SGU Episode 676

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SGU Episode 676
June 23rd 2018
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SGU 675                      SGU 677
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year, and yet far too little for the next 10.
Neil Armstrong
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Introduction

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, June 19^th, 2018, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone.

S: Cara, welcome back.

C: Hi.

B: How was South America? Oh, wait. That was...

E: No.

J: That was summer.

C: I was just in D.C.

E: Yeah. A different swamp.

C: I was there for the National Geographic Explorers Festival.

S: Oh, cool.

E: Neat.

C: Which is so fun. Yeah. They get explorers from all over the world to come together in D.C. and they do all these different events and symposia and stuff. And so I don't know if you know, but a National Geographic Explorer is a grantee. So they're mostly scientists, but a lot of them are conservationists. And sometimes it's, photographers and different people who are documenting what's going on around the world. And I hosted or emceed, if you want to call it that, these two full-day symposia events. Joel Sartori, if you follow any of his photography work, he's incredible. He does a project called The Photo Arc, where he wants to document every species on the planet.

E: Nice.

C: Yeah. He's done tens of thousands already. And he has all these beautiful photography books with birds of the photo arc, mammals of the photo arc. And he's documented all the species that have gone extinct from the time he started the project. It's pretty intense.

E: Sad.

S: He should start with those.

C: I think he does. He tries to, but a lot of them are tough. A lot of the images you see plastered around zoos are actually his work because he gives them for free away to zoos. And he showed this really hilarious video of him trying to get a chimpanzee. He still has not photographed a chimpanzee because all of his photos are on white or black cyc. So they're really stark. And chimpanzees rip the cyc. He has this hilarious thing of getting the cage already in the zoo. And it's an area where he walks from the enclosure into the smaller enclosure. And they have all the white cyc, which is the white paper, all taped down perfectly. And then the chimpanzee literally just reaches his hand in and crumples it all up in two seconds flat and starts laughing. And they're like, OK.

E: Of course.

C: Yeah. That's probably the hardest one for them to get.

E: Did you happen to eat at the International House of Burgers?

S: IHOB. You could be good at IHOB while you were there.

E: IHOB.

C: Why would I eat at IHOB?

E: This story upset me.

C: Why? You and I have very different reactions to this story.

E: I'll tell you why. Because. Because. In case you didn't know, the International House of Pancakes, or IHOP as it's known, they had announced plans to flip the P in IHOP to a B. And they left it up to people for a whole week to figure out why and what the B was going to be. And, I mean, basically the Internet burned down over it as far as I could tell.

S: Then they announced it was burgers.

E: They announced it was burgers. Right.

C: Not breakfast. Everybody thought it was going to be breakfast. Like, oh, they're not just pancakes. They're also breakfast. But it wasn't.

S: But that was actually the opposite of what they were trying to do was to advertise that they serve lunch and dinner. Not just breakfast.

E: So I did an unscientific poll in which I asked sort of everyone for a day or so whom I came across, family, friends, and others, what they thought of that. And almost 100% unanimous reaction was this dour face and like, that's so stupid. Why are they doing this?

S: Yeah, I thought that was dumb.

C: It's just a dumb advertising.

E: Dumb. Well, guess what? They're not changing their name to International House of Burgers. They used it as a marketing stunt, basically.

C: Of course.

B: No way.

E: Yeah.

C: That's also like, I don't understand why that surprises anybody.

E: To get people talking about it.

J: Not surprised, but the thing that it did, it just made me think they were really stupid because it's a bad name.

C: No. I think they're really smart. You know why they're smart? Because we're talking about it right now on our show.

E: Yes. Yes. As was everybody had an opinion about it.

B: They tricked me.

S: I wonder what the long-term effects of it are, though, because it's manipulative and stupid and it doesn't endear me to the franchise, to IHOP, you know what I mean?

C: I don't know. I guess maybe I'm super cynical, but I'm like, why is this a story?

E: Because Chrissy Teigen tweeted about it and therefore it's a story, right? Doesn't she have the most Twitter followers or something?

C: I just feel like literally, who cares?

B: I go to IHOP once a decade, so really, I don't have a lot invested in this, but I do love breakfast food.

C: Who cares what it's called?

S: We go there all the time for breakfast.

C: Are you going to, is this going to change your behavior at all, Steve?

S: Well, if anything, it would make us avoid going there.

E: Ooh, boomerang effect.

C: You're not going to go there for burgers regardless. Why would anybody eat a burger at IHOP?

S: It's basically a diner.

E: I've not tried it, actually.

S: It's a great breakfast place and a diner the rest of the day, and that's fine.

C: Yeah, that was actually, that was me showing my ridiculous snobbery living in Los Angeles and having like a million amazing restaurants at my disposal. There are just so many other, like I don't eat red meat that much, so I feel like if I'm going to indulge in a hamburger, it's going to be the best hamburger. It's not going to be at IHOP.

J: Yeah, it's got to be worth it.

C: Totally.

B: Right, exactly. I consider myself a connoisseur of diners. Liz and I go to diners every weekend without fail. If we don't go to a diner and have breakfast food, we get cranky. And we have never gone to an IHOP, never, except when we were in Atlanta.

J: What's the most ordered item in a diner, Bob?

E: Water.

B: No, you don't order water. They just throw it in your face whether you want it or not.

C: You order water in LA, lots of restaurants won't give it to you. It's free, but you have to ask for it.

B: The most ordered item in a diner, Jay? Do you actually know the answer to this?

J: I might.

B: All right.

C: I would assume it's eggs. Or coffee.

E: French fries?

B: Oh, yes. Coffee. It's got to be.

C: Jay, is it coffee?

E: What is it? Haggis? What is it?

C: Is it coffee?

J: Coffee and French fries.

E: Coffee and French fries, there you go.

C: It's a good combo.

S: Well, not necessarily together. It's not necessarily together, right? Just the most frequent beverage is coffee and the most frequent food item is French fries. It's like there probably aren't a lot of people named Muhammad Lee, even though Muhammad is the most common first name in the planet and Lee is the most common last name.

J: You're right.

C: There are probably still a fair amount of people, though. There might be. You never know.

E: There's Muhammad Ali.

S: That's true.

C: You know what I think is a good beverage with French fries is a chocolate shake.

E: Oh, yeah.

S: Oh, yeah.

E: Better than coffee, probably.

S: Although I prefer vanilla shakes, but yeah.

C: But do you prefer to dip ... I'm talking about dipping your French fries in a chocolate shake.

E: Whoa, hold on now. What are we doing here?

C: How do you not know about this?

S: I know about it. My daughter does. I hate it, though.

C: It's a best kept secret, but I don't think it would be as good in vanilla, although it wouldn't be bad.

B: Maybe if they had a ketchup flavoured shake.

C: Ew.

J: All right. Forget it. You killed the whole thing.

S: Did you know that when chocolate was really first discovered by the West, it basically was introduced as an alternative to coffee? It was really only offered as a hot beverage.

J: It was a drink, yeah.

E: Interesting.

C: Yeah, because it's bitter unless you sweeten it.

S: It was a drink, like coffee or tea. Yeah, it's basically just a different version of a hot beverage. It's a bitter bean that you roast and make into a drink.

B: Yeah, but isn't that basically what Starbucks does? I mean, a lot of their coffees is essentially glorified chocolate milk, right?

C: But is it cacao? I don't think so. I think it's still cocoa.

B: Oh, we're going to get a lot of emails, aren't we?

C: Yeah. I don't mind Starbucks.

S: Until they figured out the chemistry to get it into a solid, that would melt in your mouth, right?

B: Yeah. That's critical.

S: I learned that in the book I finished reading called Stuff Matters.

C: Stuff Matters.

S: It was a good book, but I have to say it wasn't as detailed as I was hoping. It didn't go deep enough on each of the topics.

C: You're going to have to get a book on each of those individual topics.

S: Yeah, pretty much.

C: The ones that really interested you, yeah.

S: Pretty much, yeah. I think to delve deeper.

B: Yeah, they didn't even talk about metamaterials, which I thought was a gaping hole.

C: Oh gosh.

S: It was more of a primer than, let's do a deep dive on material science. It was more, well, let's talk about the future. It was really just, all right, here's like the most basic stuff in our civilization, like cement and chocolate and steel and let's – ceramics and paper. Let's talk about those things and get some basic fundamental knowledge about their history and everything. So it was good.

C: I started reading a fascinating book for school. Have any of you read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl?

E: No.

S: I'm familiar with it.

C: It's a pretty famous book, but Viktor Frankl who is – he was Austrian, an existential psychotherapist who came up with something that he called logotherapy, which is partially what the book is about. But really, the book is about his experience in a concentration camp. He survived Auschwitz. So he writes all about his experiences and that's really where he developed his view of psychotherapy. But it's a fascinating like first person look of – and in a very clear, very kind of weirdly academic but also emotional way and I'm riveted. I sat down to start it last night and I'm already 75 pages in and it's a short book. I think it's only like a 200-page book.

E: That does sound amazing.

C: I recommend it. Yeah. It's really good.

S: It sounds interesting.

C: Yeah. It's a quick read. It's good for intellectuals or just people in general. It's kind of like on that must-read list. Like probably some point in your life, you should check this book out.

What's the Word? (9:55)

S: All right. Well, Cara, what's the word?

C: Oh, how did I know you were going to ask that? OK. The word this week was recommended by –

S: It's right there in the notes.

C: Yeah, yeah. It was recommended by Hatun Bazim. I hope I'm saying that right. He's actually from Austria but originally from Saudi Arabia. He says, "I'm a PhD student in immunology but also a writer. Thank you for your great show. It's kept me company for many hours as I experimented away in a gloomy quarantine animal facility that we, the PhD students and postdocs, like to call the dungeon." I feel your pain, Hatun. He said "My suggestion for what's the word would be vector because he has experience with it in genetic engineering but, of course, he knows that there's a lot of other usages." So this one is tough. I tried to be comprehensive but I know that I'm leaving things out because when I looked at the Wikipedia page at the last minute, you know how it has like the disambiguation? Like you put in a word and it's like, it can mean and then you can click on everything. Under math, there are five bullet points. Under computer science, there are like 15. Biology has at least 10. Business has a lot. Entertainment, fictional characters, transportation, vehicles, and other uses.

B: Oh, my god.

C: I know. So I'm like, ooh.

B: What do we do?

C: But let's start at the beginning – or not at the beginning but let's do a kind of top-down look. I saw on a blog post that was published on Wired that they wrote, "When you think of a vector, many people probably call up vector's definition from Despicable Me." He says, it's a mathematical term, a quantity represented by an arrow with both direction and magnitude. Vector, that's me because I'm committing crimes with both direction and magnitude. Oh, yeah. So that's what we often think, a quantity that has magnitude and direction. It's usually represented by a line segment whose length represents the magnitude and whose orientation in space represents the direction. But apparently, a mathematical vector doesn't have to have those two pieces of information, direction and magnitude. It can really be any pieces of information that give you an understanding of this measurement in 2, 3, 4, 5, or even 6-dimensional space, plus, plus, plus. So basically, vector is used as a term that's in opposition to or is distinct from the word scalar. A scalar has only one piece of information, like temperature, mass, charge. But vectors would have multiple. So when we're talking about, let's say, acceleration, that's going to be a vector because it has multiple pieces of information, multiple constructs that tell you what's going on. Or forces often are vectors. Displacement might be a vector. So it can be something that's like moving, but it definitely is something where you've got multiple pieces of data that tell you more about this quantity. Also, apparently, in math, didn't realize this, when you're looking at matrices, a vector is how you describe a single row or column within a matrix. Hmm, who knew? The first vector would be the first column of a matrix. What else do we have? We've got computing. We've got design. You guys have heard of vector files. If you've ever used Photoshop or you've been designing merchandise or something, you're going to use a vector file, right? It's a type of graphical representation that uses lines to construct the outlines of objects. Usually, it's going to be over some sort of transparent background. And it can scale without losing its resolution.

B: That's the key. Make it tiny or huge. It's so awesome.

C: But apparently, there's a lot more to computer science, which I didn't even get to get into. So that definition has to do with it being an array, a one-dimensional array. But apparently, there is an algorithm called a vector clock. A vector has a usage in C++. There's something called an attack vector, which is an approach that's used in attacking a computer. We talked about vector graphics. There's a vector game, which is a game that uses vector graphics. Early computers used vector monitors. Oh, my gosh. There's so many. But now let's talk about biology because this was the usage that Hatun was describing. And even within biology, there's a different usage in genetics than there is in maybe ecology. So often in like ecology and medicine, we'll use the term vector to describe an organism that transmits a pathogen, right? Like the vector for that disease would be a mosquito or a rat.

S: A tick.

C: Yeah, or a tick. Exactly. Those are common vectors. But we also use vector to describe an agent like a plasmid or a virus that helps carry usually modified genetic material into an organism's genome. So we might use some sort of virus and it carries the coding portion of the genome that we're interested when we're making a GMO, for example, into that organism. And that's how it can be kind of transfected, how it can enter into the nucleus, enter into the DNA, and affect change there. So we also call that a vector.

B: Transfected, did you say?

C: Yeah.

B: I like that word.

C: Yeah, it's a good one. Let me add that to the list. I love it when we come up with new things. All right. There's also a definition that I came across, which is kind of not a scientific definition, but it's another common usage of the word vector, which is it's just the course that's taken by a plane or a missile. That's its vector. Oh, yeah. Kind of makes sense. It goes with the physics definition. So let's talk about the word itself. It goes back a long time. It seems to have roots going. It's Latin in origin, but you might be able to even pull it back to the PIE. It's Proto-Indo-European, which is, remember we talked about that a while back on the show, which is thought to be this like backward described root language of all of the different Proto-Indo-European languages, or sorry, all of the different Indo-European languages that came out of it. And so when we look even at Latin and the ancestors of Latin, the word vector just continuously goes back to a meaning of being a transport, carry, carrying, maybe even riding. And so it makes sense when you look back at all of these different definitions. It's a quantity that has magnitude and direction. It's transporting. It's carrying. It's moving in a particular direction. A vector in biology, it's transporting. It's carrying. It's moving in a particular direction. So it actually is one of those cool words where even though it has a lot of different applications, when you really think about the root of the word, they all seem to have something in common.

S: Yeah. That's a deceptively difficult one because there's so many different uses.

C: When you guys first hear the word vector, I mean, because it must have to do with priming, right? I should have asked you this at the beginning, but do you go to the math and kind of physics definition first, like the calculus definition?

E: I go to the movie Airplane and say, what's your vector, Victor?

C: Oh, hilarious.

S: Vector, Victor. Roger, Roger.

C: Hilarious. So you go to the aircraft definition. I almost always go to the disease vector definition, but I know a lot of people that work more in genetics who go into the plasmid or the virus vector definition. What about you, Steve?

S: Yeah, I do both the math and the medicine one come to mind immediately.

C: The more genetic one or the disease one?

S: The disease vector. Disease vector and mathematical vector are kind of equal in my mind as far as the first definition.

C: Interesting. I love it. All right. Thanks, Cara.

Video Game Addiction (17:48)

• Video Game Addiction Now a Recognized Illness 

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S: So Jay, I understand the World Health Organization now recognizes video game addiction as a real thing.

C: Oh, no.

J: Yep.

E: Do they?

B: About time.

J: That's right. So, yeah, so the WHO.

E: Count us in, I guess.

J: As we like to call it. The WHO, International Classification of Diseases. That's the ICD, International Classification of Diseases, now has a new entry.

C: That's the big book.

J: That is, and it's very important. It's a very cool thing to read about because it's used across the world and people rely on this for critical information. So they have recently added something called a gaming disorder, and this new entry states that people who are addicted to video games can't control their behavior when they're around gaming, and they give gaming a priority over the more important aspects of their lives. So as an example, if you would rather play a game than eat a meal or take care of yourself, you could possibly have an addiction. So the WHO's listing for the gaming disorder reads, "Gaming disorder is characterized by a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behavior. This is digital gaming or video gaming, which may be online or offline. It manifests by impaired control over gaming, increased priority given to gaming, and continuation of escalation of gaming." So in other words, the three main vectors here, thank you.

C: Nice, Jay.

J: So vector one, the gaming behavior takes precedence over other activities to the extent that other activities are pushed to the periphery. The second feature is an impaired control of these behaviors even when the negative consequences occur, meaning you can clearly see that your relationships in your life are suffering, but you don't care. You just keep obsessively gaming. And the third feature is that the condition leads to significant distress and impairment in personal, family, social, educational, or occupational function, and the impact is real, and it may include details like bad sleep patterns, diet problems, and a deficiency in physical activity, which could be very serious as well. So listen, a little healthy obsession in video games is fine, and any real gamer would kind of see themselves in these things that I described here, but we're not talking about like, oh man, I played that game like crazy for a week, and then everything's back to normal in your life for the most part. I'm talking about people that do this on a profound level, and it has a massive disruption to their life. Now of course there's a spectrum here, and you've got to be honest with yourself because if you do have this problem, you really should do something about it because of just how disruptive it can be. They are comparing this to a gambling addiction, which could be devastating. So the WHO warns that when gaming has these characteristics that I described, it's really time to get help, and they also note that it could be episodic or all the time, but episodic, like I said, it isn't like two or three days. Episodic could be a couple of months, and then a week off, and then a couple of more months. You really got to skew this in your head to someone whose life is about to explode or has exploded because of gaming. They say you need to have at least 12 months of negative behavior before you could be diagnosed. Unless under certain circumstances you could have all of the requirements and the addiction is so severe that you might get an earlier diagnosis, but they're kind of looking at it being like a 12-month pattern before they're really going to give you the diagnosis. So apparently, as an example, there's a newish game out there called Fortnite. I'm sure you guys have heard of it, and a lot of kids have become addicted to this game. This is just the beginning because I think when VR hits, we're going to have an epidemic. It could be really bad because it's so immersive that you could be in a VR environment and feel like you are living a life. You do have friends.

E: People won't want to return back to non-VR.

J: Yeah. So as a parent, you should definitely monitor your kids' gaming. I would say it's not just the amount of time that they're gaming, but what kind of games are they playing. You got to really think about the psychology behind it. How hooked do they seem to be into the game? So history has shown that healthcare companies and insurers will use the ICD as a basis for deciding if a patient should get reimbursed for treatment or not.

C: But, of course, then you're really just talking, not just, but you're generally talking about a primary care physician, maybe a neurologist, but most mental health professionals, some of them use the ICD, but most of them use the DSM. So they have their own classification, but there's a section.

S: The ICD is for billing. That's all it's for.

C: Exactly. Honestly, so is the DSM. But that's why I was wondering, Steve, what your take is on this because I think that there's a lot of politics behind this. This is a lumper and a splitter question. Like do we need to be parsing out, "different" types of behavioral addiction or should we just have behavioral addiction or some sort of umbrella term?

S: The ICD has evolved into an epic splitter. They split diagnoses now so fine it's just a pain in the ass. So this just fits its overall pattern of where they've gone. Like they have numbness, numbness in the left hand, numbness in the right hand, numbness and tingling and whatever. It's like they parse it down so fine. Sometimes there's like 100 versions of a basic level diagnosis and you have to go through it all. Yeah.

C: Exactly. But like it's not going to affect therapy. You know what I mean? Like working with a client with this, whether there's a code next to their name, it's not going to inform, I don't think, how the therapist approaches the problem.

S: Yeah, and I think interestingly, so the American Psychiatric Association is also considering this for the DSM, the Internet Gaming Disorder is their provisional diagnosis. And they have very reasonable criteria. I think that many people might react by saying it's a spectrum and they're just making it up and how do you – where do you draw the lines? But this is what they do is they take these spectra and they say, okay, if you're way, way over to this side to the point where it's a disorder, then all that means is that this is a problem that we need to address. So, for example, here are some of the criteria they use, which I think are all reasonable. Preoccupation, so spending a lot of time thinking about the games, even when you're not playing. Some kind of withdrawal, so like when you're not playing, you're restless. You have almost withdrawal symptoms. Tolerance in that you need to play more and more and more to get the same excitement. The feeling that you feel like you should play less, but you're unable to do so. It's like you self-identify, I play too much. I shouldn't play as much as I do, but you feel compelled to do so. It replaces other activities. So you give up many, many other activities in your life. You continue to play even though it's causing problems in your life. Like if your work is suffering, your relationships are suffering, but you still do it, then obviously that's a problem. You start to lie about it. So that's another classic addictive type behavior. You start to cover for yourself and you use deception in order to protect your time. And you are willing to risk tremendous loss in your life so that you can gain. So you make tremendous sacrifices for it.

C: The bottom line with a lot of the diagnoses in the DSM is this kind of qualifier. Different iterations of the DSM utilize this qualifier differently. Sometimes it's a line of the diagnostic code. Sometimes it's you have to have seven out of these ten in order, however they want to do it. Like I said, versions use it differently. It almost always comes down to does it significantly interfere with your life, whether that be your work, your relationships, or your daily functioning.

S: And that's how we define a disorder generically. The other issue is the use of the term addiction, which is why you'll notice the APA didn't use that term. Some people think that addiction should be reserved for a biochemical addiction.

C: And also because there are medical treatments that are very different than psychological treatments. I don't know if there's a lot of good research showing that giving a person who has a video game, a difficulty with video games and not stopping, is going to have any sort of benefit taking a psychoactive medication. It might be an anxiety issue. It might be an underlying depressive disorder. I mean it's so complicated.

S: Then you get to a dual diagnosis where they're using it to reduce their anxiety. And some people do have that as well. That's why the diagnosis gets so complicated because they interact with each other. But there have been studies looking at what's happening in the brain when people are playing video games. And then that, of course, stuff is happening. And then that gets translated into, look, it's your brain on video games.

C: Oh, it's dopamine.

S: It's the same. Yeah. It all comes down to dopamine. But of course, dopamine is sort of the generic neurotransmitter for any positive pleasurable reinforcement. So anything you enjoy doing is going to give you a squirt of dopamine.

C: Yeah, when you pet your dog, when you have sex, all that gives you dopamine.

S: It doesn't mean it's as addictive as heroin. So it's not a drug. It doesn't do to your brain what drugs do. It's not a biological addiction. It's a compulsive behavior. And at some point – we all engage in compulsive behaviors to some degree. But at some point, you're more than two standard deviations to one side and it starts to have a significant, measurable, demonstrable, objective negative impact on your life. Then you can consider it a disorder. It's a problem that needs to be addressed. Often it's self-identified. People recognize that it's a problem that they have. Other times they may be in denial or they may lack insight or they may be covering because, again, the compulsion tends to do that too.

C: We want to say addiction.

S: The other people in your life may be the ones who are identifying the problem. And it gets tricky. It gets tricky. But, yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable to identify, I think, any compulsive behavior. If you're gambling your life away, that's a problem.

C: Yeah, and I think if you see any negative feedback to this, like even my opinion might be one that says, like, we don't need this other diagnosis. It's just because it's how we're categorizing. I think nobody's going to deny that this is a real issue and that people who are facing this life issue need or would benefit from psychotherapeutic intervention or some sort of intervention. But whether or not we put it under the header of anxiety disorders, whether it's listed under a type of obsessive compulsive disorder, that's just – that's where I think you're going to see the arguments come in.

S: And there's no absolutely objective resolution to that. It is a categorization issue.

C: Absolutely. Yeah, this is all – these are all human and human-created categories. So there's always going to be an argument about how, better taxonomic systems for these.

S: Yeah, and there's different contexts here. One is pragmatic. We need to – bookkeeping and communication and paying the bills. And the other is more scientific. It's like how does this affect how we think about these things and how we approach them clinically? And that's where it gets complicated. Are we constraining our thinking about it by – are the labels constraining our thinking?

C: Yeah, which is not uncommon.

S: We have to treat them as placeholders. They're just placeholders for practical reasons and they help, but they shouldn't really be constraining how we think about it.

J: I always thought that a good game, a game that really hooked you, that was a better game than a game that doesn't hook you.

C: It just means it's really good, right?

S: And that's fine.

J: Yeah, I know. But it's funny when you think about that. But it could be – there are games that have things about them that give people a lot of satisfaction.

C: Especially when they overwhelm – like there are new worlds that they can enter into that allow them to withdraw from their real world.

J: Sure, yeah.

E: Yeah, that's a good point, Cara.

J: All the modern games that we have today, I mean these are – these companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean these are more expensive than a lot of movies you go see to produce a video game. They're fantastically immersive. I mean they're building them to be immersive. They're building them to give you a lot of satisfaction. So the gaming industry – and I'm not putting it down in any way because that's what makes a good game. When you get – you say, man, I'm so hooked on that game. It's true. Like I've had games where I was obsessed with it for a week or two. But then the game ends. Like a lot of the games that we play, you put in 40 hours and you're done.

S: So people have gotten lost in hobbies forever, right? And I think we shouldn't be judgmental about what those hobbies are. I think video games have an unjustified stigma because they're nerdy and they could seem isolationist or whatever. But somebody spends – has a hobby. They spend hours and hours and hours a day painting or something. And it's purely for their own enjoyment. They're not like making a living on it or anything. People tend not to be judgmental about that.

C: That's true. If somebody reads, like, ugh, he just reads so much.

S: Yeah, you spend the same amount of time playing a video game, there's automatically a negative judgment. But that's not fair. And there's a lot of positive aspects to playing video games as well. They do – it could be very intellectually engaging, very creative.

C: They can train you for things like hand-eye coordination. Military, they use them a lot. Like, yeah, there's a lot of good aspects.

S: It's all about how is it fitting into your life. If all the other aspects of your life are suffering because of your one compulsive thing that you do, then you have to consider that. You have to think about – whether it's video games or anything.

Continent of Stability (32:03)

• New form of matter may lie just beyond the periodic table 

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S: All right, Bob. Tell us about this continent of stability. What is that?

E: Is that like the ninth continent on the planet?

B: Not even close.

C: Like Zealandia? No? Oh, OK.

B: So researchers have revealed the possibility that beyond the known elements of the periodic table may exist a huge swath of stable, ultra-heavy elements known not as an island of stability as they've used in the past but a continent of stability made from quark matter instead of normal nuclear matter.

E: Oh, boy.

C: Wait. What was an island of stability? I'm very confused, Bob.

B: Well, OK. That's fine. So that's this idea of a continent of stability. So over the years, there's been a lot of talk about how the really heavy elements with protons well into the hundreds. I mean imagine an atom with 120, 130 protons alone. They become increasingly unstable. So as we make bigger and heavier atoms, they've become more and more unstable. So if you look at the last, say, 10 or 20 or 30 elements that we've created or made and you look at how long they last, it goes kind of steadily, almost precisely from like months to days to hours and eventually seconds and even fractions of a millisecond. I mean there's a steady, pretty steady decline. I've been reading about this for probably decades. Scientists have proposed that certain magic combinations of lots of neutrons and protons could create very heavy but fairly stable elements. So they call this possibility these groups of potential synthetic atoms that we could create, islands of stability, that there's some island of stability in our near future where we will come across these atoms that are very heavy and very stable. And I've always loved that turn of phrase, an island of stability. So you can imagine how I felt when I started reading about this possible continent of stability. Like what are you talking about? So this has to do with a paper published in Physical Review Letters by a trio of researchers from the University of Toronto. Bob Novella – no wait, Bob Holdom. Holdom, H-O-L-D-O-M, very similar to Novella. Jing Ren and Chen Zheng. So the theory revolves around the idea of quark matter, which is fascinating stuff. So everyday matter is nuclear matter, right? Everything that you deal with is nuclear matter. It's composed of what they see as a fluid of protons and neutrons, right? Atoms have protons and neutrons. That's pretty much your everyday interaction is with these types of matters. And each proton and neutron has three quarks, right? If you want to dig down one layer deeper, either two up quarks and a down or two downs and an up. But there's three quarks in each of those in a proton or a neutron. So now quark matter is seen as a fluid of just up and down quarks but also strange quarks. So that's one type of quark matter. That's some bizarre stuff. And it's a type of matter that exists really or we thought it existed only in extreme environments like neutron stars, heavy ion colliders. Or even hypothetical quark stars. So this is a non-nuclear type of matter. It's called quark matter. But there's another type of quark matter though. And that's composed of just up and down quarks. There's no strange quarks. And they call this up-down quark matter. So that's UDQM for their goofy little initialism. UDQM, up-down quark matter. So the crux of this latest discovery though is that they have some fairly rigorous mathematics apparently showing that if you get enough of these up and down quarks together in the right way, it will achieve an energy state that's so low that it will prefer, that nature will prefer to create UDQM over any other type of matter including everyday nuclear matter. So imagine you have a bunch of up-down quarks and you just kind of throw them together in a collider or whatever. And if you put enough of them together, they're not going to separate and become bound quarks creating protons and neutrons. They're saying that they could likely create this up-down quark matter preferentially over any other type of matter. No matter what you do, it's going to be hard to avoid it. That's a good way to put it. It would be hard to avoid creating up-down quark matter once we start creating these really ultra super heavy elements. So the thinking then is that once atomic masses reach about 300, which is essentially the number of protons and neutrons, we may start seeing this quark matter. Element after element, we may just – we might not be able to avoid it in a way. So that's why they're calling it this continent of stability, that it could just be the way our future is going to unfold in terms of the periodic table of elements. So for example, our newest element.

E: Undobaninium.

B: Yeah, you were close, but they actually renamed it. Now it's Oganesson.

S: Oganesson.

E: What?

B: Oganesson.

E: How the heck did that happen?

B: I actually kind of – that's fine. Unun, Untium, whatever the hell those names were, blah.

C: Yeah, they're kind of annoying.

S: They're placeholders.

B: Yeah, so they were – so that's element 118. So Oganesson has an atomic mass of around 294. So we are really, really close potentially. So in fact, some researchers are saying that Oganesson may be the last nuclear element that we can create because they all – everyone that we can potentially create in the future is going to be – could potentially be this up-down quark matter. And it's fascinating to think that we may have reached this kind of milestone or plateau where any of these super heavy elements that we create are going to be fundamentally different types of matter. So not only can these things become – these new types of elements become prevalent, it could be also relatively easy to smash heavy elements together to create them. So actually creating these new elements might be easier than any other type of quark matter or easier than we have ever thought in the past.

C: Why?

B: Well, because there's no strange quarks in the mix, it's easier because strange quarks just make things really complicated.

C: Does it make them like unstable or something?

B: Well –

C: Why is it that you can't smash together things?

B: No, no. Actually, actually no.

C: Okay.

B: They think that – actually Witter showed that mathematically that you could smush together up-down quarks with strange matter in a way that has so little energy that nature might prefer that. But that's the crux of this latest advance. They show that even this strange matter is not as preferentially created as this up-down quark matter. So this is the one that nature is going to say, yeah, I'm going to go with you because this is the most favorably energy, lowest energy state. So it's kind of displacing the strange matter with this new up-down quark matter as the matter that we may see with these super heavy elements. Sure, you could see this in neutron stars and heavy colliders, but you're not going to be able to make it as easily as this up-down quark matter because it's just up-down. It's just up-down quarks. I mean, they're everywhere. Strange quarks are not common to say the least.

C: Gotcha.

B: What does this mean? All right. Yay. We could make this up-down quark matter. So what? Now what are we going to do? If it's stable, we may be able to see some bizarre things like you've heard of superconductivity. This type of matter may allow us to investigate what's called color superconductivity. And don't even ask me what that precisely means because I'm still actually trying to figure it out right before the show a good way to describe it. You know, making Cooper pairs of electrons. I mean, that's regular superconductivity and making –

C: Is that the one that makes things levitate?

B: Yeah. Superconducting material excludes magnetic field. So the idea is that superconductors are, like, bizarre and counterintuitive and, like, wow, that's really awesome. So colour superconductivity could be similarly, like, amazing material. But the best possible reason for this is using these new up-down quark matter material as an energy source. I never would have seen that coming because I always think, oh what could we do with this matter? I never really think of, like, something like an energy source because for me it's like, oh, maybe we could build this ultra-dense type of circuitry or this ultra-dense building material. But an energy source just really kind of came out of left field for me. So this is what the researchers said according – about using this as an energy source. They said, if quark matter is found or produced in accelerators, it may be stored and then fed with slow neutrons or heavy ions. The absorption of these particles means a lower total mass and thus a release of energy mostly in the form of gamma radiation. Unlike nuclear fusion, this is a process that should be easy to initiate and control. So not only a new and intense form of energy production, but one that's actually easier than fusion, which is really nice because fusion is really, really hard. And so, of course, my first thought was gamma radiation. Hmm. Is anyone else thinking Hulk besides me?

E: Oh, gosh. Bruce Banner? Come on.

B: Just saying. So, yeah, I'm going to follow this. This is really fascinating. I hope they're right and I hope we get to see some of this up-down quark matter within our lifetimes.

S: Yeah, it's interesting because we think of matter as neutrons, protons, and electrons, right? That's the only real stable matter that we're used to dealing with every day.

B: Yes, okay. Good choice of throwing every day in there.

S: Yeah, every day. But quarks tend – they like to form triplets. They kind of do that spontaneously. So this would be really unusual, the up-down quark matter. But it's interesting that it all comes down to the fact that the energy state is lower. It's like rolling downhill. Things are going to settle at the bottom of the hill. This is the bottom of the hill. And so that's where the matter is going to settle out.

B: And that's how it looks. And that's how it looks.

S: Yeah, that's really interesting.

B: Yeah. I've read the mathematics is fairly rigorous. So that's good. I mean, of course, there's no guarantee because who knows what subtle effects might come into play that were unaccounted for, unanticipated for sure. And also, we're talking about creating massively heavy and stable new elements. I mean, that's something. I mean, you don't know how that is.

S: Although the write-up says that the up-and-down quarks are nearly massless. Does that mean they'll be lighter even though they're massive?

B: The same thought occurred to me. But I don't think so because I think we're still talking about very dense, very dense matter. So I think even though individually they're incredibly light, I think it could potentially be fairly heavy. But it was actually very difficult to find any commentary or even speculation about what would stable up-down quark matter be like.

J: Yeah, I mean, could you use it to make something? Could you build a ship with it? Could you build a ship-

S: Build a bridge out of it?

B: That's just it, Jay. I mean, I don't know. That's what I tried to find out. I tried to find out specifically what some of the speculation is. I haven't found any of it yet. Maybe if I find something interesting, I'll report it back on the show. But that's the kind of stuff that really fascinates me. What kind of like science fiction technology and materials? I mean, come on. Here's your quark matter car. I mean, holy crap, or even engine. Who knows if that's even possible? It's encouraging to me because we're talking about just up-down quarks. I mean, the strange quarks are scary because you've heard of strangelets. I mean, a strangelet is a bound form of an up-down and strange quark. And that's some scary stuff because you've heard speculation that if you have one strangelet particle, it tries to make itself bigger. It basically tries to create – the least energetic thing it could do is to duplicate itself. So it's going to try and make more copies of itself. So it's the classic runaway reaction. I mean this is the speculation that if you create one strangelet, it could create a hell of a lot more, which will become a huge problem. We're not sure exactly what would happen.

E: So it's just a really scary theory right now.

B: Right.

C: Also, I love your assumption that I have heard any of this. Like you've heard of the strangelet. Nope. No, I have not.

B: Well, yeah. I mean –

E: It's a household term.

B: No, I would guess – who knows? But I would guess 20% of our audience might have heard of strangelets. I mean, of course –

C: Really? Interesting. Evan, are you in that 20%?

E: Nope. Me neither.

B: Well, Jay, have you?

J: Of course I have. I'm related to you.

B: All right. I mean I haven't –

J: I've also heard of clreamlets. You know what a creamlet is?

C: What's a creamlet?

B: It's a new type of ice cream.

J: No, it's a food product I came up with in my 20s. It's the best part of an ice cream cone. It's just the last inch of an ice cream cone.

E: The tip down at the bottom?

J: It's a cone filled with ice cream. It's bite-sized. And you throw two or three of them in your mouth.

E: And then what? And you chew and smile.

B: Yeah, but imagine if you added strange quarks to those, Jay.

C: Yeah, Jay, this is material science I can get behind.

E: It comes in strange flavours too.

Return of Astrology (45:25)

• New York Times and the Return of Astrology 

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S: We have some more pseudoscience to talk about. We're going to talk about the return of astrology.

E: Yikes.

C: Did it ever really leave?

S: Well, no, but classic pseudosciences like this do tend to wax and wane over the long period of time. Like a generation will have a flirtation with it. It will be popular for a while. Then people get tired of it. They move on to other things. They realize it's bunk or whatever, and it fades to the fringe. It never goes away entirely. And then when people, like skeptics, like, oh, we don't have to talk about that anymore, right? That's all passe. And people have forgotten about it. Then it comes back because then people are not familiar with it. Then it seems new.

E: Rediscovered.

S: It's rediscovered, yeah.

C: Hmm, given new life.

S: Cocaine had the same pattern. Like every 20 years there would be a little bit of a huge uptick and then people realize how dangerous it is and it goes away. And then it comes back 20 years later. Things like magnet therapy, all these things, they tend to come and go at a sort of a generational time scale. We've seen that with UFO, belief in UFOs comes and goes over periods of time. So apparently astrology is making a comeback after spending some time relegated to the skeptical fringe. The question is, and this is now I'm basing this partly on a New York Times article that was interesting, although said some stupid things. But I thought most of it was interesting trying to think about the different cultural forces at work that might be related to this increasing popularity of astrology in the last few years. So the article was written by Krista Burton. She was writing from the point of view of not only a woman but a member of the LGBTQ community. And she made an interesting point that I had never heard before that apparently it's very common for members of the queer community, as she says, to be into things like astrology and new age belief systems. And she attributes that to the fact that, well, mainstream religions have basically rejected us and our community. And so, of course, we reject them, you know. But paganism is pretty much wide open. And so if you're looking for spirituality in that community, you're not going to find it in mainstream religions pretty much. And so a lot of them turn to new age belief systems as a source of spirituality. So belief in astrology and crystal healing and all that sort of stuff is just huge.

C: But paganism is like an actual thing, right?

S: Yes. Wiccans Wiccans are growing in popularity recently as well.

E: Oh, boy.

C: That doesn't like subsume. I don't think that's the right word. I think I'm misusing that word. But that doesn't include things like astrology, does it? I thought it was like a very specific kind of belief structure.

B: Subsume would work.

C: Oh, it does. Good. Thanks, Bob.

S: No, but they're both similar in that they're pagan and that they are anti or at least separate from mainstream religions and that they would be open to the LGBT.

C: I see. It's not about God, but there's still magic.

S: Yes, exactly. It's spiritual but not Christian or Jewish or whatever. So there are some – let me just go over – yeah, I was thinking about it. What are all the things that could be at work here? One is just the generic ebb and flow of belief systems as we were just talking about. Another might be this turning away from mainstream religion but people still have a yearning for spirituality and there it is. And Burton also made another point which I thought was very interesting and that is belief in astrology is increasing among young millennials. And there's a recent study showing that like 18 to 24-year-olds that more than half take it somewhat seriously.

E: Wow.

C: What?

E: Wow, that's a lot.

C: Do you think it's because we're living in a very difficult time so they need something to look up to, look – be happy about?

S: Yeah. So that's another factor that people point to. So some people say because we're – yeah, the more unstable, uncertain, anxiety-provoking the times are, the more people will turn to things like this, spirituality, pseudoscience as a source of comfort. So that's another factor. But Burton says that millennials also are completely accepting of the gay community, right?

C: Yeah, even republicans, millennial right-wingers.

S: The idea that – the idea of intolerance to somebody based upon their sexual or gender choices is like totally foreign to them. It's disgusting to them. I know that I'm making huge generalizations and we're talking about a huge diverse group of people but I'm just saying there's statistically general trends. Speaking to, knowing a lot of young people my daughter's age. It's like, yeah, the idea of discriminating based upon gender or sexual identity is just anathema to them. They cannot – it's disgusting to them. They just can't conceive of it. So therefore, as part of that, they are very embracing of the LGBTQ community, right? Since they embrace astrology and everything gay is cool and hip, astrology is cool and hip. So this is Burton's hypothesis, which I think is reasonable and I never had thought about that before.

C: I think that's a stretch.

S: Maybe. Yeah, but it's interesting how – it's an interesting hypothesis and even if it's not strictly true, it shows you how complicated these cultural phenomena could be. Why is belief in astrology going up and why especially among young millennials? Well, all these sorts of things that are going on that could be potentially – you could connect the dots in lots of different ways. We're in a politically contentious time. There's the rise of the nuns, the turning away from mainstream religion, the acceptance of this community that has embraced it for their own reasons. Another factor could just be the internet, the social media, the decreasing respect for institutions and expertise and this idea that all knowledge is kind of equivalent. Anything you don't like is fake news or a conspiracy or whatever and your opinions are as good as my facts. You know what I mean? It's all just a mishmash.

C: Do you know what's a good antidote to that? There's a book that I heard of called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, How to Tell What's Really Real in a World Full of Fake.

S: Well, yeah. So exactly. I mean it is – the rise of something that has been so thoroughly debunked as astrology shows that we need to constantly keep the pressure up against pseudoscience to be educating the public about not only scientific literacy but critical thinking and skepticism. And we need to be the memory of the facts and the details about how astrology has been debunked in the past so we can jump on it when it starts to make a resurgence because you know it's going to. This is an endless, endless struggle, right? Not anything that we're ever going to achieve and be done. In a way, we are going against powerful historical and cultural trends and human nature. The enlightenment is never over. It's a constant struggle, right? It's not a destination.

E: That's right.

S: Yeah, I think this reminds us of that. In fact, we've spoken on the show about the whole Bigfoot skepticism criticism. We talked about this recently just last week I think where the idea is that skeptics shouldn't waste their time on the old classic pseudosciences because they're done. They've been debunked. Just move on. Let's get on to the interesting stuff like global warming and vaccine denial and all that stuff.

B: But they're microcosms.

S: Yeah. So in a way, first of all, I think that there's a point there in that, yes, we do have to be full service skeptics. We have to deal with them. We should focus on the important issues of the day, absolutely. But we can't completely neglect even these classic pseudosciences because as Bob says, it's a microcosm of science and critical thinking and human nature and psychology and all the things that we deal with. And you can cut your teeth on these more sort of self-contained issues. You know what I mean? Like understanding why astrology is a pseudoscience, if you really fully understood that, you would understand a lot about science and pseudoscience. You would understand why creationism is a pseudoscience and why alternative medicine is a pseudoscience and why a vaccine refusal is a problem. These are all connected ultimately.

C: And conspiratorial thinking, like you start to really understand conspiracy theories.

S: And the way people justify their belief in astrology is the same kind of psychological tricks and logical fallacies that people use to justify all their crazy beliefs. And so it's all good. It's all good fodder for promoting critical thinking. And it's good to keep the pressure on so that when a new generation starts to flirt with astrology, we could be there, hopefully gently and in a nurturing way, maybe turn them towards a source of meaning and empowerment that's a little bit more legitimate and valid like real science and critical thinking. As we are fond of saying, the universe is an amazing place without the magic. The magic is not as amazing as the universe actually is. There may be up-down quirk matter in the world. That's more exciting than freaking astrology.

E: Or psychic pigs.

S: Or psychic pigs. That's the most frustrating thing is that a lot of times pseudoscience becomes a source of empowerment and meaning and identity. And that's a shame. I've seen that in the nursing profession, which also highlights the fact that often there's an absolutely legitimate anti-mainstream, countercultural piece to all of this. So women were horribly discriminated against in healthcare. And they were sort of relegated to a subservient profession that was thought of as in the service of physicians who were male. Nurses are female and they have to be in the service of physicians who are male. The whole system was entirely sexist. And then when that started to change and with female empowerment and women's rights, et cetera, and that's all a great thing. But part of that, starting in the 1970s, some nurses used things like therapeutic touch, which is just blatant pseudoscience, in order to find empowerment for their profession. It was something that nurses could do by themselves. They owned it. It didn't have to be prescribed by a physician. It was they found it very empowering. But in my opinion, that's just victimizing them all over again because it's fake. It's fake empowerment. And then not only that, but as we talked about like with Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, savvy marketers then do it cynically. They sell fake empowerment through pseudoscience. And they do it just to make money. They're not even sincere about it. Like I think some of the nurses were. It was just, oh, we're just going to make money off of these dumb women by convincing them that buying my jade eggs and putting it up their cooch is somehow going to empower them.

C: And did you guys see – I mean I wasn't on the show last week. Did we cover what came out recently about Goop?

S: No, I heard about it.

C: How they relabeled everything on the website I think probably just to avoid legal issues in different categories. So like one category is like this is just fun. And then another category is like some people think this might be beneficial. And then the like most stringent category is like health professionals agree that this is something that we should be looking into. But they list DOs and NDs and chiropractors within the – and MDs like all together within the "health professional". So even that is like bullshit. They started subdividing the labels on their stories because so many people were like you are harming the public.

S: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of critical articles written about that. They're basically retroactively rebranding all of their nonsense as this is just for entertainment and fun. It's basically saying – like there's one article, Dr. Jen Guttner who is one of the physicians who called them out and got targeted. Yeah, she's awesome. Her title is Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop say the joke is on you if you followed their advice, which is true. If you go back now and say this is all for fun. But wait a minute. You were kind of selling this as serious medical advice and medical products.

E: There's no doubt about it. They can't do that now.

S: Retroactively you're saying, oop, just kidding.

B: Oop, goop. Oopy doop.

J: I think the behind the scenes look is that they may know it's all BS. But when you make that kind of money, all of a sudden they get very serious about the business.

C: Well, yeah. They know they can get sued if people start dying.

S: But that's exploitative in my opinion.

C: Of course. That is different than like what you're talking about. And there's shades of gray, right? A lot of these nurses who are probably empowered to go off to become midwives or doulas where there's like some legitimacy, but then it can go into the woo-woo place really easily. So I totally understand why a pregnant woman might want to have a doula, like even a scientific thinking, because they want somebody who they're hiring just for them who's like their—

S: But be science based. Do that and be science based.

C: Exactly. You can still do that. But yeah, it does open the door because it's not regulated.

S: But so much—

C: A lot of woo.

S: And that's the thing. It's like I understand why certain people may be pissed off at the elites for giving them the shaft because, yeah, there's always a power dynamic and people in power will tend to abuse it and favor themselves, et cetera. And then the elites do tend—this has happened throughout history everywhere in every society. There tends to be a greater and greater gap between the haves and have-nots. It's just a natural tendency of human society. And then there's a backlash against it. But it's unfortunate when the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, when legitimate ways of separating reality from fiction then get lumped in with the power dynamic, which is what happened with doctors and nurses, you know. It's the same thing. It's like, no, we can get rid of the bad stuff. We can get rid of the power dynamic and the sexism and racism or whatever, the colonialism, all that stuff, right? We talk about this a lot. You can get rid of that but not get rid of the good stuff, the science, the philosophy, the legitimacy, the expertise, the value the virtues. But that takes nuance and people—

C: Yeah, it has to be somewhere in the middle. And we're still not there.

S: People tend towards simplicity, which is unfortunate.

C: Because we're not in a post-racist, post-colonial, post-sexist society by any stretch.

S: We're working on it, but yeah.

C: Some of us are working on it.

E: There are pockets.

S: We're making progress.

C: Collectively, we're working on it. But that means that we do have to be mindful when we hear people having legitimate concerns about like a woman's perspective in healthcare or an indigenous perspective in psychology. It's like, yeah, that is a legitimate conversation to have and then let's go in with nuance and start excising all of the things that are pseudoscientific from those views. There's nothing wrong with that.

S: We as skeptical activists have to be very sensitive to that and we have to approach it with a lot of nuance.

C: Yeah, because if we're black and white about it, we're just as bad.

S: Yeah, we'll get lumped in, right? And that happens even despite our best efforts. Like as soon as we say, yeah there's no evidence to support therapeutic touch. You're a sexist. You're a kind of—no, no. This is pseudoscience. But anyway, one more thing I want to talk about. At the end of her article, I have to point this out. Burton writes, "Now, I'm not stupid. I may be a woo-woo crystal worshipping homosexual but I know that a polished red rock is not going to heal my tailbone. It's not going to bring my mom back either. It may do a thing. But none of us know anything about anything really. So why not be open to the posibility of hope."

E: There you go.

C: Oh no.

E: Relativism.

C: I was with her for the first half of that sentence. It's so funny.

E: Beware relativism.

S: So I know.

C: Post-modernism.

S: Yeah, it's the false equivalency that if we don't know everything, that's the same thing as knowing nothing. And therefore, let's go with our feely feelings because why not? Because we don't really know anything anyway.

E: That's just as right as anything else.

C: Well, yeah, because there is a big difference between talking about different ways of knowing and getting into a philosophical debate. Philosophical. Jeez, I haven't heard that term. Yeah. A philosophical debate about having a personal conviction of knowledge and a collective understanding of corroborative knowledge. That's two very different things. And we have to be very careful about that. Because somebody can say, I know I feel happy when I use my crystals. And nobody can argue with that. But they can't say, it's not bringing back my grandma, but we don't know why. So maybe one day it will.

S: It's a very pernicious, very pernicious philosophy because it basically boils down to believe what feels good. And believing what feels good is what leads to darkness, tribalism, feudalism, superstition. Every dark impulse that people have is justified by believing what feels good.

J: Unless that thing is back rubs, then you're good.

S: It is very, very dangerous. That engages our absolutely worst instincts, no matter how well-intentioned you may be going in. And I think that was sort of the key realization of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is all about the fact that these methods matter. And they are what is ultimately going to lift us out of the darkness. We're not going to get rid of things like slavery. For example, to use something from the time, you're not going to get rid of slavery believing in what feels good, what just supports your ego. You're only going to do that through approaching the world from a critical thinking, philosophical enlightenment perspective.

C: And that perspective has to be inclusive of everybody.

S: It's by definition. It's got to be transparent. It's got to be fair. It's got to be inclusive. Absolutely. And it's always a work in progress, but that's what we've got to be working towards. And that's why I really, really get annoyed at that perspective, that who knows kind of perspective, because it does lead to such bad things. Demonstrably so.

C: The truth is, on most of these things, we do know. On some of them, we don't. But on most of them, we do. We know that crystals don't do anything for your health. There have been plenty of double-blind controlled studies looking at all of these inert, non-medical objects and rituals, and they don't do anything. Sorry. They don't do anything.

S: Right, right. All right. Let's move on.

Antarctic Ice (1:05:24)

• Antarctica has lost three trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years time is running out for the frozen continent 

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S: Cara. So for a long time, the global warming deniers pointed at Antarctic ice to say, look, Antarctic ice is increasing. So that kind of debunks the whole global warming thing. But this story is a little more complicated than that.

C: Oh, you're right. Yeah. There was always that big land versus sea ice debate, right? And it was really confusing for a lot of people. I really think it was just kind of some mental Tetris, just to wrap people up in confusion knots, so that then they couldn't come back for the argument. But the truth of the matter is, a new study has been published. Can you guys guess? I'm assuming, Steve, you can't answer. I'm assuming none of you read the notes for the episode very closely. So how much ice do you think Antarctica has lost between 1992 and last year, 2017?

E: Measured in bags?

C: Measured in tons.

E: In tons. Tons.

C: Which I think are metric tons, T-O-N-N-E-S, because this is written by an Australian. Yeah, Australian team.

E: Trillion tons.

C: Metric tons. You think a trillion. What do you think? Bob?

B: In terms of tons, I can't even hazard a guess.

E: Come on. Hazard a guess, Bob.

C: You think it's the same order of magnitude as Evan?

B: I have no idea.

E: Express it in ten to the what?

B: I think a better answer would be how much percent has it lost.

E: That's not what she asked.

C: That requires that you know how much was there to begin with.

B: Right. But I won't even guess tons, because who the hell knows how much tons of snow is up there.

C: What do you think, Jay?

J: Oh, how much have we lost?

C: So what is that, 25 years?

E: How much has melted away?

J: I would say 175 trillion tons.

E: Oh, that's a good number.

C: The answer, and Evan's pretty close to it, is three trillion tons of ice. Three trillion tons.

E: Yeah, okay.

C: Between 92 and 2017. And this is a new analysis of satellite observations. Now, there's a big plus or minus on a lot of this, because apparently it's very hard to measure this kind of thing. And that's what most of the article that was published in Nature is about, is kind of how this was measured and what they found. It's called Mass Balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017. It was published on June 13, 2018 in Nature, the main Nature, by the IMBI, the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise. So this is what they do, is try and measure the ice sheets. And this is researchers from all over the world. The paper really does detail a lot of these changes. But then what they also did is they wrote a secondary paper, kind of an easier-to-read, I would say, response called Choosing the Future of Antarctica, where these researchers decided to model, because that's, of course, what they do, what Antarctica could potentially look like in the year 2070. And they compared two different extreme scenarios. One is if we actually affect change immediately and we stop putting emissions into the environment at the rate that we are right now. And the other is if we literally don't make any changes between now and then. Both of these are probably not realistic. It's probably going to be somewhere in the middle. What these researchers say, based on their models, is that if we were to dramatically reduce emissions, and we had a low-emission scenario because we had effective Antarctic policy and government, and we had increased... Yeah, exactly. So again, the Mass Balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017, and the response article by the same authors called Choosing the Future of Antarctica, which was published side-by-side with it. When you look at this infographic, they compare side-by-side a lot of different things. Global air temperature, sea level rise, Antarctic air temperature, the ocean temperature, acidification, all these different things. And these are directly due to Antarctic ice loss, okay? Directly due to that. So we're not talking about anything but the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean around it. If emissions are kept low, if there's effective governance globally, then we're seeing a global air temperature rise of less than one degree Celsius.

B: Okay, that's good.

C: If we make no changes, we're looking at... By 2070, we're looking at a global air temperature rise by three degrees Celsius.

B: Three! That's devastating.

C: Yeah, which is devastating. It's actually 2.9, but yeah, that's devastating. It's 0.9 versus 2.9. Sea level over the whole world, six centimeters if we make drastic changes, 27 centimeters if we make no changes now, which literally means millions, potentially hundreds of millions of people displaced. Antarctic air temperature, that's 0.9 and three, so that's pretty similar. Southern ocean temperature, gosh, the temperature of the ocean, 0.7 degrees Celsius if we make a lot of changes now, 1.9 degrees Celsius if we don't do anything. That's massive. That's the water temperature. Gosh, listen to this. The summer sea ice extent, so we've talked a lot about the difference between land ice and sea ice, so here we're talking about the sea ice. 12% loss if we make drastic changes now, so we're still going to be seeing a big change. 43% loss if we do nothing.

B: Wow.

C: 43. And the ice shelf volume is an 8% versus a 23% reduction. We know that a big outcome of this is ocean acidification and what is secondary to ocean acidification, not just a lot of changes in the balance of the ecosystem, a lot of algal blooms and a lot of jellyfish blooms and things like that, but also what is ocean acidification due to ocean creatures with shells?

S: It decalcifies them.

C: Yeah. I mean, they literally cannot persist. And this is a huge problem. It actually affects the global... There's deep stuff here. Not only does it kill off a lot of these organisms, it can affect the amount of sand that we see in the earth, which sounds crazy, but we need sand for a lot of things. There's a lot of things secondary to that. And then, of course, biological invasions. They think that we're going to see invasive species, maybe not the species count, but the incidence of biological invasions as double what it is now if we make massive change and 10 times what it is today if we don't make any effective change, which is huge because I think most ecologists agree that we're facing the, "sixth extinction" right now, or at least that we're seeing biodiversity plummeting across the globe. And can you imagine 10 times the amount of invasive events as we're seeing now? It's huge. We're also going to see a massive shift in ecosystem structure. You know, a lot of the predators are going to be dying off. And they also think as a result of this, we're going to see... This is interesting. It's like this kind of, "negative feedback loop" where more people are going to be able to go to Antarctica, which will then cause more devastation to the ecosystems there. And in addition, we'll see more resource use, so drilling for oil, overfishing, because we'll be able to pass these areas more readily with our ships. And of course, more people will be able to come. So we're already sort of seeing this problem in the Arctic Circle. And they say that they think they're going to see this in Antarctica as well. Now, they think that in the worst case scenario, we could see by 2300, which sounds like it's so crazy in the future. But guys, it's 2018 already. And remember how crazy 2018 sounded like when we were kids?

J: Yeah, of course.

E: It was just crazy.

C:' It was so far away. Yeah. So by 2300, which would be what? Your children's children's children? Something. No, maybe more than that. But whatever.

B: I'll still be around.

C: There you go. Bob will still be around. He might just be a frozen head, but he'll be here. They think that we could see three meters of sea level rise.

S: That's crazy.

C: Three meters. Can you imagine?

J: What would the world look like?

C: I know. It would be a very, very different place.

J: Most of Florida would be gone, right?

B: By Disney World.

C: Oh, I think most of every coastal city you can think of would be gone. Yeah. The continents would actually be different. They would be shaped differently with three meters of sea level rise.

B: Oh, my God. Yeah.

C: Yeah. I mean, we'd lose all our low-lying islands just completely. They wouldn't exist anymore.

B: It's easy to think that, oh, I don't live near the water. I'm fine. But if you look at things like the number of insanely hot days, there are some cities, especially some cities in the Mideast that will be so hot that they're talking mass migrations away from these areas where the temperature will get over 120, 130 regularly, like many, many more times a year than we're seeing today. I mean, imagine mass migrations trying to get away from the heat because people will be dying from heat stroke in numbers that we've never seen. Think about that.

C: Oh, yeah. People are going to die. I mean, climate change is going to effectively kill a lot of people. And I think that you're right. We're going to see that the population distribution is just very different. We are accelerating at a rate that we have never seen before, both in terms of emissions and just in terms of population and resource usage. And of course, all of these data that I was just telling you about, they're just from Antarctic sea ice loss. These are direct consequences. I'm sorry, Antarctic ice loss. These are direct consequences from that. So that's not to mention all of the other things that are happening globally due to climate change. I mean, three trillion tons of ice in only 25 years, you guys. Think about that. You know, greenhouse gases. We've got to make these massive policy changes in order to see. And this is a tough one because this requires global cooperation. And I know when I first mentioned that, like, we chuckled because it seems so far fetched. But the truth is, these numbers are getting kind of smaller and smaller. So it's one thing to say, oh, we're not very good at planning for the future. Oh, we want to make decisions that affect us now. Oh, we don't want to work with other nations because it doesn't seem like it's in our best economic interest. But hell yeah, it is. Like, this is a economic disaster. I lost everybody just then. I lost Bob. We all did.

S: We dropped Bob.

C: Can you say it again? Oh, he's not there.

J: What, you're mad at us?

C: Aren't there a lot of countries? There are, Bob. There are a lot of countries.

E: Let's list them.

C: A whole lot of them.

E: Angola, Afghanistan. Oh, there you are.

C: What did you ask? Can you ask it over again?

S: Even if you don't believe in global warming, it's a good idea to go to renewable energy.

C: Totally. Don't you want like free energy from the sun? Like, come on. It's amazing.

S: The technology is there. It's just it's there. We need to upgrade our grid. We definitely need to continue to develop grid storage options. But at this point, just continued incremental advances is enough. You know what I mean? And if we do make a breakthrough like fusion, all the better. But we don't need to.

C: No. And I personally feel, and you can take this or leave it because you may disagree with me, but I have a very activist mentality. And I think that if you're in a position where you can afford to, you're actually doing the right thing by making these kinds of changes. Because not everybody is yet. And even though it might cost you a little bit more, not only are you setting a really good example and a really good precedent, you're starting to affect these sea changes. And so, like, don't wait. Don't wait until it's 5% cheaper. Don't wait until it's, like, the best the cheapest option in front of you. If you can afford it, pay the extra whatever percent it costs to make that shift because you are leading the charge. I personally believe that.

S: Yeah. And also, like, being energy efficient, that saves you money.

C: Of course.

S: It's a win-win.

C: Yeah, in the long run. Yeah.

S: Right now, we're at the point where the win-wins are all we need. We just have to do them. We don't have to, like it's not like, oh, they want you to reduce your quality of life. No, no, no. No, no.

C: Yeah, but eventually, we're going to have to. You realize that. We're going to have rolling brownouts like they often do in India. You know, like, we're not going to be able to.

S: But we don't have to ever have that.

C: Exactly, if we make change now. But we cannot continue to live like this. Like, it's not sustainable. And we'll hold out as long as we can because we're a very, very rich nation. But eventually, we'll be hit by these problems, too.

Who's That Noisy? (1:18:50)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Atari Adventure video game

S: All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time.

J: Okay, last week, I played this noisy.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

All right, Cara, what does it sound like?

C: It sounds like Super Mario or like some sort of charge up in a video game, except there's, like, static over it. So I'm not sure what that is.

J: Not bad. Not bad at all.

E: Yeah, that's a good guess.

J: So we had some guesses. We had some people guess. We have, this was from a listener named Franziska Weers. And Franziska says, absolutely love your show. I feel like this week's noisy sounds like someone reversed the sound of Super Mario when you get one of the magic mushrooms and he grows and gets super power. Totally random guess. Well not a horrible guess because I'll give it to you that it is a video game sound.

C: I still can't get over how you guys pronounce the word Mario. I love it.

J: Mario.

E: Mario.

C: Mario.

J: Very New York. That's New York.

E: Who would Mario me?

C: Did you?

E: Yep.

C: So I take it I got it wrong.

E: Not far from being correct. Not that far.

J: We did have a winner this week and it was WM and they said it was very precise email. It was titled description. The June 16, 2018 show 675. It sounds like eight consecutive rising glissandos created on an 8-bit computer with each starting one note higher.

C: Okay.

J: Guess. This is the answer. The victory sound from the Atari Adventure video game.

C: Atari. The game was called Atari Adventure.

E: It was called Adventure.

J: Adventure. It was on the Atari platform. This was the Atari 2600. It had a cassette that you put in. So this was a pretty famous game for a couple of reasons. One was that it was fun. It was very fun to play. So you were a square dot pretty much on the screen.

E: A large pixel.

J: Yeah. Large pixel and you were moving around in and out of these different castles and you had to go through some mazes and all that. But this also happens to be the very first video game that had an Easter egg because the game developer put a hidden room in the game that a lot of people found.

E: That was so cool.

J: And he had his name in that room, which was very cool.

C: Oh, neat. And then everybody started to do that, didn't they?

J: Yeah. Most games have Easter eggs, if not at this point, all of them. Because there's little doodads that the developers put in there and a lot of times they're deliberate for fun. They want people to find them. It's a lot of interaction that way. But bottom line is back then they didn't exist. This was it. This guy hid something in the game and it was discovered by players and it was a huge deal. I remember talking about that and being like, oh my God, really? It sounded like against the law almost back then.

E: Yeah. It was as if you were breaking the game in a sense.

C: Yeah. For the younger listeners of the show, Atari is a platform that had Pong on it, right?

J: Yes.

C: We're going old school.

J: This version of Atari, it wasn't the very first version, right, Steve? I don't think it was.

C: Did it have joysticks still?

J: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: It was still joysticks.

J: It was all joystick, yeah. Yeah. You had two joysticks. You had one that was a stick and then one that was a dial.

E: That's right.

J: You swapped them out depending on what you wanted to play. Great job, WM.

New Noisy (1:22:18)

J: All right, so here we go. We have a new noisy this week and this is from a listener named Morgan Loveless.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

That's a cool noisy.

S: I like that.

C: I like that noisy.

E: Yes.

C: Got some dopamine with that noisy.

J: Yeah, definitely, right? You get a distinct satisfaction out of that. It has a very, dare I say, blaster-y sound to it.

B: Sure.

J: I think that Morgan knew exactly what he was doing when he sent me this.

C: Are you sure that Morgan's a man?

J: No. But when you hear about the details about what Morgan does for a living, then you'll think it's a man.

C: Will I? Or is that sexist?

J: It's sexist. I'm sorry.

C: I love you so much, Jay.

J: Didn't mean to be sexist.

C: No, you're amazing.

J: Oh, God. Okay, so moving onward.

S: He has a manly job. How could he?

E: That's right.

C: One of them doctor and lawyer types.

E: That's right. Go get the female nurse for me.

J: It's more like lifting really heavy things and lots of heat and stuff like that. That's all.

C: Okay.

J: All right. So if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or if you really do think I'm a sexist, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

Questions and Emails

Question #1: Polio in Venezuela (1:23:43)

S: Just one quick follow-up email. Evan, we reported last week about a possible case of polio in Venezuela and how awful that would be, but there's an update.

E: Yes, that's right, because we recorded the episode last Wednesday, and they came out with an update the following Friday, so two days afterwards. They believe a child contracted polio, polio virus, in Venezuela, showed all the symptoms, all the conditions. The initial testing said it was. The samples went out to be confirmed. So following those unconfirmed reports, which was back on June 8th, of the suspected polio reemergence in Venezuela, the final laboratory tests are in. This was just this past Friday. And they confirmed that the cause of the paralysis in the child was not wild polio virus or vaccine-derived polio virus.

C: Oh, it was neither.

E: Neither.

C: Oh, that's great.

E: Neither. That is good.

C: Did they think it was wild at first?

E: Yeah, that was one of the...

C: Yeah, obviously, that's the biggest fear.

E: ...leading candidate. But it turns out it was not that. They're still, I believe, trying to figure out exactly what it is, what it was.

C: Didn't they detect polio in his stool?

E: Yeah, it was isolated from the stool samples from the child, but the final...

C: And that still stands, right? Like somehow the kid passed polio through his stool, but he doesn't have it?

E: But he doesn't have it, right.

C: Interesting.

E: And we talked about that, the number of people who... Do you call them carriers, Steve? Is that... I don't know if that's officially...

S: If you have it but don't have an infection, then you're a carrier, yeah.

E: Then you're a carrier.

S: Or you have what's called a subclinical infection, meaning it's not manifesting.

C: Gotcha. So maybe your immune system can fight it off before it starts to overwhelm you.

S: Right.

E: Right.

C: That's interesting.

E: So the child is in... Two years and 10 months old, so sad. The child is in for clinical evaluation, and they are trying to determine what the cause of his paralysis is, and hopefully they will get to the bottom of it for the sake of the child and maybe be able to treat it in some way. But no, it is not the return of poliovirus to the Americas.

S: Which is awesome.

E: Yeah, which is good.

C: It's amazing, yeah.

E: It's still isolated to just a three... Less than a handful of countries, yeah.

S: All right, everyone, let's go on with Science or Fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:26:13)

Item #1: A new study finds that a non-antibiotic chemical often used in toothpaste can promote the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Item #2: Astronomers have discovered new exo-asteroids close to their host star by a new technique for direct observation. Item #3: Biologists have discovered a species for the first time that uses two different translations of the genetic code to translate DNA into proteins.

Answer	Item
Fiction	New technique for discovering ateroids
Science	Toothpaste
Science	DNA translations

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Cara
Jay	New technique for discovering ateroids
Evan	New technique for discovering ateroids
Bob	New technique for discovering ateroids

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. There is no theme this week, Cara, you'll be happy to know.

C: Yay.

S: Maybe you won't be so happy when you hear the news items. Item number one, a new study finds that a non-antibiotic chemical often used in toothpaste can promote the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Item number two, astronomers have discovered a new technique that allows them to identify exo-asteroids. And item number three, biologists have discovered a species for the first time that uses two different translations of the genetic code to translate DNA into protein. Cara, you missed last week. The guys swept me.

C: Really?

S: Yeah, and you missed it.

C: Wow.

E: It was, yep, a rare occurrence.

C: That's strange.

S: But that's okay. To make up for that, you'll get to go first this week.

Cara's Response

C: Oh, great.

E: Welcome back, Cara.

C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's see. Yeah, I'm very excited to be here, you guys. A new study finds that non... So the operative thing here is that there's a chemical in toothpaste which can basically promote resistance towards antibiotics and bacteria, but that chemical is not itself an antibiotic.

S: Right.

C: I could see that, though, because if it mimics an antibiotic in structure, I don't see why it would have any effect. Or if it has some sort of similar downstream action as antibiotics, even though it's not technically... Even though then it should be then not classified as an antibiotic. But yeah, I mean, that happens. I could see that happening a lot. I'm going to say that this one's true. Astronomers have discovered a new technique that allows them to identify exo-asteroids. So I don't understand. What's an exo-asteroid? Does that mean it's outside of the solar system, or does that mean that it's...

S: Yes.

C: Okay, cool. All right. Oh, I guess we probably... Those are so small, we probably can't see them. We can see exoplanets, though, so I don't see why we wouldn't be able to see an exo-asteroid. I mean, they're way smaller, sure, but at what point is something a planet or a planetoid or an asteroid? But we're not talking about comets with the tails. We're talking about asteroids, rocks, rocks that are in orbit around some sort of star. They're just really, really small. So basically, it just means our resolution is being improved. That seems believable to me. Biologists have discovered a species for the first time that uses two different translations of the genetic code to translate DNA into proteins. What does that even mean? Two different translations of the genetic code to translate... This is word confusing.

S: All right. I don't want you to be confused by the words. That means that the three-letter code... The three letters stand for one amino acid. It's using a different relationship between the three letters equal which amino acid. The basic code itself.

C: Okay. So kind of like when we would say like...

S: That's right. Different translation. How it translates the base pairs, the triplets into an amino acid is different.

C: Interesting.

S: And not only is it different, it's using two different ones.

C: Okay. So this is an alien species. Panspermia, you guys. This one seems the least believable to me. But maybe Bob is sitting there like holding his mouth being like, there's no way we could ever detect an asteroid. They're way too small. That's crazy, Cara. That's crazy. And I'm like, sure. Seems believable to me. Because I'm pretty sure we can only detect exoplanets when they like transit their stars. Like the same way we learned about Venus way back when. They'd have to be huge. They'd have to be big enough to make a blip in the light source. So I don't know. But then how big is an asteroid versus... You're killing me, Smalls. And also like why would there only be one species? Like that's nuts. You would think if we discovered this that there would be multiple.

J: At least two, right?

C: It's just weird that only one species. I mean, and you didn't say genus. You didn't say order or class. Just a single species?

J: It's got to be the octopus.

C: I know, right? And it would just be one type of octopus because there's got to be a lot of octopus species out there. So that just one seems too far-fetched to me, which means it's probably the science. But whatever. I'm going to say it's the fiction.

S: Okay, Jay.

B: Which one?

J: Right.

C: Three. I'm saying three is the fiction.

S: Translating genetic code.

E: Genetic code.

Jay's Response

J: So this one about there's a non-antibiotic chemical that is often used in toothpaste. And this can promote antibiotic-resistant bacteria. There are a lot of chemicals in toothpaste. This is scary when you think about like a non-antibiotic chemical. There's probably lots of products that have non-antibiotic chemicals out there. And now they're studying them and they're saying, hey.

B: Lots of them.

J: Some of these non-antibiotic chemicals. Yeah, but you know what I mean. Like there's just a lot o chemicals.

C: Yeah, all products.

J: No, no.

C: Other than antibiotics.

J: But a non-antibiotic chemical that could have an effect on bacteria though, right?

C: Yes. Very scary.

J: Like there's something specific when we say it's antibiotic. Yeah. Okay. And it would have to be on that scale if you think about it. Everybody's using toothpaste every day, or at least you should be. Huh. Okay. All right. I could buy that. Cara did bring up some good points about this exo-asteroid. So I asked the same questions that Cara did. Like how big would this thing have to be if it's outside of our solar system? And how big is an asteroid? Well, of course they vary in size, but they're not as big as planets are.

C: Oh, Jay.

J: Yeah.

C: I'm getting nervous here.

J: How would they see it? That's the question. And Cara asked it. How would they see the asteroid if it's not actually transiting in front of something? Next. This last one here, biologists discovered. These biologists discovered for the first time, Bob, that two different translations of genetic code to translate DNA into proteins. So that, man, wow. That, wow. That's like Bob's news item where we have new materials. You know, like it's a huge thing. So that seems the least likely out of all three of these. I'm kind of agreeing with Cara, but I don't know, man. That second one there is sneaky because it seems so like, ah, no problem, right? They just found a new way to see exo-asteroids. You know? What to do?

S: Pick. That's what you got to do.

J: I'm going to GWB.

E: Wait a minute. What? Bob hasn't gone yet.

J: Whatever Bob picks.

E: Oh, that's a... Can you do that?

C: You can't do that.

J: No one ever said you can't.

E: Let me look up the rules here.

C: That's why he waited. That's why he didn't ask Bob.

J: Wait, hold on. Wait, Steve, hold on. I'm looking up the rules.

C: That's like a blind bet you can't do it.

E: Subsection G.

J: Yeah, hold on. There's a lot of paper here. Hold on.

E: Fourth paragraph.

S: I'm looking up the rules too, which are just entirely in my head, and you can't do that.

J: Wait. I'm on page 45.

C: So that means A, that he's going to pick Bob last, and B, Bob's answer is going to be right.

J: And this one about the exo-asteroid just seems too simple. What's the opposite of this? That they didn't find it? I can't think of what the null factor here is for the second one.

C: Oh, interesting.

B: Or he made it up out of whole cloth. Hello?

C: Yeah, he does that sometimes.

E: It's true. He's been known to do that.

C: Yeah, and he's good at making stuff up. The liar.

J: I'm going to go with the exo-asteroid.

C: Crap.

S: Okay, Evan?

Evan's Response

E: They all seem like fiction to me, all three. But I think the exo-asteroids, one is the most fictitious of them all.

C: Fictitious?

E: I think Steve's used that word before.

C: Well, I'll put it down for both of you.

J: Cara, you're awesome.

E: Because that one tastes the strangest of the three. I'll have to go with that one. I'll go with Jay.

S: That was me doing my character from The Simpsons, the religious next door neighbour.

E: Oh, Ned Flanders.

S: Ned Flanders. That was my Ned Flanders.

C: Fictitious.

S: All right, Bob. It's up to you.

Bob's Response

B: All right, yeah. This is a really good one, Steve. Start at the top here.

C: Bob sounds confident AF.

B: No, no. You're totally misreading me.

C: You're a terrible bluffer.

B: No, I mean, no need to bluff. This was especially since I'm going last. So let's see. New antibiotic. Yeah, I like what Cara said. It could be chemically. The structure could be chemically close enough where it's kind of can use it to become antibiotic resistant. Or more so. So that certainly seems plausible. The third one. Yeah, that's dicey as hell and really fascinating but doesn't surprise me. I mean, sure, it's a very interesting discovery buthere's nothing there that makes me think that's impossible biologically. Or incredible unlikely. Even the astronomy one, guys. Exoplanets, it's sure. It's really small. And I'm really skeptical about this one. And for the record, there's a lot of techniques for finding exoplanets. I think there's like four or five.

C: Interesting. Not just transit.

B: Radial velocity. Yeah, radial velocity, transit, direct imaging, microlensing.There's lots of different ways. But you need, typically, it's something much bigger. Now, the microlensing could find asteroids in aggregate. But that's really difficult. You need a perfect setup and then you can only detect them once.

C: And also remember though, re-read the item.

B: It's a new technique.

C: Yeah, it's a new technique.

B: So it's something, it can't be any one of those singly, itcan be perhaps a combination that's never been tried before. That's possible. But more likely it's just a completely new technique and I'm having trouble trying to think of what the hell that is. My guess is that it's the DNA one or the asteroid one. If that's how I feel that probably means that it's the antibiotic one. But I'm not terribly confident. I'll go with the exoasteroid because they are tiny as hell. Cara, don't be worried, I'm almost as confident that you probably are right as well. This is not confident AF scenario for me at all.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: All right, so the guys all went for the exoasteroids, and Cara is left twisting in the wind by herself with the genetic code. So you all agree in the first one, so we'll start there. A new study finds that a non-antibiotic chemical often used in toothpaste can promote the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. You all think this one is science, and this one is science.

J: All right.

C: There was a part of me that wanted us to be swept.

S: At least you have company, right, Cara? So Evan, you hit upon it.

J: Don't turn your back on me, Cara.

C: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

S: Evan, you hit upon it. It is triclosan is the chemical. It is a non-antibiotic antimicrobial.

C: Oh, he knew the name of the chemical. That's awesome.

S: Not all antibiotics, it's an antimicrobial.

E: Antimicrobials.

S: Antimicrobials are not all necessarily antibiotics. So it's more of a antiseptic kind of agent.

C: Like alcohol?

S: Yeah. It doesn't work by an antibiotic mechanism. So the question is, could the use of triclosan-containing products like toothpaste, although it was banned in the U.S., toothpaste or hand cleanser, could that lead to resistance to other antibiotics? And they found that it could, which it is kind of scary.

C: Is that why it was banned here? Or was it banned for some other purpose?

S: I think mainly because it didn't work. The FDA reviewed it for like a year and said, all right, you guys, you have a year to prove that it works. And if you can't prove that it works, we're taking it off the market. And that's what happened.

C: But now we know it negatively works. Yay.

S: So they looked at wild-type E. coli after 30 days of exposure to triclosan. And essentially the exposure did produce a selective pressure, which upregulated genes that are associated with antibiotic resistance, even multi-antibiotic resistance.

C: Gross. Ew. E. coli? Like tooth poop bacteria?

S: Tooth poop. Upregulation of genes encoding beta-lactamases and also multi-drug efflux pumps. So in other words, the pumps that the bacteria would use to get rid of the drugs, to pump them out of their system. So in dealing with that, it would also give them resistance to antibiotics, right? So that's unfortunate. But it's at least good to know. And this could provide extra impetus for a more widespread reduction in the use of antibiotic soaps and putting them into toothpaste, antimicrobials in soaps and toothpaste. Because you don't really need them. And it's just contributing to antibiotic resistance, even if it's a little bit.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right. Let's take these in order. We'll go to number two. Astronomers have discovered a new technique that allows them to identify exoasteroids. The guys think this one is fiction. Cara thinks this one is science. I do want to say first that not all asteroids are tiny. You know that Ceres, right? Ceres was originally classified as a planet. Then it was downgraded to an asteroid.

B: It's a 100 miles, right?

S: Yeah. So the Ceres for most of its life was classified as an asteroid. It makes up 25% of the mass of the asteroid belt. And now it's a dwarf planet, although some astronomers still consider it as both an asteroid and a dwarf planet. And yeah, so this is a new technique, right? It's not any of the techniques that you mentioned, Bob. Have you ever heard of quantum flux lensing, Bob?

B: I have not.

C: Sounds like something Bob would be waiting on.

E: What?

S: That's because I just made it up because this is the fiction.

C: Ah, crap.

E: That guy scared me there for a second.

C: Oh, wait. Does that mean I got it right?

S: No, it means you got it wrong.

C: No, I got it wrong. I'm opposite. I'm opposite all the guys. Crap. You just straight up made this up.

S: Yeah. I straight up made it up.

E: Oh, it's wholesale. It's whole cloth fiction.

C: It's so annoying.

B: Good one, though.

S: But there was an item.

C: I'm going to go back through all of the exoplanets and see if any of them could qualify as asteroids.

S: No. So this was based on a real item, though, that I couldn't make a fiction by just tweaking it. I had to make it up whole cloth. This is a new technique for imaging exoplanets. They didn't find new exoplanets with the technique, but they have used it to look back at imaging data from known exoplanets. This is a way of separating exoplanets from their host star. The way they do this is to look at light spectra for specific molecules that would exist in the planet, but not the star.

C: Is that really new? I thought that my friend did this for her dissertation.

S: Well, they might have been working on it, but now they were able to do it.

C: Oh.

S: Because things don't come out of the blue, right? They looked at some images down to the pixel levels. Even at a single pixel, there's still a spectrum of light in that pixel. If you look at, for example, H2O, water vapour, the star becomes invisible because there's no water vapour in the star, but the planet is visible. If they look at something that's not in that planet, like they looked at methane and there was no methane in the atmosphere of this planet, the planet also becomes invisible. The planet disappears. But it's a way of separating out a close-up planet, a planet that's relatively close to its host star from the blinding glare of the star itself by just imaging it in a spectrum that exists in the planet, but not the star. That's the new technique.

C: And what did you call the technique?

B: Quantum flux.

S: Quantum lensing.

C: I'm like, of course he would have heard of that. That's like Bob's wet dream.

B: Quantum flux capacitor, maybe?

E: Nano quantum flux.

Steve Explains Item #

S: All right, so let's go on to number three. Biologists have discovered a species for the first time that uses two different translations of the genetic code to translate DNA into proteins. This is very interesting science. This would have gotten me, if this is the one that would have gotten me.

C: Thank you, Steve.

S: Because this ain't supposed to happen, right? This breaks the last universal DNA rule, right?

C: Yeah, they call this the dogma, the central dogma of, it's like, come on.

S: But there's always an exception out there, right? So it's a yeast. So they found a yeast that translates, and it's just one trinucleotide, one of the three letter codes. So the CGA, normally CTG binds to the codes for the amino acid leucine. But in this species of yeast, it translates into serine or alanine, one or the other at pretty much 50-50 at random.

C: So wait, so this species can't make leucine at all?

S: Well, no. Probably something else codes for leucine. It's redundant. There's always multiple codes for each amino acid. But instead of a leucine, there's either a serine or an alanine, and they found out that that's because of the transfer RNA. It makes two different kinds of transfer RNA. One will pick up the serine and one will pick up the alanine.

C: So it's still predictable. That's really neat.

S: It's unpredictable. It's unpredictable. So for the first time, you cannot predict the protein from the DNA because it depends on what transfer RNA.

C: They can figure out what transfer RNA is involved then.

S: Yeah, but each time it makes a protein, it just picks one at random, picks one of those two at random.

C: Oh, I see. Interesting.

S: But they also find that... So this is some kind of weirdo mutation, right, in the yeast, and you would think that these would kill themselves off pretty quickly, right, that they wouldn't work. And also, these amino acids have very different properties, so it would dramatically change the structure and therefore the function of the protein. It wouldn't be a silent mutation, right? These are different amino acids. One's hydrophobic and the other one would be on the outside. But what they found is that the yeast deals with the problem because it developed a way of basically skipping over the sections that have the CTG in it. So it tries to just avoid those parts of the protein that would be screwed up by it.

C: Oh, so it just translates using the redundant...

S: It just works around it.

C: Gotcha. But like it still makes those amino acids, it just uses the other codes for it.

S: It does.

C: Interesting.

S: So they think that this yeast is about 100 million years old, so this has been doing this for a while. But it just evolved a fix, it evolved a jury rig.

C: So it thinks it's 100 million years old and there's not been a secondary evolutionary event at all in 100 million years from this one species of yeast? This is so hard to believe.

J: I know. It still is hard to believe.

C: Single species.

S: Think about it, though, Cara.

C: There's not like a class of them or a genus of them.

S: Think about it. Think of how phenomenally conserved the genetic code is. So from that perspective, it makes sense. So even when these weirdos arise, rarely, they don't spread and proliferate, they wipe themselves out.

C: Yeah. But what we're saying here is that it's a neutral mutation, it's not a deleterious...

S: This is not a neutral mutation, though. But the thing is, it had to simultaneously evolve a fix or it eventually evolved the fix so that it could survive.

C: Yeah. So the net effect is neutral. It's not deleterious. So it's interesting to me that you wouldn't at least see some differentiation, like that you wouldn't see a couple other species.

S: Again, it's a yeast. Maybe there are, but they've only found one so far.

C: Yeah. They're going to start looking, they're going to find a bunch, and I'm going to try and get my win back.

S: This is true for right now, but they may find... It is the first. It didn't say the last, right? I mean, this is the first. There may be some...

C: You and your pedantry.

S: There may be some species that they discover that also, but it's interesting that it just quickly enough evolved the fix that it could survive with this, and so it persisted. It was allowed to endure. But yeah, it makes sense that we don't see a lot of these things because this is such a highly conservative feature of all life on Earth.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:47:50)

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year, and yet far too little for the next 10. — Neil Armstrong

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

E: All right. "Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year, and yet far too little for the next 10." Neil Armstrong said that.

S: Really?

E: Yes. The Neil Armstrong.

J: Oh, cool.

E: And I like it because we need to be a little bit more... It's true, and even back then, 70s, you needed to be more forward thinking about the long-term effect of things and have a little more perspective on the larger picture in a lot of things, and that's very true. With science and the challenges we're facing that are science challenges, global warming I think is the prime example of that.

S: Yeah, but this is a generic feature of futurism that has been observed for a long time is that we tend to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long-term progress.

E: 5 to 10 years.

S: And we see this with science fiction movies, right? So you have a science fiction movie that's set 10 years, 20 years in the future. It massively overestimates the advances that we make. But if you look 100 years in the future, we probably are massively underestimating transformational changes that nobody saw coming. I remember seeing a 1920s movie about the 1980s, and it was ludicrous. I mean...

E: Living in airships.

S: Well, no, but they had weird things, but they completely missed all the real innovations, and they completely underestimated how transformed the world was going to be by the end of the century.

J: And you can't blame them either, by the way.

S: You can't, not at all. But just by looking back on it, you're like, oh my God, they extrapolated all the wrong things in all the wrong way, and they missed everything. They couldn't have been more wrong in terms of their vision of... First of all, it's the 1980s, and everyone is dressed in 1920s fashion.

C: Which is not that unbelievable.

S: That was just lazy. A woman literally goes to a vending machine on the corner and gets a baby out of it.

E: The Stork-O-Matic 3000.

S: Yeah, whatever. But but no cell phones, you know?

C: Yeah, that's the one thing they never, ever thought to invent in their futurism.

S: Right. Exactly. It's funny. It's funny. And obviously, I would love to see what the world is like in 100 years and compare that to our futurism. It'd be fascinating. Fascinating.

E: Oh, gosh.

C: Well, I think that we've gotten really good at the dystopian future, which unfortunately might not be far from the truth.

E: The smoldering ruin char of a planet. Nice.

S: All right, guys. Well, good job, boys. Cara. Hey. You've been having a good year.

J: Maybe next week.

C: I know.

S: You've been having a good year. So occasionally taking your lumps, you know?

C: Yeah. All right.

S: You're probably still ahead of the game, so don't worry about it.

C: I hope so. Thanks for the words of encouragement, Steve.

S: I'll see what I can do about that, but for now, you're probably still ahead of the game. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

J: You got it.

C: Thanks, Steve.

B: Sure man.

E: Thanks, Steve.

Signoff

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

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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