SGU Episode 1004

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SGU Episode 1004
October 05th 2024
Ancient rock carvings showcase early artistic expression and cultural storytelling through time.
SGU 1003                      SGU 1005
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance”.
- George Bernard Shaw
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, October 1^st, 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: Good evening everyone.

S: Bob, welcome back. How was the trip?

B: Buona sera, tutti, abbiamo fatto un viaggio fantastigo in Italia e a parigi.

E: You went to Little Italy?

B: Awesome time. It was fantastic two weeks. Oh my god, Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva, and Paris. And of course, Paris Disney, which was epic. The art, the food, the architecture, it was just mind boggling. We have a million pictures to go through. I can't even pick what my favorite thing was from the Coliseum.

J: Why don't you try it for the studio audience here?

B: Duomo.

E: Give us one.

B: I mean, we took a tour at the Coliseum, which was fantastic because the guy just knew it inside and out. That was an amazing tour. But also-

S: I hate when they only know the outside of the thing. You get in there like they have no idea what they're talking about.

B: But the David, of course, is just, oh my God.

S: That's, again, as close as you get to like an actual religious experience, standing in front of the David.

B: Yeah, your jaw just basically drops. It's on the level of seeing the Saturn V and the Bridge of the Enterprise set.

S: It's one of those things that pictures can't fully do it justice. I mean, of course, you see how pretty it is, but there's just something about being in the presence of that. Yeah, that's different.

B: Yeah. My favorite meal was, in Rome, amatriciana, which is a pasta dish that I had never had before. Cacio and Pepe was great. Carbonara was great. But the third pasta that Rome is known for, amatriciana, was just mind-blowing. Oh my God. So good. Highly recommended.

S: It depends on where you go. Because I've had both of those dishes in multiple restaurants, and they're variable.

B: In Rome?

S: In Rome. The best single dish I had when I was there was a cacio e pepe, but that could be just luck of the draw.

B: Two things that I missed. Now, this is the end of September. I missed Halloween basically has no presence. And peanut butter, my two loves, my two joys in this entire universe, not over there. I saw a jar of Skippy peanut butter in a grocery store. I think that was in Rome. And I saw some Reese's peanut butter candy. But that was it. Otherwise, you go around and it was like peanut butter is just not a thing.

S: It's a very American thing, Bob.

B: Yeah, it is, and it's not only American, it's also like a male American, so that's fine, but I thought we would have exported that concept, like we've exported Halloween everywhere as well. There was one store I saw, Flying Tiger was the name of the store, and they actually had some Halloween stuff, but that was it. Otherwise, that was it for all the cities we went to. But whatever, I mean, we're still exporting Halloween, and I think it's growing everywhere.

S: It'll take eventually.

B: But I'm happy. I mean, it was sad to come home, but I'm happy to dive headfirst into Halloween and get my morphology right.

E: When they hang a trick or treat bag off the arm of David, that's when you'll know. It's gotten to the Italian culture.

B: Yeah.

S: That's not going to happen.

B: But we were just... After the first few cities, we were just museumed out. We were like, oh my God, we did... Our biggest day, 31,000 steps. Oh my God, that's a lot of steps. But it's great. We were walking so much, I wanted to maintain it. Now that I'm back, I got to up my cardio because after two weeks, we definitely noticed we were getting noticeably fitter.

S: No, you got to train. Before we went to Florence a couple of years ago, we were training to basically keep up with all the walking that you have to do to do it justice.

B: Oh, yeah. We did similar training for our big Disney trip the year before. We didn't train for this one, but we were fine. I mean, the first hundred steps up to Duomo and Florence were a little rough.

S: That's no joke.

B: Yeah, that was like 440 or so steps up to the top of the Duomo. And the first hundred I was like, oh shit, but then I got my wind or whatever and I was totally fine, almost jogging up. It was okay. But for a minute there, I was like, oh man, what the hell?

E: How long was the line to get inside there, Bob?

S: You schedule an appointment.

B: Yeah, it's all scheduled. Line was fine.

E: I always see lines.

B: The view was amazing. And St. Peter's, I mean, I got to say, I went to St. Peter's in Rome. That was, and I've seen a lot of cathedrals. That one is just my favorite. It's beyond the beyond. It's so dense in artwork and culture.

S: You saw the skeleton over the doorway?

B: Oh yeah, so I took pictures of all the skulls I came across in any art or sculpture, of course. So that's a highly recommended visit. We went to the catacombs in Paris, which of course hey, here's a million bones arranged in amazing patterns and walls.

E: Did you see Jim Morrison's grave?

B: No, didn't see that. But I recommended the catacombs as well. That was amazing. I can just go on and on.

S: Yeah, but you won't.

B: Amazing, amazing trip. And hey, and Disney Paris, Disney Paris. I prefer Disneyland Paris to, and I mean this, to Disney Magic Kingdom in Florida. It's actually better. I remember doing research, I was watching some videos on the building of Disneyland Paris, and they made sure that the quality of like the architecture and the painting and the attention to detail was above and beyond what you would see at a normal Disney park. And you can really see it just from the architecture and the detailed painting and the quality of the materials. It's actually better than I've seen at the other two Disney parks, Disneyland and Disney World in the States. And my favorite rides, the Haunted Mansion, which is Phantom Manor at Disneyland, at Disney in Paris, and the Pirates of the Caribbean, my two favorite rides are better in Paris.

J: Yeah, because they're new.

B: Sometimes you could tell that they're just newer because I mean this was built – I mean it was built in 92, which is not yesterday. But you could tell that they're just newer and sometimes they employ better technology like some of the fires in the Pirates of the Caribbean are actual digital fire. It's not the classic shimmering cloth, reflective cloth that's reflecting a light that looks like fire. This is like digital fire and it was so good. The animatronics – get this. In the Pirates of the Caribbean, they had two audio animatronic pirates fighting with a sword. I've never – I've been to other Pirates of the Caribbean. They don't have that. But somebody just stopped me. I'm going to –

S: Yeah, I'll stop you. So today is Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday.

J: My 111th...

B: Not just that.

E: Wow.

C: It's incredible.

E: What, the first president to reach 100?

S: I don't know, is he?

E: I believe that is right.

B: It's not just that, it's also another important day for other people.

S: It's my younger daughter's birthday. And it's very easy to remember another date because Jay got married on my younger daughter's birthday. Happy anniversary, Jay.

J: Thank you, I appreciate it. 13 years with my best friend. It's unbelievable when you find your best friend, you get to marry them.

S: And she's okay with you podcasting on your anniversary.

J: We'll talk about that later.

E: When she unlocks the door and allows you to come out, then you'll know.

C: Did you, wait, this is interesting. Did you know that not only is Jimmy Carter the first president to reach 100, first former president, he was the first president born in a hospital?

B: Yes.

S: I remember hearing that as a trivia.

E: Oh my gosh.

B: I remember that trivia from decades ago.

C: Wow.

B: It blew me away.

C: What a life.

J: That just doesn't even seem possible.

C: Right? What a life.

E: Yeah. They were all born on what, farms before that?

C: Yeah, at home. Yeah, because he was born in 1924.

S: Why would you go to a hospital before modern medicine, you know?

E: Yeah.

S: Right?

E: Yeah, right. Hospitals were treating people with Spanish flu and war victims.

S: They were cesspools of infection.

B: Yeah, cesspools of infection. That covers it.

E: Places where legs got cut off and stuff. Oh, you're infected. Here goes your leg.

B: Doctors wouldn't wash their hands until the end of their shift, so they'd just wash it once at the end of the shift. Person to person to person. I'll wash later.

C: Yeah, I mean, this was like 1924. They were probably still pulling people's teeth when they had like psychosis back then.

B: Oh, geez.

E: Hysteria.

C: Yeah, like medicine was weird in the early 1900s.

E: It was still finding its way. Trying to sort out the crap from what might work.

S: 1910 was a big inflection point. That was the –

E: Yes. We talked about that.

S: We said, yeah, maybe we should base this shit on science.

C: Right. And then it took a while to, make sense of all that.

S: It's still a work in progress.

E: Right. And no kidding.

S: At least we started trying back then.

E: Thank goodness for that.

Quickie with Bob: Lunar Mantle Partially Molten (09:43)

• Lunar gravity measurements hint at a partially molten mantle layer 

S: All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.

B: Thank you, Steve. This is your Quickie with Bob. Molten Mantle Moon in the news. This was somewhat fascinating, not overly fascinating, but somewhat fascinating. Some scientists have recently concluded that the Moon's lower mantle is likely molten, which could potentially impact our thoughts on the Moon's origin and evolution. Now, they arrived at this conclusion by looking at the tides on the Moon, and this is the more interesting aspect of this, is how they came upon this. Now, it's not often thought that way, right? Whenever you mention tides, it's usually about the tides on the earth that are caused by the moon. But the earth and sun create tides on the moon as well, which can distort its shape and its gravitational field. The way the moon responds to its tides actually depends to a degree on what its deep internal structure is like. So, by studying the moon's response to tides, then it can give us clues as to what's deep below, and that's the basis of this whole thing. In this case, the researchers gathered data for the first time about how the moon changes, specifically how its gravitational field changes over the course of a year due to its tides. And they added that new data on top of the pre-existing data that covered changes that happened over the course of a month, right? So they put the monthly data in with the annual data. And then they took all that and combined it with other interesting, other important data, like the average moon density, right, which you would imagine would be important about the interior of the moon. And then they plopped all of that into a model, and that model simulated the deep interior of the moon. And they found that their model could not duplicate what they were observing about the moon's changing gravitational field because of the tides. Unless the model had a soft layer at the bottom of the mantle. So in order for the model to behave like the moon does, you had to have in the model a soft, lower layer of the bottom of the mantle. Now the researchers think that if such a molten, gooey layer exists, it's probably made of a titanium-rich material that they call ilmenite. I never heard of ilmenite before. So assuming this is true, the next step then would be to determine what the heat source would be that could keep that part of the mantle partially melted for probably something like billions of years.

S: Wouldn't it have to be radioactive decay?

B: You would think, you would think, I'm not sure, I thought most of the radioactive decay was pretty much done for the moon. The implication here is that there might be some other source that they're not aware of, which would be, which sounds like it could be really fascinating. For what it's worth, this has been your Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

S: All right. Thanks, Bob.

News Item #1 - Heart Function in Space (12:34)

• Heart tissues beat half as strongly on the ISS as they do on Earth 

S: Jay, you're going to go do another space-related news item. Tell us about the fate of heart cells on the ISS.

B: I bet it's not good.

S: Not good. NG.

J: Yeah, don't get excited. So researchers from Johns Hopkins University created the study to show how spaceflight affects heart cells. Going into it, they knew that there was an effect and they wanted to be able to get more details on it. They sent 48 bioengineered heart tissue samples up to the International Space Station and they left them up there for 30 days.

B: Bioengineered?

J: Yeah, the heart cells were created from human-induced pluripotent stem cells. You know, pluripotent stem cells can become any cell type in the human body. And then these cells were placed in an advanced organ on a chip device that, in this particular case, it simulates the environment of a real heart. So the cells would actually I guess kind of think that they're in a real organ by the feedback that the chip gives them. And this allows the scientists to closely study how the cells are actually behaving under different conditions. So these devices are, they're really small and they're about half the size of a regular cell phone and they're designed to act like a human heart in a 3D environment. They're simulating the 3D environment. And they let the scientists see how the heart cells will actually function in this particular case in outer space, right, where there's almost no gravity. And the heart cells in space were then compared to similar ones that stayed on Earth so the researchers could understand the differences over the 30 days. So, like I said the findings were not good. Just didn't turn out to be a positive piece of information. Heart cells in space beat with only about half the strength of the ones that were, yeah, that were left on Earth. So the loss of contraction strength, this is called twitch forces, and it shows that heart cells in microgravity, they simply thus struggle to function properly. While the results were not positive, they weren't surprising to the researchers because previous studies have shown astronauts often experience, when they get back, they have reduced heart muscle function, irregular heartbeats, arrhythmias, and this all happens when they return from space. But this study brings a lot more clarity to what's actually happening at the cellular level, which is exactly the information that we need in order to do something about it. So they found these key damage markers, the space exposed heart cells. So first, the sarcomeres, these are the proteins responsible for helping heart cells contract. They were shorter and more disordered than in the Earth samples. Without properly functioning sarcomeres, the heart cells lose their ability to contract efficiently, right? So the lack of efficiency is a big player here, which leads to the overall weakening of the heart muscle function. And there were also significant changes in the mitochondria, right? These are the energy producing parts of the cells. And normally mitochondria, they have long structured shape that helps them generate energy efficiency. But in space, what happens? You know, the mitochondria become larger because there's less gravity. They become rounder, which is not the proper shape for them. And they lose this characteristic structure, and this led the researchers to believe that the cells were under significant stress and had difficulty producing the energy that's needed for normal heart function. So the mitochondrial dysfunction likely contributed to the weakening contraction strength of the heart cells. It does make perfect sense. So on top of that, the space-grown cells showed elevated levels of inflammation and oxidative stress, which as everybody knows, that's bad. These markers typically are seen in people that have cardiovascular disease. So that draws a correlation to the heart cells in space. They weren't just under physical stress, but they were also experiencing damage from these free radicals and other harmful molecules that are that are cropping up there, which led to the long-term dysfunction. So Dr. Yoon Hyun Ahn, one of the researchers on the team, he pointed out that astronauts often show these same markers of inflammation and oxidative stress after long duration space flight. So they come back home and they study them and they take samples and they figure out what's going on. So this cleanly makes the connection between cellular level changes and the real world results of astronauts. So this team was led by Professor Deok-Ho Kim, and he's now focusing on refining the heart-on-a-chip technology. This is going to enable them to gather more data on how the damage is happening at the molecular level. And if the researchers can better understand the specific pathways that are leading to the cellular damage, then they hope to develop medications, other protective strategies that could be used to help the astronauts from experiencing these negative effects, especially for long-term spaceflight. So this research is absolutely crucial because what's going on? NASA is preparing missions to the moon, long, long term missions to the moon, long, long, long term missions to Mars. And and there'e also talk now about what's coming after Mars, too. So these findings, they're needed. They're there to to help address these significant risks that that space travel is absolutely going to cause on astronauts as they as they spend more time in outer space. I was very curious to know if astronauts, when they return home, if they regain their heart function, and the answer is typically yes, but it depends on other factors like how long were they there and their overall health. You know, after an extended time in microgravity, astronauts' heart muscles can significantly weaken. They can become less efficient at pumping blood and this typical day-to-day function. You know, the lack of gravity really does have a dramatic effect, but if you're healthy and if they spend enough time and if they if they take the right steps, they could regain that heart function. But what if someone is in space for three, four, five years? We haven't had anybody up there that long yet. You know, it could actually lead to very scary situations where people might they could die. We just don't know. We don't have enough data to really know what will happen.

S: Or it might get to the point, like, if you've been in space beyond a certain number, amount of time, there's no coming back, yeah. Like, yeah, your heart can function in zero gravity, in microgravity, but now it's too weak to handle 1G.

J: Steve, what I don't understand is, like, there's gravity plating in Star Wars, like, why don't they just invent that and we solve the problem?

S: Yeah, that'd be nice. There are some caveats here though, Jay. Cell on a chip technology is fine, but it's not the same thing as a whole organism. There could be plenty of compensatory mechanisms or whatever that are not at play here. So, this is information, it's telling us something, and you do have to correlate with it clinically, like what's happening with actual living astronauts, which they're doing. So it's definitely telling us something, but it doesn't necessarily have to be as bad as it sounds because, again, we don't know how the whole organism is responding or adapting. The other thing is it might be that after a certain amount of time, there may be adaptations that take place that mitigate some of the cellular problems like oxidative stress and inflammation, etc.

C: Yeah, because a cell on a chip is not in a circuit, so it's not getting any feedback from the rest of the body.

S: It's not a homeostatic whatever dynamic system. Yeah, so this is not the end of this research. This is just one interesting piece of it. But I do think that taking all the evidence that there is at this point in time, the prolonged microgravity is absolutely a problem. And the best thing we could do would be to simulate gravity for long duration space missions.

B: Which we're not ready for.

S: Which we are not ready for. We just really just don't have the technology to do that.

B: Technology's not there. We got that from the horse's mouth. I mean, a representative from NASA herself said it. Just get there fast.

S: They're not even working on it. It's not anywhere on their radar at this point in time. It's just too far away. It's too challenging an engineering problem. Even though conceptually it seems simple just a long cable rotating around but it just would have to be so big that the engineering challenges are too great, so they just said screw it, we'll just get there fast.

E: Beat me to it.

S: All right, thanks Jay.

News Item #2 - Schizophrenia Drug (21:26)

• None 

S: Cara, tell us about this new FDA-approved schizophrenia drug.

C: Yeah, so there's a new drug on the market. It's called Cobenfi. That's the brand name. And it's being kind of touted as the first drug in decades that takes a novel approach to schizophrenia treatment. So a lot of the headlines are things like first new drug, first new type of drug. I take slight issue with that because although yes, the mechanism of action is wildly different, and this could potentially be a game changer, we've seen, I guess you could call them incremental advances, but I think we've seen changes in the way that we treat schizophrenia that have radically changed the lives of people. And what I mean by that is that there was a huge leap when we went from only having pills available to having long-acting injectables available. That was a massive change because treatment adherence is a very big problem with schizophrenia. So sometimes I'm like, the headline doesn't tell you everything. It's not the first new thing. But it is really interesting because it's the first drug on the market in a very long time that acts on a different neurotransmitter. And so let's talk a little bit about the landscape of antipsychotic drugs historically versus this new drug and how it works differently. So quick and dirty review of the antipsychotic drugs that are on the market now, or at least the main ones. So first there was the first gen antipsychotics, sometimes they're called like traditional antipsychotics, and they include, I'm going to give you both the brand names and the generic names because many people are aware of these drugs. You've seen them talked about in popular culture. You have people in your life who struggle with schizophrenia symptoms or even like bipolar with some psychosis, or some of these drugs are actually like adjuvant drugs for depression. And so you may see them as an add-on or even a different drug as an antidepressant. Okay, so first gen antipsychotics include chlorpromazine, so that's Thorazine, haloperidol, that's Haldol, thioridazine, that's Meloril, and flufenazine, so that's prolixin, among others. And these work by blocking dopamine, but specifically at the D2 receptor. And the problem with these drugs is that although they work really well, they have really severe side effects that come along with them. And you know, from my understanding, talking to patients with schizophrenia, talking to psychiatrists, and also reading the literature, most people who take antipsychotics have side effects. It's not like a, oh, it's few and far between. It's like a, that is just the risk that you deal with in order to treat schizophrenia.

S: Some side effects are almost guaranteed. They're basically dose and duration dependent, like you're going to get some movement.

C: Well, I'm about to dive into them. So there's basically three big categories of side effects that you get from the first gen antipsychotics. So you have anticholinergic effects. You see those with like chlorpromazine and thioridazine. Those include like dry mouth, blurred vision, trouble relieving your urine, constipation, and rapid heartbeat. You've got extra pyramidal side effects or extra pyramidal side effects. Those happen with the more high potency like Haldol and prolixin. And those are movement disorders. So they include like Parkinsonism. So that would be like a resting tremor, some rigidity of your muscles, dystonia, so those are uncontrolled muscle contractions, akathisia, so this sense of restlessness that you have inside, and even tardive dyskinesia, which is potentially life threatening. It often starts to happen after long-term use, but it can be irreversible. And tardive dyskinesia is this involuntary, very stereotypical rhythmic movement that you see in the tongue, face, and jaw. And over time, it starts to affect other parts of the body. And then there's a third category called the neuroleptic malignant syndrome category. So this is a rare, but it's life threatening. And this is when muscles can get tight, you get a high fever, you have autonomic dysfunction, so your blood pressure, your heart rate, like your sweating, all sort of goes out of whack. You can be a little bit confused, combative. And when somebody shows this reaction when they start on an antipsychotic, they have to get them off of it immediately and do supportive therapy, because it can kill you. So like there's some real risks here. Then came the second generation antipsychotics. You'll often hear them referred to as atypical antipsychotics. So those are clozapine or clozaril, risperidone or risperdal, olanzapine or zyprexa, and quetiapine, seroquil, and also eripiprazole, which is Abilify. So some of those are often used as antidepressants as well, or they're used in bipolar disorder. They also act on dopamine, but they tend to act more on the D3 and D4 receptors. And they are good at alleviating positive symptoms, just like the first gen are. But they can also alleviate some of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Because that doesn't mean good versus bad. But positive symptoms in schizophrenia are the ones that we think of as kind of like thought processes that are confused, hallucinations, delusions, hyperactivity. And the negative symptoms, as the name kind of implies, that's things like lethargy, withdrawing from social settings, having a hard time getting out of bed, having changes in sleep, not really taking care of your grooming and your hygiene, and having like flattened affect, like kind of just like flat emotions. And schizophrenia can have either. There can be positive, there can be negative, or there can be mixed. And very often historical drugs worked pretty well on the positive symptoms, but not so great on the negative symptoms. The atypical antipsychotics are less likely to cause those extrapyramidal side effects, but they can still have anticholinergic effects. They can still cause neuroleptic malignant syndrome. They can also cause metabolic syndrome. And so this is like a whole new thing that's fun for people who take antipsychotics, where they will often gain a bunch of weight, their blood pressure will go up, they'll develop insulin resistance, hyperglycemia, and even they can potentially develop diabetes and heart disease. So there are studies that show that people who are on long-term atypical antipsychotics, they're dying younger because they are gaining all of this weight and they're developing all of these secondary symptoms that are associated with that.

S: And all of this is basically the result of evolution. It's because as our brain evolved, our neurotransmitters evolved, there's a branching pattern of relationships just like in anything in evolution. And different parts of the brain use the same neurotransmitter for different things. Drugs are dumb, but they evolve subtypes, right? And then just like you could have different subtypes, like lions and tigers are both big cats, but they're different types. Same thing, you have D1, D2 receptors, etc. So there's different affinities and different proportions of those receptors in different parts of the brain. So these second-generation antipsychotics are partially selective. They're more active at the receptors we want them to be active at and less active at the ones we don't want, but it's not clean. It's not a complete separation.

C: And they do also work on serotonin more, which means and that's more involved with the negative symptoms. So you do see a little bit of a different kind of response on them, but they're still not clean, like you said, and you can even get like neutropenia from atypical antipsychotics. So that's like changes to some of your immune function because certain types of white blood cells drop and that can be pretty dangerous as well. So yeah, I mean, these are all big risks, and very often patients with schizophrenia are dealing with a risk-benefit calculation, but they're also dealing with it sometimes with insight, sometimes lacking insight, and that can be really difficult because if somebody gains a ton of weight or they start having uncontrolled muscle movements or they start experiencing symptoms that they don't like, they may just stop taking their drugs because they don't like the way that they feel. Enter this new medication, Cobenfy, and I'm going to tell you a little bit like I'm going to tell it to you in story form. So since the very first anti-psychotics, those first gen ones were introduced in the 50s, everything was based on this hypothesis that has very good evidence to support it, that dopamine is the culprit. And that blocking the production of dopamine because there's too much dopamine is going to reduce symptomatology in schizophrenia. And so then we had all of those drugs developed that I just kind of went through. Now, every single schizophrenia drug on the market up until now acts on dopamine primarily and then may have some downstream effects on other neurotransmitters as well, neurotransmitter systems. This new drug doesn't act on dopamine. It's the first drug that's been developed for schizophrenia that primarily, I shouldn't say it doesn't act on dopamine because it does have downstream effects, but primarily works in a completely different way. So I want to tell you how it was first developed because it's pretty interesting. There was a study in 1997, on Alzheimer's patients, where a drug was developed that reduced some of those kind of severe dementia symptoms, the more psychotic leaning dementia symptoms. But the patients couldn't handle the drug because it made them barf and it gave them horrible diarrhea and they felt super sick to their stomachs the whole time. It was like a really brutal GI reaction when they would take the drug. So they stopped the study, they pulled it, it never made it to market. So, the lead inventor of this new drug, Andrew Miller, he was like, huh, something about that drug was working, and it was working well. But is there a way to figure out how to make it work without making people quite so sick? So he started looking at these receptors in your gut called muscarinic receptors. They're named for a chemical that's found in some mushrooms called muscarine. And he was trying to figure out a way to develop a drug that activates them in the brain without activating them in the GI tract. So he's like, okay, what's going on? What's going on? What's going on? And he found a drug that was already used for overactive bladder. And that drug shuts down the GI receptors. And the cool thing about that drug is it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. So in putting those two drugs together, he's able to shut down the muscarinic receptors in the gut, but not the brain. And that combines with this new drug that acts on acetylcholine in the brain. And together, that drug is able to have an effect on both the positive and the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, but not affect the GI tract nearly as much as it did in its original form.

S: So that's funny, Cara, that's exactly the story of Sinemet.

C: Oh, really?

S: Well, it's, yeah, it's carbidopa levodopa. So it's the same thing that the levodopa, which is for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, it causes nausea because it has effects in the stomach. And so you combine it with a competitor that doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier over, the carbidopa. And that eliminates the nausea. That's why it's called sin amet, without emesis.

C: Yeah, without emesis. That's amazing. Yeah, I love that.

B: Wow.

C: And so I mean, what, how brilliant, how elegant. I love it so much. Ultimately, though, to be, it massively reduces nausea, it doesn't get rid of it. So in the clinical trial that was published by Bristol Myers Squibb, who is the company who bought the company that the guy I told you about before who developed the drug works for, Karuna Therapeutics, that was his company. They did a study, and it's only a five-week study, so this is interesting, the FDA was as impressed by the study results even after only five weeks that they said, we're going to approve this drug. But about 20% of the patients on the drug still experienced nausea, and about 14% dealt with vomiting. But apparently that's a massive difference than the original Alzheimer's drug, where the patients were dropping out because they just couldn't handle the GI discomfort. The jury's still out on the long-term effects, though, but Bristol Myers Squibb is claiming that the drug, which was originally called KarXT, that was like, in clinical trials, that's what it was called. Now it's called Cobenfy, that they actually kept studying these patients for a year. And later this year, they're going to release the data from those studies. And they're claiming that the patients often lost weight, did not gain weight, and they did not experience any metabolic changes or metabolic disease, that their side effect profile was significantly lessened, with nausea being basically the main side effect, and that they didn't see any movement disorders in the patients.

S: That's great.

C: So this could be a game changer.

S: Yeah, oh yeah.

C: I think what would be really cool is if they then also developed this into a long-acting injectable, because right now it's a two-pill-a-day dosage, and I do worry about treatment adherence on a medication like that. It's also probably going to be pretty expensive, and it's looking like it may be one of these drugs where you have to be resistant, or you have to have tried the one or two other drugs and had side effects that were too severe, and then your insurance company might approve this drug. The landscape, we'll have to see how the landscape changes once this is on the market and people are taking it regularly, and we're getting a lot more kind of real life data from that. But really cool story, fascinating, and could be a game changer for a lot of people who are living with schizophrenia.

S: Yeah, absolutely. What we really need is to go beyond pharmaceuticals, because pharmaceuticals can only get as specific as the receptors that are in the brain, and that's limited by the messiness of evolution. But if you could directly electromagnetically hack the circuits, there is no theoretical limit. You can get down to the neuronal level, technically.

C: I was wondering where you were going with that, because I thought you were going to say, like, genetics?

S: Well, that's another way approach as well.

C: Yeah, but it's funny, because in this one big article, where they're talking to a lot of schizophrenia researchers, there's one of the researcher, there's actually a quote here as a schizophrenia researcher, I'm embarrassed to say that we spent literally billions of American tax dollars on genetics looking to understand what causes schizophrenia and to help us develop new drugs and we've not been successful.

S: Yeah. There's only a 50% concordance rate with identical twins in schizophrenia.

C: Yeah.

S: At most it's 50% contributed to by genetics.

C: And it does seem to be the case that there are very predictable experiences that can induce schizophrenic symptoms. And so it's like it's you have to have the predisposition and then something has to happen experientially. Yeah. It's a really fascinating diagnosis. It's a syndrome, really, because there's a lot going on in the brain with schizophrenia, and it manifests in a lot of different ways for different people. So, yeah, but this is a big step.

S: All right. Thanks, Cara.

News Item #3 - Wood Vaulting (37:52)

• Wood Vaulting for Carbon Sequestration - NeuroLogica Blog 

S: Guys, have any of you heard of wood vaulting? Wood vaulting?

J: Of course.

E: It's when you lock away chunks of wood.

S: That's right.

E: You save and close the door.

S: That's exactly right.

C: Oh, no way.

E: Well, there you go. So, yes, I have heard of it.

S: So the idea is to use wood for carbon capture, and then you've got to preserve it for a long period of time, right? So there's a very fun little science story that just got published, but let me give a little bit of background first. So the idea is, with carbon capture is that we're only going to be able to reduce our carbon emissions by so much so fast. And even if we can really significantly decarbonize our energy sector and our transportation sector, we still have steel making and cement. It's going to be really hard to get below 10 or 20 percent of where we are now. But if you want to reach net zero, we're going to have to take carbon out of the air, right? We're going to have to somehow capture carbon dioxide.

E: Re-capture it.

S: Yeah. And then, of course, you have to then lock it away somewhere. You can't just release it back into the atmosphere. You've got to lock it away. So if you use biofuels, that's not carbon negative. That's carbon neutral because then you burn it, and then they release the CO2 again. Planting trees is also not carbon negative in the long term. Planting trees is basically, essentially the way to look at tree planting is the trees of the world store a certain amount of carbon. And that amount of carbon is sort of permanently taken out of the environment the air, the ocean, etc. It's not the same trees, but you had the same number of trees. As long as there's a steady state of trees, that amount of carbon is removed from the carbon cycle. Does that make sense? So what we're doing, unfortunately, is with deforestation, we're reducing trees as a carbon sink. We, of course, want to increase reforestation. We want to increase forests as a carbon sink. And that could buy us time, but that can't continuously remove carbon from the atmosphere that can only just you know provide a one-off temporary increase enlarging the forest carbon sink of the world, does that makes sense? But what if we could keep trees from decaying and releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere, then that would be a permanent store of carbon. Or you could also think it wouldn't necessarily have to be permanent permanent if it could be thousands of years that would be that would work too. Even hundreds of years would be helpful. The next two three hundred years that's going to be really critical, but if we could lock it away for a thousand years that's really what we're talking about. There's a number of ways of doing that, right? One way to do that is to plant trees and then build stuff out of them, right? And you build stuff that you keep dry and you keep in good condition and it can last for a very long time, right? So if you build a building out of it, and that building can survive 200 years, then you're taking that wood out of circulation, if you will, for whatever the duration is of that building. There are also some trees that just survive a very long time. There are trees that survive hundreds or even thousands of years, so those could be good long-term carbon sinks. But another way is to bury the wood. Just bury it. The problem is if you just bury wood, it decays and releases its carbon into the soil.

B: Like coffins.

S: Yeah, which is not a bad thing. That's a good way to temporarily increase the soil as a carbon sink, and it's also good for the soil, etc. That's actually not a bad thing, but again, it's not this open-ended, negative carbon sink, because that carbon is getting back into the environment. So, researchers were looking to see if they could find soil conditions that would slow or significantly delay the rotting of wood. And if they could find soil conditions that would delay it for a really long time, then we could just plant trees and then harvest them and bury the logs underground, and that could be a cheap and effective carbon sink, right? We're doing a lot of research on carbon capture technology, but trees are carbon capture technology. They do exactly what we want to do, which is to remove CO2 from the air and lock it in a long-term, solid form. We just need that long-term solid form to be really long, right? So this was Ning Zhen and colleagues. They found a location near Quebec with soil conditions that they thought, they predicted, would be good for preserving wood for a long time. Basically low oxygen, right? That's always the key. You know, you want it to be low oxygen. So it was very clay-rich soil, or had like a good top layer of clay. So, they dug a trench in order to put some test wood down in there so that they could follow it over time and see how quickly it loses its carbon. And you know what they found when they dug that trench? A log.

E: Did they?

S: And you know how old that log was?

J: 5,000 years old.

E: 1000.

S: 3,775 years old.

J: I knew it.

E: Wow.

S: Which, to me, is so ironic. They're saying, hey, this might be a good place to bury logs. They dig down there, and there's already a log there. And that was naturally buried. So nature has already done, already did the experiment they were hoping to do. So instead, they just analyzed that log and published those results. So they found out that not only its age, but they estimate that the log has lost less than 5% of its carbon over that period of time.

J: That's amazing.

S: Which is negligible, right? So essentially, they were able to demonstrate that this is an effective long-term way to store wood so that it would be in the vault, right? So this is now a wood vault. It's not going to just go back into the ecosystem. And again, the key is that I guess the clay prevents water from getting down in there and keeps the oxygen very, very low. And there are other aspects of it too. It's all about the acidity and other things as well. All right, so they also did some calculations. Okay, so if this is the case, then how, if we had an optimized or even a reasonable system of growing trees and burying them in soil conditions that will preserve them for thousands of years. How much carbon could we take out of the atmosphere? And, another critical component, how much would it cost? So, right now we're releasing about 36 gigatons of carbon each year, right? Which is the most we've ever released. We're still on the maximum release of CO2. We haven't even turned that corner yet. We haven't even decreased the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. So 36 gigatons per year. Their calculation showed that there's a potential, a global potential, to sequester 10 gigatons per year just using existing technology. So not requiring the development of any new technology. You're basically just growing trees and burying it. So that's pretty good. That's a little bit less than a third. So that is more than enough. So the IPCC estimated that the minimum amount of carbon removal we're going to need to do in order to reach our goals, right, in terms of limiting global warming is five gigatons per year. Which is way more than we could do right now. But this could potentially be, by their estimate, 10 gigatons per year, which is more in the middle of the estimate of what we might need. So that's sort of well within range. This of course would still cost a massive amount of money. Now they estimate the cost to be anywhere between $30 and $100 per ton. They say, quote unquote, after optimization. So I don't know what that means, but I guess that means like if we have to really automate and mass produce this kind of process so that you get some kind of cost benefits of scale. So even at the- current methods of direct air capture of CO2, which is what we're talking about here, ranges from one hundred to three hundred dollars per ton. So they sort of overlap right at the boundary there, but this would be less than that. I mean, hopefully we can get it close to the $30 per ton. If we assume $30 per ton and we're sequestering 10 gigatons per year, that means that program to do that would cost $300 billion per year to do that, which sounds like a lot, but it really isn't, because we're talking globally, right? That $300 billion a year is not a lot for the world to spend on a project that could...

C: Well, especially a project that mitigates things that cost way more than that.

S: The estimates are that global warming, the cost of global warming, the estimates range from $1.7 to $38 trillion per year. So even at the low end of that estimate, which is probably way under-calling it, $1.7 trillion per year, this would be a sixth of that, right? So yeah, it's going to cost way less than mitigating the effects of global warming itself. Probably way, way less. You know, one to two orders of magnitude is what we're talking about. So, even at $300 billion per year, if we can get it down to that cost, at the high end it could be $1 trillion per year, which is still less than the cost of global warming, but that would be the high end of their estimate. So, what all this means is these numbers are back of the envelope in the range of plausibility, in terms of the amount, the scalability, and the cost. It's not ideal, but it's plausible, right? This would actually work if we could pull it off. And this could go a long way to reduce our CO2, our net CO2 release. This could get us to net zero much faster than not doing this, right? So yeah, this is somewhat encouraging that it may be as simple as burying trees in the ground, which is not a high-tech solution. We obviously need some follow-up studies, like we really need a survey of where in the world are the soil conditions adequate? How deep do we have to dig? How many logs could you throw in there? How much would it cost to engineer the ground to do that? What would be the long-term effects on the environment for doing this? This requires more study. I'm sure it would not be as bad as global warming, though, so again, I'm not worried that we're going to find out that this is a cure that's worse than the disease. That's probably very unlikely.

B: But all it takes, though, is for the world to work together for the greater good.

S: Yeah.

E: Is that all?

B: That's all. That's all it takes, so it's not going to happen.

E: Right.

S: Right. My approach generally is to not put all of our eggs in one basket, right? So we always want—it's not like we're trying to find the one solution, right? This is one more thing that could add to a lot of other things. Like, we should do reforestation, right? We should do something like this. We should do other forms of carbon capture as well. The other thing is there's maybe other places that we could put wood products. Like there are other places that have very, very low oxygen. I know some people have brought up-

B: Space.

S: Space has very low oxygen. I understand that, but that's probably cost-prohibited.

E: That's expensive.

B: Yeah, there is that.

S: But what about like the Marianas Trench? You know?

E: Ooh.

S: Right?

B: Wood floats.

E: What about the whales living down there?

S: Not all wood floats.

B: That's true.

S: But I haven't seen a plausibility study on that. So anyway, there's a movement to build big buildings, big commercial buildings out of wood rather than steel and cement, because wood has a much lower carbon footprint than steel and cement does.

E: How big of a building can you make out of wood?

S: Surprisingly big with modern engineering.

E: What examples do we have? We have the largest...

S: I've seen some. They're gorgeous, first of all, like an all-wood huge building. They have these massive beams. But I don't know off the top of my head like what the maximum size you can get to. Not skyscraper size, right? You need steel for that.

C: Well, and I know that this isn't like building buildings, but Evan, you should Google the way that they do scaffolding in most Asian countries. Because they don't use metal for scaffolding, they use bamboo, and it can be like very high. I know that's not the same as building a building, but it is pretty impressive how you can change the engineering of these things in ways that you can utilize them. You know, we're envisioning just replacing steel beams with wood beams, but there are other ways to build buildings.

E: Oh, sure. Or just use more wooden materials in the building of these buildings.

C: Right.

E: You know, a hybrid.

S: I remember we talked about compressed wood or condensed wood, which is much stronger than natural wood. And I think it can get to greater specific strength than steel, which is strength per weight. It's not stronger than steel. It's just for the weight, it's stronger. But again, that's a process and that costs money.

C: But aren't residential homes still made of wood?

S: Residential homes are mostly made of wood still.

C: That's what I thought, yeah. They're mostly wood frames.

S: Yeah.

C: Yeah, that's interesting.

S: Yeah, but I don't know what the average life expectancy of a home is.

E: Oh gosh, but some homes in New England have been standing for 350 years, easily.

S: Yeah, not a lot though, but some, yeah. But again, anything we think about, we have to be in the realm of gigatons of CO2 or it's not going to have enough of an impact. But collectively, again, I think we should take the all of the above approach here. We're trying to buy us some time and we're trying to get to net zero as quickly as possible, maybe even net negative for a while until we reach whatever scientists say is the best equilibrium point. And then we might get to the point where the world industry just releases a certain amount of CO2 that we're really never going to be able to get rid of, and then we just have to also carbon capture the same amount to get to a steady state. But there's general consensus that we do need to do some type of significant carbon capture to get to net zero. And that's like the one piece to the puzzle that we don't really fully have now. For pretty much everything else that we need to do to mitigate global warming, we have the technology. We just got to do it. It's a matter of just transitioning fast enough. Scalable, cost-effective carbon capture. We're working on it, but it's still expensive and nothing really is fantastic. So this could be a good option.

News Item #4 - AI Finds Nazca Lines (55:41)

• 'Knife-wielding orca' and alien-looking figures among 300 Nazca Lines discovered in groundbreaking AI study 

S: So Evan, tell us about those Nazca lines.

E: Yeah, the Nazca Lines. Have we talked about this before on the show?

S: I'm sure probably 15 plus years ago.

E: Really, it had to have been a long time ago because I went looking through my notes for old notes on one I've at least talked about Nazca. I could not find any. So I'm not sure. All right, let me give you a little background then. Well, I'm going to take us back to 1997. This was eight years before the podcast. We were running a local skeptics group, the New England Skeptical Society, and we had a featured speaker come and speak at one of our lectures in our lecture series, Joe Nickell. Do you remember?

B: Oh yeah, Joe Nickell.

E: He's great. Gave a presentation about so much of the work he had done over the prior 20 plus years as a skeptical investigator. He was the chief investigator for what was what, CSICOP at the time, the Committee for Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal, and today they're simply known as CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. One of the topics Joe had investigated and reported on were the Nazca Lines of Peru. This was brand new to me, and this might be new to some of our maybe younger listeners who have never heard of the Nazca Lines before. So these Nazca Lines, they're a series of large geoglyphs. They're etched into the ground in the Nazca desert of southern Peru, about 200 miles southeast of Lima, near the modern town of Nazca. Yep, these lines were created by the Nazca culture, the people that lived in this region between 500 BCE and 500 CE. And it is basically ancient large-scale art. They stretch across an area, these lines, about 1,000 square kilometers in the area. And really, their full scale can only be appreciated from the air or perhaps the surrounding foothills due to their immense size. These things get very, very large. In fact, they were only really recognized, I believe, in the 1920s when airplane technology finally was emerging and they noticed them at that point and became more curious about it. How did they make them? Well, you make them by removing what are described as the reddish brown iron oxide rich pebbles that cover the desert surface and it reveals a lighter yellowish soil underneath and that contrast creates the visible patterns. And a lot of these lines, they're simple geometric shapes straight lines, spirals, trapezoids, triangles. Some of them stretch as long as 12 miles. And sometimes they form more intricate patterns. There are depictions of animals, plants, among other things. Maybe some of the ones you've seen in pictures, a monkey with a curled tail, or we've seen them in slides. Certainly Joe Nickell brought examples with him during that presentation. There was a hummingbird. That's one of the more famous ones, a spider, a whale, a condor, a lizard, a dog, among others. Those lines are amazing for really so many reasons. It's the size and scale, like nothing else from that era. Some of those lines have stood the rigors of time, just the fact that they're still around after all this time. Thank goodness they're in the desert, in which I guess it's a relatively, comparatively stable climate, fewer weather swings, and those kinds of things. But there's also been the disturbance of other cultures, treading on the region over thousands of years. And it makes you wonder, how were they able to accomplish such a feat of both art and engineering? One set of lines, let's see, it's described as an enigmatic human-like figure known as the astronaut or the owl man. And when you take a look at that particular one, you can go online and look at it, you can start to think why some people might jump to a conclusion that this particular work represents, well, something otherworldly like a deity or a supernatural being such as an extraterrestrial. Yep. You know, that big round head the big eyes, that prototypical sort of alien that our current culture would have us envision of what such a thing would look like. And then you can see how that would then touch into the world of pseudoscience. An alternative archaeology. Because why? Well, they didn't have a bird's eye view of what they were trying to accomplish at the time, so how did they get into the air, the people, to see it? You can't really discern it at ground level, right? They're just lines that stretch and curve at great distances and you can't really envision it in your head even if you walk the path. How did they do it? This was a legitimate scientific mystery well up through the late 20th century trying to figure out how it was done. Now, the Nazca lines could only really be extensively studied in the 20th century, obviously, for flight. There was a German archaeologist at the time. Her name was Maria Reiche, R-E-I-C-H-E or Reiche. She dedicated much of her life to studying, preserving the lines and advocating for their protection and proposing that they had, well, her theory was they were of an astronomical significance, maybe of stars and constellations aligned and those sorts of things. And the purpose is still today a subject of legitimate scientific debate, right? Are they astronomical significance? Or was it a calendar of some kind? Were they just religious symbols? And they're still trying to work this out. But the idea that someone or something other than the Nazca people created these geoglyphs is the stuff of pseudoscience and alternative archaeology. And that idea gained widespread attention largely through the work of Erich von Deineken, which is a name we may have brought up in the past at some point, a Swiss author who promoted the concept in his 1968 book, Chariot of the Gods.

B: Oh, God.

E: Right? Remember that? That extraterrestrial beings either directly created them or they assisted the humans in constructing these. Because, of course, there's no way people back in those times could have done this without the assistance of what? Imaginary super outer space creatures. And they said, of course, they were doing it. You know why? And they had the help of aliens because they were using them, what, as landing strips, navigational markers for extraterrestrial spacecraft, right? These were intended for beings that could only fly and that had to be extraterrestrials at the time aliens. You know, was it a form of a tribute to the sky gods, which they called them at these aliens from other words? So it all touches the-

S: Yeah, because no ancient culture had a concept of identity living up in the heavens, right?

E: Right, right. So that's why the Nazca Lines are a topic in the skeptical community. We've been tackling it since really the 1970s, and this was one of the reasons why Joe Nickell came to talk with us about his investigation into the Nazca Lines. He went down to Peru and studied them firsthand. He did his own investigation. They were able, after their investigation, they saw everything that was going on. You remember what they did, what Joe told us they did? They went to a desert, I think in New Mexico or in Arizona, and they decided, we're going to make our own Nazca lines. We're going to see, and we're going to only use the technology that was available at the time, which is basically twigs and rope and a sketch, just a sketch on a regular piece of paper what they were trying to draw. And they got it to work.

S: They did it.

E: Yep, they absolutely did it. And in fact, Joe, I remember Joe telling us, he said there was a flaw in the sketch, like there was a notch or something that they hadn't noticed at the time. But when they did the work and then they went up into the air to look at it, that notch, that little mistake was actually in there in the actual lines that they drew. So fascinating. No extraterrestrials required. That's the back story. Here's the news this week. Scientists are now using AI to find more of the Nazca lines in the desert. They have found so far over 300 of them that they weren't able to detect before. Whoa. Yep. Including abstract humanoid figures, ancient ceremonies, decapitated heads, Bob.

B: Cool.

E: Yeah. And one that they described as a killer whale holding-

S: Wait, is it a decapitated head?

E: Yes, decapitated.

S: Is it a decapitated head or is it a decapitated body?

E: Oh, well.

S: Right? Can you say a head is decapitated?

E: Hmm.

S: Does it mean without a head?

E: Interesting.

B: I knew what you meant.

S: I know, just curious.

E: No, that's a fair point. That's a fair point. I hadn't really thought about it. Well, let's not lose our head over it. So yeah, and there's one they call it, they describe it as a killer whale holding a knife. It was one of these. So here comes the new alternative archeology theory that's going to assume that sea mammals crawled out of the ocean to help the Nazca people create those lines. I doubt it. The geoglyphs they are finding, they're hard to find, right? Obviously, which is why they needed the AI technology to find them. They could not be found with direct observation or even the satellites, satellite imagery that they had been studying for decades of pictures of the area. They found, and they're mostly smaller. They span what, maybe about nine meters long, some of these? And they're mostly humanoid and animals. So yeah, a little harder to kind of see those. It just faded out so much. But they said here was what they were able to do. The AI model looked for them in the aerial photographs. Their high resolution photos covered an area about 10 times as large as Manhattan, which encompassed the desert plateau, the Nazca Pampa, and its surroundings to search for missed shapes in satellite images of the Nazca Desert. And so the AI produced a gridded map that categorized the probability of each grid square containing the geoglyphs. And then researchers spent more time, 2,600 hours, manually inspecting the highest probability photos and doing field inspections of the sites. And they estimate the AI helped speed up the screening process, before AI and then after AI, sped it up by a factor of 50 times by eliminating 98% of low probability aerial imagery from consideration and providing probabilities for the remaining 2%. So they used it as a great tool, a great use of AI in order to really narrow down their search for these. And in the yielded results, they also said they expect with more research, they're going to find at least a few hundred more of these as they continue. They released their paper and their findings without even having fully looked at all the data they have that they anticipate there's going to be hundreds more that they're going to find using the AI. Very cool stuff.

S: You know, it makes sense that you would have these smaller Nazca figures because, and oftentimes we see that where like the pseudoscience community is presenting the tip of an iceberg like the best examples. And they say, look how amazing these are. But once you see them in the context of the full expression, you realize that, yes, this is people who were doing this, and they were using techniques. These are basically doodles. You wonder if some of this was just developing their skills, and the best of the best are the ones who got to draw the really big ones.

E: Yeah, right. It absolutely makes sense that you would look for smaller and smaller ones. Especially if you were relying on satellite photographs, to begin with, your chances of finding small things in those photos are not as good. You find the low-hanging fruit, which are the big ones first, and then you work your way down. They expect to find more.

S: Then, of course, with hundreds of these weird pictographs, the Geoglyphs, Pareidolia kicks in, right? You're going to be able to imagine all kinds of funky stuff.

E: And they have found some funky stuff. Yeah.

S: So just looking at a couple of guys playing basketball, the giraffe.

E: Right.

S: There's a Teletubby. See the Teletubby?

E: Yeah.

S: Okay. Thanks, Evan.

E: Yep.

News Item #5 - LISA Gravitational Telescope (1:08:16)

• Meet LISA, the Gravitational Wave Observatory of the Future 

S: Bob, tell us about the biggest telescope ever. Isn't Lisa going to be the biggest telescope ever?

B: You can say that.

E: Well, he said it.

B: A new type of gravitational wave detector has been approved and it's called LISA for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. It won't be deployed for 10 years, so that sucks, but when it does it will be the first gravitational wave detector in space and it could transform our understanding of the universe. You guys remember the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy, 2015. It's going to be long remembered. It opened an entirely new window into the cosmos. Instead of detecting light, like visible light, x-rays or infrared, et cetera, these gravitational wave detectors sense the ripples in space time itself that Einstein predicted over 100 years ago. And of course, he was right yet again. These waves expand outward at the speed of light whenever three conditions are met. Number one, you need mass. Mass has to be there, has to be present. Two, that mass needs to accelerate. It has to have some change in motion, such as a collision. That's a classic one, classic example. And three, that accelerating mass needs to be asymmetric. So if you had a perfectly symmetrical spinning neutron star that would not emit gravitational waves because it was perfectly symmetrical. But even if it had an atom-sized bump on its surface, then that would be enough to emit gravitational waves because it would be asymmetrical. Now, these waves literally distort space time. But even the waves from titanic events, like colliding neutron stars, distort space time by an amount less than the width of a proton. Such Lilliputian distortions are detected using interferometers, though. And of course, it's not just the interferometers. It's the fact that they're isolating these devices so exquisitely from outside interference, which is a key component. But the key technology here is the interferometers, specifically Michelson interferometers. Look that up. So these split laser light into two beams that then travel away at 90 degrees from each other. And these beams come back, and then they interfere with each other. They overlay. They combine them together. And if both beams have traveled the same distance, then they will be in phase, and the light waves will interfere in a specific way, producing a specific and predictable interference pattern. No problem. If, however, a gravitational wave has passed by while this was happening, then the resulting stretching and compressing of space time means that the distances that the light travels no longer match. So one of these laser beams, their path was changed so that it was longer or shorter. And then the interference pattern would reflect that. And the pattern that would arise would make it obvious that, oh, look, the light didn't match, and we probably had a gravitational wave go by. Now, we've detected over 200 such gravitational waves, lots of stellar mass black hole collisions and neutron star collisions as well. They've been detected by the three facilities that are on the Earth, LIGO in the States, then there's Virgo, and that's in the UK, I believe, and Kagra in Japan. Now, these use laser beams that travel four kilometers or two and a half miles. And these are the arms of the device, right? The arms of the gravitational detectors is the length that the beam travels before it comes back. And that's a good, I mean, two and a half miles, that's pretty good, right? But that distance limits the frequency of the gravitational waves that they can detect, right? There's a correlation there between how long the arm is and then how sensitive it is. So that means that they can detect only certain events that produce those types of gravitational waves. So therefore, we can now detect black holes merging, but only if they have a mass between, say, 5 to 80 solar masses. So we call them roughly stellar mass black holes. But if it's heavier than that, we can't see it because our gravitational wave detectors cannot detect those frequencies. What if we want to detect supermassive black holes colliding with millions or billions of solar masses each? To detect such low-frequency, long-wavelength gravitational waves, we need far longer arms, longer than the Earth is wide, the diameter of the Earth. So we have to put it in space. And that's exactly what LISA will do. LISA will consist of three spacecraft in an equilateral triangular formation. And they will travel behind the Earth in very stable orbits. Their orbits will be not around the Earth, but around the sun, like the Earth. And they should be able to maintain their triangular formation for years. The distance between these spacecraft or the arms, right? The arms of these spacecraft, where the laser beams go out and come back, wouldn't be four kilometers like LIGO, but two and a half million kilometers. That's wider. That's bigger than the sun. Wider than the sun. Two and a half. So these are going to be extremely far apart. You'd have to be that far apart to detect really the really big events that are happening that produce the low-frequency, long-wavelength gravitational waves. Now, the real interesting part here, in my mind, is the inside each spacecraft, there's masses, bits of a chunk of matter that they call golden cubes. Are they golden? They might be gold-colored. Are they made of gold? I don't know. Are they cubes? Probably, I guess. They've got to call them golden cubes for some reason. So these cubes are not attached to the craft. They're suspended within it using electromagnetic traps. And that allows them to move freely. Now, the goal here is to have them in perfect freefall around the sun, because they're in orbit around the sun within these spacecraft. And if you're in orbit, you're in freefall, right? You're just giving into gravity. You're just basically falling around the sun. That's how orbits work. So each craft then sends laser beams from cube to cube. So each cube will send a laser beam out to the other two cubes in the triangle, and they come reflected back. Now, as with LIGO, if the combined light has specific interference patterns, then it's likely that a gravitational wave has passed by and changed the path lengths that these laser beams have traveled. So it works like the ground-based gravitational wave detectors, but you're in space. It's just a much bigger example of the technology in a lot of ways. Now, having such an instrument in space, LISA is expected to make many different types of groundbreaking discoveries. She'll likely see hidden details about supermassive black holes with billions of solar masses merging in distant galaxies. This could fill in details about how these huge black holes formed and evolved that we still don't know how they got to be the way they are. It's so massive, and even over billions of years, we're still not confident on how some of these can get so big. LISA should be able to test also some predictions of general relativity that would be untestable otherwise, and they could either confirm our understanding of gravity or even better challenge our understanding of gravity and maybe even lead to new physics, which is always awesome. LISA might also be able to detect gravitational waves some early in the universe, leading to an improved understanding of the Big Bang itself. Unfortunately, LISA won't be in space, as I said, until the mid-2030s. But unless I'm dead, or even better, a zombie, I'll be sure to tell you about it in episode 1530, approximately. No guarantees on that number.

E: Can't wait.

S: All right, thanks, Bob.

B: Sure.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:16:14)

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

J: All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy. [plays Noisy]

E: Oh, probably my favorite noisy of all time.

J: Yeah. It is really good. All right, so-

E: I don't care what it is.

J: I know. It's just a fun noise. So Benjamin Davolt, he wrote in and said, hi, this is a frog. You know what? I've heard frogs make some crazy noises. Why not this one? This is not a frog, but that's a good guess. A listener named Taylor Gregor wrote in, he said, hey guys, new listener, hoping to get through as many of the thousand episodes as possible. While hearing this week's noisy, I instantly thought, that's a giraffe. And he said, if you've seen the South Park movie, I'm sure you can guess why that is my guess. I think there was a time that I did hear what a giraffe, the sound that the giraffes make, but that's not it. John M wrote in, hi Jay, I heard something like this when on a boat at the Ophenokee Swamp in Georgia. It is a baby alligator. Baby alligators sound more like blasters. That's definitely not a baby alligator. If you've ever heard a group of them making their squeaking noises, it sounds like a Star Wars blaster fight. Len Schafer said, Hey Jay, this is my first time having even a ghost of a guest at the Noisy, and I've been listening for years. Any chance that that was a parrot you played us this week? He said a presumably incredulous parrot. No, this is definitely not a parrot, although birds can make lots of different sounds. The same bird can make lots and lots of different kinds of sounds, but this is not like a typical parrot noise. There is a winner. Actually, there was a few people that won, and this was the first person. So Gary Rubinson wrote in and said, I think I'm right that today's Who's That Noisy is the call of the go-away bird, previously the gray lorry, which is a very common resident bird in urban South Africa. Gary, you are 100% correct. Let me give you guys a little bit more information here. The gray go-away bird, crinifer, conchler, Also known as gray lorry, gray loray, or quevo, like, wow, names I can't pronounce. It's a bold and common taraco of the southern afrotropics. They're present in arid to moist open woodlands and thorn savanna, especially near surface water. Yeah. So this is a bird and birds make pretty much every noise on the planet. I would be very happy to play you this one again. So take a listen. [plays Noisy] OK, so there it is.

E: I want five of them.

J: I know. I mean, I don't know if owning one of them would be fun because you'd hear that in the middle of the night. I have a new noisy for you guys. This one was sent in by a listener named Scott Leonard. And let's check it out. [plays Noisy]

S: I'm going to guess that one was not a bird.

J: No, that was a bunch of birds. So if you think you know what this noisy is, or you heard something cool, please email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, I'd like to make a couple of quick announcements. On December 7th of this year, we have an SGU Private Show Plus. You will be a part of a live recording of the podcast. Then after that, we have an hour of audience interaction. This is a really good time and we hope to see you guys there. You can get tickets for this show by going to theskeptic'sguide.org and look for the button on the homepage. Just so you know, George Hrab will be, of course, joining us for that show. On the same day, that night, December 7th, we have our stage show. It's called A Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance. At this show, guys, we teach you how you can't trust your brain. This is a two-hour show packed with a ton of fun bits. We have been running this show for, I think, about 10 years, and it is awesome. I really hope you can join us. You can also go to theskepticsguide.org. There'll be a button there for tickets. And finally guys, here's the big one, NOTACON, tickets are available, the roll out is happening right now, let me tell you exactly how it works. Paid patrons get access on October 5th, they can buy all their tickets, there's different things going on at the conference. Non-paid patrons get access on the 7th and everyone else gets access on the 9th. If you want to get earlier access to those tickets and those other shows that we're going to be doing, then you could consider becoming a patron or becoming a non-paid patron. We have one day tickets, we have full conference tickets, and we also have a VIP. We also have a new event called the Board Room, which is a board game event. And if you're interested, you can play tabletop board games with the Rogues and with the other hosts of the show, that's Brian Wecht, Andrea Jones Roy, and George Hrab. Tickets for the VIP and the board games are limited. One other note, the VIP includes the following. It includes a meet and greet on Thursday night, early access to all the SGU swag, you'll also get a VIP pin, you'll also get a VIP badge, and there's VIP preferred seating. Tickets are limited to the VIP and to the board games, so please register early. You can get tickets at notaconcon.com. Let me say that again. That is notaconcon.com. And like I said last year, you can thank Ian for that URL.

S: Jay, are we going to do a Pearl Harbor themed extravaganza?

J: Why?

S: Because it'll limit him to December 7th?

J: No. I don't even know why you'd bring that up. So anyway, moving on.

S: Because it's December 7th?

J: Whatever. Who cares? We're going to be in DC. We're going to have fun. We're going to have a couple of good meals. We're going to do a couple of shows. We're going to get to hang out with Cara, who basically is my sister at this point.

C: Yep, but just Jay's. I kid.

S: I bet you Pearl Harbor will come up, though.

J: Steve, wait a second. Steve, one more thing. Steve, hold on. One more thing. Are you there?

S: I'm here. Go.

J: All right, listen to this. [plays Noisy]

S: All right, thank you, Jay.

Emails (1:19:59)

S: We're going to do one question. This question comes from Campbell, and after some prologue he writes, My question is, where might-does-could critical thinking sit in helping religious people push back against extremist religious ideology, but without making an atheist argument? Is there something humanists should be encouraging non-extreme religious people to do? So what Campbell's talking about is, should we be spending I say we, like in the rationalist movement, he says specifically humanist, but it could be atheist, could be skeptical movement to encourage religious people, people who have religious faith, to be less radical, less extreme, and more critical thinking, rational. You know, moderate in their religious beliefs. Is there a place for that within the rationalist movement? What do you guys think?

C: Of course.

S: Yeah, that's kind of my reaction is, yeah, sure. It's not, I kind of, throughout the course of my skeptical career, have rejected this, like, perfect being the enemy of the good approach of. It's, we have to have a purist method, either, we have to have a purist message. Either you're pushing hardcore atheism or nothing. You know what I mean? It's got to be, like, there's no room for anything in the middle. And I've heard the term gets thrown around like you're an accommodationist, right? If you do anything other than promote a purist approach, which I disagree with, it's not accommodationist. If you're trying to meet people where they are. Think about it, if you could turn somebody from a radicalized fundamentalist religious believer into a deist who believes in God but takes a more scholarly intellectual approach to theology and how that applies to the world, doesn't mix their religion into science, all that stuff, would that be a positive change? Of course it would be. You're not going to say we're not doing that just because either you're an atheist or get away from me, you know what I mean? What's the point of that?

C: I also can't stand this mentality within the skeptical movement that being a firebrand atheist is the best way to prove that you're a skeptic. There are tons of skeptically oriented scientists who are also religious.

S: Absolutely.

C: And they're good at their jobs, you know what I mean?

S: I think that's a minority of the skeptical community, Cara.

C: I think it is now the minority. I do not think it was when I first started in this community.

S: Well, I think you might be confusing, though, because the thing is like the humanist, the atheist, and the skeptical communities kind of all overlap a lot. And there are people in the skeptical community who are really humanists, or they're also humanists or atheists, and sometimes they're atheists first. And again, that's fine. But they're the ones who are more likely to have that kind of attitude where like, the atheism is more important to them than scientific skepticism.

C: I guess but like yes, it's intersectional. And I would define myself that way. I am atheist first. I actually came to atheism long before I came to science and skepticism. And I really do wear that hat heavily, but I also am not the type of atheist who thinks everybody should be atheist. It's just a weird mentality to me.

S: Yeah, I mean, our approach has always been at The Skeptic's Guide, The Skeptical Society, ever since we've been activists is like, we don't really care what your faith is. Like, that's not our business and it doesn't really affect anything necessarily. What we care is that you don't use faith to trump science, logic, or reason.

C: Exactly. It is incompatible with fundamentalist views.

S: Fundamentalist belief, yeah. But if you want some unfalsifiable deist belief, I disagree with that philosophically. That's not what I believe. I will argue with you about it philosophically. But it's not like I feel like I need to be an activist to make people not have that belief. I just don't want people to deny evolution, to deny signs in the name of their religion, to oppress people in the name of their religion.

C: Absolutely. There's a massive difference between promoting an ideology or I should even say like a phenomenology, like promoting a way of thinking that makes the world better, right? Promoting a way of thinking that improves public policy, that improves public health, that improves safety. And promoting an ideology that, for example, doesn't. Like the thing that's just so confusing to me is when people care if somebody has a personal faith relationship. That doesn't affect anything. If somebody denies science, that affects the world. But if somebody has a personal faith relationship, that doesn't affect anything. If somebody is fundamentalist, if somebody is engaging in organized religion and utilizing it for social control, that's a different question. But that's not what we're talking about.

S: And, not for nothing, and this is a discussion I've been having with my fellow atheist skeptics, humanists, for 30 years, is even if it is your goal to move people away from faith, your approach doesn't really work. The approach of beating their faith out of them, metaphorically-

E: They entrench.

S: Yeah, there's not a good approach. The approach of let's give you some critical thinking skills and appreciate why science says what it says, and etc., etc. And eventually, if they're going to get rid of their faith, they're going to surrender it because you gave them the alternative worldview and the tools to do that, not because you bashed religious belief in faith. And the last 30 years of research has, I think, supported that position.

C: Yeah. And even in the truth of the matter is that a skeptical mindset will not ever replace faith for some people. And I think that the toolkit won't necessarily completely lead them to that place because there's a whole other component of faith that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

S: But it has a far better chance than religion is bad. You got to get rid of it. Yeah.

C: And that's like the Dunning, the David Dunning idea of like, it's not just that people have these blank minds, it's that they have ideas. And if you can't replace them with something else, if there's not a good alternative appropriate for them to kind of put on for size, they're never going to abandon those core beliefs. And the problem with viewing atheism that way is that that's a lack of belief. I can't replace your deism with my lack of deism.

S: Yeah, I mean, but I will push back on that a little bit because, yes, you are technically correct. Atheism itself is a lack of belief. But we do fill that space with a philosophical and science-based and rational approach to thinking about the universe and existence and morality.

C: Well, I think you do. But I think there are plenty of atheists out there who are not scientific skeptics.

S: Well, I know that. Believe me, I know that.

C: So I think they just don't need faith.

S: But the thing is, if you give people those things, their need for faith goes down, in my opinion. Does that make sense?

C: I think that that is true, but I don't think it takes it to zero. I think that faith serves a purpose for plenty of people that is far beyond what we're talking about.

S: And I don't care if it takes it to zero, because again, if you get rid of all the negative aspects of it, what are you left with? Just a personal faith? Okay, good for you. Who cares?

C: Exactly. We all have different, like, I'm very existential in my philosophical leanings. Like, I don't expect you to be that way.

S: Good.

C: You know, it's like, what does that matter to me?

S: Yeah, we are agreeing with each other. You gotta do the Indiana Jones thing when he has the statue and the bag of sand.

C: Yeah, you gotta put something else there.

S: You gotta, like, swap them out, you know.

J: But Steve, that didn't work. That didn't work so well.

C: But it almost worked.

J: He almost got run over.

E: He almost got crushed. But that's a sad point.

S: Yeah, okay. Anyway, good question. All right, let's go on with science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:31:37)

Theme: None Item #1: In a recent survey, 86% of climate experts expressed belief that we will experience >2.0 C of warming by 2100, with a median estimate of 2.7 C, a level projected to have catastrophic consequences. Item #2: A CRISPR-like gene editing system, once thought exclusive to prokaryotes, was recently identified in eukaryotic cells. Item #3: A recent AI-powered simulation based upon current exoplanet data finds that F-type stars, which are slightly more massive than our sun, are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Item #3
Science	Item #1
Science	Item #2

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

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

S: Each week I come up with three science news items for facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just got three news items this week. This is a hard week to find news items for science for facts. It's taken me a long time this week. Are you ready?

C: Yes.

S: Alright, here we go. Item number one. In a recent survey, 86% of climate experts expressed belief that we will experience greater than 2 degrees C of warming by 2100, with a median estimate of 2.7 C, a level projected to have catastrophic consequences. Item number two, a CRISPR-like gene editing system, once thought exclusive to prokaryotes, was recently identified in eukaryotic cells. And iron number three, a recent AI-powered simulation based upon current exoplanet data finds that F-type stars, which are slightly more massive than our Sun, are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Evan, go first.

E: Okay, we have a recent survey, 86% of climate experts express belief that we will experience greater than 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. This is terrible. I guess that median estimate of 2.7 degrees Celsius. Yeah, catastrophic consequences. Well, I mean, this is the one you want to be fiction, I think, right, of these three. It's not going to be, unfortunately. I see nothing here that would make me think this is obviously fiction. I'm going to move on. Number two about the CRISPR-like gene editing system. Wait a minute. Have we talked about other gene editing systems other than those CRISPR ones? I don't recall. Once thought exclusive to prokaryotes, was recently identified in eukaryotic cells. Oh, I don't know. This is very new. And I'm very ignorant about this. So I don't have a good sense for it at all. And then let me see what I can find it in the last one. Recent AI-powered simulation. And this is about exoplanets. F-type stars, which are slightly more massive than our sun, are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy. Don't those usually happen around, what, the red dwarfs? The most Earth-like planets? Which are, I think, smaller, but the planets are closer to them. Right? So this is kind of different.

S: So you're first, so I'll clarify, by Earth-like, I mean completely Earth-like, so like a tidally locked planet would not qualify as Earth-like.

E: Oh, okay. Well, I mean, I'm most ignorant about this CRISPR-like gene editing system. Again, I don't recall us ever talking about a gene editing system other than CRISPR. I really know nothing about that one. And the exoplanet one. I'll just say the CRISPR one is fiction. I wish I had a better reason as to why, but it's just because I'm ignorant.

S: OK, Jay.

J: You know, with this first one here, you're saying that climate experts are saying that we will experience a two degree Celsius warming by 2100. I thought that we were going to get there sooner than that. That's a long way off. 2100 is a very long way off. So I'm not sure about that one. Number two, the CRISPR-like gene editing system. So Steve, again, the difference between those two types of cells is what?

S: Prokaryotes are like bacteria, eukaryotes are us, multicellular creatures.

C: And plants and fungi.

B: A nucleus is one of the key differences.

J: Oh, I mean, so I'm not clear about what the difference is, though. So the first one means that CRISPR can edit...

C: No.

J: Explain it to me. I'm just not getting it.

S: CRISPR was derived from bacteria.

J: Correct.

S: Right? Bacteria are prokaryotes.

J: Right.

C: So the CRISPR was a bacterial system that is now used for gene technology.

J: Got you. So they found that system in creatures like us, not in bacteria.

S: Yes.

J: That's the claim here. Okay, got it. That makes perfect sense. All right, so this CRISPR1 for sure, I mean, I think it makes sense that if it exists in bacteria-sized creatures that why wouldn't it exist in human-sized creatures? I know that there's a massive difference between bacteria and a super large organism like a human. But still, it just seems to make sense that the cells would need to do things like this over time. So I don't know, I'm feeling like that one is science. And this AI-powered simulation based upon current exoplanet data finds that F-type stars are likely to host greatest number of Earth-like planets. Okay, so that one doesn't seem that remarkable either, right? These are stars that are slightly larger than Earth, Earth's sun, our sun, and they're more likely to have Earth-like planets. Okay, I just don't see what the big deal is with that. That one seems like it's not a strange thing or out of bounds of what I'm typically used to reading here in this segment. That means that the first one, which I was not too happy about to begin with, this is the global warming one, I'm going to say that one is the fiction.

S: Okay, Bob.

B: Really, the first one?

J: Yep.

B: That one seems totally, totally correct to me. Yeah, I get what you're saying. 2,100. I thought maybe we were going to hit two degrees a little before then. But no, 2,100. That's kind of like the iconic date for some of these estimates. And yeah, 2,700 catastrophically. Yeah, we're totally going to hit that. So that makes way too much sense to me. Let's see, the CRISPR one, this one makes sense too. It wouldn't surprise me that they would identify some bizarre CRISPR-like gene editing system in prokaryotes. See, I could totally see that, see that happening. And the same with three here with the F-type stars. So it's really, for me, it's a coin toss between the CRISPR and the F-type stars. They both seem reasonable. I don't think we have enough data points necessarily to conclude what kind of type of star would host more Earth-like planets. I know we've got 4,000 last time I checked, 4,000 or 5,000 exoplanets discovered, but still, that's still a tiny, tiny number compared to what the real numbers are in terms of exoplanets in our galaxy alone. But still, this is what the – based on the current exoplanet data, that's what the AI came up with apparently. And that kind of – that wouldn't surprise me. But I'm kind of thinking it might be less massive than our sun. So I'll just say that's fiction.

E: Whoa.

S: Not for the first time, Cara. The boys are all over the place. So you're the tiebreaker.

C: Okay, so one each? Yeah, because I also am having the same struggle where they all seem reasonable. I think the one that's the coolest to me is the CRISPR one, but I also think like, yeah, of course, eukaryotic genes are going to be edited as well. So why wouldn't we have some sort of interesting mechanism that's similar? Plus, we evolved from prokaryotes. So wouldn't we have evolved some sort of system that's similar, or maybe more complicated, but you know, has the same kind of core roots. So that one is the coolest in some ways to me, and maybe the least I don't know, but I think that one's science. I'm going to be really annoyed if the climate one is the fiction.

B: Yeah, me too.

C: Yeah, because it's such a duh thing, but I have to say it's science, unless just some of the numbers are off, but I just don't think they would be off by that much.

B: Yeah, right, not dramatically.

E: Well, I'll get mad at Jay if he wins.

C: The one I just don't, I don't know enough about is the F-type stars one, and my guess would be that AI-powered simulation data would show, sorry, what types of stars the sun?

B: G?

S: G, yeah.

C: I don't know. My assumption is that they would be like, well, where are we more likely to find Earths? Around suns. So I'm going to say that that's the fiction, and maybe they found that G-type stars were more likely. Who knows?

S: Okay, so I guess I'll take these in order. We'll start with number one in a recent survey 86% of climate experts expressed belief that we will experience greater than 2.0 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, with a median estimate of 2.7 C, a level projected to have catastrophic consequences. Jay-

B: Catastrophic!

S: -you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is obvious science. And this one is...

B: I don't know what to hope for.

S: Science. This is science.

E: I mean, in a way, we'd be celebrating if it was the fiction.

S: This is just a survey. This is not a study or anything. This is just asking experts who know the data. Their assessment of the data is, and Jay, my interpretation is not that they're saying that we won't cross 2.0c until 2100, It's just that by 2100, we will have crossed 2.0. So it could be any time between now and 2100.

J: That's not cool, because that's...

S: That's exactly what it says. With a median estimate of 2.7 by 2100. At 2100, the median estimate was 2.7.

B: So what do they mean by catastrophic? I don't remember any details of how catastrophic it is.

S: Well, that's when you get to tipping points. If we get to 2.7, we'll probably end up at 6. And that's when everything melts. That's bad. 2.7 would be bad. So yeah, this is what they think. But again, this is not a prediction so much as this is what they think is the most likely to happen. In other words, there's not a scientific projection or anything. They're just saying – because a lot of this includes their estimates of how they think – what they think the world is going to do, right? This is not like if A and B and C, then this will happen. This is just, yeah, this is what we think is going to happen based upon how we think politics is going. You know what I mean? That's factored in here as well.

B: True.

S: But a lot of them do think on the positive. On the positive, they do think we will reach net zero by the second half of this century, which is good. So, it's just going to take longer, though, to get to net zero and to turn that curve around. It's going to be too late. By 2100, we'll probably still be close to our peak, which is not good. So, we have to do more and we got to do it faster in order to prevent these scenarios.

B: I am sorry, future grandkids and great-grandkids. Really, really sorry.

S: All right, item number two, a CRISPR-like gene editing system once thought exclusive to prokaryotes was recently identified in eukaryotic cells. Evan, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. So there are reasons why the scientists thought that a CRISPR-like RNA-guided endonucleases were exclusive to prokaryotes because they probably evolved from things that bacteria do that eukaryotes don't do, like exchanging DNA, etc. So they were a little bit surprised when they did find that it exists in eukaryotic cells, because this one is science. Actually, this is a follow-up study where they're looking at the anatomy of these systems. So they basically found that there are two clades, if you will, of these eukaryotic-based gene editing systems, FANZOR1 and FANZOR2, that's F-A-N-Z-O-R. So the new study is a cryo-electron microscopy looking at the structure of FANZOR in a specific cell type. And they're just looking at the architecture and trying to understand how it works. So this is still early days because we've this has only been discovered fairly recently. But yeah, but this could eventually become a gene editing system that we can use clinically. Or in research. It's a eukaryote-based gene editing system. Cool. All this means that—I know Jay's really excited—all this means that a recent AI-powered simulation based upon current exoplanet data finds that F-type stars, which are slightly more massive than our Sun, are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy is the fiction, because the study wasn't even about that.

C: Did you just make this up?

S: No, no, it is based, it's loosely based upon a paper that was published by some astronomers who were just kind of speculating about the kinds of stars that might have life on it. Now, planets that are in the habitable zone, they focused on F, so basically they were trying to say, is there any possibility that F-type stars may have life? The reason to be pessimistic about that is because, remember, the bigger the star, the more massive the star, the shorter their lifespan. And so these stars would not survive as long, which is why they're not going to have the most. Essentially, you could do this calculation. You have to figure out what's the probability of having a planet in the habitable zone, which is partly based upon how big the habitable zone is, And also, is it far enough away that you could be in the habitable zone and not be tidally locked, right? So they're saying, well, we haven't really been considering F-type stars as host stars for life because they're too short-lived. But they said, but their habitable zone is big. It's bigger than, say, a Sun-like star, and there might be more opportunity for life to arise around an F-type star. And they could arise around moons orbiting Jovian, or Jupiter-like planets. So they were just speculating about that, but there was no calculation. I made all that AI-powered stuff up. And we've talked about this before, actually, so if you remember our previous discussion, where astronomers did calculate which type of star is likely to have the most Earth-like planets. And it's slightly smaller stars, as Bob said. It's orange stars, because they're big enough and bright enough to have a good habitable zone, but they are way longer lived than the yellow sun of the Earth. They might live for 15 to 20 billion years, for example.

B: Wow, that long.

S: But they're not so small that they're red dwarfs and you'd have to be tidally locked to be in the habitable zone. So the orange stars may be in the sweet spot, right? So just a little bit smaller than Earth is probably where the sweet spot is not bigger than Earth. Big bigger than bigger than our Sun.

B: Yeah. Yeah.

S: So there was a way to figure out that that one was the fiction. All right. Well, good job, Bob and Cara.

C: Thanks, Bob.

B: High five.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:47:56)

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance”.  – - George Bernard Shaw, (description of author)

S: All right, Evan, give us a quote. You know what, Evan? Give us a really old, crusty quote.

E: Wait, wait. Before I give you a really old, crusty quote, I'm about to do it. I want to segue from the last segment to this. Is there such a thing as an F-type planet?

S: I don't think we'd name planets that way.

E: Yeah, I don't know. Our planet seems pretty F-ed.

B: Wasn't there M-class on Star Trek?

S: On Star Trek, yeah.

E: Totally worth it. Right, yeah. All right, a crusty old quote. So, this one was suggested by a listener. His name is Patrick. Last initial L. Thank you, Patrick. And back on August 8th of 2014, Patrick suggested this quote to us. So, I'm catching up with some old emails here.

S: 2014?

E: 2014. 10 years ago they were suggesting this one.

B: Wow, that's awesome.

E: "Beware of false knowledge. It is more dangerous than ignorance." The legendary George Bernard Shaw.

S: Yeah, that's a good quote.

E: Infinitely quotable. Oh, my gosh. I had to look this up to make sure we had not used this particular one before. We had used so many great ones before, but we had not.

S: And we've expressed this sentiment. This is, ironically, what Kara was just saying about the Dunning Kruger idea that it's not ignorance that's the problem. It's the illusion of knowledge. People's brains are not blank slates. They're filled with false information and narratives and beliefs and et cetera, et cetera.

E: So true.

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

B: Sure, man.

E: Thank you, Steve.

C: Thanks, Steve.

J: Thanks, Steve.

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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