SGU Episode 986

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SGU Episode 986
June 1st 2024
"The Egyptian pyramids have fascinated people probably since their construction between 4700 and 3700 years ago."
SGU 985                      SGU 987
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he hasn't formed any idea of them already; the simplest thing can't be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.
Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer?
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, "Can I pet that dog" video

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, May 29^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Can I pet that dog? Hi, everyone. Look it up. It's cute.

S: I have not seen that. Can I pet that dog? Is that what you're saying?

C: Yeah.

E: Yes. Yes. Okay. It's a video. It's a 10-second clip. It's a little girl on a porch, but a bear comes up to the porch.

S: Black bear?

C: Like a baby bear.

E: Yeah, like a baby bear.

C: Black bear. Black bear.

E: And the camera is going back and forth kind of between the little girl and the dog, and she's saying, can I pet that dog? Can I pet that dog?

C: And they're like trying to pull her back into the house, like, no.

E: But, of course, me, I'm never satisfied with just seeing is believing kind of thing. So I did a little deeper dive into this.

C: Of course you did, Evan.

E: And what it is, it's actually not the little girl who said it. It happened in another video in which just some little boy is saying it, like in his kitchen about petting a dog. But then they took that audio and they put it over on top of the bear girl video, and it's much cuter.

C: Are you sure?

E: Yes.

C: Oh, that's such a bummer.

E: Oh, I'm sorry. Spoiler alert.

C: Because I know that like—

S: Everything is fake, Cara. Everything is fake.

C: I know they do that a lot where like somebody will take somebody else's audio and like overdub it. But this video looks—I wonder what the little girl was saying.

E: Yeah, right? Yeah.

C: That's a bummer.

E: I can't—right, I could not find the original source material or a longer clip of the video. But certainly the can I pet my dog is a meme unto itself, and it's everywhere. You can—it's still cute. I don't think it detracts.

C: Huh, that's so interesting.

S: Yeah, that—a baby bear. You stay far and away from that thing because where there's a baby bear, there's a mama bear.

E: Yep. An unhappy mama bear.

J: Yeah, the thing about that video that is disturbing to me is like they didn't immediately bring that kid in the house and shut the door. Like they were acting very calm that there was a 200, 300-pound bear like two feet from her daughter.

E: A little too casual?

Steve's Starlinked cabin; internet monopolies (2:22)

S: So you'll notice that the show went up on time this weekend. I was in New Hampshire in the middle of freaking nowhere. So this cabin that we got, no 5G. Like there's no phone, no phone service. The only connection we had to the universe, the outside world, was through a Starlink.

C: Nice.

E: And it worked?

S: It worked really, really well. It's very impressive.

E: Wow.

S: Actually, I was checking multiple times over the weekend. I had an—I averaged 300 megabytes per second download.

J: That's not bad.

S: That's good. That's straight-up broadband.

B: That's solid, man.

S: And I had 20 megabytes upload, which was fine. I got the show—this is my benchmark, right? The show uploaded in less than a minute.

C: This is such a weird American thing, though, isn't it? Like I have really fast internet at my house. I pay for like the fanciest internet. I'm in a huge city in L.A. and I'm checking right now. But I want to say my internet is like 900 megs down or something like that. But then, yeah, fastest download, 945 megs, fastest upload, 41. Why are uploads throttled so much?

S: Because most people use it for streaming and downloading and stuff, and they don't use it for uploading large files or they're not streaming to the internet all the time. I know like my—now that I have fiber optic at the SGU studios, right, we're basically a gig down and up.

C: I'm so jealous.

S: Yeah, because it's fiber optic. But the cable company for years, I'm like, I got the—I want the business cable.

C: Yeah, that's what I have.

S: Because we stream from our basement. So they kept increasing the download, but the upload never got past like 20 or 30 megabytes per second.

J: I know. Isn't that crazy?

S: They throttle the crap out of it. I'm like, you realize this is business cable, right? You realize I'm a business. I am streaming, and that's why I'm paying you guys for business cable. But they just didn't get it.

C: And mine is fiber, and it's still throttled.

E: Is there a direct relation? In other words, if they increase the upload speed, they would have to decrease the download speed?

S: Yeah. Yeah.

C: Oh, they'd have to decrease it, you're saying?

S: Yeah. It's a finite bandwidth, and they just give 90% to download and 10% to upload. They could make it whatever they want.

E: Okay. Well, they must know what works best for most.

J: Yeah, that's right. They probably have statistics that shapes that. Most people aren't uploading. I mean, it's happening more now than it ever did, but still.

C: Yeah. Why don't they have an upload choice?

J: Exactly.

C: Like a choice that gives you more upload.

J: That's what I was going to say, Cara. But they should create a freaking one that's like, hey, do you need to be an uploader? I just don't know if they can do that. It's more of like, here's the pipe. This is how we've set it up, and they can't make it different for this house versus that house.

S: Again, I get that. But when you get business account, that should be different. I thought that was going to be 50-50, but no. I get it for residential. Most people are streaming to their TV. I get it.

C: I have the best plan they give you. You can't get a better plan than what I have.

J: The fiber optic here, like Steve said, 1,000 up, 1,000 down.

C: That's amazing.

J: It was like $30 less a month than Xfinity.

E: Wow.

C: Well, and I feel like this is another, I mean, not to get too political here, but table company, how are they not in violation of antitrust laws?

E: Because they're going out of business on their own?

C: They have a massive monopoly. Well, no, I just mean telecom in general.

S: That was the way America did it, which is very different than Europe. With America, it was, well, who's going to pay for that last mile to every individual house? It's like, I want to own the backbone and make all the money off of that, but who's going to pay to install cable to that last mile to every house? And the deal was, well, we'll do it, but then we want exclusivity. So then companies bid for a region, and then they became the sole offer of cable to that region, which was terrible.

C: Because that's the whole point of why we did that.

S: Yeah, because there was no competition. They could abuse their companies, and the cable companies became infamously evil for their ability to screw us over because of their monopoly. It was just a-

E: They did. They wore tall hats and fake moustaches, went through the roof.

S: It was a bad system.

J: They made their money back. So they get the monopoly, right, in these different regions, and it was a handful of companies. I mean, we're talking about four or five companies. You know what I mean? It was not that many companies. All of that is regulated, and they've done things to control it politically and all that, and finally, that is starting to break open here in the United States. Now, keeping in mind that the United States already has a fiber optic backbone and has had it for a long time. That's the backbone, though, not to the door, like Steve said, not to people's houses, and they've been in court for decades. You know what I mean?

E: I know. It's a long time.

J: It's crazy. This is where regulations and monopolies and all that stuff, like you think particularly the U.S. would be sensitive to that shit. They're not. It's all lobbying and all that crap. It's just-

C: And isn't fiber mostly buried?

J: Yeah.

C: Yeah.

S: No.

C: No, it's not?

S: It's run along the same-

C: Oh, is it? Okay.

S: -the telephone lines on the poles. The backbone might be, but the fiber optics running right along next to the cable and phone lines and all that other stuff on the poles, yeah, it's really expensive to bury lines.

C: Ours is buried in my community, but-

E: Well, you're a new developer.

S: In most urban areas, they do bury the lines, yeah, but-

E: Yeah, especially newer ones.

S: In suburban and rural areas, it's very rare.

C: I see. That's why. Yeah, because I'm looking up, is it always buried? And it's like, no, it's not always buried, but a lot of municipalities prefer that it be buried.

J: And they want to bury it anyway because it protects the cables from environmental damage. They are very break-easy. You know what I mean? They're breakable.

C: Oh, yeah. I'm seeing here they should always be buried beneath the frost line.

S: I think they should bury all the lines, but it'd be expensive.

C: Me too.

S: Imagine how much prettier things would look. Plus, in Connecticut-

C: Oh, my gosh. It'd be so nice.

S: We lose the power on a regular basis every time there's a bad ice storm or something.

E: Right, because the big trees fall down.

S: And they have to maintain the trees. They've got to cut through the trees and everything. It's terrible. It's just terrible.

C: Also, think about how often you see a pole that only has a phone line that you know nobody is using. If we could rip down all of those phone lines, it would clear-

S: Yeah, but again, the regulations don't often keep up with-

C: Yeah, it's such a bummer.

J: When we do stuff like that, Cara, this is, I think, version 2.0 of the United States grid. We need to do stuff like that. We need to harden our grid, and even wires to your home need to be hardened and protected. And burying is fantastic.

C: Yeah, it's a win-win. It protects them more, and it would be like, call it a beautification project, and everybody would get behind it.

J: I've got to tell you, I never got more excited about something related to the internet than when I saw the trucks pull up in my neighbourhood, and they started digging those trenches in my front yard to bury the wire. And I knew it instinctively. The nerd in me was like, that's fiber optic.

E: Did you run out and thank them, like the French did?

J: I was throwing those guys sodas like nobody's business. But it did take eight, nine months before that happened, and when I was able to get it. It takes a long time to build up that infrastructure.

S: I get the feeling like this is an off-the-cuff conversation, and we acknowledge that. No one's done the deep dive research on it, so I'm sure.

E: We'll still get 24 emails, though.

S: I know, everything we're saying is very superficial, and the experts are like, oh, you're getting this wrong, you're getting that wrong.

E: Oh, just a bunch of stuff.

S: Fair warning. We know, seriously, we may need to do a deep dive on this, where we actually look up the info.

C: Oh, that's a good idea.

E: A deep dive on burying lines, I like.

S: Yeah, yeah.

Quickie with Steve: New Gene Editing Tool (10:18)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

S: But anyway, I have a quickie for you guys.

J: Go ahead. Shoot.

E: Quickie with Steve.

S: Yeah, quickie with Steve. So this is a yet a new gene editing system.

J: What?

S: This one, you guys are just getting used to CRISPR. This is MOBE.

B: MOBE.

S: Have you heard of this, Bob?

B: A little bit, yeah. I haven't done a deep dive on it, though, what's going on?

S: MOBE, multiplexed orthogonal base editor. You barely have memorized, or maybe you haven't memorized what CRISPR stands for.

B: I have! Clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats.

E: Bob, okay.

S: That's right. Now you have to memorize MOBE, multiplexed orthogonal base editor.

B: Just give me a year.

C: It's shorter. It's shorter.

S: It's a little bit shorter. So the base editors themselves are not new. What's new about this one is it's multiplexed and orthogonal.

E: Multipass.

S: Yeah. So a base editor, so with CRISPR, you make a double cut to the strand, and then you leverage the repair mechanism of the cell in order to insert new genetic material, right? You're like inserting a gene, or maybe you can use it to turn off and then turn back on a gene, or you're using it to just like permanently double cut the DNA to kill the cell, right? It's like if you're targeting a cancer cell, you want to make a few cuts in the DNA in sequences that only exist, that are unique to the cancer, right? To sort of target cancer, whatever. That's CRISPR. The MOBI system, the base editing is you make one base pair edit. C to T, G to A, right? That's it. You're not slicing. You're not inserting a whole gene. You're just making one edit. So what do you think that kind of genetic manipulation would be useful for?

B: Like single point genetic diseases, right?

S: Yeah. Yeah. Creating them, actually. Because for research purposes, you could take an animal and you could just create you could create a breed of rats or whatever that has whatever point mutation genetic disease you want. So it'd be a boon to research. Of course, you could also go the other way and you could fix point mutations, but we'll get to that in a second. But that's a different beast, because then you've got to get into a human, a living human and get to their cells. And that's the hard part, is vectoring the cells, not doing the genetic manipulation once you're there. Although you could do the whole sickle cell thing where you take the bone marrow out of the body, then you do whatever you want to it, and then you put it back in. So that may be a way of fixing point mutations for those diseases where there's tissue you can take out of the body. What's new with this system is that it's able to make multiple point edits at the same time and multiple different point edits. With one go, it could do a C to T cytosine to thymine and guanine to adenosine change. So it's much more efficient. But also, the recent study looking at where they were showcasing this new technology, it's much more accurate. So they use the term crosstalk to refer to when you make a gene edit somewhere else, somewhere you're not supposed to. Making an individual change resulted in crosstalk, unwanted mutations, about 30% of the time.

C: That's not good.

B: Was it that high?

S: Yeah, 30%. But with this technique, with MOBI, they reduced it to 5%.

E: Oh, goodbye CRISPR.

S: And they were... No, but totally different.

E: No, I'm kidding.

S: Just so you know, it's a totally different type of edit. It's a complementary, not replacement. And they were able to, meanwhile, their rate of successfully making the desired change was increased to 30%. So you get the change you want 30% of the time, only 5% of the time do you get unwanted changes. And you can do multiple changes at once, even if they're different. This is, again, in the short term, this is going to be for research and it's going to be a huge boon to genetic research, especially for single point mutation diseases. But who knows what other applications will come down the line.

News Items

3D Printed Superalloy (14:35)

• US economy to benefit from NASA investment in 3D-printable superalloy 

J: All right, Jay, you're going to tell us about some other cool technology. Tell us about this new 3D printed super alloy.

J: Yeah. So we've talked about 3D printing quite a bit. You know, the SGU bought a 3D printer. We used one to make a lot of the parts that we needed for our game show for Boomer versus Zoomer. You know that, Steve?

S: Yeah. Yeah, I know.

J: And they're fantastic. There's some incredibly high end 3D printing going on out there that uses all different types of materials.

S: By the way, to all our listeners out there, if you have any really cool 3D printing files you want to send us, please feel free.

J: Yeah, we're always looking for something cool that we've been wanting to make like a SGU swag item that's 3D printed. So I always have my eye out for 3D printing news and I came across this one that is really freaking awesome. So this is called the GRX-810 or 810, whatever. It's an advanced super alloy that was developed by NASA and they specifically designed it to be a high temperature resistant alloy. They say that it will be used in aerospace and I'm sure that they're going to be planning on using it for like rocket engines and things like that. So it's 3D printable. This is what they're saying, right? They're saying it's very durable, it's very strong, and its heat resistance is excellent and it also can be resistant to oxidation. So the key features of this, of the GRX-810 nickel alloy, is that so the high temperature resistance can go up to and over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,093 degrees Celsius. So they can use it in liquid rocket engine injectors, combustors, turbines, other hot areas of different components. So it's super, super useful. This is the one that really got me excited about it, the enhanced durability. So they're saying that this alloy demonstrates a lifespan of up to 2,500 times longer than conventional nickel-based alloys. So these alloys, they're comparing them to alloys that are under high temperature and high stress and it's 2,500 times longer lifespan. That is incredibly significant. When you extend the operational lifespan of components like that, it saves an incredible amount of money. It's much, much safer, right? There's less error points. Every time that they fix a jet airplane, mistakes can be made. The less you have to do repairs and the less times that it has to be repaired, the better. This is just a great upgrade to those really, really intense materials that they use for super high temperatures and flexibility and things like that.

B: Jay, this article is saying that it's 3.5 times better at flexing before breaking and twice as resistant to oxidation damage.

J: Yeah, Bob, it also can, when it gets to temperature, it's really good at dealing with the heat and it doesn't malform as quickly. There's all these other properties that they're finding about it. So they're saying the improved strength of the GRX-810's microstructure, that comes from nanoscale oxide particles, which they're saying that it's enhancing the mechanical properties and allows it to endure higher stress levels without degrading. And I know that sounds kind of blasé, but that's a big deal, right? So what we're saying is that these parts can be really, really pushed much farther now with this alloy. They're just not going to break and malform. And being resistant to oxidation is huge. It's twice as resistant to oxidation damage compared to existing materials. So extreme environments, with all the things that we're going to be doing on the moon and beyond, we need materials like this to help us build things that are going to last longer. And the innovative manufacturing angle is a big deal. So they developed it using advanced computer modeling combined with laser 3D printing. And it allows for the precise control over the composition and the properties. So they were able to manufacture this thing that just a handful of years ago we could not manufacture, which I just think is really cool. So the alloy was created by NASA engineers and researchers, two people in particular, Tim Smith and Christopher Kantos.

B: Way to go, Tim and Chris.

J: Yeah, right? Thanks, guys. They're at NASA's Glenn Research Center. And through the technology transfer program, I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this. I'll tell you about it in a minute.

B: That's cool.

J: NASA has licensed the GRX-810 to four US companies, Carpenter Technology Corporation, Elementum 3D, Lind Advanced Material Technologies, and Powder Alloy Corporation. And the reason why they're doing this is they want to help these companies to integrate this new material into aviation and space industries for the singular goal to drive innovation and economic growth, which is great. Because NASA spends a ton of money. They come up with these technologies and materials and different things. Yeah.

B: Commercialize it. Yeah. It's great.

C: Well, they also make money by selling it.

J: Absolutely. Yeah. And the technology also is there. Like, here you go, guys. Here's technology. Use it.

C: But you know who sadly doesn't make money is the actual researchers.

S: But I don't know.

C: Usually it's the university.

S: I don't know about that, Cara. Because what they say, you may be right in this case, but what you didn't say, Jay, is that NASA leases the patents to these companies. So that means at least NASA will be getting paid for that.

C: That's what I meant. Yeah. That's what I meant.

S: I don't know. They may in turn have an agreement with their researchers.

C: Maybe. But usually like, you know. Tech transfer is a common –

B: Part of their job.

C: There's an office of tech transfer at most major universities. And that's what they do, right? Researchers who work there.

S: Yeah. But the researchers make money off the patents.

C: Sometimes.

S: Well, at least – all I can tell you is I know at Yale, if you're a researcher and something that you discover, invent, whatever, gets patented, Yale will work with you to make this all happen. And then they get their cut and you get your cut.

J: Yeah. They give you an extra dollar, right, Steve?

E: Would you invent?

C: But very often it is the university that was employing you that owns the IP.

B: Yeah. That's –

S: It depends on what your agreement ahead of time is.

C: True. True.

J: Yeah. And I think at this point I'm sure – I mean I'd like to hear directly from these people but I'm sure that there is some type of incentivizing going on. But who knows, right? I mean look, the corporate world is pretty rough out there and I've never worked for the government. I don't know how tight the government is but I can only imagine. But anyway, I had never heard about the technology transfer program and I'm pretty excited about it. I mean I've heard of NASA creating things in the past and I'm going to ask you guys a question coming up. But let me tell you about the technology transfer program a little bit. So what it does is it's a NASA initiative and what their goal is, is to ensure that the technologies that are developed for space missions are made available for commercial use and public benefit. So what they end up doing is they identify patents, licenses that NASA developed technologies and they pass them over to U.S. companies and other organizations and the idea is to help translate taxpayer-funded research into practical applications. You know, there's a lot of really good things that they're trying to do here. The bottom line is that it's touched several industries, aerospace, healthcare, manufacturing, a whole bunch of other industries. It does contribute to companies furthering the innovations themselves and improving on those technologies. They've contributed over 2,000 technologies to the commercial sector so far. And I'm curious to hear what you guys think about this. So if you were to try to name some of those technologies, what would they be?

C: Probably most things. Like there's probably a lot of things.

J: Well, there's one thing in particular that we keep hearing like Velcro, right?

C: Oh, that's funny.

J: I researched it. Because I was like, where is this? I'm looking at the list and where is it? And it turns out that NASA did not develop Velcro.

C: Oh, that's funny.

J: I know. And so one thing that I'm like, oh, I know that. I'm sure that Velcro's on the list.

S: One thing you think you know turns out to be a myth.

E: Well, the other thing is Tang, but you know.

C: Oh, Tang.

J: So this Velcro was invented by a Swiss engineer named George.

S: George Velcro?

J: DeMestral. And check this out.

B: His dog, right? His dog.

J: Yes, he got the idea because burs were sticking to his dog's fur. And he's like, how does that work? And that turned into freaking Velcro, man, which is fantastic. But there's things that they have created that have gone out where you're like, what? How does that go back to NASA? But here's some of the things I found out. Like a wireless arthroscope, Steve?

S: Arthroscope.

J: So a minimally invasive surgical tool that uses aerospace-grade lithium-ion batteries developed with input from NASA's engineers. It's now used for knee surgeries. They have disease diagnostics, like technologies for diagnosing illnesses such as COVID-19, hepatitis, and cancer have been adapted from NASA's space exploration research. Environmental and energy solutions, wildfire management, digital winglets, all of these different things that I never knew about. You know, you're thinking, oh, duct tape and this and that. But it's a lot of esoteric stuff that has gotten out there that really penetrated all of these different industries.

B: How about this Jay? Databases. I mean, I remember reading that databases really were born with Apollo tracking all of the components of the rockets and the other machines. And they were tracked in like the first kind of the first databases of their, the first modern databases. That's what I remember. I remember reading that. I think it's true.

C: Also, this is really interesting, and I guess I didn't realize this when I mentioned the way that tech transfer usually works at universities. But NASA's tech transfer does not prioritize revenue because they're a public good. So they do get paid, but it looks like they get paid off of royalties if and when private companies then sell products. So that's really interesting. I like that. Because usually with tech transfer, yeah, they're making money by selling the IP or selling the products that are made with the IP to the public sector, or sorry, to the private sector. But here, yeah, it's usually in royalties or like licensing agreements.

J: It's nice to know, though, that all of these incredible inventions and progress that this one department in the government makes, over the years, just incredible amounts of money spent to create new technologies, and it is being used. It's a good thing. I'm really excited about that. And it was a lot of fun learning more about that whole, the whole transfer program. But the bottom line here is, guys, getting back to the GRX-810, it is something to be excited about because it will eventually get into airplanes that we ride on and things like that to increase safety and make them lighter and stronger. So it's a really cool thing. And it is going to be a player in our move to the moon, which I'm also very excited about.

S: Yeah, but it is a great example of how material science changes the game because they were, I was reading another article with the engineers are salivating, it's like, we can with twice the strength and three times the flexibility and higher temperature, we could make things lighter and stronger and whatever. It's like, they can completely reengineer things, they could do things that are just not possible with existing materials. The other thing I think worth mentioning is that, yet again, this is an example of how, modern computing and simulations were able to accelerate this research by orders of magnitude, right? They were saying that they were able to use simulations in order to figure out which configurations of like the oxygen molecules, whatever in the, in the super alloy would work, rather than just doing all trial and error over and over again, trial and error. And it took again, like what would normally take have taken months, they could do in days, because, because of the computer simulations.

Lacking an Inner Voice (26:35)

• How people without 'inner voices' could help reveal the mysteries of consciousness 

S: All right, Cara.

C: Yes.

S: How do people who don't have an inner voice think?

C: Yeah, so if you remember, I recently spoke about a topic, a really interesting topic called aphantasia on the show. And do any of you other than Steve, remember what aphantasia is?

E: No internal visualization of something-

C: Right, right, so-

E: -no imagery in your head, right?

C: So the mind's eye seems to be, quote, missing, right? Sometimes people who have aphantasia are referred to as having a blind mind. But aphantasia is sort of growing into a larger term, a bucket term that may talk about a lot of different imagined experiences. So even though it's usually referring to visual imagery, it could be referring to other types of imagined experiences, like taste or smell, or, in one very specific case, having an inner voice. So there are people who do not have a voice in their minds. Does anybody here have any form of aphantasia? Any of the five rogues?

J: I don't think so.

E: I'm not aware of.

B: It's hard to say, because it but it's not only, it's not just binary, right? It's also a spectrum, right?

C: It's for sure a spectrum.

S: I absolutely do. I cannot imagine four-dimensional space.

C: Yeah, I have it for that, too. That's true.

B: I remember talking to somebody, and I don't know if he was just bullshitting me, but he said that he could, his visual imagination was almost as good as reality itself. And I was just like, what?

C: Right, so kind of on the opposite end of that spectrum.

B: Right. And it just sounded-

S: Hyperphantasia.

C: Hyperphantasia.

B: It was a real drastic exaggeration, though. That was my bet.

C: And so that's interesting, Steve, because, yes, hyperphantasia would denote that you have a really, really skilled or high-fidelity visual imagery. But we don't really say hypophantasia, but maybe we should, because aphantasia almost sounds like a complete and utter lack.

S: That's what it means.

C: It does, but I think what researchers are realizing is that it is a spectrum, and some people might not have a blind mind, just like most people with visual impairment and blindness do not have no light perception. That is an extreme version, but it's not the only way for somebody to have a visual impairment or blindness. And I think that visual imagery, let's focus on that for a second, specifically visual imagery can be impoverished in the mind, or it can be nonexistent.

B: Yeah, so any one of us could really be at the impoverished end of the spectrum. And you can imagine it, but you're at the end of the spectrum that is like not nearly as good as average, say.

C: Yeah, and there are some self-report measures that are given that try to drill down into that. And this new study that I'm going to reference called Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice, Behavioral Consequences of Anandophasia is about, they actually do use a self-report measure to try to figure out where on the spectrum are these adults. And that's sort of how they are able to make two categories, those with what they call anandophasia and those without. So that is a term that is proposed in this article, which was first published earlier this month in the Association for Psychological Science by researchers who feel that aphantasia may be too broad a word and that this specific phenomenon, which they are calling anandophasia, kind of deserves its own category so that we can better communicate about it when we research it. So anandophasia, they are defining as the lack of an inner voice. And it's really interesting to think about what life would be like without an inner voice. Anandophasia specifically translates to without inner speech. There are some other authors that have recommended the term anoralia, which is without auditory imagery because they're trying to stick with that sort of imagery theme. But not having inner speech, does that change the way that you think? Does that change the way that you behave? Does it change your conscious experience?

B: How about this? Does it change the way you dream?

C: Yeah, absolutely does it change the way you dream.

B: Right? If you have that, then what do you hear when you dream and what do you see when you dream? Does one follow from the other? Can you possibly see visual imagery if you have this deficit?

C: Yeah, you can have. So I have seen plenty of reports of people with visual imagery, but no inner voice. I've seen reports of people with no visual imagery, but an inner voice. And then I don't know if you guys remember, but when we covered this during our live show in Dallas, there was one researcher who talked about having a lack of both. And so that would be especially, I don't know, I think fascinating to study. There were a fair amount of people in the audience who came up to us that said, I think I do have some form of this. But when we talk specifically about a lack of inner speech, researchers want to know does that actually translate to differences in cognition or behavior? And so these researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they developed kind of a four-part study. They looked at four different things and they found that there was a significant difference in the group with and without a lack of inner speech on two out of the four paradigms. They chose four things based on sort of a hypothetical that they would be affected. And so let's talk about specifically what each of those four investigations showed. So the first two, the ones where individuals with low or no inner speech, this was defined by having like a 20% or lower cutoff on the questionnaire or on the self-report index. They were asked to look at a series of cards very quickly and then either try to recall the words that were on the cards or, in a different paradigm, tell me do these words rhyme or not. So think about how difficult that might be if you don't have a voice in your head.

E: Sure. Because how do you bounce the word that you're hearing off of another word that you're not hearing?

C: Right. Because remember, they're taking the visual away as well. So one is a working memory task, the other is the rhyming task. And in both of those situations, you would sort of need to say the words in your mind in order to do well. And that's what they found. Individuals with less inner speech did not do as well on those tasks as individuals with higher inner speech. But something interesting, the minute that they were allowed to say those things out loud, the difference disappeared. So clearly, there are compensatory mechanisms by using one's voice. Even if they're just whispering, as soon as they said them out loud to themselves, they could rehearse those things the same way that those with an inner voice or inner speech would rehearse it in their own heads. They also did two other tasks, one where they had to recall similar numbers of words when the word had a different appearance to a different one. So that was the multitasking task. And then in another task, they had to distinguish between different picture shapes. And in both of those situations, there was no difference in performance. And when asked how they did these different tasks, some people said that they tapped their index finger to count one category and their middle finger to count the other category, for example. So even though they weren't verbally saying, square, circle, square, circle, they were still counting using an external cueing device that didn't require an inner voice. So it is really interesting that there are a lot of compensatory mechanisms that are used by individuals that we may not even notice. And the researchers actually say it's very likely that in regular conversation with somebody with no inner speech, you wouldn't notice a difference. And it's probably true that just like with aphantasia, those with anendophagia may not know that they have it until right this second that we're talking about it. Because they may have never had a conversation with somebody else where it was made explicit that that is a thing that many people possess. You know, it's sort of like when something is normal to you, because that's how your mind has worked your whole life, you may not realize that other people's minds work differently. I'm always interested in individuals who have these neurodifferences and how, I don't know, how it affects their lives. So yeah, super interesting.

S: Yeah. And I do like the idea that they're using this to try to research, like, how does consciousness come about? Because you have different—

C: Yeah. So clearly you don't need an inner voice to be conscious.

S: Clearly. Yeah. Right. Or do people who have this have a different kind of consciousness? It's still consciousness.

B: Yeah.

S: Like, we can't assume that what, like as you say, what's normal to you, you think is normal and everyone must have that. But maybe that's not true. Maybe there are different ways consciousness gets sort of put together in different people that are not neurotypical or whatever. There's a lot of— There's a lot more neurodiversity out there than we realize because people aren't explicitly telling other people what their inner experience is.

C: Exactly. So probably neurodiversity is the norm if you look at it across the board.

S: Is the norm. 100%.

C: Yeah, exactly. What's interesting too is that—and I like what this one author who wrote about this in the conversation. He was not involved in the research study. He's a psychology professor named Derek Arnold at the University of Queensland. He himself has aphantasia and he talks about his own experience. And one of the things that he describes is being sort of minimized when trying to describe his experience to other people and saying, oh, no, no, I'm sure you have inner imagery in your mind. You just don't know how to talk about it or you're not quite getting it. You're not describing it appropriately. And he was really tired of feeling minimized. He was like, no, I'm a psychologist. I know what I'm talking about. I've been researching this. And so he uses this tool where he'll ask people in groups, can you imagine a taste or can you imagine a smell? And he'll kind of go through the different senses. And it's true. Like it's harder for me to visualize, quote unquote, a flavor or it's even harder for me to visualize a smell in my mind's eye.

E: Like a visualized orange.

C: Yeah. Than like a color or something like that.

E: Well, it's both a color and a flavor.

C: But I think that that is kind of helpful to increase empathy for the experience. Because yes, I have a lot of visual imagery in my mind and I have an inner voice. Some people have multiple inner voices and some people don't have any inner voice. But we all, I think, have differences in how we are able to imagine the multiple senses. And I think when we start thinking about other senses, it helps us sort of empathize with somebody who may have a quieter version of one of the senses in their mind.

S: All right. Thanks, Cara.

C: Yep.

Spider Silk Sensors (38:48)

• Imperceptible sensors made from ‘electronic spider silk’ can be printed directly on human skin 

S: Bob, tell us about spider silk sensors.

E: Are they tingling?

B: No, no tingling.

C: I feel like it would be a good score on Scattergories, spider silk sensors. Extra points, alliterations.

B: Well, this is another example of spider silk inspiring technology to a certain extent. Researchers have created bioelectronic fibers that can be spun onto biological surfaces like skin or plants and remain imperceptible even while providing data about health, the environment, and who knows what else. This is from researchers at the University of Cambridge. Their study is called Imperceptible Augmentation of Living Systems with Organic Bioelectronic Fibers. So yeah, I wasn't too sure what to make of this one, but it is fascinating. This is an attempt essentially to remove the common drawbacks of wearable sensors. From a human point of view, these are personal sensors essentially on our bodies that can tell us how we're doing health-wise and more about the environment we're in than our regular senses can. Right? That's one way to think about wearable sensors. And we kind of know, right, I think we'd agree that we know at some point that we're going to have some killer app technology that we can wear that will be amazingly helpful for health monitoring, data gathering, but we don't have it yet. The closest thing commonly used now, I would say, are watches like the iWatch, right? What do you guys think? Can you think of any other ones that are common? You know, like Fitbit, things that you basically wear on your wrist, right, that can track various things. Like I know the iWatch has an accelerometer, gyroscope, heart rate sensor they've got photodiodes to detect blood flow, so that's kind of, that's a wearable sensor, right?

C: Bob, I don't think it's called an iWatch.

B: What is it? What is it?

C: It's called the Apple Watch.

E: iClock.

B: Whatever.

C: I'm just saying.

B: I don't have one.

C: I'm so confused for a second when you said that.

B: I see them a lot. I don't have one. Don't really think I need one yet.

C: The naming convention makes sense, though. I think that was a reasonable assumption.

B: They should rename it, but that's a wearable sensor. It's kind of popular, but that's it. That's it. And I mean, there's like medical ones, but that's as far as we go. Beyond that technology, I mean, it's impressive, but beyond that technology, we're starting to see other things that researchers are developing, like flexible electronics that are printed on plastic. But even those, they don't integrate with us as much as possible, since you're ultimately just slapping plastic on your skin, right? It's not really integrating with your integument, right? But even more cutting-edge research uses things like nanomesh structures and electronic skins that are gas permeable, so they integrate much better with biology, and maybe we'll see them in 5, 10, 15 years, or never.

C: And tattoos, too, right, Bob? I feel like I've seen a lot of kind of research about tattoos with color-changing inks that react to like pH or temperature.

B: Yep, that would be another example. Now these researchers, though, want to take even that, like those nanomesh structures or whatever, they want to take it to even another level, the next level, or two levels more. Professor Yanyan Sherry-Huang from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, who led the research, said, we also want bioelectronics that are completely imperceptible to the user, so they don't in any way interfere with how the user interacts with the world, and we want them to be sustainable and low-waste. They're very, very concerned with that as well. They were looking for something that you basically can't even, don't even know what's there, because they don't want it to interfere with you or the plant that it might be on, any biological skin, they don't want it to interfere in any way. So to achieve this, this is where they kind of took inspiration from spiderwebs, which are strong and adapted to their environment, while also using minimal material. So that's like the limit of the inspiration here. They're not really going much deeper than that. But to do this, they're using what's called biocompatible conducting polymers. So these are composed of hyaluronic acid and polyethylene oxide. When it's used in water, they use a water-based solution to control how spinnable the fibers are. And so it's room temperature. These aren't exotic temperatures or pressures or anything. This is very simple. Here's the fluid, and you could pull the fibers out of that fluid. They can spin threads 50 times thinner than a human hair. That is really, really thin. It's this incredibly small size that really helps it integrate with the complex biological surfaces of like your skin or a leaf, for example. And such small fibers can go up and down, for example, inside your fingerprints, and it won't block important structures like your pores. So it's really integrating at a level far beyond any other type of wearable sensor because it's just so damn skinny. The end result is that you don't even know that the fibers are there. If you had some on your finger, wrapped around your finger, you would not know. Based on the pictures that I saw, you can kind of see it a little bit, but it's so minimal that you really couldn't touch your finger or move it around and even have any sense that you have this network of fibers around your finger. Now they apply the fibers using what they call an orbital spinning approach. What the hell is an orbital spinning approach? How does that even work? And I had to dig around. I finally found a video of it, and I was like, okay, that's what it's doing. So I'll try to describe this using words.

E: Good.

B: So imagine holding a pencil by the eraser, okay? You got a pencil by the eraser, and then you're moving the tip around and around in circles, around an object.

J: Oh, yeah, I do that all the time.

B: Like, say, a meatball, all right? So this device, this orbital spinning approach uses an arm that kind of looks like a long and skinny piece of metal that's going around an object. So every time that the pencil tip arrives at the top of the circle, it touches the solution and it pulls out a thread, and then it wraps around the object. So it's wrapping around the object every time it does 360 degrees. It picks up another thread, and it wraps it, picks up another thread, wraps it. So that's how they apply it. Lead author Juan said, using our simple fabrication technique, we can put centers almost anywhere and repair them where and when they need it without needing a big printing machine or a centralized manufacturing facility. These centers can be made on demand right where they're needed and produce minimal waste and emissions. So and before you ask, yes, they can be easily washed off. These are not hard to take off, apparently. You can wash them off. I'm not sure if you need a special fluid to do it because some of these are very, actually, they're more robust than you think. The question though is, does this work? How does this work? Well, based on the study that I read through, the proof of concept looks pretty impressive in terms of actually doing something. One thing they did in terms of how well it can integrate with delicate things, they wrapped fibers around incredibly delicate objects like a floating dandelion. You know the dandelion that floats in the air, that head on top, that fluffy part? They wrapped that in the fibers. And they did chicken embryos too. And chicken embryos are kind of very well known for being incredibly delicate and sensitive to the environment. And they were able to wrap around that without doing any damage at all. In their paper, they say, we use customizable fiber networks to create on-skin electrodes that can record electrocardiogram and electromyography signals, skin-gated organic electrochemical transistors and augmented touch and plant interfaces. So even these fibers are getting fairly sophisticated even at this point. In their paper, they show an image. Now, this was interesting. They showed an image of two fingers. One of them was wrapped with these barely visible bioelectric fibers, right? And they connected that to a computer screen. And it showed these up and down squiggles, right? The squiggle signals of an electrocardiogram. The other finger had the conventional, really big commercial gel electrode, right? It gets stuck to your finger. And then there's a big wire coming out, going to the same computer. And it showed the same identical EKG signal. Same exact one. One was this big, super clunky, commercial gel electrode. And one was these fibers wrapped around a finger that you could barely even see. And you wouldn't even notice that were on your finger, producing the same exact signal. That was kind of impressive when I saw that contrast. And then, like I said, how strong are these fibers? They seem incredibly resistant. I was really surprised. I would think they were just like, imagine wrapping a spider silk around your finger. I mean, it would not take much at all to rub it off. But these are actually very, they can be made to be extremely resistant to rubbing and heat and moisture. They even had the people's fingers in just water, holding it in water for extended periods of time. And it stayed fine. In the paper, they say, we show that the device and contact formats of the bioelectric fibers on a fingertip can be customized to withstand environmental and touch perturbations, simulating daily fingertip experiences. Yes, daily fingertip experiences. I'm not going to say any more. That's just too easy, right, Jay? Okay, so what will come of this? Who the hell knows? But we can speculate. Healthcare and health monitoring seems like an obvious no-brainer application. You could also potentially connect this to a VR system to enhance immersion. And you can get, obviously, tactile feedback. That seems very likely. But of course, it's not just for human skin. It can be integrated into many different biological surfaces, plant leaves, for example. The researchers say that this can be used for precision agriculture and monitoring the environment as well. You can imagine putting this on plants that you're growing, and you can detect things in the environment that would be damaging to the plant. And you could be notified of whatever, some environmental conditions that you want to be made aware of. Further down the line, other functional materials could probably be incorporated into the fibers to make displays on your skin and do more intensive types of computation. Hard to say how far this can go, or even if it will really even take off. But it seems really interesting, and it seems like a cool research project that I'd like to be tracking this in the future. We'll see what comes of it.

S: All right. Thank you, Bob.

B: Sure.

How Were the Pyramids Built (50:06)

• How Were the Pyramids Built?  

S: So guys, let me ask you a question.

E: Mm-hmm.

C: What's up?

S: How do you think we built the pyramids?

E: Very carefully.

B: Slave labor.

J: I mean, I know that there's theories out there, and I don't know if there is an absolute answer to that. But, you know.

B: Pretty confidence?

J: They were probably using-

E: There's clearly an absolute answer to it.

J: Like logs to hold them on, to move them around. I know how they stood up the big pillars, or anything that was really high up, they would use a sand pit to slowly stand that up, which was really cool. But what do you got, Steve?

B: I mean, the last I heard, it's not even slave labor. I mean, a lot of these people were paid, right? These were just paid laborers?

S: Yeah, they were paid laborers.

C: Yeah, that's like a-

S: I was just about to correct you. They were not.

E: Non-union.

S: Probably not enslaved. That's what most archaeologists and historians think today.

C: But, I mean, there was a lot. I mean, you think about, I don't know, tools. They had tools, right? Plenty of tools.

S: So, here's one question. So, we know a lot about how they built the pyramids. We don't know everything. There's no documentation. People didn't typically document things that everybody knew at the time, you know what I mean? Like, they weren't thinking 2,000 years from now, people are going to have to decipher exactly how we did this. They weren't thinking that. So we have to infer a lot of their methods. Like, were there tool marks or were there any images of people building them pyramids or whatever? Well, one question that had been incompletely resolved was how they got the big blocks of stone, like multi-ton blocks of stone, to the location where the pyramids at Giza were built, right?

B: Down the Nile, right? They flowed them down the Nile?

S: But the Nile doesn't go past the pyramids of Giza, right? Why would you build pyramids far away from your water source?

E: Oh, because you built it where the stones were.

S: No, but the stones didn't come from there.

E: Okay. Where did they come from?

S: They came from far away.

B: Maybe the Nile was closer back in the day.

S: Or you're close, Bob. Or maybe there were branches of the Nile-

C: Yeah, tributary.

S: -that were present 3,000 years ago, but not today.

B: Maybe they made those branches?

E: Artificial, temporary ones.

S: No, there weren't canals. They were not constructed. That's the new bit. So there was a study-

B: Okay.

S: -which is very interesting. They used a combination of satellite imagery and on-the-ground information in order to reconstruct a now-dried-and-buried branch of the Nile that was probably there several thousand years ago, but is now, again, dried and buried under the sand. They named the river, they named the branch of the Nile, the Ahramat, A-H-R-A-M-A-T, which is Arabic for pyramids, right?

E: Okay. Makes sense.

S: So here's the thing. There's actually 31 pyramids that were built along this now-dry branch of the Nile.

B: Oh, damn.

S: So it made no sense before. Why are all these pyramids built over here, away from the Nile and away from the source of the stone? And the thinking was, well, maybe, I guess they dragged them across the desert, like Jay was saying, they had some kind of system where they're pulling them over logs or something, and they just did it, right? But of course, it would be much, much easier to just float them on rafts down the river. And so this kind of resolves a lot of issues. Why are there so many pyramids built along this pathway? And it all makes sense now, right? If you just say, well, there was a river, there was a branch of the Nile, the Ahramat branch was there. But this always reminds me, though, because of a lot of gaps in our knowledge about how ancient peoples built stuff. And Jay, again Jay and I have been watching a lot of TikTok video and videos responding to a lot of these. And it always seems like the answer is, well, the aliens must have done it, right?

C: So racist.

S: Well, yeah. That's the thing. It is very racist.

C: Yeah.

S: It always seems to come up when you're talking about people who are not Occidental, right, who are not basically the ancestors of Europeans.

C: And it's like, how could they possibly have figured this out with their brains?

S: It's like, hey, these savages, these primitives were able to move these giant blocks around. Whereas nobody says that about the Colosseum. Those Romans couldn't have been smart enough to build this. Aliens must have built the Colosseum. You know what I mean?

E: Someone is saying that. I'm sure.

S: Well, I'm sure. But I mean-

C: But it's not the same.

S: It's asymmetrical. It is definitely asymmetrical.

C: And it's so silly because it's like, didn't Arabic people invent algebra?

S: Yeah. Oh, totally.

B: Oh, my God.

C: Like all of this really important technology and knowledge.

J: Well, I think, Steve, part of it is people are ignorant to history. They don't know how unbelievably developed and advanced that society was back then.

S: Yeah.

C: Yeah. But I think they also have a hard time imagining certain people being that advanced and developed. And that's just- Yeah. It's racist.

S: There's multiple layers here. I do think there is a these non-European people couldn't have been this clever. But also, there's, I think, a general underestimation of how advanced ancient civilizations were and also how effective simple engineering principles could be. Keep in mind, the ancient Egyptians had access to all six of the basic engineering tools. Who could name them?

J: I can.

E: The lever.

C: A wheel.

J: Meatball technology.

S: Wheel. Levar.

B: Pulley.

E: Inclined plane.

S: Inclined plane. Pulley. Two more.

E: Internal combustion engine.

C: Oh, wait. What's the thing under the lever? Fulcrum.

S: Well, that's part of the lever.

J: They had buttons, right? They had buttons.

S: No.

E: I know four of the six.

C: Okay. So wait.

E: The other two.

S: You got wheel, lever, inclined plane, and pulley. There's two more.

J: A phaser.

S: The wedge.

C: Some sort of, like it's something to hammer something?

E: Oh, yeah. The wedge.

S: And the screw.

C: Oh, the screw.

B: Well, the screw is just a variation of an inclined plane, though.

E: Yeah. That's what I thought.

S: Yeah. But it counts. That was a separate one. So those are considered to be-

E: Sorry, Bob. You're wrong.

S: -the six engineering tools.

B: No. I'm very right.

S: And they had access to all of them. And it's amazing. You could do a lot. If you have a lot of muscle power and you have access to pulleys and planes or whatever, you can build the pyramids, apparently.

C: Right.

S: Right? And again, I don't know if I've said this before on the show, it always reminds me of the movie Starman where the alien was amazed at how quickly the car needed to be refueled. But that's the opposite of what would be true, in my opinion. I think they would be thinking more like, this is a primitive internal combustion engine. They're just burning chemicals and spewing smoke. I mean, it probably would go for a very short distance and peter out. They would probably be surprised that you can go hundreds of miles on one tank of gas. I just think it would be the opposite. People don't tend to overestimate ancient technology. They tend to vastly underestimate it because they don't realize how much you can get done with the technology that people have, with a little bit of persistence, right?

E: But there are cranks who go beyond that and say, oh, there were computers in the 4,000 years ago.

S: Yeah, but that was the aliens or the Atlantans or the Atlanteans or whatever.

C: Yeah. They don't think that these people did that.

S: Yeah. And also, yeah, it is largely based upon their own ignorance of the actual archeology. It's like now we have actual artifacts and documentation. We don't know everything, but we don't know nothing either. We don't know so little that you could say aliens did it, right? That's not the case. We have a pretty good idea. And we're filling in some of the more smaller details as we continue to do good science and good archeology. And this is one significant thing. It's like, oh, OK, there was a river branch there.

C: It's also silly that there's this lack of belief that you see with these sort of pseudoscientific claims around building, around construction, yet everything that we know about their pretty sophisticated sort of medical interventions that they were doing are not surprising to people.

S: They were drilling holes in people's heads, and they were surviving.

B: Trepanation.

C: Yeah. And they were also embalming these different people. And some things we now know were kind of silly, and some things kind of stood the test of time. But they're really sophisticated.

S: Absolutely. And again, getting another example, we just did this on a TikTok video of being ignorant of actual archeology and then filling in the gaps with just your made up bullshit. So have you guys heard of the pocketbook of the gods?

J: No.

C: No.

B: No.

E: Chariot of the gods not pocketbook.

S: The pocketbook of the gods. There's a lot of these ancient reliefs, like like it's flat, but it's three dimensional. It's not a statue. You know what I mean? You know what that is. So there's a lot of these paintings or reliefs of ancient gods in certain regions of the world. And superficially, it looks like they're holding a purse like they have in one hand, they're holding a handle with like a little square thing below it. And to a modern eye, you could you could imagine that being a pocketbook or a purse, right?

E: Gucci or Kate Spade?

S: Unbranded, Evan. So people have invented this whole again, ancient alien mythology about there was a bag and they were spreading seeds to whatever, repopulate the earth and blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, we know exactly what these things are. You know, what do you think they are? They are if you think about like a handle and a rectangle, but it's two dimensional of a three dimensional object. These are these are buckets. They're water buckets like we know exactly what they are. We have examples of them like we have actual surviving archaeological examples of these things. It's a two dimensional representation of of a bucket. That's what it is.

J: Bucket.

E: Fetch me a bucket.

S: And we actually had text referring to them like it's like we don't even have to guess. Like there's text where it's referring to like the guy carrying the water bucket, you know, because that was a symbol of something, you know. But they just in there, they fill in their own ignorance with these fantastical claims and weave it into this mythology, this alien mythology. The whole process is just so frustrating. But science finds actual answers like evidence of a river where the pyramids currently are. All right. Let's move on.

Exoplanet Hunt for Life (1:01:21)

• NASA space telescope finds Earth-size exoplanet that's 'not a bad place' to hunt for life 

S: All right. Evan, tell us about this latest exoplanet.

E: Yeah, the headlines are blaring this past week about a potentially habitable new planet that has been discovered has been discovered. Yep. Time to pack our bags. Start making plans to get there, right? Not so fast headlines. Let's see exactly what we're talking about here. All right. From NASA, using observations by NASA's TESS, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which we've spoken about before, among some other instruments and facilities, two international teams of astronomers have discovered a planet between the sizes of Earth and Venus in size only 40 light years away. It is the nearest transiting temperate Earth size world located to date. Yay. Yeah. TESS is amazing. It stares at large swaths of the sky for about a month at a time, and it tracks the brightness changes of tens of thousands of stars at intervals ranging from 20 seconds to 30 minutes. And they capture transits, right? That's the regular dimming of stars caused by the passage of orbiting worlds. That is TESS's primary goal. During a transit, the host star's light passes through any atmosphere, effectively sampling it, and different gas molecules absorb different colors. So the transit provides a set of chemical fingerprints that can be detected. So you can learn some things as well about what these bodies are. One star in particular has the astronomers captivated Gliese 12. I think we mentioned Gliese 12 before.

B: Yeah.

E: An M3 type dwarf star, a cool red dwarf star. It is located 12.2 parsecs, or roughly 40 light years away, and you can find it in the constellation of Pisces. Han Solo could not be reached for comment. Gliese 12 is about 27% the size of our Sun, with about 60% of our Sun's surface temperature. Gliese 12 itself is described as showing no signs of extreme behavior, which is important because that can happen with these kinds of dwarf stars, and that would diminish any chances of, say, a rocky world orbiting close to it that would be able to maintain any kind of atmosphere or be a candidate, suitable, potential candidate for life. So they've located Gliese 12b. Yep. And it has an orbital period of, what, under 13 days, 12.76 days, and an equilibrium temperature of around 42 degrees Celsius, which is 170 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, the Earth has an average surface temperature of 15 degrees Celsius, or 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, this is supposedly the low, I didn't double check this, but I read it's the lowest estimated temperature out of all the exoplanets that have been discovered to date, and there have been about 5,000 exoplanets discovered to date. The distance separating Gliese 12 and Gliese 12b, the planet, is only 7% of the distance between Earth and the Sun, so it's very close, obviously. And Gliese 12b receives 1.6 times more energy from its star as Earth does from the Sun. Here's a quote from Dr. Masayuki Kuzuhara, an astronomer at the Astrobiology Center in Tokyo. He said, we found the nearest transiting temperate Earth-sized world located to date. Although we don't know yet whether it possesses an atmosphere, that's important, we've been thinking of it as an exovenous with similar size and energy received from its star as our planetary neighbour in the solar system. Gliese 12b represents one of the best targets to study whether Earth-sized planets orbiting cool stars can retain their atmospheres, and that's a crucial step to advance our understanding of habitability on planets across the galaxy. So this is a neat find, certainly interesting. Gliese 12b, oh yeah, Gliese 12b gets enough light, so now we're talking about how much light it receives. It receives enough light as if we had a planet parked somewhere between where Earth and Venus orbit our Sun. So they said that's important, that will give them as they study it more information basically about atmospheres, worlds that close to their stars, how habitable they may or may not be. Do you experience loss of water at that point, like Venus did, lost all its water, right, whereas Earth did not. So it helps get us closer as to figuring out kind of, I suppose, these Goldilocks zones that we talk about. And one other fact, it is unknown whether Gliese 12b is tidally locked or if it exists in a spin-orbit resonance, and obviously that would have an impact on whether or not it is able to retain water.

B: Probably tidally locked.

E: I would think so, being that close, whipping around like that. So it's a super great find, and only 40 light-years away, which makes it even more intriguing. You know, I don't know about the headlines really calling it potentially habitable. There's so many other things that it would have to – so many more hurdles you would have to clear. You can't just say because of these facts that it's really anywhere close to being that. But hey, it's closer than others, so I suppose in that context. It's kind of like saying, oh, I walked a mile closer towards the North Pole, therefore I'm that much closer to the Arctic Circle than I was before, basically. You still have a long way to go.

S: Yeah, we still haven't found like an Earth analog exoplanet, like fully Earth analog.

E: Oh my gosh, what a discovery that will be.

S: Yeah.

E: Can't wait. Maybe in our lifetime? Maybe? I don't know.

S: Maybe. It's totally possible.

E: Maybe.

B: Sure.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

Who's That Noisy? (1:07:35)

Answer to previous Noisy:

a 1970s M1000 computer punch card reader from Documentation
Here is a video of an M600 restored reader

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

J: All right gyus, last week I played this Noisy.

[motor winding up, engaging its action, then winding down]

Any idea guys?

E: Something motorized.

J: That would be a good start.

E: Yes. There you go.

J: All right. I've got a lot of guesses. Lots of different cool guesses here. I've got a listener named John Sanchez who wrote in and said, "Hey-o, well, I'll give this another shot. I'm guessing a paper bill money counter." And that does sound probably exactly like a paper bill money counter. Not the correct guess, but a very, very good guess.

C: Ooh, or like a card shuffler.

J: Yeah, or a card shuffler. That's good, Cara. You're getting close. Another listener named Darren Pekusik said, he says he's from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Pretty sure, he said, "I have this week's noisy made by a tool I wish I owned. I believe this is the sound of someone turning wood on a lathe." That is not correct. I've heard lathes many, many times, and I don't remember them having that kind of like repetitive percussive noise happening. But it is a power tool like noise, which is another a good, not a bad guess. Definitely not a bad guess. Chris Clark wrote in. "To who's that noisy from May 25th sounds like a paint shaker at your local do-it-yourself hardware store." And I've heard that too. And yes, there is a little bit of that there, but that is not correct. And then really quick, I just had a lot of fun with a lot of these guesses this week. Sarah Sadio said, "I think it's the sound of a 16 millimeter film reel in a cinema projection booth." That's a great guess, but not correct. Darcy Stevenson said, "I think this week's noisy is a homemade automatic elastic band machine gun", which is cool. That's not correct. And my last one, Brandon Alexander said, "First time guessing, and it's a family event." He says his kids want to guess. So his son Wesley thinks it's a vacuum with a hard object rattling inside. That's a good guess. His daughter Sage thinks it's a helicopter. That's a good guess because of the repetitive noise. And he thinks, again, it's a wood lathe. So we got, we did get many people guessing a wood lathe. All of these are incorrect. There is a correct guess this week, Gary Kravis. And he said it's a computer punched card reader.

E: Oh wow.

J: So your guess was good, Cara. So listen again, and then I'll give you the details on this particular one. [plays Noisy] So punch cards were used by computers way, way back. When are we going back? 60s and 70s, guys?

E: Oh, 50s, I think.

J: Or even earlier. Yeah, you're right, Ev. I think it went back even earlier than that. That was a way that they stored data. They would have a program, and the program would be stored on a series of punched cards, and the pattern on the punched cards would turn into binary computer language.

E: Yep. Don't get any of the cards out of order.

J: Yeah, that's right, man. You messed the whole thing up.

B: And they were derived, those cards were inspired by a jacquard loom that was used to create patterns on-

J: Textiles.

B: Yeah, and carpets. And they used that. So it was actually storing information to create this pattern in the carpet, for example, and they used that to store data for other stuff.

J: Yeah, on the carpet.

B: Amazing. IBM, I think, is the one. I think IBM may be the one who first did that. And I remember a statistic that they did it for a census well over a century ago. And if they didn't have that technology, then the census would have taken like 15 years to compile because it was so difficult, so many more people in the country that without that innovation, it would have taken more than 10 years to complete the census.

J: So this particular machine is the M1000 Punched Card Reader. This was produced by a company called Documentation, Inc. It's a high-speed card reader designed for use with mini computers in the 1970s. It could read a rate of punch cards at 1,000 cards per minute. So that was fast back in the day. And today, it is completely useless. Anyway, thank you guys for joining us.

E: You mean we can't send probes to Venus based on card technology?

J: We could. We could. But they're not going to. We don't need them anymore.

New Noisy (1:12:15)

J: All right, here's a really cool one, guys. This was sent in by a listener named Jim De La Harp.

[Airy bird calls or squeaky metal]

Good luck on this one, man. It's hard. I've never heard anything like it. So I think this might be a difficult one. So if you think you know what it is or if you heard something cool, what do they got to do, Steve?

S: They have to send an email to WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Announcements (1:12:52)

J: All right, Steve. There are things in the SGU universe happening. I mean, every day that we wake up, guys, we get closer to our 1,000th episode.

E: Oh my gosh.

J: 20 freaking years. My God. All right, so where is this happening? So we have a few things going on. We are going to be in Chicago. We will be doing two extravaganzas in Chicago. One of them is sold out. Another one isn't. The 230 extravaganza in Chicago on August 17th. You could go to that show and we will all be there and we'd like you to come. George is the host of this show. It's the extravaganza. It's a stage show. We do lots of fun things in this show. There is a science backbone to the show. And then what we do is we do a bunch of comedy improv bits where George basically makes us look silly.

E: I don't need his help.

J: Yeah, I know.

S: It's a lot of fun.

J: It is a ton of fun. We've been doing this show for many years. We keep refining it and changing it and making it better. So if you'd like to come to that show, you could just go to theskepticsguide.org and you could find ticket information on our website. There's buttons there for you. But then on August 18th, we have our 1,000th SGU episode. It's going to be a five-hour show. It's going to be live. We're going to have a ton of virtual guests coming in. We'll be talking about some of the best moments of the podcast. We will be having George Hrab interview all of us, getting very personal and bringing up funny things that we probably don't want the public to know. But anyway, it's a five-hour show. It's totally worth it. We'd really love for you to join us. The more, the merrier. I think we already have over 300 people coming. So I think it's going to be an incredible experience. Five hours. Five hours. Right, Steve? That's a long time. Not the longest that we've done.

S: But it goes by fast.

E: Oh, my gosh. Way too fast, actually.

J: There's so much to talk about.

E: I know. Oh, my gosh. 20 years of retrospectus.

J: So, guys, I think I mentioned this on the show before.

B: No, you didn't.

J: There is a spreadsheet where largely patrons have been taking these slots. So what I did was I took every episode of the SGU and put it onto a spreadsheet. And I'm asking people to pick one or more of the episodes, especially if you're already planning on listening to them. And what you do is you listen to the show, and then you just write down up to five of the best moments that happened in that episode. And if it wasn't the best episode, you just move on to the next one. But we're looking for standout moments, funny moments, things like that. Anything that was really interesting. Anything that would be like, oh, wow, remember that? It was before the pandemic. Whatever. Like anything that just piques your curiosity. You could make a note of it. You know, give me the timestamp, whatever. I can go back in, and I'll find the best of the best of the best. And then I'm going to be playing these at the five-hour show. So there's going to be a lot of that going on. And I think it's going to be really incredible. It'll be a cool experience to, like, listen back to, like, what we were thinking about what up to 20 years ago, you know. So if you're interested in helping that effort, email me, Steve, and Ian at INFO@theskepticsguide.org. Just do me a favour. Put the subject line in as the thousandth SGU 1000th episode. And I will email you a link to the form that you can fill out. If you just pick one episode, it would be a huge, huge, awesome thing that you could do for us to save us the time of having to go through all of these, which means me. So I can't possibly do it all on my own. So your help would be greatly appreciated. And beyond that, Steve, we will be at SciCon, which is in October. What is the weekend, Steve?

E: 24th through 27th.

B: The last weekend of October.

E: Oh, Bob. I'll scare you as much as I can, Bob, during that weekend.

B: I'm going to cry.

E: Don't cry.

J: You're going to be fine, Bob, and check this out. We're going to be in Las Vegas. It's going to be an awesome conference. So we got Brian Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Banachek and Michael Mann and a ton of other speakers. Steve is going to be giving a talk about – what are you talking about, Steve?

S: I'm going to talk about controversies that skeptics disagree about.

J: Nice. And it's going to be in Vegas. If you've never been to one of these conferences or if you have never been to TAM, this is probably the closest that you'll get to that experience. The group of people that go, the regulars that go, they're all awesome people. We know all the people that go. It's a really, really awesome conference, and I highly recommend that you consider it, particularly this year because the speaker lineup is fantastic. And we're going to be there. We'd really appreciate it if you show up, especially if you live nearby. You have no damn excuse. You just got to come. Go to sciconconference.org. That's C-S-I-C-O-N-F-E-R-E-N-C-E dot O-R-G. Did you get that? Want me to say it again? No, I'm not saying it again.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

J: Bye.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:17:49)

Email #1: Star Trek and Acupuncture

S: So we got a lot of emails pointing us to a recent StarTalk episode with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

C: We're going to go there?

E: He's going to be at SciCon.

S: They were talking about alternative medicine. They were talking about it with the current director of the NIH office on complementary alternative medicine, which is now like integrative health and something. Yeah, so just keep rebranding it. Got to keep up with the branding. So a lot of people specifically pointed us to one segment where they were talking about acupuncture. I watched the whole thing, and it's highly problematic in multiple places. I mean, obviously, they're talking with somebody. This is, by the way, one of the people that was at that meeting in Washington that I was at.

E: Right. Back in what? Wow, 2016 or so?

S: No, no.

E: Oh the recent one.

S: This was the recent one, yeah.

E: Oh, okay.

S: For the fall. In any case, that was a different – that was her predecessor that I met with going back. Yeah, Evan, that you're thinking about like eight years ago. It's currently the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health is what they call it. So she is a proponent of alternative medicine and of acupuncture. And so, of course, that set the tone for the whole discussion.

E: Yeah, Neil pushed back hard on her, must have.

S: Well, the thing is, listen, Tyson is a – I think he's a great science communicator on astrophysics. And he's again, a knowledgeable science journalist. But in my personal experience, and this is going back with him 20 years, he's had a blind spot when it comes to medicine.

C: Oh, really?

S: Yeah. It's just not his area of expertise. And, I mean, again, I was at a health fraud conference. Again, Bob, you were with me at this one. This is one, again, that CSI hosted. This is before he was famous. And he got up and he asked kind of a naive question about like, well, what's the big deal with treatments like this? And somebody said, you're the director of the Hayden Planetarium, aren't you? That's part of how I remember this whole exchange. And he said, well, how would you feel if they wanted to open up an exhibit on astrology in the Hayden Planetarium? And he's like, all right, I get your point. And he sat down. But there have been multiple times over the years where he's given a speech or whatever, where he just – he doesn't quite get clinical medicine. And why would he? He's not a doctor. He has no experience with it.

C: Because he's a public science communicator.

S: Yeah, I get that. But this is a very – Jay and I were talking about this on the live stream today. In order to really be an effective science communicator, you need to have sort of a broad, just general scientific literacy. You need to have general critical thinking skills. You need to have media savvy. And you have to have a certain amount of topic expertise. Or if you don't have the topic expertise yourself, you need to be talking to somebody who does.

C: Right.

S: And that's where this, I think, episode went off the rails because his topic expert was somebody who has a fringe opinion, who is not in the mainstream, in my opinion, and who gets a lot of things wrong. A lot of what she said was fine, like whenever she's talking about generic scientific issues or generic medical issues. But her discussions of the placebo effect were terrible. Her discussions of acupuncture were just straight up wrong. She gave a very, very biased and to the point of being misinformation sort of discussion of these issues. And no one else on the podcast had the topic expertise to recognize that or to properly push back. So I would hope that at some point he would have somebody on from science-based medicine. I'd certainly be more than happy to go on to give the other side of the equation. Because there is another side of the equation. And there's a lot that was not said during that talk. What was not said was as important as what was said. So at the end of the day, she was just mainstreaming and normalizing magic in medicine and lowering the bar for what is acceptable threshold of evidence, all biased towards promoting alternative medicine. That's basically what was happening at the end of the day. So there were some people who were asking specifically about the claims that acupuncture has been demonstrated to have a mechanism whereby it affects the autonomic nervous system. Again, this is a great example of how she's giving a biased perspective on the evidence. So I've looked at this many times before. I just today updated myself with a fresh deep dive on what has actually been published on this. And it's crap, right? The problem is that, so there was actually one study trying to look at the relationship between the sensory nerves in the ear and the different acupuncture points for auricular, that's ear-based acupuncture. And their conclusion was there is no relationship. You can't say this point does A and this other point does B. They basically all did the same thing, just maybe to slightly different degrees, which has probably just to do with neuronal density, just like the density of the nerves at different parts of the ear. But that was it. They all basically did the same thing. So the notion that this point over here is the point for the intestine and that one over there is for the heart or whatever, is nonsense. It is not backed by evidence. The people who were studying it trying to look for it themselves concluded, ah, this anatomy isn't here, right? There's nothing here. So what does the evidence actually show? Is that if you that there's an autonomic response to stimulating the ear. It's like, okay, sure there is. There's autonomic responses to anything painful or to a lot of sensory stimulation. But that does not mean that that's how, quote unquote, acupuncture works. It does not prove that acupuncture points exist. They don't. They objectively do not exist. It's completely misrepresenting this evidence and just taking like anything and interpreting it completely inappropriately scientifically in order to like gin up this case that acupuncture points exist. But they're talking about sticking little needles in the ear and this is supposed to have some kind of actual physiological effect. It doesn't beyond just you're stimulating your ear. Now, you can, there's a separate literature on using electrical stimulation of the ear in order to activate the vagus nerve. That's real. And so you could think, well, maybe there's some vagal stimulation non-specifically if you're stimulating the ear. If you're not using electrical stimulation is probably minimal. But again, this is not, quote unquote, how acupuncture works. This is just stuff that happens, that is, sure, if, like there's counter-irritation, if you rub your elbow after you hit it, it makes it feel a little bit better. That's about the level of effects that we're talking about. It doesn't justify all of acupuncture and not for nothing, when you look at the clinical trials, cherry-pick selective evidence and accept anything that says acupuncture works regardless of how crappy the evidence is. But like all the fake medicine, whether it's homeopathy or Reiki or energy medicine or whatever or acupuncture, when you get to the well-controlled studies where like they really do a good job of controlling for needle insertion and needle location, it is obvious that those two things don't matter. It doesn't matter where or if you stick the needles. And since those two things are what define acupuncture, the only conclusion you could say is that acupuncture doesn't work. Right? And I think that to a large degree she knows this because at times she says things which is like, well, it's a ritual and you're distracting people from the pain. It's like, yeah, that's right. But the thing is that's all that it is. Right? That's the thing that she won't admit is that it's nothing more than that. That explains the entire effect. It's a ritualized placebo and that is it. And the evidence, I think, clearly supports that conclusion. But she wants to use these sort of fringe studies to pretend like there's something more to it. There's something physiological going on because there's these non-specific effects that basically amounts to you're stimulating the body. You know what I mean? But it doesn't mean that acupuncture points exist. They don't or that they have a specific effect. They don't. And then, of course, interpreting she goes out of her way to interpret the subjective symptomatic effects, which are all placebo effects, with healing and therapeutic effects. Like she uses the words this is therapeutic, this is self-healing. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. She completely misinterprets what the placebo effect is. And again, I wouldn't expect even a good skeptic and science communicator to know this. This is really rarefied, science-based medicine knowledge.

C: But you'd expect her to know better.

S: Yeah, but she's a believer.

E: Oh, sure.

S: But she's a believer. You know?

E: Yeah.

S: Science-based medicine, I mean, it's taken us years, decades, to really understand this very nuanced, complex relationship between science and medical practice and how to interpret studies and how things go off the rails. Like, how is there a literature that people think says that homeopathy works? What are they doing wrong? We've explored that in detail, which bleeds into how are mainstream physicians misinterpreting the mainstream medical literature? This is all the same question. It's not like there's a separate question dealing with the French stuff. It's the same question. Like, how do we know what works and what doesn't work?

C: Yeah, it is.

S: And it's really complicated. It's really freaking complicated. They're just doing it wrong. They're just not good at it. They are not steeped in this literature. They do not understand the statistics. They do not understand the methodology. They don't understand Bayesian analysis. And they should. They absolutely should. Or they do understand it, but they're selective in their application because they're biased. They're massively biased.

C: Yeah. But, like, hence the need, like you often say, for science-based medicine. And I see this all the time in psychology as well. Hence the need for science-based psychology. Because there is a ton of literature in psychology that is it's exactly what you're talking about. It's like poor methodology. It's purple hat therapies. It's things that you can very easily think are evidence-based. But when you really dig deep, it's very clear they're not evidence-based. But it takes a pretty discerning eye. Like, there are things that the American Psychological Association says are evidence-based therapies that are not.

S: That are not. Right.

C: Yeah.

S: They're only evidence-based if you really water down what evidence-based means.

C: Exactly.

S: Right.

C: Yeah.

S: Yeah. Exactly. And it's it gets away from thinking about, like, what's actually predictive. Like, what type of evidence predicts that something actually works? And also, again, there's so many layers here that, like, there's no way Neal could know anything about this, right, as a non-expert. Like, the fact that evidence-based medicine itself has been distorted. You know, evidence-based medicine is a movement within medicine that is generally accepted, and yet it has been completely subverted by the proponents of alternative medicine. And even people who are earnestly trying to do evidence-based medicine don't realize that they're doing it wrong. It's like, no, you can't. You cannot legitimately factor out prior plausibility. You can't do it. Mathematically it doesn't work. You know? And, like, statisticians know this. Like, they're frustrated because they know all of this. This is just math. And they're like, yeah non-statisticians don't know this shit. And for that reason, they even competent expert physicians, whatever, don't know how to read their own literature because they don't realize that you can have, or sometimes they do pragmatically, but not necessarily explicitly. So they don't necessarily know how to apply it across the board. They don't realize that the implications of, like, this means that you cannot say that this works based upon this evidence. Right? But, and again, not everybody, of course. I work with a lot of people who have a very, very good understanding of it. But I also lecture about science-based medicine to my colleagues.

C: In medicine.

S: In medicine. And the bottom line is these things are not systematically taught in medicine. They're not.

C: And I guess the thing that's important here, too, when you say, like Neal can't really be expected to know all of this, is that he can be expected to have somebody on his show who knows this.

S: Yes, I agree. I do think he should have known that this is not a mainstream opinion. That the head of the National Center of Complementary and Integrative Health was not necessarily somebody representing the mainstream consensus, and that at least he's got to know that there's a science-based medicine movement out there that think this is all horseshit. You know, he's got to know that.

C: So he's making a choice by giving that person a platform. And by whether or not he says, I agree with everything you said, or he pushes back or he just listens and asks questions, there's an implicit endorsement when you talk with somebody on a public platform like this and say this is an expert there telling you the way things are.

S: Yeah, totally. All right, guys, let's move on to science or fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:22:34)

Theme: (in Professor Farnsworth voice) "Good news, everyone!" Item #1: A new study finds that improving air quality by aerosol mitigation significantly reduces the risk of forest fires. Item #2: Engineers have developed a method for making reproducible high quality graphene at scale. Item #3: Researchers have developed an antibiotic that treats many multi-drug resistant bacteria without affecting the gut microbiome.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Aerosol mitigation
Science	Reproducible graphene
Science	Antibiotic spares gut

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Jay	Aerosol mitigation
Cara	Aerosol mitigation
Evan	Antibiotic spares gut
Bob	Antibiotic spares gut

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is good news, everyone. These are three science news items that are pretty good news.

E: I thought it was Futurama trivia. Okay, well.

S: Of course, one of them is not real.

C: But it's still bad news that it's not real.

E: Well, it depends on how you altered it, but we'll see.

S: Yes, we shall see. Or I just made up that whole cloth, who knows? All right, here we go. Item number one. A new study finds that improving air quality by aerosol mitigation significantly reduces the risk of forest fires. Item number two. Engineers have developed a method for making reproducible, high-quality graphene at scale. Item number three. Researchers have developed an antibiotic that treats many multi-drug resistant bacteria without affecting the gut biome. Jay, go first.

Jay's Response

J: All right, a new study finds that improving air quality by aerosol mitigation significantly reduces the risk of forest fires. Improving air quality by aerosol mitigation. What does that mean, Steve?

S: You know, getting aerosol out of the air.

J: Oh, okay. And whatever chemicals are in there. Okay. All right. It would reduce the risk of forest fires. I don't know about that. That seems weird to me. Because what would be in aerosol that would increase the likelihood of forest fires? Engineers have developed a method for making reproducible, high-quality graphene at scale. I mean, this doesn't surprise me if it's true. It's about freaking time. So let me put that one aside. And then researchers have developed an antibiotic that treats many multi-drug resistant bacteria without affecting the gut microbiome. Okay, I am definitely going to go with the first one here about the aerosol mitigation. I don't think there's anything in there that would make it so on the scale of the atmosphere, you know what I mean? That's huge. That would reduce the risk of forest fires. Yeah, that one's got to be fiction.

S: Okay, Cara.

Cara's Response

C: Improving air quality. Okay, so Jay thinks it's a fiction that we're not able to improve air quality by reducing aerosols in the air and thus reducing well, he didn't really say and thus. That's kind of how I'm reading it. Maybe that's incorrect. Significantly reducing the risk of forest fires. And the graphene one is amazing if that's true. I thought that that was the whole point with graphene is that we can't make it at scale. And then but these are all supposed to be good news. Let's see. And then antibiotic that treats many multi-drug resistant bacteria without affecting the gut microbiome. How? Well, it's probably a different method of action altogether then. So that's kind of cool. Like an antibiotic that's not like a typical antibiotic. Maybe it has a different antimicrobial function. I mean we need that. So it's great if this is true. It also wouldn't surprise me if in the early stages we do have some good leads. When you say researchers have developed an antibiotic I assume that just means, something was identified. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's gone through clinical trials. So I think I'm going to agree with Jay that a new study finds that improving air quality by aerosol mitigation reduces the risk of forest fires. I don't know why that would be the case. Forest fires made worse by pollutants in the air or are they made worse by clean air? I don't know. Yeah, I think I'm going to go with Jay because I just don't really understand that one.

S: Okay, Evan.

Evan's Response

E: So the aerosol mitigation one, reducing the risk of forest fires if there were less aerosol contaminants I imagine they're contaminants. In the air, what that means they're... How would that contribute to the risk of forest fires? Do these things gather around embers and carry them further around and stuff? Yeah, this is a strange one. The second one about graphene at scale, okay. I think that one's going to be science because they developed a method for making it at scale, but what? We're talking probably some super small quantities, right? Just the very first baby steps towards it, maybe. You've got to start somewhere. And then the last one about the antibiotic and the gut microbe. I swear I've been reading over the years that you can't have one without the other, like no matter what, your gut microbiome is going to be impacted by these antibiotics, but how would you make an antibiotic that treats many multi drug-resistant bacteria without effect? That seems like too good to be true. That's got to be too good to be true. Shoot, it's that one or the aerosol one. I don't know. I'll say the... I don't know. Antibiotic, I'll say that one's the fiction. I don't see how it could be for all these many multi drug-resistant bacteria. I don't see it.

S: Okay, and Bob?

Bob's Response

B: Alright, yeah, these are good. These are tough. The first one, I could interpret this the opposite way, potentially, because by reducing the aerosol, you're making the oxygen even more easily accessible, making forest fires worse, so I'm just going to go with that and be like, maybe it's the opposite. I mean, it sounds a little silly, because, I mean, how many goddamn particulates are you going to have to inhibit oxygen uptake? But whatever, I'm just going to roll with it, because I can make a good case for all of these. The graphene, high quality graphene at scale, that just sounds too good to be true. And the same is... I agree with Evan on the third one. Not only do you have a new antibiotic, that by itself, a brand new antibiotic, is just a cause for celebration unto itself, but it also treats many multi drug-resistant bacteria. Not one, many, and, oh, by the way, it doesn't affect the gut microbiome. That's like a trifecta of awesomeness. I'm not going to believe it, so I'll say that's fiction as well.

S: So you're going with the antibiotic one at the end of the day.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: All right, so you all agree on number two. Engineers have developed a method for making reproducible, high quality graphene at scale. That certainly would be awesome.

B: Please be true. Probably not true. Probably not.

S: This one is science. This is science.

B: Wow!

E: Bob's all excited.

C: I think we should all be excited by this. Even the person who doesn't love material science.

S: The method is called oxygen-free chemical vapour deposition. So you know there's basically two ways to make graphene. Graphene is a two-dimensional isomer of carbon. For researchers, you know how researchers make graphene?

C: With a pencil?

S: Yes, with lead. With graphite.

E: A number two pencil?

S: Graphite and sticky tape.

C: It's a graphite pencil.

S: They put sticky tape on it. It pulls off a layer, but this only makes very, very tiny amounts of it, but you get good, high quality, small, tiny pieces of graphene from doing that. It basically pulls up one, like, two-dimensional layer of the carbon.

B: Well, just make tree-sized pencils and then...

C: Really sticky tape.

S: Or you use what's called chemical vapour deposition, which can make it... which can mass-produce it, but there's a problem with quality. So you can make a little bit of high-quality graphene or a lot of low-quality graphene. So this uses... The researchers figured out that the problem with the quality and the chemical vapor deposition method was the oxygen. That it was messing with the growth of these... of the graphene.

B: Oh, really?

S: So by doing...

B: So they made it anaerobic?

S: Basically, by doing it in an oxygen-free environment, the synthesis was fast, highly reproducible, and they say with kinetics that can be described by a compact model and that can... that is amenable to being produced at industrial scales. Now, obviously, they haven't done that yet, and until they do it they...

B: Then talk to us.

S: You do that, but this is, again, this is what... They developed a method that should be able to do this. But they had to get rid of even trace oxygen to have this work. So you really... You need a room to do this in that they could make for free of even tiny amounts of oxygen. Yeah, if this all works out, this could be a game-changer for if we could make lots of high-quality graphene, at scale.

B: Oh, man, please. I've been waiting a long time for that.

S: Alright, which one should I do next?

C: The one where I'm right.

B: So go to the antibiotic one then.

S: So the antibiotic one next.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Researchers have developed an antibiotic that treats many multi-drug-resistant bacteria without affecting the gut microbiome. Bob and Evan, you think this one is a fiction. Jay and Cara, you think this one is science. This one also would be totally awesome if it were true, because as Evan and Bob both correctly pointed out, this is the ultimate dilemma. The more broad-spectrum powerful the antibiotic, the more likely it is to wipe out your gut microbiome, which then opens the door for things like C. difficile, C. diff infections and everything. How do you separate these two things? So this one is science. This is science.

E: Oh my gosh, holy crows.

C: So what is the mechanism?

S: It's a novel mechanism. This is a gram-negative selective antibiotic. So you know there's gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. This is gram-negative, and that's the important one in terms of the gut, because most of the gut microbiome is gram-negative bacteria as well. They call it lolomycin, because it targets the LOL protein system. I don't think it has anything to do with LOL, but...

B: Lots of love?

S: Essentially, they found a mechanism that is different for pathogenic bacteria and friendly bacteria. They found that whatever, evolutionarily their proteins are different enough that you can actually target pathogenic bacteria without targeting the so-called commensal. That's another term we use, commensal bacteria, the friendly bacteria. So it's specific not only for gram-negative, it's specific for pathological gram-negative bacteria. And it's a novel mechanism, so it's effective against many currently multi-drug resistant strains of pathological or pathogenic bacteria. So this is extremely promising. Now, this is a proof of concept. They haven't done all the clinical trials necessary to prove safety and blah, blah, blah. So it's still years of clinical research before this would hit the market, but this is a really promising candidate antibiotic. Extremely, extremely promising. All right.

E: Sure.

B: Nice, man.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: All of this means that a new study finds that improving air quality by aerosol mitigation significantly reduces the risk of forest fires is the fiction. Bob, you were correct. It actually increases the risk of forest fires.

E: Oops.

C: Oh, interesting.

S: And the reason for that...

C: More oxygen?

S: It has nothing to do with oxygen. It has to do with the particulate matter in this type of air pollution, and which, if you recall, particulate matter bounces away sunlight, and if you take it away, then more sunlight reaches the ground, which increases the temperature, and melts the ice frozen in the soil earlier in the season, and evaporates that water, and basically creates the conditions that are more conducive to forest fires. The point of the study was that you can't just do aerosol and particulate matter mitigation. You have to do greenhouse gas mitigation at the same time. Otherwise, we're going to have a double whammy. We're going to actually increase not only in the short term, we're going to increase global warming, and we're going to increase the risk of forest fires. We talked about this before in the context of global warming itself. If you take... Improving air quality, reducing air pollution actually worsens global warming in the short run, because you're eliminating the particulate matter, which has an immediate cooling effect. You're taking away the short term cooling effect, whereas the CO2 and other methane and other greenhouse gases has a longer term effect. Reducing CO2 takes longer to have an effect on the climate than reducing particulate matter does. You end up causing worsening warming, and based upon this study, worsening forest fires in the short run when you reduce things like fossil fuel use. It's one unfortunate unintended consequence of transitioning away from things that cause a lot of air pollution. What it means is we have to make sure that we are keeping pace by reducing CO2 emissions, not just... You can't just have the whole idea of, we're going to have clean coal, we're going to get all that particulate matter out of the air. That's great, but if you're not keeping the CO2 out of the air, it's actually going to be even worse in terms of climate change, because you're eliminating the cooling part of the pollution but not the heating part of the pollution. Does that make sense?

C: It's a bummer. Sounds expensive.

S: We don't want the air pollution, but the air pollution has this side effect of having a cooling effect, ironically. The best solution is just to eliminate all the air pollution, including the CO2.

C: Evan, you were right. Two of them were good news and one's a bummer.

E: Well, yeah, I was right about that, but didn't win the game.

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:47:42)

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already.  – Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian writer "It is hard to fill a cup which is already full." – "Avatar" quote/Zen proverb

E: All right. This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Dorothy, who is also a patron and long-time listener. Thank you, Dorothy. Much appreciated. "The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most low-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already. But the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already." Leo Tolstoy.

S: Yeah, the idea that an empty mind is preferable to one full of misinformation.

E: Right.

S: Yes, it's hard to unlearn things that you think you know. There's also...

E: Definitely.

S: There's a lot of permutations of that basic idea. If you remember, I forget which one, one of the Dunning-Kruger guys made a similar statement. It's like, the real problem is not misinformation or ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge. That's the real pernicious problem.

E: Yeah, tough to...

S: Yeah, this illusion that you understand something that you really don't.

B: It's an illusion.

E: Oh, gosh, because they have to try to decouple someone from those thoughts in which they are so sure of something.

S: Yeah.

E: Even though they're wrong, that can be tough. That can be super tough.

S: It gives them a sense of control, a sense of security, a sense of understanding the world and how it works. You try to take that away from them and they're going to resist.

C: I also think of it almost in terms of receptor binding. If there's an open receptor, it's easy to plug something into it. But if there's something already holding it, you have to bump it out before you can put something new in, which is a lot harder.

S: A lot harder. But it's a lot easier if you have something to replace it.

C: Yes.

S: The evidence shows that you can't just... Your attempt at fighting false beliefs or misinformation, it can't just be, that's wrong, you should not believe that anymore. It has to be, here is a better way to make sense of the world. To give you...

C: There's something with higher affinity for that receptor.

S: Exactly.

C: I love it.

S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

B: Sure man.

C: Thanks Steve.

E: Thank you once again, 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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