SGU Episode 1012

This episode needs: proofreading, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

SGU Episode 1012
November 30th 2024
"Diagram of ocean currents in the North Atlantic, highlighting key flow patterns."
SGU 1011                      SGU 1013
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality."
Paul Kurtz
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (applause). Today is Saturday, October 26^th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella (applause). Joining me this week are Bob Novella... (applause)

B: 5 days! Five days until Halloween. Hello.

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy. (applause)

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys. (applause)

S: Evan Bernstein...

E: What's up, CSICon. (applause) And we have a special guest today, Brian Wecht. Brian, welcome.

BW: Guys, just call me Dave.(applause)

S: So we are at CSICon in Las Vegas. Thanks, everyone, for inviting us here. All right, let's go on with some Science News.

News Item #1 - Near Earth Microquasars (00:54)

• https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Near_Earth_Microquasar_found_to_emit_powerful_gamma_radiation_999.html 

S: Bob, you're gonna start us off with some some more black hole news. Sort of, kind of.

B: Sort of. All right, this one was pretty interesting as I think some of my topics are. So astronomers, well, it's not interesting. I'm not going to do it in my mind anyway. You might disagree. All right, observations made by astronomers on using HAWC. High-Altitude Water Cherenkov gamma ray Observatory may actually rewrite some what we know about the birth places of the most energetic particles ever created in the universe. So what do you guys think are the most energetic?

S: Cosmic rays.

B: Well, yeah, that's right. But some people might say the LHC, right? The LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, accelerates protons into collisions of 14 trillion electron, tera electron volts, trillion electron volts. Pretty powerful, but cosmic rays are the champ by far. We're talking energies of 100 trillion electron volts to 1,000 trillion electron volts, which is petavolts scale. The most, and actually it goes even higher than that, the most energetic proton they've ever discovered in these cosmic rays had the kinetic energy of a 57 mile per hour baseball. In a proton, that's how close to the speed of light this thing was accelerated to. So what can accelerate protons to that level? What can impart that much energy to a proton? And the consensus, we're not sure what's creating these super ultra high energy cosmic rays, but the consensus is typically that these are very distant, extremely, as you might imagine, energetic processes like pulsars, supernova remnants, and specifically for this news item, quasars. And quasars, we've talked about them on the show a bunch of times. These are super massive black holes at the cores of galaxies that emit gamma rays and cosmic rays. But most importantly, these are distant. These are 500 million light years away, up to 13 billion light years away.

S: What's the closest one really?

B: 500 million light years.

S: That's the closest one?

B: Yes.

S: Is that because their origin is so far in the past?

B: I would think, because to create super massive black holes that size, it takes some time.

S: It takes time. Is that right, Brian?

BW: I'm not sure, honestly.

B: But I Googled it yesterday. That's the closest one, 500 million. But these are far, far away. What if I said that we may have found an energetic process right in our backyard that could potentially create these in the Milky Way, say only 20,000 light years away. They have found these micro quasars that are emitting surprisingly powerful gamma rays. And it's right in our backyard, 20,000 light years away. That's nothing compared to billions. Super, super close. Now, micro quasar, I wasn't even sure what that was until last week. A micro quasar is a black hole, but it's not a super massive black hole. It's a stellar mass black hole, three, four, five, six solar masses. And it's in orbit or co-orbiting or it's feeding off of a regular star and siphoning that matter into its system and dealing with it in ways that I'll get into detail. So the gamma rays that they detected at these micro quasars was 200 trillion electron volts.

S: Wait, gamma or cosmic?

B: What did I say?

S: You said gamma.

B: Okay. No, no, the gamma rays, the gamma rays, the gamma rays, the gamma radiation coming from this micro quasar is 200 trillion electron volts. So I'll make that connection to cosmic rays. So the micro quasars that they've detected in the past were nowhere near that. So this was a surprise. How could this micro quasar be creating gamma rays that powerful? So what's happening is that black holes can be the best accelerators in the world. They can accelerate particles far more than anything that I think we've ever detected. So what's happening is that you've got a twisted magnetic field that's taking the particles that are getting sucked into the black hole and then channeling them into jets. So now the gamma rays are produced by these jets by interacting by the protons in the jets, interacting with the interstellar medium right around the jets. And that's creating the gamma rays that we're detecting here. But the key here is that because we see gamma rays, that means that there's also probably cosmic rays coming from these. And it's really interesting processes that are happening here, creating these accelerating protons to like a baseball being hurled at 57 miles per hour. There's things like shock acceleration. Imagine a proton in this jet. And what happens is that the protons go across the shock wave of this turbulent jet back and forth across the shock wave, getting faster and faster every time it goes back and forth. There's also magnetic reconnection, which is extremely powerful. If you've got these super powerful magnetic fields and they're being reconfigured, and that reconfiguration releases tremendous amounts of energy. Our sun does this with its magnetic field. But a black hole, as you can imagine, would be much, much more powerful. So every time the particles go near this, the magnetic reconnection happens, it imparts energy to the protons and electrons. They go faster and faster and faster, closer and closer to the speed of light. There's also things like Fermi acceleration, which is really fascinating. Particles scatter off of moving field lines, magnetic field lines. And it does it over and over. And it makes it faster and faster. So this is how a black hole, even a small black hole, can impart tremendous acceleration to protons, accelerating even to the level of these ultra high energy cosmic rays. Now, what are the benefits? The benefits of this is that if you're studying how these particles are created, and you're looking at quasars a billion light years away, it's hard. It's far away. It's very old. And things happen over millions of years. And so you're not going to see a lot of change. And it's also not very clear, because over millions of years, the radiation is being scattered. So when you're looking at micro quasars, though, 20,000 light years away, it's very clear. We can study the processes that impart these accelerations much more easily, because it's right in our backyard. And you could see changes in real time happening. You could see jets changing over days when it's in our backyard. But when it's a billion light years away, you're not going to see much change at all. So we can learn more about how these amazing particles are created.

BW: So the interesting thing here was that they've been able to detect these things for a while. Here, they were able to pinpoint where they were coming from. So was there some technological advance that let them pinpoint this, or had they just not done that experiment? Because the tech doesn't seem that new.

B: The thing is, gamma rays fly out basically straight. If you see a gamma ray, you're basically seeing, you could easily determine where it came from. The problem with cosmic rays is that they're charged particles. They're quite circuitous as they travel through. So when you see one come this way, it could have been born way over there. So that's why you kind of have to infer at this point that to get this gamma radiation that we see, high energy gamma rays are also probably producing cosmic rays. And it's probably also being created at the same place, because the black holes are creating, they're marshalling amazing energies, creating gamma rays and the gamma rays. And the cosmic rays are protons and electrons accelerated to really high energies. Now, it depends who you talk to.

S: So you said gamma rays were protons that were super-accelerated?

BW: No, gamma ray is electromagnetic radiation.

S: It's just the EM radiation.

B: Right.

S: The protons are cosmic rays.

B: Gamma radiation is light.

S: Does the protons and electrons, do they only become cosmic rays when they get to a certain speed, or are they always considered cosmic rays?

B: Yeah, if they were accelerated to high enough energies and they impact the Earth, and we detect them somehow by their daughter particles that shower down, we would say, yeah, these are cosmic rays. But I'm talking specifically about these ultra-high energy cosmic rays, which are rare, but it's so immensely powerful that we're like, how are these things? It's mysterious how they're being created. But one clarification I could make is that cosmic rays are often, an astronomer will always say, oh, yeah, it's electrons and protons primarily. Some will say that it's also gamma rays, but other scientists will say, well, won't necessarily include gamma rays into the cosmic ray definition. But they're created by similar processes. So there you go.

E: It ain't over.

B: Oh, I'm done.

News Item #2 - How To Watch Researcher Misconduct (09:12)

• Reflecting on research misconduct: What’s next for the watcher community? – Retraction Watch 

S: All right, Cara.

C: Oh, I'm next.

S: Yes, you are next.

B: He likes surprising people.

S: Tell us how we could fix science.

C: No, that's a terrible intro for me. I will turn the question around on you. So there's an article that I came across, an editorial, really, in Retraction Watch. If you don't read Retraction Watch, you should. And the editorial is by Daryl Shubin, and he is a long-retired independent consultant, but previously worked at the federal level. There's so many things here. He's the founding director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Center for Advancing Science and Engineering Capacity, senior vice president of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, senior policy officer for the National Science Board. And he worked at the federal level for many, many years. And he writes this editorial kind of looking back on the 80s when he first started his career, before we even had an Office of Research Integrity. And he reflected on concepts like scientific misconduct and how the scientific community handled those concepts so many years ago, right, 40 years ago, and what they're doing, what we, I guess, as a collective are doing now. And I think when we talk very often at conferences like this, but in conversations in the halls and conversations on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, we often talk about distrust and mistrust in institutions in science and what sort of we can do as science communicators, what individual citizens can do. But one of the conversations that we don't often have specifically is how scientists and specifically the publishing process within science has some amount of responsibility and what we can do to improve. And so in this editorial, he sort of reflects back on the idea of misconduct in research, which was his research topic way back when, and how, here's a wonderful quote, today it's a quaint reminder of how much science has been captured by for-profit politicized international interests.

S: Cara, by misconduct, do they mean deliberate fraud or could that also just mean mistakes and bad techniques?

C: I mean, I think these are all variations on a theme, right? So it's a spectrum, Steve. Yes, I think there is, obviously there is fraud that is often committed.

S: There's not just fraud that we're talking about.

C: Yeah, but we're not just talking about fraud. We're also talking about interests that put undue pressure on individuals. And, but yes, he does use language like deceit and suspicion. And so he poses quite a few questions about how we might as a community and not just the scientists who are actively doing research and publishing, but the editors who are involved, the journals themselves, how we might grapple with this really important question. He often calls that the watcher community throughout his writing. I'm going to kind of pose some of those questions to you. And the big one sort of at the end is he says, can the watcher community, which should include you and me, do more than better report the perversions of scientific publication? Indeed, how can we meet the moment and increase the promotion of better practices? So that's sort of the top, the overarching question, but let's get into some of the individuals. He claims research should not be a policed activity. And oh, by the way, when he enters into these, he basically says, I offer the watcher community some prescriptions and a few questions without solutions or answers. So many of these are quite rhetorical. But he claims research should not be a policed activity, a policy that permits practice, can regulate or undermine it. Is the trust-based publication honor system perhaps always a fiction, now eclipsed by extrinsic interests or actually subverted by profit motives? And so I'm curious what you all think about that, given the nature of how we publish. And maybe we should, we could probably talk a little bit about that.

S: Yeah, but so he's saying that publishing is still on the honor system and that maybe we can't do that anymore because there's too many vested interests to really have an honor system for research integrity in publishing.

C: But I think that's the open question, right? Are we still on an honor system like we were 40 years ago? We do have regulatory agencies that do exist now that didn't exist 40 years ago. But that said, we also have for-profit journals. We have predatory journals that didn't really exist back then.

S: From my understanding, the answer is sort of, because, I mean, it's journal by journal, right? As you say, we have predatory pay-to-play journals. Are they providing any kind of quality control? No. In some cases, the answer is a straight up no. We also have ideological journals, right? Journals that have a certain perspective, and like if you're the Journal of Acupuncture, I don't expect you're going to do a lot of good quality control on acupuncture research. But if you're the Lancet, or if you're the New England Journal of Medicine, or Cell, or like Nature, these big journals, they have a robust editorial process. But even there, there's room for, there are things that they're not doing that they could be doing. One specific point that comes up is, should we force researchers to provide their raw data to the journal so that the number crunching could be independently verified? And I've spoken to researchers about, I'm not a researcher of that kind, so I don't, but I've spoken to researchers and the responses are mixed. But the one point that many of them raised is I generate terabytes of data in my research, and you're really going to force me to keep all of that data and provide it in some format upload it? No. I mean, so it's like, it could be laborious and not realistic, expensive, and expensive is a bad thing when you're talking about research and would really bog down the process. So there's a return on investment question with all of this, right?

C: And what about the question of pre-registering experimentation, right?

S: I'm 100% in favor of that.

C: Yeah, like I have an interesting scientific question I want to ask. This is how I want to approach it. I'm going to document that in writing, and then I'm going to go do it, which prevents this phenomenon of p-hacking, where I just keep collecting data until I get to the point I want to be at. You set the parameters in advance, and then you, it doesn't force, but it helps to shape.

S: Yeah. It does help. I'll tell you in one way that's very specific, as I saw not too long ago, and I can't remember if we mentioned this on the show, but a systematic review of medical studies on some question, I forget what, it doesn't matter what the topic was, but they did an analysis of like, if we looked at, like, we did, there were 30 studies looking at this question. If you look at all of the studies, this is what, this is the result that you get. There's a little bit of a positive effect. But if you only look at studies that were preregistered and didn't violate their preregistration, meaning they didn't change their methods between registration and publication, there's no effect. So the effect goes away when you basically control for p-hacking, which to me means there's no effect there. And that was only possible with preregistration. So I'm a big fan of preregistration.

BW: Does honor system here mean anything that's not possibly catchable by peer review, everything, like the raw data, the analysis, maybe some specific analysis, that's what we're talking about?

C: Yeah. I think they're saying honor system is also peer review. You know, that this is, these are volunteer reviewers that are subject matter experts. And he poses that question well. It's a very burdensome process and individuals don't get paid for it. Yeah. And very often what ends up happening is that people who step into those roles may not have specialized knowledge. And he's pretty firm in his language here. He literally says some of the best analysis is done in this behind the scenes role, yet it remains largely unrewarded. Without this specialized knowledge, reviewers lacking subject expertise are perpetrating fraud. Like he straight up claims that if you do not have the expertise to review this paper and you are reviewing it and kind of let it slide because you don't get it, that's fraudulent.

BW: Not to say people who have the expertise, but just aren't taking it that seriously.

C: Yeah. Yeah. It's another question. And I think here's an interesting one. So this is more of a statement than a question. Grapple with it as you may. The frequency of scandals of fabrication and misappropriation should be statistically insignificant. But the magnitude of these relatively few misdeeds can have profound real world consequences for careers, funding, perceptions, and confidence in scientific progress. And this is, I think, an important phenomenon to grapple with. Even in the instances where there is outright fraud or in the instances where terrible mistakes are made maybe unknowingly, the consequences can be really dire. And as we often talk about, it's very hard to put a genie back in a bottle, right? Or unring a bell. I mean, obviously, like Wakefield comes to mind. And so what can we be doing within the community to either prevent or mitigate those kinds of issues? Because they're really important issues.

S: I mean, committing fraud, like deliberate fraud, that's hard.

C: Even if it's not fraudulent, even if it's a mistake, but like large mistakes that get a lot of play that are really hard to then retract. That's the point of Retraction Watch, right?

S: I do think that journals have more responsibility to do the kind of analysis that would have a reasonable chance of detecting bad mistakes or outright fraud. Sometimes fraud goes undetected for years because nobody did a basic analysis that would have revealed it. And when it is ultimately revealed, it's like really obvious. And it has even worse effects than you were saying, Cara. All those things are true. But also, like there have been cases, there was a recent case of a researcher who for years was publishing fraudulent Alzheimer research and distorted the entire field for a decade. You know, one person. And because if you're going to commit fraud, you're probably going to do it to discover something new and interesting, which people are going to get interested in.

C: And that's going to lay the groundwork.

S: And then it gets cited, and then it gets retracted. But it continues to get cited, get these zombie citations, right? So it creates ripples throughout the literature that are just devastating. But I do think that we're not doing nearly as much as we should to minimize that because such, a few instances could have such a bad ripple effect. I do wonder, though, how valuable AI will be in sort of automatically looking for the signatures of fraud, you know?

BW: Because at some point, it's just a volume problem, right? There's so much research, and it's not slowing down. We're only getting so much time.

S: Tens of tens of thousands of papers a year. It's crazy.

C: I guess one other big question that I want to pose before we move on is this question about the culture of science, the modern culture of academic science, and how much does the publisher perish culture, the lab culture, the aspirations of individual researchers? How much would a culture shift there then have a trickle-down effect on the publication industry? And just as a quick kind of continuation of that, he asks can watchers, of course, the yous and the mes and the reviewers and everybody, serve as honest brokers, or must they inevitably become partisan by virtue of investing in the publication industry? Is the very act of engaging in this way changing our ability to remain unbiased?

S: Yeah, I know that's a hard question. Yeah.

C: And I don't know how often we're really sitting and exploring. We're just turning the machine very often.

S: What I find is that even researchers, even people who absolutely need to know this, and there's a lot of research out there to show this, don't necessarily know how to not commit fraud, or meaning they don't do it deliberately. They do it because they don't know what they're doing. Like they p-hack. 30% of researchers, when asked, do you do A, B, C, or D, all of which amount to p-hacking, said, yes, I do that occasionally. I think mostly...

B: 41%?

S: 30%. About a third. Mostly because they don't know it's p-hacking. And they don't even know what p-hacking is.

E: So they should have some sort of, what, course or something? They should be taught.

S: Yes.

C: We are. We are.

S: They are taught.

C: Part of the issue is maybe...

E: They're ignoring it.

C: Or maybe it is important in certain types of science to have also a subject matter statistical expert as a co-author. And you do see that. That is a tactic that some people take. But we are all supposed to already be able to do that as part of our training.

S: A lot of the teaching... A lot of the training is mentorship, which means it's hit or miss. And I think it needs to be way more systematic.

C: And I'm also biased as a social science researcher. Like in psychology, we get a lot of statistical training. And when I was trained as a biologist, it was night and day. I didn't get nearly as much of that kind of training.

BW: I got none of... Sorry, for context, I'm a physicist. I got none of this training at all.

C: Well, that's frightening.

S: Medicine, it's all mentorship, hit or miss.

E: Context, I'm a tax preparer by day. I have to do certain certifications every year, year after year after year. I have to take... Even if it's the same class. And in fact, sometimes it is the same test that I have to take and pass every year. And I get the repetitive nature of it, but it does definitely help keep tax preparers like myself, honest, up to date on the latest issues. And we always have to keep certain things in mind. It's part of our culture now. And it weeds out. It really weeds out that bottom 10% that tend to kind of pollute the rest of the...

C: Yeah. And we see it too. Steve's a neurologist. He has to maintain a license. He has to do continuing education. I'm a psychologist. I'm going to do the same thing. But researchers, it's true. Maybe there should be a continuing education requirement.

S: There... So the good news there, and I think we talked about this maybe six months ago or so, there is now a certification in research methodology, like how not to p-hack. It's not required yet, but it exists.

C: Perhaps some journals will start to require it.

S: We just need to take that next step. And I think this is a process. I think they're going to do it for a while, see how it works, whatever, and then require it.

C: Yeah. Like if I do human subjects research, in order to get IRB approval at my university, I have to be NIH trained in the ethical way to work with human subjects. Like why can't we have that as a federal...

S: I would not be surprised if before too long, the NIH will require certification in how not to do research fraud.

J: I mean, is this something you can learn by watching a video? Like does it have to be taught by a person or can it just be like, here, let's watch this and you'll understand?

E: You can watch courses. I do that all the time.

S: Yeah, most of the way there. But yeah, it does help to also have somebody that you can talk to about it to make sure that you're absorbing the lessons, you know? But yeah. All right, let's move on. All right. So we fixed science, right?

C: All good. You're welcome.

E: Black holes, check. Science, check.

News Item #3 - Genetically Modifying Brains (24:37)

• Could a new medical approach fix faulty genes before birth? 

S: I'm going to talk about genetically modifying the brain. This is cool. This is very cool. So we're big fans of CRISPR, the ability to precisely manipulate genes, swap in segments, turn genes off, turn them back on again, etc. And it's amazing. It's amazing what we can do now. In terms of clinical applications, right? Curing disease with CRISPR or some other genetic method. The big limitation, guys, is what? We've talked about this. What's the big limitation?

C: Getting it in?

B: Getting it in. The vector.

S: The vector. Yeah. It's getting the CRISPR to the cells. So there's a couple of ways around this. One is you could take the tissue out of the body and then do it in the petri dish, right? So if you're taking bone marrow out of a patient, you then CRISPR their bone marrow and you put it back into them, right? So you can target the cells because you have them in a jar, in a petri dish, whatever.

J: You can't take somebody's brain out.

S: No, you can't do that.

C: And it's hard to get to the brain.

E: Not ethically, at least.

S: It's hard to get to the brain. You can also do the CRISPR at the egg stage, right? As part of IVF. So let's say, although this is still ethically gray zone, we remember we talked about the Chinese researcher, He who did this without approval and it was a mess. But that's another way. Again, you have IVF, you have the cell in a petri dish, you do the CRISPR, and then you correct the genetic mistake, and then you implant it. But what if you have an adult or just even a growing baby? It's hard to get the CRISPR to the cells in an organism that you want to get them to. So for years, we used viral vectors and viral vectors work, but they have this nasty tendency to cause infections. And that has slowed, like in the 90s, there was like this one study where they were using a viral vector to try to treat a genetic lung disease. And the first subject died of encephalitis. And that literally set the whole field back a decade, at least because we had to go back to the drawing boards. Well, we can't do that again, you know. So viruses are an option, but they're a problem. Another option is what we call lipid nanoparticles, lipid nanoparticles. And I think we've mentioned them on the show before, but they're basically just like this, and they're little lipid spheres of fat, and they're nanoengineered. And these are little packages, they're little delivery mechanisms. So you could put the CRISPR in the lipid nanoparticle and then inject that into the target tissue, right?

J: Or you could cook with it and you eat it.

S: Yes.

J: It's oil, right? So you can fry up some meatballs.

S: Mm-hmm.

J: The oil.

S: You could try that. Yeah. I don't think that would work.

E: You have meatball on your bingo card. Check it.

C: So the idea is that the lipid can like pass the cell membranes and get to where it needs to go.

S: Yes, yes. But there's a couple problems with that. So one limitation is it's a lot of fluid, right? And you're sort of injecting that fluid into an organ and that's a problem because it's physically–

C: And also, how is it targeted?

S: Well, it's not really targeted. It's just diffusing into the cells that you want to get it to. There's another problem and that is that these lipid nanoparticles are very immunogenic, meaning the immune system doesn't like them, right? They trigger an immune reaction because they are literally foreign particles, right? I mean, they are what the immune system is supposed to fight off.

B: Just fat. Just fat.

S: Well, but they're engineered or whatever. There's not just fat.

C: And it's not their fat.

S: But it's also that there's other things there, but–

B: Okay.

S: As you could see in the little graphic. So, this new study now addresses a lot of these issues. And specifically, we're targeting the brain with the current research that we're looking at. And the idea is that we want to get these lipid nanoparticles with genetically modifying material as a delivery, as the package, into brain tissue. Again, it's hard to inject into brain tissue without damaging it. So, the solution there is to inject into the ventricles. You know what the ventricles are? They're the fluid-filled spaces inside the brain. So, the brain has its own essentially sort of delivery receptacle. Like, it's just unload here. You know, you inject it into the ventricles. The spinal fluid has access to a lot of the brain tissue. And it's a fluid-filled space. So, you're not injecting directly into brain tissue. So, that's one thing that they did. We're going to inject into ventricles.

C: Into the ventricle itself, not into the column.

S: No, into the brain, like the lateral ventricles.

C: Stuck a needle through their skull.

S: Yes.

C: Cool.

S: We do this all the time.

C: Yeah, yeah.

E: Yeah, we do.

S: In humans, what we do is we want to inject something into the ventricle. We go through the right frontal lobe because that's the most redundant tissue in the brain.

C: You have to drill. Like, do you have to do a craniotomy? Like, yeah, you drill a little hole first.

J: Steve, just to clarify, would you only do this to affect the brain or you would do this to affect other organs?

S: No, the brain. This is all about targeting the brain. Okay, so here they're trying to treat a developmental neurological disorder. In this particular study, it's Angelman's syndrome, but there's many, many different disorders that affect the development of the brain, right? And they're all horrible, right? But if you're trying to affect brain development, you got to get to it while it's developing, right? You got to get to it in the womb. So here, they're trying to... This is a mouse study, but what they did was they injected these lipid nanoparticles full of a Cas9. Cas9 is the snippers, right? This is the part of the CRISPR system that makes the cut at target that will make the cut where you want it to. But actually, it didn't have Cas9 in it. It had Cas9 mRNA in it, right? So now, you're injecting the mRNA that codes for Cas9 with the lipid nanoparticles. Then that gets to the brain cells. They make the Cas9 themselves. And then that makes the genetic alteration. It snips the gene that we want to get rid of. Now, this process has been done before and with a success rate of about 1%, meaning that when you do this, 1% of the brain cells get the genetic change that you're looking for, which is therapeutically insignificant, right? So that's no therapeutic effect. So they wanted to they were looking for ways to increase this. And the limiting factor is the amount of these lipid nanoparticles that you can inject because if you inject too much, you get an immune reaction, and the inflammation destroys the brain. But they figured out a way to dramatically increase the amount that they can inject by essentially having the lipid nanoparticles degrade as soon as they deliver their package. And their results were they were able to make the genetic change in 30% of the brain cells, up from 1%, which is therapeutically significant. So it basically went from not significant to significant. So now, this is an extremely good proof of concept, but it's actually better than it sounds for a couple of reasons. Because they were injecting at a stage in brain development where there were still a lot of neural stem cells and progenitor cells. And so those neural stem cells become a lot more cells, right? So they're trying to make the change early enough in the development of the brain that a lot of the brain cells. And then like a month after birth, they sacrifice the animal and they look at the brain and say, how many of the cells have the genetic change? 60% of the hippocampus cells had the change, and 30% of the neurons had the change. So that's significant.

C: And so why do this in the fetus and not the embryo?

S: Well, there needs to be a brain. There needs to be a brain to target, right? So they need to have the ventricles to inject it into.

C: hey can't just do it in like the neural?

S: I guess it would be too primitive, you know. But there are some diseases, though, where they suspect that the success would be even greater. Can you think of a reason why that might be? Remember, this is a genetic disorder that kills brain cells, if you think about it that way. Because the cells that are not treated die. And the cells that are treated live disproportionately represent the eventual brain, right?

B: There's a lot of pruning that happens anyway, right?

S: Yeah. But this is now for development. Yeah. Even in development, there's a lot of pruning. But the key is that in a destructive disease, they think they can get up to 90% of the cells because only the cells that get the genetic change are going to survive or they're going to differentially survive. So they should really predominate in the ultimate brain that they're born with. So this is really encouraging because, again, the vector is the problem using genetic manipulation to treat disease in basically, once you get to the fetal stage and beyond, right? Because it's in a living organism. You can't have it in a petri dish, right? So this is great.

BW: How early can they detect these things?

S: So they're genetic disorders. So they could detect them as soon as they know that someone's pregnant. They could do a a karyotyping and do a genetic analysis. And it's... Also, if you know the parents, like, are at risk, they could screen for it, etc. They say, oh, yep, you have it. We're going to have to do the treatment, you know. So, yeah, it's potentially extremely, extremely useful.

J: What's the threshold for them to do this on humans?

S: Well, yeah. I mean, the first they're going to do, they need more animal research because, you know, you're injecting genetic modification into the brain. This is serious.

C: Is any of this ethically approved? I mean, do we do any CRISPR in...

S: No, this is not approved for humans.

C: I don't just mean this. I mean, anything that uses CRISPR in utero, we don't do.

S: In utero, not that I'm aware of.

C: I don't think so.

S: No.

C: Not yet.

S: We're... Yeah, the only ones that were approved were, like, the blood ones, the ones that we could take it out of the body and put it back in. So, yeah, this is great. So, obviously, this takes years, this kind of research. So I imagine there's going to be a few more years of animal research. Then we're going to get the first human trials are going to be just, like, safety trials just to make sure that it doesn't cause brain inflammation, things like that. And then maybe 10-15 years before we see, like, therapeutic trials and... But this is definitely something that's happening. And this is extremely encouraging. And this is a massive step forward. They solved a couple of really big problems here.

B: Steve, this is one application of this technique. What about using it for anywhere else in the human body?

S: Yeah. So the ventricle thing only works for the brain, but just the fact that they can get a larger volume of these particles into tissue without causing the inflammation is a great advance. Yeah, absolutely. And again, using the mRNA to make the Cas9 is brilliant.

B: Yeah, that's cool. Just send the instructions where you want it.

S: Yeah, right. The raw material is already there the mechanism is already there. Just, yeah, just use it. All right. Let's go on.

News Item #4 - Largest Prime Number (36:05)

• Mersenne Prime Discovery - 2^136279841-1 is Prime! 

S: Bryan.

BW: Yes.

S: A lot of numbers on the screen. Tell us about those numbers.

BW: Lots of numbers. So let me give you a little context about who I am, because you know these guys, but you probably don't know me as well. I am trained as a theoretical physicist. So my interests are string theory, quantum field theory, and math. Although I left that job a while ago, and now I dress up like a ninja and play piano. So, cool.

S: Ninja Brian.

BW: Talking about some math stuff, yeah.

B: I still have hope Brian will be a physicist again one day.

BW: Yeah, no one makes me feel worse about my career decisions than you do, Bob.

B: Yeah, somebody's got to.

C: Once a physicist always a physicist.

B: You're an awesome musician.

BW: That's true. Yeah, I still, I was saying this to Leonard the other day, I'm still a physicist. I'm just not a professional physicist.

C: Professional ninja.

BW: That's right. I'm even a fake one of those, actually.

S: Professional fake ninja.

BW: That is actually true. So I'm going to talk about prime numbers, because I'll just cut to the chase, and then I'll give them context. Recently, just in the last week or so, the new largest prime number that we know of was announced as a discovery. That's the headline, but let me back up a little bit. What's a prime number? So I think most people here probably know a prime number is a number that is divisible only by itself and one, right? That's the definition of a prime number. Lowest prime number is two. All other prime numbers are odd, right? Because any even number is divisible by two. And then you have a bunch of other prime numbers that come up pretty fast. Three, five, seven, not nine, etc, etc. That's a prime number. The question is, how do you check? So if you're writing down the list of prime numbers, how do you check if any given integer in front of you, an integer is basically a whole number, is prime? So the naive thing to do is you just start dividing it by a bunch of prime numbers and see if something goes in or not. You actually only need to do this. The most naive thing you can do is check all the primes up to the square root of that number, right? Because you can't have all the factors be bigger than the square root of the number, right? Then that would be too big. So the problem is when you start generating very, very large primes, that gets computationally extremely onerous and expensive, right? So if you're looking for really large prime numbers, which we currently are, that just divided by every prime you know starts to break down pretty fast. It's still theoretically possible. It would just take forever. So the question is, are there prime numbers we can generate or possible prime numbers that maybe we can check a little bit faster? So there's a class of prime numbers called Mersenne primes, which are of the form 2 to the p, where p is the a prime number, minus 1. So for example, the lowest prime number is 2 to the, let's take the lowest prime, 2 to the 2 for minus 1, gives you 3. That is a prime number. Turns out if you do this with a bunch of low prime numbers, you get other prime numbers. 2 to the 3 is 8, minus 1 is 7. That is prime. So you can start checking this, and it turns out that this is not a sufficient condition for, to use the math word, primality. Because if you check 2 to the 11 minus 1, that is a composite number. That's 2047, which is 23 times 89, right? That is a composite number.

C: Composite means not prime?

BW: Not prime, yeah. Composited means not prime. So Mersenne primes are just primes of this form, but you still have to check that they're possibly prime. And it turns out that there's an algorithm called the Lucas-Lerner algorithm that, for this specific type of prime number, is a much faster way to check for primality. So you can do it, and it's computationally not too bad. Okay. So right now, if you start checking for Mersenne primes, you get a bunch of them pretty early on. But to give you what I think is a pretty remarkable piece of data, I should say, by the way, we also know there are infinitely many prime numbers, right? We don't know if there are infinitely many Mersenne prime numbers. It does a class of prime number, but they might stop at some point. That would be weird. No one thinks that's the case, but theoretically, it's true.

S: And can I ask you another question, Brian? So if, when we're looking for prime numbers, we're looking for the biggest prime number we can find, but we're not necessarily finding them sequentially.

BW: Oh, no.

S: There may be smaller prime numbers we haven't found.

BW: There almost certainly are. I mean, it would be shocking if there weren't. What we're looking for right now are numbers that are big and that we can check in a computationally non-expensive way that are prime, right? But there are, I mean, certainly, I think it would be a truly shocking result if you look at the list of the largest primes and there was just a gap, a vacuum of primes in the middle of them. Because there's a lot. These numbers, as you'll see in a second, are pretty large. Right now, we know of only 52 numbers that are Mersenne primes, which is an amazingly, amazingly low number because they're very sparsely distributed.

S: Total, including all the low ones.

BW: Yes, including all the low ones. There are only 52. And the headline here is that the 52nd one that we know of, which is not necessarily the 52nd Mersenne prime because it's possible some are hiding in there, was found as though this was announced by the great intranet Mersenne prime search. And the person who actually found this, his name is Luke Durant, found that the following number is prime. I have to read this off because I didn't memorize it.

B: This could take a while.

BW: So the number itself, the full number, has over 41 million digits. Which I'll start reading right now.

E: Yeah, do it.

S: Settle in, folks.

BW: Yeah. The number is 2 to the 136,279,841 minus 1. So that number has been conclusively shown to be prime.

B: And that number in a text file was 46 megabytes. And Total Stories War and Peace was like 3 meg, 3.4 meg. So it's a big number.

BW: Yeah, it's a big, big number. Matt Parker, if you guys know him, a really wonderful math video guy, has a video where he displays, I think it's a large number of these digits, one frame at a time. And it still takes six minutes to get through. And he's doing like 24 frames per second or something like that. It's pretty awesome. So what's interesting about this, a couple interesting things. So this great intranet Mersenne prime search was, they were using this Lucas Lerner algorithm to check for primality up until about six years ago when they found a faster way, which is probabilistic. So they can do a quick check. And it's not 100% guaranteed that if it meets that criterion, that it's prime. But the probability that it isn't prime is very, very low. So they discovered that this was faster. And the thing I read, which I thought was really interesting, is that the probability that it isn't prime if it passes this check is lower than the probability of a hardware error checking it with the Lucas Lerner algorithm. That's how successful this is. So what they do is they use this probabilistic check. And there's some modifications to it that have been refined over the last few years even. And then they go through another check and make sure that, you can actually run the Lucas Lerner thing and check to see if the number is actually prime. And this number is now 100% guaranteed to be a prime number.

J: Is this like just an exercise to find these numbers or is there a practical use for prime numbers?

BW: There's a cash reward for some of them.

J: Really?

BW: Not offered by me. No, I mean, there's no practical use for it specifically. It's just like, hey, let's find a cool big number. One thing that was interesting about this recent discovery is that it was, I think, the first to use GPUs because the guy that discovered it is a former NVIDIA person who wanted to show people that GPUs, graphics processing units, which are used a lot in AI, are good for more than just AI stuff. So this was kind of a proof of concept for him to show that you can use this computing power to do something else. There is, I would be shocked if there was any actual utility to the discovery itself. Although, like many things, maybe the process of trying to find ways to do it can have offshoots that are potentially interesting.

B: And that's not to say that primes aren't useful for lots of things, but these are so big.

BW: That's right.

B: It's like they're too big to use like in security or encryption.

BW: Yeah, yeah. That's right. So primes are extremely useful things in a variety of contexts, but not ones this big. So the other cool thing about the great internet Mersenne prime search is that it's the kind of thing that anybody can be a part of. So you can just go to this website, download the software, and start using your computer to check large numbers for being prime.

S: And this number was found just using desktop computers, like not a supercomputer somewhere?

BW: It was a bunch of, yeah, GPUs kind of spread out all over the world.

S: Oh, OK. So it was crowdsourced kind of.

BW: Yeah, that's right.

E: Could a quantum computer find the next one?

BW: Well, if such a thing existed, that would definitely cut down the computational time.

S: The question is, yeah, is there a quantum computer algorithm that would not run on a conventional computer that would find primes?

BW: Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I imagine the answer. It's almost...

J: So, Brian, if everyone in this room, we connected our computers and we find a prime number, we can...

BW: I'm not connecting my computer to anything that you've touched yet. I'm very sorry. Or Bob. I've seen your internet history.

J: We could make a million bucks together.

BW: Yeah, well...

B: This guy spent a million.

BW: The number I read, there's a Washington Post article about this. It says the guy spent $2 million, right? You see that? Of his own money, which seems so large that I don't know if I quite believe it. And the cash reward, I think, was $3,000.

J: Forget it.

BW: So I don't know if it's exactly...

E: But that's a deductible expense.

B: So never mind.

E: Which we'll carry forward into future years.

BW: That's right.

J: I have a $2 million tax write-off.

B: Steve, I see some non-primes in your image down there, but that's all right.

News Item #5 - Magic Amulets (46:11)

• Why is John Tavares backing a ‘magical amulet’? 

S: Evan, more magic amulet news.

E: Yeah, let's get to some hard science here. Yeah, so this one comes from Canada, the world of sports. Are we familiar with the Toronto Maple Leafs?

BW: Sure.

E: Yeah, hockey, national... Thank you. Yeah, love hockey. That sports team has been around since 1917. So that's 107 years of proud hockey tradition in Canada. Now, but the team just recently, like last week, made news outside of the hockey rink when their team assistant captain, his name is John Tavares, was seen last week wearing what can only be described as a amulet with magical powers draped around his neck while he was playing. Yep. And upon noticing this, surprisingly, in a way, the internet started jumping on him and calling him out for promoting pseudoscience and nonsense. So yay. Good for them.

S: Go internet.

E: They actually got this one right.

J: But we don't know if it works or not.

E: Well, yeah. What is this magic?

S: You proven it doesn't work, Evan?

E: Uh-huh. Yes, I have, actually. Okay. Why is he wearing this thing? All right. It's called the Airestech, that's A-I-R-E-S-T-E-C-H. That is the company that makes it. And the product is called Lifetune One. I went to their website to find out what exactly it is they claim this does. Here are their words, not mine. The only proven solution for neutralizing electromagnetic field pollution, creating safer environments without disrupting your daily technology use. It is patented, clinically proven nanotechnology, Bob.

B: Whoa.

E: To neutralize harmful radiation from your everyday devices, such as your cell phone and your Wi-Fi, keeping you and your family and your pets safe.

S: So what exactly is patented?

E: Yes, right. So what it is...

B: What part of it? Is that the name?

E: Here's the part that's patented. It's a... And we've talked about this before. It's a sticker. The sticker that they put onto a charm or some kind of wearable. Or they also have products in which these stickers exist on little placards and plates that you put around your house. So it's the actual sticker that got patented. More from them. Our silicon resonator chip negates EMF radiation present in your surroundings without damaging your tech. So you can also put this actually on your cell phone, on your laptop, computer, and on appliances, apparently, as well.

C: How do you patent a sticker? Isn't that already patented?

E: But it's...

C: Sticker technology.

S: This is a nanotechnology sticker.

E: Yeah, if you look very close...

BW: It's very small.

E: It has these swirls, almost like a fingerprint design on it. It's sort of... Or it's this Mandelbrot kind of...

C: Patents don't have to work, right? They just have to be an idea, something new.

E: Exactly, right? If you pay the fee and you get like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a patent, as well. They say their claims are backed by the 22 global patents, 25 clinical trials, and nine peer-reviewed studies.

C: So remember that my topic, like just only two...

S: When companies say that, so there's a couple of possibilities here. One is they're just straight up lying, right? That's a possibility. But there are also a lot of companies that do research for hire, basically. They'll do clinical trials or whatever and get whatever results you pay them to get.

J: Yeah, like there's a box on the website that says, what result do you want us to find?

S: Yeah. So that's... Or the other thing is they're citing research that has absolutely nothing to do with their product.

C: And interpreting it.

S: Yeah, they're just... Yeah, so whenever you go to these companies and like pull if they cite the research that they're quoting here, the research is always completely irrelevant to the product and the claims that they're making. They're just hoping that no one's going to check, right? There may be some superficial... It's a study on EM radiation. And that's it. That's it. That's the connection. And they say, this study supports our technology because it's about EM radiation and our technology is about EM radiation. That's literally what they do. So it's just marketing BS, basically.

E: There are a list of other athletes also who have promoted this product in the past. So why are athletes... Why is a hockey player, okay, concerned with EMF radiation while he's skating around on the hockey rink? Does he have a cell phone in his uniform or something? Is he carrying a laptop? No, no, no. You see, the magical amulet here is all... And this is from them. This is also designed to stimulate healthy biological function, empowering athletes to optimize performance and recovery by enhancing the body's natural electromagnetic fields, promoting optimal function, and the lucky charm will also increase resilience and adaptability to environmental stressors.

B: So he's cheating.

E: Or gobbledygook, right? Basically, right?

S: Yeah. If it actually did work, you'd probably have to ban it. So how does it block electromagnetic radiation and your phone still functions?

C: Well, it's sticker technology, Steve. It's complicated.

E: You know, it sort of absorbs the harmful stuff.

C: Wiggles.

E: Allows the good stuff to get through, apparently.

S: There's harmful EM radiation and good EM radiation.

C: And it optimizes your biologicals.

S: Yeah.

J: I thought the same thing. If you put it on your router your Wi-Fi, and it's supposed to block the radiation. I mean, basically, Wi-Fi is a form of radiation.

S: Or is it cleaning the electromagnetic... Cleansing the EMF?

E: Do they know? Do they care? They're selling these things for up to $430 per-

S: Sticker that probably cost a buck, yeah, to make.

J: Not even.

C: Not even, yeah.

E: Well, the charm costs something, and I'm sure the little necklace that it comes with.

BW: That's such a specific number, too. 430.

J: That's marketing, too, though. You don't sell things for round numbers.

BW: Oh, right. I know.

S: Then it seems arbitrary, right?

E: And can EMF hurt us?

S: Non-ionizing?

E: Right. From our phone, from our laptop?

S: No.

E: No, it cannot. Nope. That's been proven, right? Wasn't... You did a write-up on this, the recent WHO study.

S: Yeah, I think it was last week's episode. It was about the WHO review of 25 years of research on does EMF from cell phones cause brain cancer? And the answer was a pretty resounding no. So yeah, from first principles scientists think that non-ionizing radiation, so too weak to break chemical bonds, doesn't have any biological risk, you know? So the only sort of maybe, like, again, if we talk about hazard versus risk, like, you have to ask, is there anything happening? The only thing that happens maybe is a little bit of tissue warming. Yeah, I'm talking about like a degree, you know? Not anything that you would think would be biologically significant. That's it. That's really it. And the rest is just the precautionary principle. Like, well, how much evidence do we need to prove that it's not doing anything? It's like, well, there's really no reason to think that it is. And we have lots of evidence now to show that it isn't. So that's as I like to say, there's a lot more things that are a lot bigger problem to worry about. This is way below the threshold of worry.

C: And I mean, isn't it true? Ionizing radiation needs to be shielded. And when you shield it, it no longer radiates. So it's like your microwave, right, works on the inside, but it doesn't work on the outside because it's shielded.

S: Yeah.

C: So if this actually was shielding...

S: It wouldn't work. The device wouldn't work.

C: It would block. Yeah.

S: Yeah, but it's not... There's no internally consistent, coherent claim being made here. It is literally just magic.

C: It's a sticker.

S: It's a magic sticker.

C: Yeah.

E: Latest, greatest. Someone else will come up with another one in a few months, I'm sure.

S: Right. And we were talking, Evan, about this. Like, what is the responsibility of a sports celebrity in promoting pseudoscience? I mean, they're not scientists, but they are celebrities.

E: They're influencers in their own right.

S: Influencers. And if they're true believers, then it's sad. But if they didn't do their due diligence, I think that's grossly irresponsible. And again, good for the internet for pickpiling on him for doing this. I think, really, that's... Shame is really the only recourse we have in the case.

J: There's nothing you can do.

C: It is in this case. I mean, if they actively cause harm, though, if they promote a pseudoscience that leads to somebody being like...

S: There's liability there.

C: There is liability. I think there should be.

J: Well the Kinesio tape thing was another one.

S: Yeah, it's still around.

J: But we have to educate ourselves and educate our kids and not expect famous people to freaking tell us what reality is, right?

S: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: Yep.

News Item #6 - Atlantic Current Climate Tipping Point (55:10)

• Key Atlantic current could collapse soon, 'impacting the entire world for centuries to come,' leading climate scientists warn 

S: Jay, tell us how the world is going to end.

J: Yeah, I mean, I read a ton of space-related news and a ton of global warming-related news,just the topics I tend to like to cover. So the interesting thing about what I'm about to talk to you about is that I got to talk to Michael Mann today about this particular topic. Now, let me give you a little background. So what ended up happening is I'm picking the topic that I want to talk about. I stumble on an article. I look up the same topic given by other outlets, reading through, reading through, trying to figure out what's going on. And it's pretty grim, you know? And I'm like, wow, I should talk to people about this because it's one of those like, moments for global warming. So here's one of the titles. Scientists Warn of Imminent Collapse of Key Atlantic Ocean Currents.

S: Sounds bad.

J: It sounds bad. And potentially it could be an amazingly bad thing, right? So I've noticed in one of the articles that they mentioned that Michael Mann was one of the people that like kind of signed his name on it saying, yeah, like this is a good thing for people to know about, right? So we talked about it. And it turns out that the articles, the news outlets, they tended to, particularly with global warming stuff, over-exaggerate how dangerous these things are.

S: Or imminent.

J: How quickly they're going to happen, right? It was a really awesome moment for all of us talking to Michael Mann because it was like, damn, like even these trusted news outlets that pretty hard-hitting science news outlets are amping up the drama.

S: They're clickbaiting us.

J: They're clickbaiting us. So I wanted you guys to know that just as a consumer of science information, I'm sure you guys are reading it as well. Just take a step back and realize that even the most trusted ones out there can be amping it up a little bit to clickbait you. And who knows to what degree.

BW: Do you mean in the article itself or just the headline?

J: In the article itself.

BW: The article itself.

J: Yeah. Like as I go through what I'm about to say, I'm going to have to pull it back a little bit. There is an observable effect happening here that I think people should know about. So there was an article published on October 31st or 21st, sorry, and we had 44 of the world's leading climate scientists, including Michael Mann, say, yep, this is something that people should know about. So there is a ocean current, the Atlantic meridional, please don't correct me on that, overturning, meridional, meridional. Thank you.

C: Meridional.

E: It's better.

J: Yes, I like it. All the ways that people say it, I enjoy. So let's call it AMOC, A-M-O-C. Okay. And they're saying it's deteriorating, right, this ocean current. So if you look at the graphic, you could see that the ocean currents move water significantly all over the world and they're happening continuously. What they have noticed, though, is that because of global warming, right, what is global warming doing? There's a few things that global warming is doing to the earth right now. So it's melting polar ice and it is increasing rainfall and increasing rainfall in places where rainfall is not commonly found, right? Massive amounts of fresh water is entering the ocean and that has an impact on these ocean currents because there's a system that happens when these ocean currents function. What they do is, for example, the AMOC current takes warm water from, like, say, the Gulf of Mexico and it moves that surface warm water up to the north and then the heat dissipates out of that surface water and then that water then, at a lower temperature, then drops and it creates a shift in the water, which creates motion, which keeps the current going. Keeps that current moving, right? But when you enter a lot of non-salinated water into the mix, it changes the way that the water behaves because fresh water is less dense than salt water and it makes it harder for cold water to sink, which disrupts this cycle and it's continuously happening. This disruption is continuously happening, which is not good. And another factor here is that because global temperatures are going up, in general, the ocean water is heating on its own as well, just from the air temperature being warmer all around the world. So why does it matter, right? So you've got to look at AMOC like it's a massive conveyor belt moving water around and it transports the warm surface water, like I said, all around and that distributed heat does a lot of things to the areas around it. For example, it warms up North America, it warms up areas in Europe, especially areas like Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. People there probably don't know this, but they're depending on that heat being transferred from the equator to come up to them so they don't have things like the cold blob, which you might have heard about, right? Because right now, there's something called a cold blob that is happening in very specific areas. And it's basically the weather patterns are changing and there's certain areas where it's getting really, really cold because of the changes that are happening here. And the cold blob is getting bigger, which is not good. It's like this is one of those signs of, well, in the future, global warming has had these crazy effects on our environment because weather is changing globally. So the bottom line here is that this effect is happening, but the article said this is imminent and it's going to happen within a few decades. And after talking to Michael Mann today, he's like, look, this is all, they're observing things, they have data, but it's not going to happen and they don't know what's going to happen in a few decades.

S: Yeah, they said there's a range. It could be 20 years. It could be 80 years.

J: Yeah.

S: You don't know.

J: So I think after talking to him I was like, maybe I won't even cover it. And then I realized, no, this is a good lesson for all of us because, again, this is legitimate. They are observing this. They're taking readings. They're seeing the temperature changes.

S: They just hyped it. They hyped the imminence of it. And so when it does shut down, if it does shut down, right, and whenever that happens, what are the bad consequences? Obviously, it'll disrupt climate. You know, Europe will become colder.

J: Europe's agriculture is going to shift. Typhoons are going to shift southward. And this is what's bad, right? So as like we're used to in North America here, like, yeah, we know we got hurricanes that they develop in the Gulf of Mexico and in that region they come through. But what's happening is the intensity is dramatically increasing. That's just where I happen to live. But this is happening all over the world. Well, you'll have tropical monsoons that are going to places that they never have gone to before because weather patterns are changing. And insects and animals and the environment is not adjusted to that because it just hasn't happened there before. Like, as an example, it takes a long time for water to be absorbed by certain types of soils. You know, if it has more clay, the water doesn't percolate as quickly and go down into the soil, which is really bad because that causes massive flooding. And as we all know, after watching these two hurricanes barrel through Florida, lots of people die when that happens because the water can't be absorbed. Because basically, Florida, Kevin Folta, I talked to Kevin extensively about what happened with him and his farm, that all that happens so quickly the water can't be absorbed by the ground because the water table is basically the ground in Florida.

S: In Florida, yeah, they can't even have basements there. And also, won't the ocean like raise by a foot?

J: Yeah, Michael Mann said that like in the West Coast, it could go up by a foot, which is a massive that's a city changing water levels.

B: Where would that extra water come from?

E: Glacier melt, right?

J: It'll come from glacier melt. It'll come from-

S: But also, water is different volume based on its temperature, right? So it's not just amount of water. It's also the temperature of the water.

B: Didn't Michael also say that even if this does collapse, it wouldn't be as apocalyptic as a lot of people think?

J: Potentially. The point is, we don't know. And the article says we do, right? The article puts it into a place where you're like, oh, okay, this is going to happen in the next 20 years. I have young kids. The world's going to be done when they're there, you know? It's a sad thing to think about. Yes, all of these things are happening. But we're getting fooled by science news media. We can't trust everything that we read.

S: Well, I first heard about the AMOC cycle and the potential for it to shut down like 30 years ago. Yeah, this is not a new idea. This is just a new, I think, estimate of when it's going to happen and what the effects would be.

BW: Based on updated-

S: Based on updated information.

E: Wasn't there a Star Trek episode called AMOC Time? Anything? No?

S: No, no connection.

E: Okay, no connection.

C: No idea.

Interview with Andrea Love (1:05:05)

https://www.immunologic.org/

S: We're going to pause our live recording at CSICon to go to an excerpt from an interview that we also recorded at CSICon with Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist who is an avid science communicator. As is often the case, the full uncut version of this interview is available to our premium members. You can find that content on our Patreon website.

J: Andrea, thank you for joining us for this interview. We're here at CSICon. And I would like to talk to you first about, give us a little idea about your talk that you did and why they invited you.

AL: Yeah. So thanks for having me. Big fan. I'm going to be talking about the selective rejection of science based on ideological beliefs. So talking about a lot of the themes that we've already heard about, that people who can be scientifically minded or at least believe that they're scientifically minded are still susceptible to misinformation. So utilizing some of the case studies that I've kind of written about recently with regard to endorsing anti-science rhetoric in the context of things like food ingredients and food additives and genetic technologies and cancer treatments and using those to kind of underscore that people can be very staunchly pro-science those who have their lawn signs that say they believe in science. But then we see states like California who pass legislation where they're banning food additives that it's entirely based on false premise and misinformation and often influenced by their constituents or anti-science activists.

J: Is there anything going on today that you think is like one of the worst offenders of this?

AL: So I would say that a lot of these NGOs that claim to be pro-health or advocates for health or the environment, Consumer Reports, the Environmental Working Group, they've been long term propagators of this and they make a lot of money and they have ties with media outlets and politicians and they're very well funded. And so they kind of get their hooks in and they create this ecosystem of misinformation. And many people actually don't realize that those organizations are the originators of these things that they come to believe. For example, the Dirty Dozen list. Everybody knows of the Dirty Dozen list, but a lot of people don't know that it's coming from the EWG and what the EWG has actually done to erode science and public health over the last several decades. And so I think they're obviously a major player. I think a lot of the media outlets and particularly kind of the lax oversight with what's getting published, this kind of fixation on clickbait and mischaracterized data. But it also is coming from poor quality science, right? We have people that are publishing studies in fields that they don't have expertise in. The lead in tampons headlines I wrote an article about and the lead author, she's a postdoc. Her background is in public health and she's writing about biomedical science and toxicology and biochemistry and public health scientists don't have biomedical training. And so she doesn't even have the expertise to even study this phenomenon. But if you look, she has a long personal history in like feminist activism and she received a grant from an organization geared towards women's health. And so you kind of see how people, even in the sciences, are influenced by their personal beliefs to pigeonhole themselves into creating bad science, which is then taken out of context by press release, media outlets, social media influencers, and then it goes viral.

C: But to be clear, somebody in that position could also be doing good science. So I think it's important maybe just to take a second to talk about why that particular scenario was bad science.

AL: Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

C: Those things didn't – because she was those things, that's not why it was bad science. The science was bad and she may have been motivated because of those things.

AL: Yes and no. I mean, I think if your doctoral work and kind of your scientific training throughout your career has been in a non-biomedical science field, it would be really hard for you to craft a study that's going to appropriately assess a biomedical phenomenon, right?

C: And she was a sole author?

AL: No, she was the primary author. So the senior author on the study is a geochemist. She knows how to do analytical chemistry assessment, which is essentially what the study did. But they were making claims about health where none of those authors actually had expertise in any sort of biomedical science. So they're trying to find a problem where there isn't. And essentially, they were finding these trace levels of elemental metals that exist in the environment and they exist in all plants. And they were then saying, oh, we found it in digested tampon fibers. Therefore, your tampons are leaching toxic metals into your body. And it's like, first of all, those levels were far below the regulatory thresholds for any of those things. And I think people forget that cotton is a plant and it grows in the soil. And so it picks up these substances. And so they kind of undermine and they said even that this was the first study to assess that. And they clearly don't understand how regulatory oversight occurs because tampons are class two medical devices. And even if they're not publicly publishing these data, I guarantee that all of these ISO standards for raw materials for tampon manufacturers, like they know what impurities are in those fibers. And so by saying that in their study, they're undermining all of these things that go into regulatory oversight and further eroding confidence that people have in our federal safety agencies and science as a whole.

S: I think you just described my whole problem with the Environmental Working Group. I'm so glad to hear that because I've had a problem with them for years. And I'm glad it's not just me.

AL: No, definitely not.

S: Because they seem so ideological. And I find often, because I write for science-based medicine, I cover a lot of the stuff that they write about. And it always feels to me like it's a bunch of chemists who have no idea about public health who are looking at hazard. It's like, oh, there's stuff here. They have no idea how to put it into context of risk. And they have an agenda. They want everything to be scary.

AL: Yes. They get money the scarier they make these claims sound. And they're getting money for their organization, but also for the companies that donate to them, which are the safer alternatives that they're frequently recommending to people, whether it's food, whether it's consumer products, whether it's sunscreens. And they sell their EWG verified label on top of that. And it's interesting, because I met a relatively new hire to the EWG. I was speaking at a cosmetic chemist conference about the overarching harms of chemistry, cosmetic chemistry misinformation. And I called out the EWG. And I didn't know that he was in the audience, because I'm not a cosmetic chemist. And I don't know the sphere. But one of the other panelists was like, oh, that guy, he's like, and he came from industry. And he connected with me on LinkedIn. And so now I can see his content. And I don't know if there's financial incentive. But his content has so dramatically shifted. And he essentially insinuates that hazard assessment is the more appropriate way. Whereas any other toxicologist or safety chemist would say the opposite.

S: And yeah, so what I have found, it's not unique to me, but I think that the pattern that we see a lot, this is going to be really subtle. You tell me if you agree with this, that industry doesn't necessarily have to tell you, these are the opinions we want you to have. They just need to find somebody who already has those opinions and fund them. So that person thinks, I'm just getting funding to talk about the stuff that I'm already talking about, not realizing that, yeah, you were selected by industry because you are fitting into a narrative they're trying to promote. And then, of course, once that relationship happens, I do think they kind of get steered even more in that direction.

AL: I agree. And it's interesting because when I'm often debunking claims, because I'm always trying to alleviate that risk perception gap, right? Because I think people are paralyzed with health anxiety about things that don't pose tangible risks to their health, right? Food ingredients, vaccine adverse events, vaccine ingredients, organic produce versus conventional produce, trace levels of pesticide residues. And FYI, organic farming uses a ton of pesticides. They just omit all of those. And they're not looking at social determinants of health, equity to health care, equity and access to affordable foods. And those are the things that actually impact health. And what ends up happening is that when you debunk them, then you get accused of being bought and paid for. And they're like, well, this industry is buying you off. And it's like, these other people that you're promoting are industries, right? Big organic farming is a multi-billion dollar industry. And it's so interesting to me that there's this dissonance in terms of like, well, we know it's because they have this parasocial relationship and this confirmation bias. But if you're ever saying something, even if you have 30 years of data supported by 20 plus global regulatory agencies, you're the one that's being paid to say that versus the person that's cherry picking a study that was bombarding mice with 10,000 full doses of anything.

S: Right. But that's the narrative. If you look at videos on TikTok, which we do, that's the narrative that people say. And it's really hard to push back against that because, as you say, immediately you're the shill.

AL: Yeah.

S: And it's like, yo, that's just big pharma looking for money. It's like, yeah, but you realize the people you're quoting, like that guru is making millions of dollars selling snake oil.

AL: Yes.

S: I'm just telling you that he's wrong. I'm not making anything out of it. But so it's just really hypocritical the way they selectively decide who's—

J: And it's thrown around, too. The whole shill thing is thrown around so freely at this point. And it's so pathetic because we're science communicators. We're not getting paid off by anybody.

AL: I know.

J: We're a small business here. You know what I mean? Making money has been not a priority of ours.

S: It's the black box conspiracy. It's just like anything I disagree with, they are doing it. There's no detail. There's no specificity. Just they are engaged in this broader conspiracy. And that's it. That's the boogeyman.

J: Are they getting into prestigious journals or who's publishing them?

AL: No, not usually. They're usually pay to play or low quality or journals that routinely have peer reviewers that don't have relevant expertise. Like they're having a physiologist review toxicology-related studies. And again, I think that's a bigger challenge of the whole academic research model. That's a bigger conversation because I think it's very wasteful that people are kind of doing frivolous research in order to get published so they can get their next grant. And when they publish something that all of these people that are scraping the internet for buzzwords like certain heavy metal words or the words of pesticides or things like that, then that gets kind of selected, cherry picked. And otherwise, it probably wouldn't have even gotten any attention. And it's very frustrating for me because I actually have a full-time job in biotech. And I do all of this in my free time. And I left academia for a lot of different reasons. But one of them was the frustration with kind of the model of how research is able to be conducted. And it's not to say that biotech is perfect or anything. But the goals are very different because there's always some tangible endpoint as opposed to simply trying to... Academic researchers are just trying to sell their ideas to get more grant funding. And so it's always interesting too when I see like people with academic appointments kind of be automatically trusted more than someone who's a scientist in an industry role because you have that kind of ivory tower perception.

C: I think about sort of when I was working on my dissertation, I was digging deep into like Heideggerian phenomenology. Stay with me for a second. One of the things that Heidegger did, which was different from previous views of phenomenology, is he was like, biases exist. And I'm saying, let's own them and make them explicit. Because if we do that, then everybody is operating from a standard playing field. Whereas historically, they were like, let's be unbiased. And that's bullshit. I'm sorry. That just does not exist. And so I guess that leads to an important question, which is what are the solutions to these issues? Because it's very easy like we were talking about the tampon thing. It's very easy to be like, well, look at their bias. But at the same time, I understand why there's activist science going on because the historical bias was very anti-woman. And so we want to counter that bias. Like, is it about making more room for more biases and hoping they come out in the wash? Is it about people pretending they're unbiased? Like, what is the solution?

J: Cara, there's a whole ecosystem – correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I'm learning – is there is an entire ecosystem now that is a sham. It's like you have the people who are doing research that aren't qualified to do it. You have bullshit journals. You have people reviewing the papers that get put in these journals that don't have the credentials to do it. And it seems to me it's all propped up just so they can get grant money. That whole thing has to be toppled over. And the only way to do it is to expose it.

C: Yeah, but it's like it's all variations on a theme, right? Like, this is the most egregious version, but we could come down to the middle and be like, it's still kind of happening, even in people who are above board. So that's an important question.

AL: Yeah, no, absolutely. And that's often why we talk about the body of evidence on a topic, right, and how you can't take a singular study at face value. You have to look at it in the context of all of the information on that topic. And I actually talked about the kind of the reason that this tampon study got so much attention with, oh, I can't remember what magazine, it was like a career magazine talking about, like, women's health in the workplace and all that. But it's one of those things where they're exploiting the fact that there is systemic misogyny and sexism in research, in medicine, in science, and using that to foment fear and anger and panic. And all of the wellness influencers that I saw sharing this study were like, see, no one cares about your health as a woman. They don't care that your tampons are poisoning you, this, that, and the other. When in reality, the story should be, listen, we've been doing research on menstrual products and menstrual health. We have a lot more we need to do to better characterize and better study this. But this is not saying that your menstrual product is unsafe. And what you ended up seeing was these wellness influencers, while they're vilifying tampons, they're selling menstrual cups, they're selling menstrual discs, they're selling menstrual underwear.

C: Of course.

J: InfoWars sells vitamins. They always have something that they sell.

C: But it doesn't undo the fact that the body of evidence, which we're always talking about how science is self-correcting and there's this body of evidence and we want to look at meta-analyses, that there are biases even in those. That historically, especially when it comes to women's health, there is a misogynistic bias in the science itself. And so it becomes a difficult it's the whole thing when we're battling pseudoscience and much pseudoscience has like a kernel of truth in it. And so it's like, how then do you approach that and really have, I think, a gray area conversation with a public that doesn't want to be in the gray.

S: And just to genericize it a little bit, because I was going to ask also if you have any tips or tricks about this one, is similarly the narrative of you don't have to worry about that, it's actually safe, certainly makes us sound like we're the deniers.

C: Totally.

S: The person who is saying you need to be worried, they are trying to poison you or whatever. They don't care about your health. They're the maverick truth tellers who are out there trying to save you. We're like, nothing to see here. Don't worry about it. This isn't a risk. It's hard. I mean, in the movie, we're always the villains.

AL: Yes.

C: Of course. Because that's what the bad guy says.

S: Exactly. That narrative is so out there. How do we combat that?

J: Let's just face it, guys. As fun as science is to people, especially to people like us, like science and critical thinking and all that, it's not sexy.

AL: It's not sexy.

J: It's just not.

S: It's tedious, but that's the way, by definition.

C: But it can be sexy.

AL: I want to make it sexy, right?

S: What do you do to confront that villain narrative?

AL: It's really hard. When we're talking about the tampon study, for example, we need more women's health research, but this isn't the way to do it, right? We shouldn't be wasting research dollars on these studies that are trying to find a problem that doesn't exist. We should be conducting quality studies funded for people that have expertise in these fields and have legitimate reasons to assess these sorts of things. That's really hard because grant applications are very disparate across different fields and different funding agencies. There isn't going to be a singular solution, but it becomes so challenging to even have those nuanced conversations about, hey, this was wildly mischaracterizing things. Often what I do is I try to... I like to lead with data, but people don't like data. They like emotion. They don't want to connect with who's delivering the message. So it's, all right, I know you read the study. This is what the data actually say. This is how little lead you're actually finding in these tampons. And this is the environment they extracted it in, which is not the environment of your vagina because your vagina is not 350 degrees and a pH of one. It's not going to happen, right? But then it's, and I still use tampons and I still feel totally comfortable using them and you also, if they're your preferred product. And so I feel like we have to convey some of that emotional attachment while we're also trying to assess things. And so often I get a lot of heat when I talk about the marketing ploys of organic agriculture and how it's not even just that it's not more nutritious and not pesticide free, it's actually more ecologically damaging and all of that. And so people are like, well, are you saying that you buy conventional produce? And I'm like, yeah. And honestly, I wish that we could get to a point where we had more modern agriculture tools so we could impart more nutrition and further reduce use of pesticides. Because that's what they all claim they want, right? They don't want to use pesticides, but they refuse to acknowledge that the organic products that they've so emotionally invested their identity in use pesticides, many at much higher quantities and many that are more ecologically damaging. And so it's got to be a way to frame things that hit or resonate with their motivation. And so if their motivation is, well, they don't want pesticides, well, can we continue to repeat and reiterate, well, GM crops can actually allow you to reduce pesticides and increase yield and improve food stability. And we have 30 years of data that say it's not harming the environment, even if the EWG and Vani Hari have told you that it does.

S: Where can people find you on social media?

AL: Yeah. So my name is Andrea Love. I have a PhD in microbiology and immunology. I work in life sciences biotech, primarily developing therapeutics and interventions for cell and gene therapy, cancer, infectious diseases. And I founded Immunologic to provide science communication and help demystify a lot of these science and health topics. So you can find me at immunologic.org or on the social channels at dr.andrealove.

S: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting with us. This has been fantastic.

AL: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Science or Fiction (1:25:56)

Theme: 19th Century Pseudoscience Item #1: Although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline. Item #2: Hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases, and involved wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths, and drinking vast amounts of water. Item #3: A popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form, and was a significant early influence of Picasso.

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: All right, guys.

J: What time is it?

S: It is science or fiction time.

J: I tell a joke, Steve, or no?

S: No.

J: I've been coming up with jokes about everything that's going on at this conference. And Steve's like, you're not telling any jokes.

S: All right. Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. And the audience gets to play along, too. All right. Here they are. There's a theme this week.

C: Vegas?

S: No.

E: Nevada?

S: You were hoping it was going to be Vegas or Nevada. Neither. The theme is-

B: Halloween. Halloween.

S: Nope. Come on, Bob.

J: Peanut butter.

B: Zombies.

S: The theme is 19th century pseudoscience.

J: Oh, cool.

E: Cool.

B: Halloween would have been better.

S: Well, maybe. All right. Here we go. They're a little complicated, but bear with me. Item number one. Although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline. Item number two. Hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases and involved wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths, and drinking vast amounts of water. And item number three. A popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form and was a significant early influence of Picasso. All right. So we're going to do something very simple is going to pull my panel and then we'll pull the audience. See what you guys say. Let's just start from the left and go down to the right. So, Brian, you get to go first.

C: Get to.

S: Get to go.

C: Always a privilege.

BW: What a joy.

E: Privilege.

S: In the vanguard position, Brian, you get to go first.

BW: All right. I think it's pretty clear that I don't have anything intelligent to say about any of these.

E: Clearly neither did they.

BW: Yeah. Mesmerism surviving seems plausible to me, although giving rise to psychology as an academic discipline, I guess. I don't know. The one that's kind of since the one that's kind of tweaking me here is number two. Hydropathy, the belief that water could cure most, most diseases, most diseases. That's I've never even heard of that. At least I've heard of mesmerism and three short, I guess the influence on Picasso is weirdly specific. But let's say that's right. So I'm going to say number two is the fiction.

S: Hydropathy one you think it's the fiction. OK, Bob.

B: I'm having trouble with one in three.

BW: But I said two. Maybe you didn't hear me.

'B: I did. I did. You said two is fiction. I'm thinking one or three is fiction.

BW: But my point is, I said something different. I just feel like maybe you didn't hear me or something.

J: He's a nonprofessional physicist.

B: All right, David, it's my turn.

BW: Call me Dave.

B: Phrenology, that's brain bumps, right?

S: Yes.

B: Now, I know that that science actually, it's baloney, of course, but I've read in the past that phrenology actually helped with the study of the mind and psychology because they were focusing on the brain so much that it actually helped transition to real science. So I've heard of that. So that's why I've never heard of phrenology dealing with anything like this painting and sculpture. But then, number one, you're saying specifically that mesmerism survived and actually helped give rise to hypnosis and psychology, which I thought phrenology did. So I don't know which one to pick.

BW: Probably two.

C: Can I ask a clarifying question while we're still early on? So the way that it's written, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology. Do you mean contributing to the rise?

S: Yeah, contributing to the rise. But pretty directly. I'm not saying that we wouldn't have psychology today if it weren't for mesmerism. But there are connections leading through from mesmerism directly to academic psychology.

B: Yeah, it feels like an episode of Connections. So I'll say phrenology, number three, is the fiction because I think I've never heard of that ever happening. So I'll have to go with that one.

S: Okay, Jay.

J: You know, bloodletting led to modern medicine, right? So kind of. But still, there's a pathway, you know. So I could see with number one with mesmerism, like, sure people were trying different things. You know, some of them probably believed that some of them knew it was BS, but were taking advantage of it. But then it seems like the progression that you set up there with number one seems reasonable. I don't know for sure, but I'm going to say that one is science. And then I'll go to number three next. So the applied phrenology and then the fact that there's lots of painting and sculpture. I mean, I have seen tons and tons of pictures of paintings and sculptures of phrenology. I'm sure everybody here has, right? You know, just something I've stumbled across. I've seen phrenology skulls in museums. You know what I mean?

BW: We have the white skull with the black stuff from.

J: So that kind of seems legit. I mean, the Picasso one is sure.

BW: I like where you're going with this, Jay.

B: Yeah, I don't.

J: So I'll take number one is the fiction. I'm kidding. I'm going with Brian, I'm going to go with Brian because Brian is smart and I love him and I don't want him to cry after the show. So I'll go with number two.

BW: Yeah, but I'm going to cry no matter what.

B: What was Brian's first words for science fiction? I don't know. Basically saying he doesn't know anything about this.

BW: It sounds like you listen to something I said, Bob.

B: All right. We shall see.

S: All right, Evan.

E: Yeah, mesmerism. So there have been other examples of pseudosciences that have helped sort of give rise to real science. You know, astrology probably is the prime example of that. So I think there's a parallel here. And my recollection, didn't Ben Franklin contribute to the debunking of mesmerism? If my memory serves. So I think I think that one is science. I also think that number three is science. For many of the reasons Jay mentioned, it was very artistically expressed in a lot in several different ways. You know, the intricate drawings, definitely the sculptures. No doubt about it. I had no idea about the Picasso aspect of it. So I'm not sure if that would be enough to turn that one into the fiction. But the hydropathy one, that I have not really heard much of it all about. That's the most foreign of the three to me. So that's why I'll say that's the fiction.

B: That's what Steve wants.

BW: Good job Evan.

S: And Cara.

C: So just just to be clear, Bob thinks that phrenology.

S: Phrenology. Everyone else is hydropathy.

C: Is with hydropathy.

B: GWB.

C: Am I mixing that up with animal magnetism? Yeah, same thing. Yeah. So this idea that there's this life force. And then when something's dead, you can like reanimate or you can reforce. And then this idea of hypnotism did sort of come from that. Early psychology experimentation is really about sensory understanding of the of the world. Like a lot of it is what's the just noticeable difference between this and that? Yeah, the academic psychology is an academic discipline is very different than like clinical psychology. I do think that like physio psychology that I could see there being a link there, although I don't know. That's a tough one, because like how what percentage did it give rise. Going down to phrenology, which is not bumps on the brain, it's bumps on the head and the skull.

S: Made by the brain.

C: So, yeah, I could see phrenology that there being an art movement. But as a method of understanding and representing the human form is interesting to me because phrenology, like iridology and like all of those representational pseudosciences, they say something about something else. But phrenology is talking about personality traits. It really didn't talk much about your foot does this or your arm does this. And this sounds like he's talking about more of an iridology like chi map. So that one's kind of sticking out to me. But then also with hydropathy, I know that there have been like water bath therapies for a really long time, like, oh you've got the, I don't know, the fevers and let's put you in an ice bath and all of that. I don't know if it was called hydropathy. It might have just been hydrotherapy. I don't think you would make something the fiction because you changed the name like that. I don't think anybody believed that water could cure most diseases. I think the idea there was that temperature changes were important. So I think the one that's sticking out to me is the phrenology one, that jump from the brain to whatever. That's not actually phrenology. That's not what that is.

S: So there was two for phrenology is the fiction, three for hydropathy is the fiction. Everyone agrees with Mesmer. Now we're going to pull the audience. We're going to do the George Hrab one clap method, right? I'm going to hold my hand up here. And when I come down to here, you're going to clap for the one you think is the fiction.

C: Should we practice?

S: Yeah, we're going to practice. So just clap when I get my hand come drops. Perfect. All right. So if you think that the mesmerism one is the fiction, clap. (small amount of claps) If you think that the hydropathy one is the fiction, clap. (a big amount of clamp) And if you think the phrenology one is the fiction, clap. (a big amount of claps) It's a pretty even distributed. So you guys were.

C: I heard more for phrenology.

S: You think so?

E: Tune in next week when we reveal the answer.

S: I'm going to do a tiebreaker. All right. Hydropathy. Phrenology. All right. Phrenology definitely is in the lead. Okay.

B: Smart crowd.

C: Do not put your faith in me people.

E: It was close.

S: But there's only like three people in this room. I think the mesmerism one is the fiction. We'll start there.

J: Cara, I know what you're feeling right now.

C: No, you do not.

E: They'll be superstars if they go.

S: Although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline. Most of the people in the room think this one is science.

B: Look at the smile on his face.

S: This one is science. You can't read me, Bob.

B: You're lucky.

C: I was going to be ashamed.

B: I know, he's unreadable.

S: All right. That is very interesting science. Yeah. Mesmerism started by Anton Mesmer, right? The idea of animal magnetism kind of playing off this recent discovery increasing knowledge about electricity and magnetism. He said, well, that's an invisible force that you can manipulate. There's an invisible force in living things. We'll call it animal magnetism. And you can manipulate that in order to cure diseases and whatever, and ailments. Most of his clients were women. And it was very exploitative.

C: How surprising.

S: Yeah. And they he would cure whatever their ailments were with his manipulating the animal magnetism. He was, and he trained a lot of people. There were people who were supposed to be sensitives who were able to manipulate it. It was like a thriving industry. And then the the Royal Commission was set up to investigate him in France. And Ben Franklin was part of that. And they investigated him and said, he's completely full of it, right? This is, he can't do anything. It's all nonsense. And that pretty much killed mesmerism in that form, right? But it did survive. And later in the 19th century, because the quacks are not going to stop doing it just because it's not true, right? But instead of like saying that we're moving this fluid around, this magnetic fluid to cure disease, mesmerism became really a form of stage hypnosis. What we today would recognize as stage hypnosis, putting people into a trance where they don't remember what happens during the trance, but you can get them to do things. And not only that, but the idea was when they were in the trance that was induced when they were mesmerized, right? They had access to a deeper intelligence. They had insight into themselves and into other people, especially their illnesses and their ailments. So it's like, essentially, you take somebody, mesmerize them, put them into a trance. And then while that person's in the trance, they're like a guru who could now make profound statements about like other people's problems and diseases. There's an interesting feminist angle to this in that women started using this in order to gain a voice that they would not otherwise have, right? Because when they're mesmerized and in this trance state, what they say is supposed to be magically profound. They're now an oracle. It took advantage of it. Yeah. Now, the same sort of now the hypnosis movement that came out of the mesmerism movement was very interested in this, all of the psychological aspects of this and the mind and how does the mind work and how does all this hypnosis work? And that the same people and the same sort of discipline did feed into the development of academic psychology in the early 20th century. So there is a direct through line there. Again, I'm not saying we wouldn't have psychology today without mesmerism, just like we would have chemistry without alchemy. We would have astronomy without astrology. But the same people, the same traditions that kind of evolved from one into the other. So I thought that was all pretty cool.

BW: I just want to put a plug in here for the 1986 Mets theme song, Get Metsmerized.

S: Get Metsmerized?

BW: Is absolutely worth hearing. Thank you. One person knows what I'm talking about.

S: Let's go on to number two. Hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases and involve the wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths and drinking vast amounts of water. Evan, Jay and Brian, you think this one is the fiction? About a third, maybe 40% of the audience think this one is the fiction. And this one is science. Good job, Bob.

B: Yeah, high five.

S: Absolutely. This was a very popular movement in the 19th century. It was hydropathy, also called the water cure, later adopted by naturopaths. Not surprisingly, still around for that reason. And yeah, they just thought that pure water could cure just about anything. And if you drink it, you bathe in it, you wrap yourself in it, whatever, that would work.

B: Pure? Was it treated?

S: It had to be pure water.

BW: But wasn't the water not that great?

S: No. Yeah.

C: That kind of worked. Just clean water is pretty good for you.

S: But remember, this is probably dovetails with the spa movement, which was based originally off of like mineral springs, like this pure, because everything was so foul.

E: Kellogg.

S: Actually did have a pure water source that probably would be seen as very curative and been healthy, healthful, etc. Because everything else was sewage, right? Yeah, so that one is absolutely science, which means that a popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form and was a significant early influence of Picasso is the fiction. But what aspect of that is the fiction?

E: Picasso.

S: The Picasso aspect. 100% fiction. The rest of it is real. So there was this artistic movement in the 19th century. Phrenology was really popular in the 19th century. And again, phrenology is the idea that different parts of the brain do different things. And just like a muscle, if you exercise one part of your brain, it's going to get bigger. And they couldn't measure the brain directly, but you could measure the skull over the part of the brain. So they thought the brain would sort of bulge out in one location because of your personality. And that would influence the overlying skull. And therefore, there would be a bump that you could measure with precise phrenological measuring devices. Interestingly, the phrenologists were mainly opposed by neuroscientists who thought that the brain was not compartmentalized. And the phrenologists were correct. They were on the correct side of that debate. And as we learned more about that, this is partly why phrenology became so popular. Again, it was thought of as legitimate because they were actually on the correct side of pretty much the first big debate within the neuroscience community on the most fundamental question, is the brain homogenous or do different parts of the brain do different things?

C: Problem is all the things that they said that it did were just wrong.

S: They're all wrong. Their map of the brain was complete nonsense, utter fiction. And it is wrong that the brain does not hypertrophy, right? The internal structure changes. You can see the connections and the networks and everything. And we could now measure them. If you play the violin, the representation for your left hand in the motor cortex gets bigger. But you can't see that on the surface of the brain.

C: And you definitely don't have a skull bone.

S: Certainly not in the skull, the overlying that part of the brain. So that part was utter nonsense. But it enjoyed a lot of academic legitimacy and popularity into the 20th century. You know, very, very late.

B: Steve, can you confirm my memory of the idea that phrenology impacted psychology and studying?

S: You were wrong. It was neurology that you were thinking of.

BW: I knew you were wrong.

B: Some ology.

S: Yeah. It was what I just said about neurology. That's what you were thinking of.

B: I was kind of right.

S: Kind of right. I.e. wrong.

B: I still won. I still won.

S: Part of that popularity- That's true. Part of the popularity led to this idea that, well, because artists at the same time were trying to not just like copy human figures or whatever, but like really understand the human form mechanistically. And that helped them. Like they wanted to know the muscular structure and how things worked. And that would help them reproduce as they represent the human form. So, of course, you have to know about phrenology because that's part of the human form. It's like if you're going to paint a picture of an angry person, you've got to give them bumps in the right place to try to represent their essence. What they are. That was a real tradition. But I think it pretty much faded out by the time Picasso was around. Picasso's early influences were African art. So a lot of what you think of as like a Picasso kind of form, especially early on, was that he actually appropriated a lot of it from African art. And now we're looking back on it. A lot of artists are critical of that because he did appropriate it. And he also presented it with the tropes of the time about savagery and primitivism and everything. So he was a product of his time like everybody. So, yes, he did suffer all of that sort of bigotry of his time. But that was his early influence. Nothing to do with phrenology. I just made that up because it's Picasso. You know, it's kind of weird. And I thought people would buy it.

C: And they did.

B: Cara and I didn't.

BW: But you still got a bunch of stuff wrong.

E: Bob was wrong and he won. I was right and I lost.

B: People will remember that Cara and I won. That's the important thing.

S: Let it be known, Bob and Cara. And most of the audience. So congratulations. I did a good job. (applause)

E: Hey, smart crowd.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:46:39)

"Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality."  – Paul Kurtz, (description of author)

S: Evan, give us a quote.

E: "Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct, yet have no factual basis in reality." The late, great Paul Kurtz. (applause)

S: Yeah, he was he was quite the guy. I remember. Here's my anecdote about Paul Kurtz. My very first skeptical meeting. So this is it was the four of us. We come to Buffalo for a meeting of CSICop at the time. And we were nobody. Nobody knew who where we were. We were just getting started. This is like 1995 or whatever. And I met Paul Kurtz and he like pulled me aside and talked to me for like 15, 20 minutes about the skeptical movement and the humanist movement. And his philosophy, they like really just had this nurturing instinct, wanted to just saw me as just some new person just entering the movement. And he really, really, really wanted to to express to me like what the whole movement was about and bring me in. And that made a huge influence on me. You know, I was like, yeah, this is this is a cool movement. These are cool people. They're educators, mentors like this. His mentoring instinct was there and it was great. Never forget that, which is a good good thing to remember, like those little things. People never forget it. You go that little extra step to just give somebody some time. I always try to remember this because we're at these events. We're all busy. We're overwhelmed. We're prepping. We're doing this. I do try to stay humble. We all try to remember that just giving people that little extra time could have the same kind of influence that like he had on me. You know, just try to keep that in mind. All right. All right. So thank you all for joining us at this episode. (applause) Thank you to CSI for inviting us. Always a great time. Thank you guys for joining me this week. (applause)

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

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.

[top]