, over the short term, significantly increases sensitivity to sweetness and decreases sensitivity to bitterness. Cara, why don't you go first?

Cara's Response

C: Anecdotally, I'd say, okay, with the coffee one, could be the case. Because I think that the more, like, sometimes people will say coffee is an acquired taste. And that could be in some ways what they mean, right? Because coffee is very bitter. You know, that's why people add milk and sugar when they want to, and some people like it black and blah, blah, blah. But the more you drink it, I think the, like, the less sugar you might need in the long term or the less milk you might need in the long term.

B: I disagree.

C: But generally speaking, I probably have a better coffee tolerance, if that makes sense. And I do still have a sweet tooth. And maybe my sweet tooth is worse because I drink coffee. I don't know. It just doesn't seem that farfetched to me. Heavy rainfall triggering a volcano eruption, I mean, volcanoes are a type of kind of seismically active situation. But I could see there being some sort of mechanical or physical situation that would induce a volcano. And then drones are more energy efficient than diesel delivery vans in urban settings. And can I ask, Steve, I mean, you might not be able to tell me, but is that within some sort of weight parameter? Is that just across the board?

S: They didn't put any limits on it. So I think it's just they did, they modeled I guess, typical package delivery. So they didn't give any weight parameters.

C: Okay. So but it is like package delivery. It's not just like letters.

S: Yeah, it's package, package.

C: So if it were just like very light things, I might say, yes, that's true. But it seems like it's between the volcano and the drones. I'm actually gonna say that the fiction is the drones.

S: Okay. Evan?

Evan's Response

E: Oh, boy. So heavy rainfall triggering the Kilauea volcano eruption. Okay. Well, all I can think about is when I see lava pouring into the ocean, it causes a lot of steam in this glass and stuff that forms and real nasty, toxic vapors and things. So but that's kind of an opposite effect of what's going on here. But nasty stuff can occur when you add lots of water to something volcanic going on. So there may be, I don't know if that's some kind of direct connection, but I kind of have a feeling that this one's going to turn out to be science. New study finds that drones are more energy efficient than diesel delivery vans now in urban settings. Oh, my gosh. I can go on and on about drones.

C: Steve's like, but you're not going to.

J: You can drone on about drones.

E: Thank you, Jay. Thank you for clarifying that for those who needed the clarification. Well, okay. So what you're talking about here, I imagine a drone can carry one package at a time, I think, or maybe a few small things at a time, as opposed to one nice big diesel delivery van in the urban settings, which is the city, which is making delivering potentially hundreds of boxes over the course of a city block. So I don't know if that one's going to hold up. I don't know if the math works out there. It's just kind of a matter of those ratios. If you know the ratios, you know the answer here. So I don't know about that one. And then drinking coffee, which I do not do. I am not a coffee drinker. If this one's the fiction, then it's going to either significantly increase, but the opposite would be significantly decrease. Would it significantly decrease flip-flop the two? Decrease sensitivity to bitterness means increase sensitivity to bitterness, if this were the fiction. But I think I'll go with Cara. I'm going to, something with the drones and the vans, I don't think the math is adding up there. I'll say that one's fiction.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Let's see. The heavy rainfall triggering the kill away, yeah, can't make a tremendous amount of sense out of that. Although I think the whole, this whole steam production, and there are some islands just get so much rain. It's insane. It's like the highest rainfall.

E: In the planet.

B: Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. So maybe I could see that. The drinking coffee one, that just makes sense that over the short term there, there would be a you're getting hit with this bitterness, assuming you're not, I guess, throwing in a lot of sugar. But I could see, I could see how that would kind of work. And that, so by elimination, I think that, I think drones, I think that one's going to be the fiction. Yeah. There's something wacky about that. I'll say that's fiction as well.

S: Okay. And Jay.

Jay's Response

J: So I'll click right over to the drones thing. I've done a little bit of reading about this. And what I, what I know is that drones are not good for heavy packages. I don't know if that has anything to do with this news item, but I would imagine though, the real question here is when you say more efficient again, we're just saying raw energy, what, what takes more energy? And I know that it's incredibly energy, not energy efficient to put something up in the air. So that's the one thing about that news item I don't like is that, but then I question it. Why would they do it then? Why would they use drones if it wasn't going to be some type of savings? So I don't, I'm not sure. The rainfall one with the volcano, I have no problem with that. I can see rainfall causing erosion, erosion, making, lower the amount of material that's on top of a node or nodule that's coming up. Yeah. So, okay. That was fine. And then this one about drinking coffee. I am a regular coffee drinker. I absolutely know that when you exercise your palate, it reacts. So that one does make a lot of sense. So just from those two things, I would want to go with number two, but there is, there's details about number two that if it is the fiction I'm going to want, I got to, I'm going to want clarification from Steve. All right. I'll go with the group. Go GWG.

S: All right. So you guys are all in agreement. So we'll take these in order.

E: Oh boy.

C: We're going to call that going with Cara, by the way.

E: Yeah. How about going with Cara this week?

S: Oh, you really want to say that, Cara?

C: I mean it this way. You asked me to put my nickel down, so.

S: All right.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: Item number one, scientists have concluded that heavy rainfall triggered the Kilauea volcanic eruption in May, 2018. You guys all think that one is science and that one is science.

C: Nice.

S: So that the, I don't think any of you hit upon the key though, which is that the water basically softens the rock.

B: Oh, nice.

S: Yeah. So it makes it more likely for the magma underneath to break through.

C: Oh, interesting.

S: It's just all about pressure. You know, is there enough pressure to break through? The water loosens it up enough that it was able to break through. It's just that simple. So that's based on models et cetera. But that's, yeah, they had a massive amount of rain. So, you know.

J: Wait. So Steve, models are doing science reporting now?

S: Yep. That's right.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right, let's go to number two, a new study finds that drones are more energy efficient than diesel delivery vans in urban settings. You guys all think this one is the fiction. So the question is, remember we had that news item about flying cars like drone like cars could be more efficient in an urban setting because they could bypass things like traffic and blah, blah, blah. Does the same thing apply to drones delivering packages?

B: Yeah. It's a time savings. It's a huge component, right?

S: Right. So how do all those variables work out?

B: Yeah.

S: Well, this one is the fiction. So you guys got it.

E: Thanks Cara.

S: And in terms of the reason that this is the fiction, Evan actually gave the most complete answer. Evan, you were exactly correct.

E: Oh.

C: Is that because it can only carry one or two at a time?

E: One at a time.

C: Yeah.

S: So the drones deliver one package at a time, whereas a delivery van could stop in an urban setting, could stop in one location and then deliver a whole bunch of packages to a whole bunch of people. And so it's particularly in an urban setting. So they tested diesel vans, electric vans, and then the electric drones. The most efficient was the electric vans. They were 10 times as efficient as drones. 10 times. It wasn't even close. Diesels were still a lot better than the drones, but they weren't quite as energy efficient as the electric vans were.

B: What about fusion vans?

S: In a rural setting, the drones could be more efficient, right, because making a single delivery of a single package, the drone could be more efficient than driving a whole big van out there to drop off one package. But it's the multiple deliveries in an urban setting that makes the delivery van more energy efficient.

C: Right.

E: All right.

S: So good job with that, Evan. You hit upon it.

E: Thanks.

C: And also good job, Cara, because I was right.

E: Yes. You blazed the trail.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right. All this means that researchers find that drinking coffee, regular or decaffeinated, because they did test both, over the short term, this is not a long-term effect, Cara, significantly increases sensitivity to sweetness and decreases sensitivity to bitterness. So what they did in this study was they simply had subjects eat something and rate its sweetness or bitterness, and then they had them drink coffee, and they had an internal control, right? And then rate sweetness and bitterness, and they rated things more sweet and less bitter after drinking coffee. They repeated it with decaffeinated to make sure it wasn't the caffeine itself, and the results were the same, so it's not the caffeine. This is a short-term study only.

C: It's like the actual flavor of the coffee that's doing that?

S: It's something in the coffee molecule, the substances that are in the coffee that are doing it. And they tested this for a very specific reason, because they suspected that the perception of... And this had no effect on smell, by the way. This was not an olfactory effect. It was purely taste, not smell. Their concern was that when we do taste tests, like scientific taste tests, that you have to carefully control for whatever the person had before the test, because that may up or downregulate their perception.

E: We didn't do that at NECSS last year. Ooh.

S: No, we didn't.

E: During our taste test. We didn't cleanse our palates.

S: That's right. That's why you have to cleanse your palate. So they said that they wanted to test it with coffee. And so it may be true that when you're drinking coffee, apparently people like to eat dark chocolate with coffee, which is sort of less sweet and more bitter than milk chocolate, but it might make sense because the coffee makes it taste sweeter, relatively speaking, and less bitter.

E: Interesting.

C: That is interesting. I wonder, what do you drink or eat to clear your palate?

S: Water?

C: What's the best way? Just water, you think?

S: Milk? No.

B: Whiskey.

C: The funny thing is people use coffee beans to clear your scent palate. Like if you're shopping for a perfume, you might smell coffee beans in between each of the perfume samples so that you're getting a fresh smell.

E: In Chinese restaurants, they give you orange wedges or orange slices to clean your palates.

C: Yeah, you're right.

S: The only time I encountered using coffee as a olfactory, quote, unquote, palate cleanser was in the morgue when we had to do autopsies on people who were ripe.

C: Oh, I see. So more it was just to mask the odor.

S: Yeah, just masking, to bring out cans of coffee grounds, just something to cover up the odor.

C: What's the stuff you wipe underneath your nose?

S: Yeah, you could do that, too, something very, very... Yeah, what is that? It's like a menthol kind of thing.

C: Yeah, like a eucalyptus or something.

J: Why can't they just give you a whole body helmet or something, you know?

S: Yeah.

E: Or send a robot in to do the autopsy or something.

S: That was bad.

J: Steve, is there ever a point when you're walking into a room full of corpses and you just turn around and go, F this?

E: Ask Bob. Don't ask Steve.

S: There was one time in my gross anatomy class where I had the cumulative heebie-jeebies. You spent an entire semester with your head in a corpse, you know what I mean? At that point, it's just anatomy. There's nothing horror story about it. It's just anatomy, you know? But then at one point, I'm like, holy crap, I'm in a room full of corpses. And I just got this one wave of the chills, but I got over it very quickly. However, it did affect my dreams for years.

E: Interesting.

C: I have a friend who's a film director, and she did a show that required a lot of forensic coverage, a documentary series. And she had to film in a lot of morgues and film in just a lot of dead bodies. And she said it really dramatically affected her. Like she's like, I won't go near a dead body for any projects for the foreseeable future. I just can't do it. It's just like too much. She said the smell is too much. I mean, it's mostly that the smell was too much, but she also said that, yeah, it invades your dreams at night.

S: Yeah.

C: Just being around it a lot. But I guess some people just don't have that.

S: You've got to get over it. It's like half the reason I think that we do that in medical school. I mean, obviously, it's you're learning gross anatomy. That's the primary point. But it's part of the whole experience. I mean ideally, doctors need to be able to function fully without being emotionally affected, surrounded by gore and whatever. Like you can't be squeamish and be a doctor. And so that gets beaten out of you, again, to use that metaphor. In medical school basically it's exposure therapy. It's like any squeamishness you have will be gone by the end of your training.

C: And you assume that like a an undertaker or somebody who works in a capacity around dead bodies all the time, like you said, you just get used to it.

S: Just no effect. Yeah. There's no effect after a while. All right. Very cool area. It was kind of a large segue there at the end there.

Skeptical Quote of the Week ()

Induction, analogy, hypotheses founded upon facts and rectified continually by new observations, a happy tact given by nature and strengthened by numerous comparisons of its indications with experience, such are the principal means for arriving at truth.
– Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), French naturalist

S: Evan, give us a quote.

E: So I'll give you the quote. But do you remember when I was speaking about Ridge Cactus Coral before?

C: I remember that. That was like today.

E: You know what its official name is? It's Mycetophilia Lamarckiana.

B: Lamarckism.

E: Lamarck. So this week's quote is going to be from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. That's what inspired this quote. I looked it up. So here we go.

S: The most unfairly treated person in the history of science, by the way.

E: You think so?

C: I totally agree. Yeah.

E: Wow. OK.

C: He was treated like some sort of scientific charlatan.

S: He was a great scientist.

E: He was early.

C: Yeah. He just had some ideas that some panned out. Some didn't, actually.

S: And the way the idea that he is, that people attach to him, the passing on of acquired characteristics, wasn't even his. That wasn't him.

C: There you go.

B: He got screwed.

E: Interesting.

S: Yeah, he got screwed.

E: He did get screwed. So let's honor him with this quote. "Induction, analogy, hypotheses founded upon facts and rectified continually by new observations, a happy tact given by nature and strengthened by numerous comparisons of its indications with experience, such are the principal means for arriving at truth."

S: Yeah, and his career reflected that. You know, he started out thinking that evolution was a progressive force leading quote unquote upward. And he completely reversed himself based upon the evidence. He looked at it. He did experiments. He looked at looked at the fossil record. Nope, it's not. It's just adaptation to local environment. That's it. That was the bulk of his career as an evolutionary scientist. He was correct and he listened to the evidence over his preconceived notions.

E: That's right.

S: And changed his mind.

E: Hello.

S: Good for him.

E: Super good for him. And we should learn more about Lamarck in our science classes.

S: All right. Thank you, Evan.

E: Thanks, Steve.

S: And thank all of you for joining me this week.

B: Sure, man.

J: You got it, brother.

E: Thanks, doctor.

B: Got nothing better to do.

S: See you on Friday.

E: Friday.

J: See you Friday.

E: Can't wait. It's fun.

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.

Today I Learned

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References

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