SGU Episode 995

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SGU Episode 995
August 3rd 2024
Microscopic structures showcase the beauty of molecular biology and intricate cellular interactions.
SGU 994                      SGU 996
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"Scientists think that just regurgitating science is going to cut it. It's not going to cut it. You have to realize people are bringing their backgrounds, their experiences, their personal encounters, their fears, their hopes, their dreams, all of those things. Unless we factor those things in, we're going to fail and we'll just continue to get trampled by the misinformation space."
- Jessica Steier
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voiceover: 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. Today is Thursday, August ^st, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone.

S: So are you guys watching the Olympics?

B: Oh, yeah.

C: I'm watching clips of the Olympics on Instagram late at night when I'm trying to sleep.

B: Gymnastics, baby.

C: I know, Simone Biles. Team USA.

B: Spoiler alert, she rocks.

C: Spoiler alert.

E: Gosh, she's been at the top of her game for so long. What an inspiration.

B: Incredible. At 27, which is basically the oldest American gymnast to ever win. The team gold, she just went all around.

C: And after, yeah, after sucking down for her mental health purposes, having the twisties like the yips and, I mean, everything that she's gone through coming back, coming back so strong. I don't know, I keep seeing posts from people saying like people talk about these talents that are like generational talents, but she may just be it. Like she may be the greatest. Yeah, as of right now, she's the greatest of all time, but I don't know if she's gonna be surpassable anytime soon.

E: Right.

B: Well, Rebecca Andrade from Brazil did very, very well. She was closer to Simone than anybody else. She got a silver in the all around. She's fantastic. She's the only one that even had she had an outside chance. But still, Simone won by like 1.2 points at the end of the day today. And Suni, oh my God, Suni, what a story she's got. She's the one that had, after she won the All Around a few years ago, she woke up and had two kidney diseases and gained 40 pounds in a month. She was not doing great. And she came back, she won bronze All Around today. Fantastic story.

C: And didn't another member of Team USA, like have three separate ACL injuries or something like that, and then came back to complete.

B: Rebecca Andrade had from Brazil, she had a Brazilian ACL damn surgeries. And that always I've mentioned it before. That's amazing to me because you're at such a high level, as high as it gets in gymnastics. You have three ACL surgeries and she comes back and she's still back at such a high level. You would think she would lose five or six or seven percent at least and then be kind of out of such contention. She could have potentially won gold today.

C: Yeah, that's very cool.

B: Amazing. She was closer to Simone than anybody else, but nobody's beaten Simone.

C: Do you know what my favorite is watching? Have you seen any of these side by side videos of like the best of the best 50 years ago versus today? And how much the sport has just massively accelerated?

E: Technology just is incredible.

C: It's amazing.

B: The training and the techniques, they were really, they were really horrible. I mean, some countries were horrible, especially the way the American training was done in the 80s and 90s. They were treated horribly. They were so ridiculously strict. It was terrible.

E: And it was amateurs only.

B: What's that?

C: Oh, was it?

E: It was amateurs only at that time, yes.

C: So that's also a big difference. Interesting.

E: Yes, huge difference.

C: I didn't know that. Okay. Because very often when I see these side by side videos, I think it's just a function of like, I don't know, people are just way better athletes now. I didn't realize that there was sort of a ceiling.

E: Yeah, if I recall, it was into sometime in the 80s, they finally allowed professional athletes to participate in US Olympic teams. But prior to that, you had to be an amateur.

C: Yeah.

E: Did you guys see the sharpshooter situation?

B: Oh, my God.

E: I did.

B: That guy from Turkey shows up with no with no ear goggles. No accoutrements of the of the of the sport. He's had got his hand in his pocket shooting like like and he's like a divorced dad from Turkey. He gets silver. He just like strolls in. Get to Silver.

E: And it probably wasn't even his best day.

B: You look at him, it looks like your neighbor across the street just strolling in with nothing, none of the high-tech equipment that everybody else had, just him, Silver, walks away with Silver. Awesome.

E: I love that.

B: I just saw the picture in red of a little blurb. It was like, oh my God, that's awesome.

C: I also love, Bob, that you called them ear goggles. Is that a thing?

B: I did?

E: I knew what you meant.

C: I love that.

B: That's funny.

J: The other thing that was mildly irritating was all the backlash over the opening of the Olympics because apparently there was symbolism being used that a lot of religious people didn't like.

B: Or apparently understand.

E: The pagan ritual, they didn't like it.

J: Yeah, I mean, there was like, the big one was like the Last Supper.

B: But I think it wasn't the Last Supper was the bacchanalia.

J: What we're seeing is a bunch of like, people dressed up as Greek gods and stuff like that. But because there was a table and the body positions of the people they may very well have been making fun of Christianity by doing this.

C: I doubt it.

J: I don't know for certain. I'm just saying that it's possible because it's like-

C: Can Christians really own something like a symbolic dinner? I'm pretty sure that existed prior to the Last Supper.

J: That's the joke, Cara. That's the ridiculousness. It's the idea if you're looking to be offended, you will be offended.

C: Right. How funny to be offended by somebody else's religion because it offends your sensibility about your own religion. What a weird way to live.

S: The director, Thomas Jolly, apparently completely denies that it was inspired by the last supper. So that's his official statement.

C: So there you go.

B: That's all I need.

J: And I think that very well could be the case. Again, whether it was or it wasn't, to me, it's irrelevant.

S: It's irrelevant. You have to go out of your way to take offense at it.

J: Well, there was people dressed in drag and you know, that type of thing. And there's a lot of people now that get offended by that it's like, it's...

C: I'm sorry, like, yeah, if there is a celebration of a plurality of viewpoints and people, and you're offended because it doesn't fit your narrow view of what the world should look like, maybe you should look inward.

J: Yeah, definitely. They used a bull's head at some point, it was on the stage somewhere, and to a certain religion, the bull represents one thing, and to other mythologies, and I wouldn't just say these are all religions, but just a history of other countries and things that people used to believe, the bull means many different things to many different people. It's exactly what you said, Cara.

E: Yeah, they had rallies in support of Christianity, among other things, as a response to what they perceived the opening ceremony was to them.

C: How did I just miss this entire, I'm like literally frantically Googling right now because I was completely unaware of this quote unquote controversy.

E: Because you are a responsible member of society doing your hard work, nose to the grindstone.

S: It does also look like the painting The Feast of the Gods, which was a painting of the Greek gods, you know. But anyway, you could go either way. You could say that it was kind of a wink-wink nod-nod we're kind of doing it deliberately, but we have plausible deniability. But it's also perfectly plausible that it was just- The whole thing was themed after the Greek gods, which of course, because it's the Olympics the bowl, everything. But it's like Nostradamus, right? You can take anything he says and interpret it. You could retcon it, you could retrofit it to any history, you know what I mean, to make it fit anything. The fact that you could find similarities and imbue your own interpretation on it is not surprising. But of course, that's also part of art. Sometimes artists want people to imbue their own meaning on the work, which is why they don't say what it's supposed to mean. You're supposed to figure it out for yourself.

C: And that's a beautiful thing when I think ventures into narcissism is when you are indignant that something personally offended your sensibilities.

S: It says more about you than anything else.

C: Exactly, instead of having a global view of the world.

S: By the way, getting back to the athletes and gymnastics, have you guys noticed that gymnasts are getting older?

C: Are they?

B: Oh, yeah. Simone is the oldest winner, I think, in 30, 40 years, 20, 27. She's still quite young, but for gymnasts, that's up there.

E: Steve, you're saying the average age of the participants has increased?

S: Yeah, I found it, Chuck, because it seemed to me like when we were kids, they were all girls. They were like 15 early teen girls for the female gymnasts. So what the chart shows is that the average age of women Olympic gymnasts, reached its nadir in 1980 at 16.5 years old. It has been steadily increasing since then. Now it's almost 20 years old. But before that, it actually reached its peak in 1952 at 23 years old and decreased steadily from 1952 to 1980, and then the trend reversed and started going up again. That's interesting.

E: Well, the communist countries of Europe after World War II, 1952, maybe that somehow...

S: It's their fault?

E: No, I'm just... Well, not the fault, but a reflection of perhaps that time in which those countries were...

B: Well, they dominated. They dominated so well that they were looking to emulate that.

E: Right, what type of athletes were those countries sending?

B: In fact, the Corollis ran the American gymnastics and they had a lot of say and they were very, very rough. They were verging on abusive in terms of like what you can eat, what you can do. It was really not good.

E: Like Nadia Comaneci.

B: They kind of had – they're so much more free now to do kind of like their own thing. But also the thing that they're focusing on now, it's more power. There's a lot more power. If you're 16 years old and you weigh 85, 90 pounds, you are not going to be able to generate the power that you need to do some of these amazing tumblings that these gymnasts do. For example, like China this year, their gymnasts were still small and very slight, smaller than I think many of the other teams as far as I could tell. They did not do well on the vault because you need to jump on that platform and shoot up off of it and the spring platform. And if you're 85 pounds, you're just not going to be able to do that as well as a woman that's heavier, that's got 20, 30 pounds on you that's older and more mature, you're not gonna be able to generate that power. And that's one of the reasons why the men can generate so much power because they on average, they're going to be heavier and they're going to be able to leap off of that springboard so and do things that even Simone can't do.

C: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how they you know, men's and women's gymnastics are two completely different sports. They have different apparatus, they do have different moves. There are a lot of moves that the women do that men can't physically do. There are moves that the men do that women don't do. But it is interesting to see how over time those some of those expectations have been turned on their ear. Men are doing things that are a little more graceful, that are a little more show off flexibility, and sort of lightness on their feet and women are doing more things, you're right, that show like just sheer power and strength. When you're historically, they were much more, I guess, gendered in that way.

B: Yeah, this is still a long way to go. I mean, the guys, like floor routines are just so regimented and from-

C: They don't even have music, do they?

B: Yeah, I mean, it's-

C: They're not expected to dance around like the women are.

B: Yeah, there's no, yeah, there's no dancing at all. There's no like artistic component like the women's floor routines at all. But yeah, so who knows?

C: Make them dance.

B: Merge them a little bit.

C: See the men dance.

S: All right, well, let's get started with the news items.

News Item #1 - Progeria Treatment (25:28)

• A Disease That Makes Children Age Rapidly Gets Closer to a Cure - The New York Times 

S: Cara, you're going to tell us about a potential new treatment for progeria.

C: This is an interesting item that I was digging into. It gets deep in the weeds, so I'm going to try and keep it at a reasonable level.

B: What does that mean?

C: That it gets deep in the weeds? Oh, it's just... The reason that I wanted to talk about this week is that there was an article published in the New York Times last week, well within the last week, called A Disease That Makes Children Age Rapidly Gets Closer to a Cure by Gina Collada. I love the way that this peace of science communication or health communication was written because the storytelling component is really lovely. She tells the tale of Francis Collins, former head of the NIH, and his sort of career spanning interest in progeria, his personal experiences working with patients with progeria, having colleagues who have a he had a colleague with a child with progeria, and the timeline of this very rare genetic disease, wanting and passionately being interested in trying to do something about this very rare genetic disease, and being unable to move forward until the technology opened new pathways. And so there are multiple bottlenecks along the way, but basically Francis Collins, Before he was even at NIH, back when he was training at Yale, became really interested in progeria. It was always in his mind. While he was at NIH, he was able to run his own small lab and have a graduate student, and he focused on progeria in that lab. He was involved with the team, I think it was his graduate student who first identified the genetic mutation that causes progeria, but very often there wasn't a lot to be done because identifying why something happens and then actually changing that thing are two completely different animals. So let's take a second to talk about progeria first. When I say progeria, does everybody here, at least on the show, have an image in their head of what that disease is, or is this a new word to you? So Bob's got it, obviously. Steve's got it.

J: Isn't it the kids that have a really large head and they don't age properly?

C: Yes, yes. So sometimes it's referred to as a rapid aging disease. It's sort of a misnomer, but it does actually kind of follow that a little bit. It's actually called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome. Most people just call it progeria for short, and it's caused by a very, very obvious and individual mutation. It's a dominant negative. So this is interesting. It's actually a dominant gene and there is I think one documented case of a family in India, where they did pass this on to their children, but most people with progeria die before their childbearing or even if they don't die before childbearing age, they are incapable of bearing children. So that part's kind of interesting. So it is dominant, but it's a CG to TA mutation, it's a simple base pair mutation in a gene called LMNA. That gene LMNA usually encodes for something called nuclear laminin A. Nuclear laminin A, when it's healthy, is involved in building the nucleus of the cell and a few other kind of components at that core level. When it has undergone this mutation, The RNA mis-splices and produces something called progerin. And this is a protein that wreaks havoc on these individuals. Very often they refer to it as rapid aging, but it happens because of a whole series of issues, including I think there's been documented 1400 different SNPs. So you know, there's all these different manifestations of this single gene mutation that happened down the line, and it causes the cells to divide incorrectly. Very often it either limits the ability of the cell to divide or the cell division is defective, which leads to all this kind of like misorganized chromatin during the cell or actually it's the other way around the misorganized chromatin leads to the cell to divide ineffectively. And very often, I think the average lifespan of children with progeria is around 13. It might be pushing a little higher, 14, 15 now. They very often die from cardiovascular illness. There are these changes to the heart that occur relatively early on. Some children with progeria will have strokes. Some of the telltale signs have to do with their cardiovascular health. And it's a visible disease, right? There's a lot of... Would you say, Steve, like pathognomonic signs? You can recognize it when you see it.

S: Yeah. It's what we call an across-the-room diagnosis, right?

C: Totally. Yeah. When you see somebody with progeria, it's pretty clear that that's progeria. But interestingly, when they're first born, there aren't signs or symptoms. They're born healthy, and then they start to see those changes. in development. So coming back to this story, basically, Francis Collins has this lab, he brings in a postdoc, a fellow and says, let's figure out what causes progeria. Nobody knows we need to figure this out. And remember, Francis Collins is a guy who is like part of the he's like an architect of the Human Genome Project. And this is he's a geneticist. That's that was his training. And so he had this postdoc, Maria Erickson, and he said, okay, let's give it a year. Let's see if we can figure this out. And in only a few months, she was able to identify this mutation. And they published a paper. This was way back in 2003. They did a bunch of animal models, they started looking at cells in petri dishes to try and understand it a little bit better. But at that point, there wasn't really much they could do about it. But then something came along around 2012. What might that have been?

B/S: CRISPR.

C: CRISPR comes along around 2012 and they're like, holy crap, we can actually go into this very specific mutation and we can cut. But is cutting what they needed? Did they really need to just splice the gene to disable the gene? What was probably even more important than going in and targeting that gene? It was correcting the problem. And how did they correct the problem? Well, that came along in 2017. Dr. David Liu, who has, who's a director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at Harvard, developed something really interesting. He developed something called base editing. And base editing started as cytosine base editors, and eventually they developed into newer base editors called adenine base editors. And what adenine base editors can do is they can introduce adenine to guanine substitutions, which is a really big deal. So now you can go into a very particular mutation, you can target that mutation using CRISPR, you can use a base editor to then actually correct that mutation by swapping the individual building blocks there. And what do you think happened when they did that first in a mouse model, or maybe I don't know the order, so I'm going to say both in a mouse model and also in petri dishes using actual human cells, fibroblast cells from children with progeria?

B: I would think that it would stop progression or if it, I mean, I'm thinking more of like if you gave it to a person.

C: Right. And they haven't done that yet.

B: But I would, I would think it would, for a person, it would either stop it or prevent it from manifesting.

C: So in a petri dish with these fibroblasts from children, 87 to 91 percent correction of the pathogenic allele.

B: Nice.

C: They were able to correct the DNA at that level, which then mitigated the misplacing of the RNA, which then reduced the levels of the progerin and corrected those nuclear abnormalities. So you have this downstream effect, 87 to 91% correction. It was a big deal. In mice, a single injection, it was basically an infusion, I think. No, it was an injection. It was retroorbital injection that encoded this adenine base editor resulted. This is directly from the publication. This was back in 2021, where they did the mouse study, quote, substantial durable correction of the pathogenic mutation, restoration of normal RNA splicing and reduction of progerin protein levels. Okay. So the injection was given to the mice at postnatal day 14. And remember, this is a mouse model for progeria by inducing the same genetic mutation in mice. So they injected it at day 14 after birth. And they found that the median lifespan of mice went from 215 days in the mice with mouse progeria to 510 days in the mice without, which is the beginning of old age for mice. That's the beginning of what they call like a mouse's elder years or days, I guess you could say. So you know, they say right there in the paper, these findings demonstrate the potential of in vivo base editing as a possible treatment for HGPS and other genetic diseases by directly correcting their root cause. One of the big hurdles they had to overcome apparently was just getting both CRISPR and the base editor into a vector that was small enough to enter a cell.

S: Yeah, vector is always the problem.

C: Yep. They had to find the right virus. They had to do a lot of shrinkage first of the actual apparatus, the technology, and then they had to find the right viral vector, vector to be able to get this to work. But at this point, with such promising results in both mice and in vitro human cells, This team, and this is incredible, this is a team of researchers from all these different labs all over the country. They meet once a week to talk about what's on the horizon? What can they do? And they're actively working now to try and find pharma companies that are interested and to get a clinical trial going. So there is no clinical trial yet, but they're working to obtain permission from the FDA to start a clinical trial. Right now, they need to find the right pharmaceutical company and actually might not even be a pharma company, but biotech company to make the base editor for use in humans to make sure that it's safe to make sure that it can fit all the hurdles.

S: It's got to be an orphan disease, right? So that-

C: Oh, 100%. Progeria is, so they call this an ultra rare genetic disease. They call ultra rare genetic diseases, those that affect fewer than one in 1 million people, and there are about 7000. Okay, let me let me put it this way. There are about 7000 genetic diseases for which we know what the mutation is. Like we already know where the mutation is, meaning we could potentially do something about it. Of those 7000, 85% of them are ultra rare, meaning that they affect fewer than one in a million people and only a hundred or a few hundred of those have treatments available to them. Progeria is especially rare, it apparently only affects one in 18 to 20 million people. So in the United States alone, according to the Progeria Research Foundation, there are only 18 living patients. This is why when there are diseases like this, they're viewed by a lot of researchers as curiosities. They make for great doctoral dissertations, but pharma companies aren't often invested, or even labs.

B: Sure, what's in it for us?

C: Exactly. Like it's a very expensive investment with no return, really, when you're looking at the pure numbers, except for basically the gift to humanity, and the gift to these individuals who are suffering, and these families who are suffering. I mean, this is a fatal disease. And so this team is doing this with no remuneration, no hopes for remuneration. They're just meeting because it's fascinating to them, because they are super interested in the biology here, and also because people are going to continue to be born with progeria. Even though it is a hereditary disease, it happens because of an acute random mutation. And so that's always going to happen. It's just happening in very, very low numbers.

S: That is neat.

B: Wow, man.

S: Good old reduction of science. I always say this a lot, but it's like understand something at its fundamental level and fix it, right? There's just no substitute for that.

C: There isn't. And I love it when science stories are told in the way that this article tells them, where you really feel the history, the human players, and you see, okay, we've gotten as far as we can go, we're going to keep trying, but then all of a sudden, a dam breaks loose because a new technology is developed or becomes available. It's just incredible.

S: Thank you, Cara.

News Item #2 - Solid State Battery (25:28)

• Samsung’s 20-year-life EV battery runs 600 miles on 9-minute charge 

S: Jay, give us an update on solid-state batteries.

J: Well, you know what a battery is, right, Steve?

S: I'm vaguely familiar with the idea.

E: It's a park at the tip of Manhattan Island.

J: Just to be clear here, solid-state batteries have existed for quite a while. Basically, they were originally conceived in the 1830s by Michael Faraday. You might have heard his last name.

B: Yeah.

J: And I think they've made the first one back in the 50s. Today, there's multiple companies that are developing solid state batteries. Some of them you've heard of, and some you probably haven't. We have Samsung, Toyota, and then you have a company called QuantumScape. There's Solid Power, and then there's contemporary Amperex Technology Company Limited, C-A-T-L. These are all companies that are working on the technology. So I'm going to talk about Samsung's latest advancement and what is basically going on with their technology. So Samsung recently announced that they made a major advancement in EV batteries, and they revealed it at the S&E Battery Day 2024 Expo, which happened in Seoul, South Korea. This was on July 23rd and 24th. So here's the basics. So their solid-state battery has an estimated 600 mile range, it can charge in nine minutes, and it could have a lifespan of up to 20 years. So Samsung is saying that their new batteries have 500 watt hours per kilogram. This is double the current mainstream EV batteries. The company actually has a pilot solid-state battery production line and it's fully operational. They're making these batteries right now. This is happening at their R&D center in South Korea. So Samsung's SDI batteries, they stated that they built the pilot line last year to mass produce these solid state batteries by 2027. So they have the initial batches that they're making, they've sent them to EV manufacturing companies for testing, and so far the feedback has been positive. This is all very, very good news. Now these batteries are supposed to be smaller, lighter, and a lot safer than standard lithium-ion batteries that are currently basically everywhere, right? You know, in every electric vehicle and they're just that is what the world is using right now. So they're replacing the liquid components with solid ones. They're supposed to be safer than the traditional lithium ion batteries due to essentially the replacement of the liquid electrolytes with solid electrolytes, right? So we have, because of this, there is an elimination of flammable liquids, right? So the liquids that are in a lithium ion battery, they're flammable and they could leak and they do. And you could see videos of people's cell phones having problems and EV bike bicycles, the batteries are pretty big. And I saw a guy get in an elevator and his battery basically exploded on him.

C: So scary.

J: Yeah. It doesn't happen that often.

C: But yeah, this is this is why, like you have to have your is it that you have to have them in your carry on and not your checked package?

J: You know what?

C: Yeah, that's why. Yeah.

J: So there's also this thing called a reduced risk of thermal runaway, and this means thermal runaway is a condition where an increase in temperature can cause a further increase in temperature, and this could lead to a fire or an explosion. There's enhanced structural integrity in the solid state batteries, meaning that they could withstand more damage. You drop a lithium-ion battery and don't feel like everything's okay. You know, like you could do some structural damage and that could lead to some bad things. And they just overall have improved chemical stability. So I think that this so far sounds great. There is one caveat, though. The initial production costs are going to be extremely high because they're brand new and they're they're amazing. You know what I mean? Like double the range. So the first application is going to be in the ultra high-end EV market. These are cars that are probably going to be more expensive than, say $70,000, which most of us can't afford. But just like everything else as they produce more and more factories come up and more competition catches up these prices will definitely come down. They're going to be rolling these out in the year 2027, which is really not that far from now. And I think probably within the next five years, they're going to we're going to start to see them trickle down into more and more things that can be affordable to the average person. So a few clarifications here. I did more research and I wanted to make sure when I say that they could do a nine minute recharge, what does that actually mean? Well, they don't mean from 0% to 100%. What they typically mean with a recharge is a battery on the low end would be at the 10% to 20% mark, and then to get it up to 80% capacity. That's where the 9-minute charge comes in. You know, the full charge could take a lot longer, and the reason why is when you charge a battery above 80%, you have to slow down so you don't damage the battery. So I don't know what the full 100% charge would take, but it's probably an overnight charge, just like every other battery.

S: The thing is, you're not going to use fast charging to go up to 100%, right? You can use it for that 10 to 20% up to 80. You can even push it to 85, 90%, but that's it. If you're gonna be charging and even for day-to-day use you don't charge up to 100% you charge up to 90% or 85%. The only time you ever charge up to 100% is like the night before you're going on a long trip.

C: I don't know when I drove electric, I just plugged it in at night like my cell phone.

S: Yeah. That's what I'm just saying. But you could, like with our Tesla, we program it and we tell it how high to charge it up to.

E: Oh, I see.

S: So day to day use, 80%, that's more than we need for day to day use. And then twice a year, three times a year, we're going on a long trip, we charge up to a hundred percent just so we get that extra range for the long trip. And then when you fast charge on the highway, you just charge it up to 80% because you could do that in 10, 15 minutes. But it takes like 30 minutes to get that extra 20%, right? It's just not worth it.

J: Yeah, keep in mind, these batteries are going to be roughly double what today's batteries are. So 80% of a battery that's double what today's range is means everything's fine. You know, it's still a very short charge time. We are shifting towards an EV market here. Of course, we need more charging stations and charging infrastructure and the grid. All of these things have to be dramatically improved. It's going to cost billions of dollars. But that society is changing at all times and these changes cost money and they take time. I'm seeing battery charging stations pop up all the time.

S: So just for context, though, Jay, the Amprius silicone anode lithium-ion batteries also have the same exact specific energy of 500 watt-hours per kilogram. So that was like a year ago, two years ago. So basically, they're the solid-state batteries, and the silicone anode batteries are neck and neck in terms of their energy density and specific energy. And which is good. I mean, so we already are at the double what like was the standard a year or two ago. And again, they're introducing them into the high end market. And what I'm beginning to see is that, yeah, this is what's happening. If you want a car with a 200 to 250 mile range, you get the lithium ion batteries that do not use the cobalt and the nickel, right? Because they have a little bit less energy density. If you want the 300 to 400 mile range, then you get the next one up. That's the more standard lithium ion batteries with cobalt and nickel. And if you want 500 to 600, maybe you'll get a solid state battery or a silicone anode battery, right? So depending on what your range you want, you will get a battery that fits that range. Of course, you're going to be paying a premium for the super long range vehicles. We've talked about the fact before that like range anxiety, I think it's a temporary condition, but the market is basically playing to range anxiety at this point. But people are basically getting way more range than they need. And it's just not cost effective. We're better off actually just investing in more charging stations to deal with the range anxiety rather than ridiculously long range vehicles that are more than what you're going to need 99% of the time. But yeah, we're well on our way. I think definitely by the end of the decade, these sort of double energy density batteries, whether it's the solid state or lithium ion, are going to be more standard. And we're going to be moving on to the triple density batteries or whatever to the 2030s.

C: And is there anything about the, this is me not knowing much about batteries, but there's nothing about solid state batteries, for example, the technology that would preclude you from having a two way battery in your house, right?

S: No, like having this as your house battery, like for battery backup?

C: Yeah, having it as battery storage.

S: Your power wall? Yeah. No, no, it's fine.

C: That's great. That's definitely what we need to be moving forward to.

S: But you wouldn't use this battery for that, Cara, because it's way too expensive. What you're going to use for your home battery is the least energy dense battery because it's...

C: Sorry, to be clear, what I mean is having your car as a backup battery. I'm talking about this battery in your car serving as a backup battery and having a two-way charge function.

S: There's a lot of discussion about that. And it's really up to the car manufacturers to allow this to happen. So right now, your house gets alternating current energy, and then you need to have a converter to DC because the cars run off of DC. So you would need a DC back to AC if you're going to use your car as a backup battery. And not all EVs have that. And for some of them, if you use an external DC to AC converter, it voids the warranty. They don't want you to do that. But now where I do see the market, there's a lot of discussion. I think it's shifting into just saying, OK, we're going to include the DC to AC converter. And yes, you can use it for grid backup. Because then we're going to get to the point, I think, where when we park our EV at night, we plug it in every night, no matter what its GPS is. That's just standard. And we let the car figure it all out. We don't even worry about it. You park and plug, and that's it. If everyone does that, and we're up to the 20, 30, or more percent penetration of EVs, that's massive grid storage, right? And then you could theoretically get a rebate from the power company or from the state or whatever, if you agree to plug your car into the grid at nighttime and use it for grid storage. There's already that for home battery backup. In Connecticut, there are incentives to have a home battery that the utility company will use to stabilize the grid for peak shaving and all that kind of stuff.

C: And then you add your own solar panel to that.

S: Oh, yeah.

C: Yeah.

S: It's all good.

C: You're off grid when you need to be. You're on grid when you're giving back. I mean, or when it's peaking, you're giving back when you don't need. I mean, it's great. It just expands the grid.

S: It also stabilizes the grid. The other thing is, and this is, I think, it's a little bit more speculative. If it will happen, it's farther off, is that, so right now, so solar panels are DC. They convert to AC for your home and then back to DC for your car and then back to AC if you use your car as a backup. Wouldn't the whole system function better if it was all DC from beginning to end, right?

C: 100%. At least to the box.

S: Everything, but the whole thing could be DC. So the reason that AC won out over DC 100 years ago-

E: Oh, because the marketing.

S: No.

C: Oh, I thought it was safer.

S: No.

C: Oh.

S: No. It was-

E: Those experiments they did.

S: No. It was primarily for long distance transmission. That was it. AC, there's much less power loss over long distance with AC than with DC. That was so simple. It was a technological feat. That was it. That was a technological reason. That was the reason why AC won out over DC. But now, we have the technology for long-distance DC transmission. So that one big advantage to AC isn't such an advantage anymore. And now, because of solar panels and car batteries and battery backups, we might be better just shifting over entirely to DC.

C: But God, that would be a big change. What if we shipped it so that the panel was DC but then the converter was only for things within your home that converted to AC? That would make sense. It could be that the hub was DC.

S: The AC to DC converter can be before your home.

C: Right, and that way we don't have to like change every appliance in our country.

S: Yes, everything after the home is DC. Well, the thing is, like when you have a brick for your laptop, that's an AC to DC converter. But of course, you wouldn't need that if your home was DC. I think we might have a phase where the two systems run in parallel, where there's basically an AC system and a DC system running in parallel. Or again, I think everything distal to your home is DC, and then it gets converted to AC for the long-distance transmission, so we don't have to replace the grid. But if we're upgrading the grid anyway, we could theoretically put in a DC grid and just make everything DC. It'd be very difficult to make that level of transition, and that's why there's a little bit of inertia to the technology that we have right now. But if we had it to design all over again, it probably would be better just to make everything DC from beginning to end, which is interesting to think about.

C: Well, it's also yeah, it makes me think about places in the world where certain technologies are just coming online. Yeah. Or where certain infrastructures are just being laid down. It's like, let's skip all of the learning curve. Let's start with like the most efficient things we have.

S: Exactly, exactly. All right, thank you, Jay.

J: You got it.

News Item #3 - The Cass Review (39:54)

• [chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/integrity-project_cass-response.pdf None] 

S: All right, guys, I want to talk about a controversial topic, the Cass Review. Have you guys heard about this?

C: I am so glad you're doing this, Steve. And I personally, like I've I've dabbled. A deep dive sounds exciting to me.

S: It's tricky. And we've had a lot of emails of people asking us to talk about the review. And it's taken me a long time. I had to read the whole thing and read plenty of analyses of it and criticisms of it. And I think I understand the core of the issue. Now, this is really complicated. Let me just preface that. So what is it? What is the Cass Review? This has to do with gender affirming care. And this is a multi-year, very thorough review that was done in the UK. And Dr. Cass is a pediatrician who headed up the review. And they came up with guidelines and recommendations based upon their exhaustive systematic review of all the evidence for gender affirming care. And what are we talking about with gender affirming care? The big focus of the review was hormones for delaying puberty, but also included cross-sex hormones and gender affirming surgeries either breast reduction surgery, mastectomy, or vaginoplasty, or whatever, right? So basically genital surgery.

C: And can I ask right here at the top before you even get into a deep dive, because I read an article recently that I don't know, I feel like we need to make mention of this. The Cass Review, is it specifically for gender affirming surgery in trans individuals, not in cis individuals?

S: Yeah.

C: Okay, because, yeah, I recently came across a study that showed that the vast majority of gender affirming surgeries that are performed in the US are performed on cis people. So like, we've got to make sure that we make that clear. The Cass Review is only looking at surgeries that are affirming the gender of somebody who is trans.

S: It's for gender affirming care in trans individuals and only in pediatrics, right? Not in adults. The outcome of this review has been wildly misreported, in my opinion. Every popular mainstream media reporting I have read about it, I feel, especially in the United States, has missed what the report actually says. The narrative has largely been that the medical system in the UK is finally coming to its senses with this really respectable Cass Review, And American medicine is stubbornly refusing to listen and are continuing to mismanage pediatric patients. And of course, this is mainly coming from right-leaning journalists. There hasn't been much written by left-leaning journalists in my experience. I think they're just ducking and covering because, again, they don't want to make of it because it's very complicated. But it is largely true that in the UK there have been already numerous changes in the guidelines and in the practices of the UK Health Service, and the United States medical system has largely ignored the Cass Review. We have not-

C: Oh, so you're saying those changes in the NHS have been a direct result of the Cass Review?

S: Absolutely. Absolutely. And there have been some red state laws in the United States have cited the Cass Review to justify things they were already doing. But in terms of the medical establishment in the United States, they have not been impressed. Let me just put it that way. And again, the mainstream journalistic narrative is that, again, American doctors are being stubborn and ideological and whatever. And I just don't think that's fair. First of all, I think that a lot of people misunderstand what the Cass Review actually concluded. And they're making it sound a lot more negative than it was. Now, having said that, they did make some recommendations, which I personally disagree with, and I'll tell you why in a moment, but that are negative about gender affirming care, but not in the way that people are reporting it. So first of all, the standard of care that the Cass Review recommended is largely in line with the existing standards of care of the Endocrine Society clinical practice guidelines and the WPATH guidelines. This is sort of the major international group looking at gender affirming care, right? So it actually isn't that out of line with the published standards of care that already exist. And where it is out of line with it I do think they get it wrong. The other thing is, nowhere in the review does it say that gender-affirming care does not work. That's the narrative that has sort of come out of it, but that's not what they said. They didn't say that it's harmful. They didn't say it doesn't work. All they said was that it doesn't meet a threshold of evidence to say that we can recommend it outside of the context of a research study. So their recommendation was, like, we should not give puberty-delaying hormones outside of a clinical trial, right? That was a specific recommendation.

C: I see. So they're basically saying we need more research.

S: Yes. Which, of course, sounds superficially reasonable, right? And, of course maybe the world's preeminent proponent of science-based medicines, as I coined the term, and that's most of what we talk about in science-based medicine is increasing the threshold of evidence before recommending a treatment and like only doing it in the context of clinical trial.

C: But at what point is something like do we go okay we don't need to do any more clinical trials?

S: I would say never. I mean, we always need more clinical trials. But the question is, is when you're going from the existing evidence to practice guidelines, how do you do that? How do you make that translation? So I think the fortunate thing from my perspective as a science communicator is that we've been writing about this on science-based medicine for 15 years. So we have a long track record of spelling out in excruciating detail what we think that relationship should be, and it's complicated and nuanced. But the good thing is we could look back at that. This is predating the whole trans issue, right? So it's easy for us to say, this is what we've been saying for 15 years, and now we're just applying it to this one specific case, right? And it does get to the heart of the difference between evidence-based medicine and science-based medicine. So I'm going to just digress a little bit and talk about that. Evidence-based medicine essentially is saying you shouldn't base treatment decisions on just plausibility or because it makes sense or anecdotal evidence or whatever. It needs to be based on the best clinical evidence that we have. And of course, we agree with that. The problem with EBM is that it focuses too narrowly on just the clinical evidence. And what our argument has been at Science-Based Medicine that you need to include all of the evidence, all of the scientific evidence, not just the clinical evidence. You need to include the preclinical evidence, the animal study, plausibility, physics, right? Because what happened was, Homeopathy, acupuncture, Reiki, all of these things that had no prior plausibility or break the laws of physics were like, we love EBM. All we have to do is just roll the dice on clinical trials without any consideration of prior plausibility and basically use that to promote our, then cherry pick the positive results and use that to promote our nonsense.

C: It's like in science or fiction when you're like, a study says, and I'm like, a study can say anything.

S: Right, right, right. But this cuts both ways, too, right? Because you could also use this to turn skepticism into denial, right? You could also say that, well, you don't have a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, therefore this is not evidence-based. It's like, well, you have to put what evidence is necessary or what evidence is appropriate into context of the specific treatment. And there's a lot of ways in which you need to do that, but I'm going to focus on two. One is, is it possible to do double-blind, placebo-controlled trials? Obviously, it's not possible to do it for most surgical interventions. So if your one threshold of evidence is you need to have double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, you could basically rule out all of surgery. As not being evidence-based.

C: Yeah. You could also rule out like most of psychology. That's always been my issue with psychology.

S: You have to say, for this type of intervention, what is the evidence that we can get? And there may be a ceiling of evidence that we could theoretically get to for ethical and practical and pragmatic reasons. The other issue is that you have to put it into the full context of risk versus benefit. It's not just about the treatment. It's also about all the other choices available, including doing nothing.

C: Yeah, and sometimes, and especially in this population, sometimes doing nothing means children dying by suicide.

S: Yeah, so that's definitely a core issue here. So with the review, the review has come under withering criticism from American physicians who specialize in transgender care, and even just pediatricians. There was one review in particular which I recommend, which I'll link to as part of the story, which did come out of Yale. I'm not biased because it's out of Yale. It just happened to come out of Yale. The author group has collectively 86 years of experience caring for more than 4,800 transgender youth, published 278 peer-reviewed studies, 168 of which are in the field of gender-affirming care. Most of the people involved in the Cass Review do not have anywhere near that level of experience. There are mainly pediatricians without experience in transgender care. So that's one of the criticisms. But even that aside, the criticisms of the Cass Review, again, there's a lot of them, and you can get lost in the weeds here, but I'm going to focus on two things specifically. So if your argument is that the current evidence base for gender-affirming care doesn't meet a threshold of evidence necessary to recommend it outside of clinical research, you have to ask the question, what threshold of evidence? How did you determine that threshold of evidence? And the bottom line is that they just made up a threshold of evidence.

C: It wasn't based on previous, like, practices?

S: No, they deviated from established norms, established standards of translating evidence into practice guidelines. They did not follow any standard. They just made it up as they went along, which of course opens up the possibility that, well, you could have just arbitrarily set the threshold higher than whatever exists, you know what I mean? If you decide after you look at the evidence what the threshold is-

C: Well, that's p-hacking.

S: It's the equivalent of p-hacking.

C: That's a form of p-hacking. It's not hacking the p, it's hacking something else.

S: It's hacking the threshold.

C: It's after the fact. It's post hoc determination.

S: Or ad hoc. So rather than, here are the established methods that we use to evaluate whether or not the threshold of evidence has been met. And we're going to apply that established standard to this body of evidence. They did not do that. They violated standard practice.

C: It's not good.

S: Yeah, it's not good. And if you look at the details it becomes pretty egregious because, like for the using hormones for delaying puberty, they said, well, we need double-blind placebo-controlled trials, right? And it's like, well, how are you going to blind whether or not somebody is going through puberty or not? You can't. So it's a classic, they held it to a standard of evidence that really is impractical and makes no sense, really. So they kind of rigged the game. They're like, there's not enough evidence to recommend this care if you exclude all this positive evidence over here that we arbitrarily can say doesn't count. And so that's like the main criticism from US physicians as to why this was not a good review. They basically were excluding all of this pretty good evidence of really positive outcomes from gender-affirming care that just didn't meet a kind of nonsensical threshold that isn't applicable to the context in which they're applying it.

C: And then on top of it saying, let's go ahead and get we can revisit this when you get more evidence, but make sure that evidence is either unethical or unreasonable to get.

S: Right, exactly. The other thing is, is that, and this is what I just spoke about in terms of the context of risk versus benefit, is that they spent a lot of time talking about the risk of hormone therapy in prepubescent children, and they did not consider the risk of not treating those children. And so, that gets back to what you said, Cara. If the risk of—and again, this is, I think, the inherent dilemma. This is the inherent dilemma of gender-affirming care in minorities and children. So, for example, if you have someone who's 11, 12, pre-puberty, they have a trans identity. And there are different subsets of people with a trans identity, but a lot of them, I think it's the majority, had their trans identity from as long as they can remember, a very young age, and it's remarkably persistent, right? It has all the features of a, this is how your brain developed, this is not a choice or a social contagion, you know what I mean? You're trans. And their trans identity is remarkably stable over a very long period of time. If you look at those subset of people, and you have somebody who was born, identified male at birth, but whose gender identity is female, and they're staring down puberty, you essentially have to consider the risks of forcing somebody who identifies as a female to go through male puberty.

C: Right, because puberty blockers are largely reversible.

S: They delay puberty. It's 95% reversible. There's still some debate about the risks and everything. I get that. It's mostly reversible.

C: Mostly reversible. Puberty, never reversible.

S: Right, but puberty is not reversible.

C: You can't reverse puberty.

S: Yeah, that's right. And so, yeah, the dilemma is we would love if you could wait until they were 18 and they had years of time to really evaluate it, but they don't. It's you're forced to make a decision one way or the other before they go through puberty. And especially if you're just talking about like this is the most benign medical thing you could do. You're just delaying puberty to give them more time to figure out if this is what they really want to do. But if you make them go through puberty, now that you have irreversible biological changes that may conflict with their gender identity, if now as an adult, if you say you have to wait till you're 18, they want to reverse those biological changes, you've now said you have to go through multiple more invasive surgeries with less good results, right? So you're basically condemning them to multiple invasive surgeries that with imperfect results because you denied them a much more effective treatment because they were quote unquote too young to get that treatment.

C: And you're ensuring something called gender dysphoria at that point. You're ensuring that they get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

S: And of course there's all the psychological stress even if they do gender affirming care as they're an adult that doesn't save them from all the psychological distress that it caused. And yes there is an increased risk of suicide although exactly what that risk is is still a matter of research and we should continue to research that. The numbers are certainly trending in that direction, that it has a positive impact on the survival and the psychology of people who get gender-affirming care.

C: And that's all from internal. I think there's a whole other secondary thing that's probably very rarely considered, which is that gender-based violence is highest among, or not among, but towards trans individuals, and especially trans individuals who quote unquote, don't pass. Because individuals who are, who are trans, who the general public doesn't know is trans, they are not committing violence against them. The violence is highest towards we think gender based violence is highest towards women. It's actually highest towards trans women. And that's not something they can control what they look like, especially if they were denied puberty delays.

S: So that's my take on the Cass Review. It's consistent with this review coming out of Yale, what many of the physicians who treat transgender youth are saying about in the United States. And I think the criticisms are legitimate. And if you're going to defend the position of the Cass Review, you have to seriously address those criticisms. You know, why did you choose that standard of that threshold of evidence? Why are you demanding the types of evidence that really can't realistically exist in this situation? Why are you ignoring all the risks of not treating? Again, I acknowledge this is a tricky area, this is a huge dilemma, but you know what? You have a group of experts who are thoughtfully going over all of these issues, trying to do the best that they can for these kids, and I see no reason to politicize this whole thing. To get governments involved in sort of telling physicians and the medical community what they can and cannot do. The history of the government in a draconian way prescribing to medical professionals what they can and cannot do is not good. That's not a good history. Certainly, in my experience with any laws being passed in the last 20 years, they've all been disastrous, completely against the evidence, completely against science and skepticism. You know what I mean? You don't want to politicize this. The Cass Review spends a lot of time complaining about how politicized it's been, but I don't think they've actually turned the heat down on this. I think they turned the heat up, if anything, and they've fueled... I mean, the Cass Review has been used now repeatedly in many contexts for anti-trans legislation and for restricting gender-affirming care, even criminalizing it. I think it was very unfortunate that the review, I think, bungled it. I think they dropped the ball in a big way and that it's being kind of exploited by to fuel this basically culture war that we're in the middle of. And the people who are suffering are there's the trans community directly because of this.

C: Do you think that the Cass Review itself and the authors and the architects of the review, and the authors, and the architects of the review had a specific agenda?

S: I don't know. I thought about that.

C: It's hard to tell?

S: I don't know. It's hard to tell. I do think, maybe not an agenda, but I think a bias. Because we're all biased, right?

C: Right. And we all have a bias, right?

S: We all have a bias.

C: Every piece of science that's ever been documented has bias.

S: And I do think it's just my personal, this is my take on it, since you bring it up, is that I just think people in general have a, we've lived in a binary world for thousands of years, right? Basically, culturally speaking. But the reality is it's not strictly binary. And now that 0.1% or 1% or whatever it is of people who are like, hello, we're here.

C: Yeah, we've existed this whole time.

S: We've been here the whole time. And it's like, it would be kind of nice if we could live our lives and sort of fit into this world that has been created. And the people have a really hard time wrapping their head around the fact that gender and sex are not strictly binary. And they just can't handle it.

B: Yeah, they really can't. It's scary to see what some of these people are saying. It's so simple to them. Either you're a man or you're a woman and that's it. And that's where it ends with them. It's like it's just reading these comments today. It's just like, oh, it's so much more nuanced and I don't think they even care to dig any deeper.

S: Yeah, I know. And what's funny is when you read the comments, which of course I do more than I should, is that you have so many people confidently and very derogatorily saying, like, again, trying to take this sort of scientific or skeptical higher grounds, like, of course, there's just two sexes. And it all comes down to this, right? But they each cite something different and mutually exclusive, right? It's like, well, they're proposing a range of standards which are not really the same. It's all either you're XY or you're XX. That's it. That's it. It's very, very simple.

C: Which is insane, because then it's like, OK, so there's no Kleinfelter.

S: So what about all the people who are XXY? What if you're XY, but you have—

C: What if you're XO? What if you're—

S: Yeah. What if—this is my favorite example. You're XY, but you have complete androgen insensitivity. So even though you're XY, you are otherwise indistinguishable from a woman. Are you a man or a woman? Is that person a man or a woman? There is no correct answer to that question, because it all depends on how you decide arbitrarily to define it. What's your defining characteristic? It's not whether or not you have a penis. It's not your chromosomes. It's not your hormones. There's no one thing because they don't always line up one way or the other, right?

B: Is it a plant or not?

C: Right. And the idea, like, here's the thing. If Pluto could tell us what Pluto was, wouldn't we just listen to Pluto?

S: Well, Cara, this is what it comes down to.

C: It's really smart.

S: This is what I think it comes down to. It comes down to brain denial. Because basically, if you really—if you push these people against the wall and you dig down to what they're saying, they're saying that feelings don't count, right? Because they're just feelings. Feelings aren't real. Your penis is real, or your vagina is real. That's basically what they're saying. But the unstated major premise there is that feelings are all psycho-cultural, social. Sometimes feelings are brain biology, and they're just assuming that it's not brain biology.

C: Feelings are things that happen in your brain. And like, I think it also comes down to something even, and you know, this is more psychological, maybe even sociological, philosophical, it comes down to humanity, right? Because it's one thing to say, I disagree with your religion. It's another thing it's one thing to say, I disagree with certain experiences or certain things that you do in your life. It's another thing to say, I deny your existence. And I think it blows people, like, can you imagine, and there's a lot of pretty overt racism in this country, but can you imagine if somebody just said, black people don't exist? You just don't exist. You may identify as black, other people may call you black, but like, listen to me, you're white. You don't exist. Blackness doesn't exist. Nobody would be okay with that. And yet that's exactly what's happening here.

S: Well, I mean, not too long ago, it was sort of a dominant opinion that sexual orientation was, there was only two or really one correct sexual orientation.

C: And that everything else was-

S: Everything else was a mental illness or was a delusion or was a cultural choice or was an affectation or whatever. That was a dominant opinion up until fairly recently culturally speaking. Then again, that was brain denial. It was like, well, how you feel doesn't really count. It's not real. You know, it's actually personality, like core personality, things like how you identify is like, that's exactly the thing that's dominantly biological and has to do with how your brain developed. Not social, right? It's like personality. We talked about this. Personalities are remarkably stable. You're born with your personality and you can't change it.

C: That's why we call them traits, not states.

S: Yes, exactly.

C: Yeah.

B: Steve, I noticed that a lot of people, they equate people saying for example, I know by appearance I'm male, but I feel female. And that's what they're denying. But they equate that with, well, today I feel, I'm Italian, but I feel Irish. You know, they equate those two things that just because you feel it does not make it a thing.

S: It's a false analogy. Because—

B: That's common as hell.

S: So basically they're saying—they're confusing a biological trait with a cultural—literally something that's cultural. Right? Or if they're saying that they feel genetically Irish, what does that mean? The thing is that- That's not amenable to developmental changes, right? But we know that the brain is a sexual organ. We know that the brain development is influenced by sex hormones. We know that you're born with traits that relate to biological sex that have to do with your brain development. And you cannot convert somebody out of their basic neurological trait. You know what I mean? Whether that's their sexual orientation or apparently their gender identity. There hasn't been as much research on it yet as there is about sexual orientation. But that's what everything is pointing in that direction. It certainly is, I think, the most parsimonious conclusion at this point in time based upon the evidence. And certainly there is no reason to assume that gender identity is dominantly a social construct or it's primarily a social contagion or a choice or a fad or whatever.

C: No, because the incidence is persistent across culture. There's a lot of good evidence to show that that's not the case. And the truth of the matter is, to even go beyond that, that false equivalency, that comparison that you brought up, Bob, Okay, I'm Italian, but I identify as Irish. Who gives a shit? Like, even if that is true, we don't have any laws. There are literally no laws on the books to prevent somebody from saying I was born Italian, but I identify as Irish. I'm going to go down to the to the city hall. I'm going to change my name. I'm going to live my life as an- sure, go right ahead. We don't care. Why do we care so much about this?

S: And there are people who do that. There are people who are genetically one nationality but grew up and for whatever reason identify with another one. Good for you.

C: Nobody has any problem with that.

J: This is like, this is the same thing back in the 60s and 70s with the gay community.

C: Yeah.

J: First off, it's foreign to people. It disrupts the way that they think about the world. It makes them uncomfortable. And for a lot of people, I think it's emotionally very complicated for them.

S: So, on the inconsistency point, I'm going to end on this, because that's another angle to the Cass Review, is that you could also take the standards that they applied and apply them across medicine and show how absolutely inconsistent it is that there are so many treatments that are accepted as the standard of care with the same or lower threshold of evidence as current gender-affirming care.

C: Interesting.

E: That's a tell.

S: It's a big tell. Absolutely. All right. Wow. That was a big topic. Let's move on.

C: That's good, though.

News Item #4 - Mammoth DNA (1:08:10)

• Scientists Reconstructed a 52,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth’s DNA. Resurrection May Be Next. 

S: Evan, give us an update on mammoth DNA.

E: Yeah. Mammoth DNA. The latest and greatest. The woolly mammoth. It went extinct about, what, 10,000 years ago? I think it's arguably the earliest.

B: Or earlier.

E: Yeah, or earlier, Bob.

B: I've heard of isolated instances, like even like a crazy like five or six thousand years ago, I think.

E: Yeah, yeah.

B: I read that years ago, though, so...

E: When I looked it up today, they seem to be capping it a 10.

B: Okay, all right. I haven't looked it up.

E: I think it's arguably the most well-known extinct animal, and therefore, whenever scientists learn more information about the shaggy beasts of the Siberian tundra it jumps to the front of Science News headlines. And this week is no different because loudly and proudly yet another scientific advancement in the understanding of the woolly mammoth has been made. A team of researchers from Rice University in Texas have spearheaded an international study revealing that a fossilized chromosome from a 52,000-year-old mammoth that was essentially freeze-dried after it died in Siberia. Okay, well, that's interesting. But have we already delved deep into the frozen matter and DNA of willy mammoth remains? Well, yes, they have, but this particular sample they hit the DNA motherload. Yep. In prior extractions, woolly mammoth DNA samples collected would be in these very tiny fragments, no more than 100 or so base pairs at a time. But this discovery, in particular, this freeze-dried sample, the DNA was preserved so well, the yield was 100 million base pairs.

B: What?

E: 100 million base pairs, possibly more. And possibly more, but they're confident that they got 100 million base pairs out of it.

B: That's gargantuan.

E: In fact, Jay told me the other, just a few seconds ago, it was mammoth. That way, if you don't like that joke, you can. Now, this sample shows how the genome was organized in living cells and reveals what genes were active in its skin tissue. The results of the study were published in the journal Cell, C-E-L-L. The paper is titled, Three-Dimensional Genome Architecture Persists in a 52,000-Year-Old Woolly Mammoth Skin Sample. Here's the highlights from the paper's summary paragraph. We use Paleo Hi-C to map chromatin contacts and assemble its genome, yielding 28 chromosome-length scaffolds. Chromosome territories, compartments, loops, bar bodies, and inactive X chromosome superdomains persist. The active and inactive genome compartments in mammoth skin more closely resemble Asian elephant skin than other elephant tissues. Our analysis uncovering new biology. Differences in the compartmentalization revealed genes whose transcript was potentially altered in mammoths versus elephants. So the inactive chromosome of the mammoth has a tetradic t-e-t-r-a-d-i-c.

C: Like a tetrad, yeah.

E: Not bipartite like human and mouse.

C: Yeah, it's a group of four.

E: Yeah. So we hypothesized that shortly after this mammoth's death, the sample spontaneously freeze dried in the Siberian cold leading to a glass transition that preserved subfossils of ancient chromosomes at nanometer scales. Okay, so a couple things here. Paleo Hi-C, that is a high throughput genomic and epigenomic technique to capture chromatin conformation. Chromatin is a complex of DNA and proteins found in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells and forms, of course, chromosomes. Now, the team determined it had 28 pairs of chromosomes, and that is significant because it's the same number as the mammoth's closest living relatives, modern elephants. So I think that speaks to the robustness or the, almost the completion of what they were able to get. The chromosomes were structurally preserved down to the nanometer scale, Bob. Yep.

B: Oh, billionth of a meter, baby.

E: Yeah, baby. The chromosomes retained structural features similar to modern chromosomes, including chromatin loops as small as 50 nanometers. The three-dimensional arrangement of the DNA fragments in the fossil was shown to be frozen in place for tens of millennia, preserving the entire chromosome structure. Olga Duchenko, who's an assistant professor of molecular and human genetics at Rice University, says that fossil chromosomes are a game changer. Knowing the shape of an organism's chromosomes allow us to assemble the entire DNA sequence of extinct creatures, enabling insights that were previously un-possible, un-possible.

C: Un-possible!

E: Isn't that weird how that triggers in my head, like, I automatically see un-possible when I read impossible.

B: Oh my God. The shape of the chromosomes, the shape is actually critical?

E: Yeah, apparently so.

B: I think if you had this sequence you'd be good, but the shape?

E: Yeah, apparently the shape is in fact a big part of this. And they used, what did they use? I'll jump ahead to that. What was it? The 3D imaging. In order to put this together, Venetius Contessoto, who is a research scientist involved in the project, said, it's the first time we have been able to turn back the clock as it were to look at chromosomes of extinct species in full 3D. The results are remarkably similar to those of modern elephant chromosomes. Scientists were able to create this 3D model of the chromosomes without relying on existing elephant DNA. All firsts, apparently, as part of this.

B: Or frogs.

E: Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah. They were able to see which genes were active through this chromosome compartmentalization, the genes whose activation state were altered compared to the modern elephants were associated with what? Hair follicle development. The wooly and the wooly mammoth, right? The wooly part. All that hair that the modern elephants don't have for the most part. Here's another aspect to the news that's also groundbreaking and fascinating. Researchers ask, how could ancient chromosomes remain intact for 52,000 years? What they did is they proposed that the chromosomes were in a state resembling glass. Where individual DNA fragments couldn't move far preserving their structure. And going back to that summary, here's what they wrote. It's known as glass transition, a physical process whereby factors like cooling and dehydration can effectively arrest the diffusion of the molecules in a material. We hypothesize that this glass transition was induced by spontaneous freeze drying of the woolly mammoth tissue shortly after death in the cold Siberian climate. Yeah, so essentially they said like, well, this glass-like state of the mammoth remains, induced by cooling and dehydration, is like that of the jerky we often eat as a snack.

C: What?

E: Yeah, basically they found mammoth jerky. And when they say glass, they do mean glass because you can shatter this stuff, right? But it's very resilient. While it shattered like glass, the chromosomes remained intact inside.

S: I wonder what the upper limit of that is. Could we have that DNA preserved in that fashion from dinosaurs? Of course, that would be extending it to millions of years, which is dubious, but I'm just curious if that extends the upper limit of DNA that we could possibly reconstruct.

E: But how are we going to find that, though? It's one thing to be 52,000 years old as a specimen, another thing to be 65 plus million years old.

B: I mean, if it happened once, I'm sure it happened many times throughout history. Did it survive, though? Did it not only maintain its integrity, but was it not destroyed by tectonic processes or whatever?

E: So many other things could have interfered with that. Did it stay in the glass light? How long did it maintain its glass-like state?

B: Right. It'd have to maintain that state for a million years.

E: But that would be fascinating, Steve. The article didn't really talk about bringing back the woolly mammoth. That's not really what this was about. It was just about these techniques. I mean, they touched on it very briefly, but that's really not what this was about.

B: But that's the main thing going through my head. Like, oh, this is cool. When are they going to de-extinct the mammoth?

E: Yeah, which we've talked about in prior episodes.

C: Yeah, there's plenty of articles about that.

B: But not in light of this new evidence.

C: True.

E: No, you're right, Bob. Here's my fantasy. Can they bring it back, but can they make it like dog size so that you can have a little pet woolly mammoth in your house? Oh my God. So cute.

C: Toy mammoth.

E: Oh my God. Right. Wouldn't that be adorable? And then you wouldn't have to worry about it wreaking havoc on the environment otherwise. What are you going to do? Release a bunch of these enormous creatures into the tundra again? You'd have all kinds of problems.

C: I'd still worry about it if they were dog size.

E: You think so?

C: 100%. People would be like, wow, I thought this was a good idea. This made a terrible pet and then release it into the wild.

B: It'd be smarter than dogs.

C: I think maybe we should look at every human decision ever made with regard to domesticates and probably base our decisions off of that.

E: Probably, but I don't know. It's so cute. And you can modify them so they don't grow tusks so they wouldn't become victims of poaching and other things.

C: They probably still smell really bad.

E: Yeah, but I've known some people who have had ferrets and those things smell awful.

S: They stink.

E: They keep them in the house. Oh boy, do they ever.

B: It was totally tolerable. But imagine if it was as big as a dog. Elephants are smarter than dogs. Imagine having a super-trained mammoth dog.

E: Yes, Bob. Now you're talking.

B: Of course, he would talk to you about training it in a very nice way.

E: Right, right.

S: Yeah, that's the problem Cara had with it, is you're trained.

C: Yes, that you weren't nice when you trained.

B: They are smarter. I remember we were at some nature show in some park and they're like, yeah, they were training dogs and there was an elephant enclosure nearby and the elephants picked it up just by watching faster than the dogs. They were like, they are so smart. It's ridiculous.

S: Some elephants have passed the mirror test.

C: Yeah, it's, I have my views, I've done a lot of animal research, and I have my line in the sand, but you know, of like which species I think we shouldn't be doing animal research on. And I think that that often would also apply to which species we should not be domesticating and keeping as tiny little prisoners in our home.

B: Yeah. I don't disagree with that.

E: What makes it worse, Cara, I'll finish with this, is that we were – some people were talking about, well, maybe we could have it like in the zoo or something, like if we do bring them back, we'll make them zoo attractions. In a way, I think that's even a little more–

C: It is. It's terrible. And there's a lot of ethical considerations around elephants in a zoo.

E: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

C: They're social creatures. They need very large roaming areas. Most zoos for elephants are substandard. There are some, there are some really good ones with good enclosures. But yeah, it's, I feel bad for them. They're brilliant creatures.

S: For the record, though, dogs domesticated themselves as much as we domesticated them. And we have a very symbiotic relationship. The dogs are quite happy. Thank you.

C: I agree. But that happened over tens of thousands of years. Yeah. Inducing domestication is very different.

S: Although I do think that some of the modern breeds of dogs is cruel. I mean, why a breed of dog that can't breathe. I mean, come on.

C: Yeah, that requires human intervention just to give birth.

J: All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:21:00)

J: All right, guys, last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] Do you guys have any guesses?

C: It's like a particularly brutal shaving session.

J: Well, a listener named Kathy Collins says, Hi, everyone. I think this sounds like a milkshake machine. And it's funny. I've seen like those machines where you like stick the cup up into like the the arm that spins around to mix it. And yeah, maybe a little bit. I can kind of hear that. Another listener named William Steele. That's a cool name, William Steele. He writes, Hi Jay, this week's noisy really sounds like someone blowing into their hands to do some sort of bird call. Thank you all for another great episode. That is not correct, although when I was in high school, I used to be able to make fart noises with my hands and I drove one of my teachers crazy.

C: Hey Jay, I have to tell you, when I was in college I went to Disney World and the bus driver that drove us from the airport to the resort, he was named Rockland Steele. I can't, I can't, it stuck with me my whole life. Rockland Steele, my bus driver at Disney World.

J: A listener named Samuel Brett wrote in and said, Hey, Jay, my guess for this week's noisy is a leaking main airlock seal to a CM-88B Bison M-class towing vehicle.

C: Wow. That's very specific.

J: Yeah. You know, I have never seen one of these. I've never driven one of these. I don't know what this is exactly, but it is a M-class towing vehicle. No, I don't know. You know, you may have heard that. I have never heard the main airlock seal break, but if you say so, I'm with you, man. Another listener named Hunter Richards said, Hunter Richards, another cool name.

B: Another one.

J: Hi, Jay. This week's noisy sounds a lot like a small motor or compressor, a handheld one that is that's being shaken, perhaps a small tire ball pump, RC motor or Dremel. Now, typically, I don't let people like shotgun me with like It's a small truck. It's a ball pump. It's an RC motor. It's a Dremel. I don't let people do multiple answers like that, but I thought this one was interesting. I was thinking the common denominator here is that the air compressor is driving it. I don't think that's a bad guess. I put that one as my favorite guess of the week, but unfortunately there was no winner. So I'm going to pick one of you guys at random. Cara, what do you think this is? Why would I pick you?

C: Oh, why would you pick me? What do I know that you guys don't know? Is it something in L.A.? Is it something only women have access to in our secret layers? I don't know. I have no idea. I mean, it does sound like a what do you call it? Like a hedge trimmer?

J: It is a beluga whale.

C: No, it's not.

J: From the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Yeah. Listen again. So what he's doing is he's blowing air and shaking that big ball that's on the it's in the front of their head. That's like that has air in it. And it's making like this sound. So listen again. [plays Noisy]

C: Yep, now I hear it.

J: See creature.

C: Ugh, at least it's not trying to talk.

J: Didn't catch it. I don't know, I'm disappointed in you, Cara.

C: It's the talking aquatic mammals that really get me.

J: Every week you're like, it's an aquatic animal! No, Cara, that is an airplane. So I figured you would lead with that, but you didn't anyway. It's okay. All right, guys, so that was fun. That was a cool noisy there. I mean, I've said it so many times, it's remarkable how things sound like other things.

B: Remarkable!

J: Context is everything. Thanks, Bob. Anyway, I got I got an interesting noisy here from a listener named Rabbi Adam Bellows.

E: Adam's a long time listener.

J: That's correct. And here is the Noisy. [plays Noisy]

E: That's someone stapling a cat.

J: I'll give you one hint, the... Let's hear that again, Evan.

B: Oh, my God.

J: Someone's stapling a cat. [plays Noisy]

E: See?

J: Oh, my God.

B: Wow.

J: All right. So if you listen to this noisy, you might hear a rhythm in there. The rhythm is irrelevant. Okay? That's my clue. Just I didn't want anyone to get hung up on the rhythm. It doesn't mean anything. If you guys heard something cool this week or you think you know the answer to this week's noisy, you can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Announcements (1:26:10)

J: Steve, I have shut down ticket sales for our 1,000th episode.

E: That's it.

B: Oh.

J: I actually sold more tickets than I wanted to.

E: A little standing room only situation.

B: I hate when that happens.

J: No, there won't be standing room only. I just wanted it to be a little bit more cozy in the room. But people want to see us. You know, it's our 1000th episode. There'll never be another one of these. So that's that. There are still tickets available for the daytime extravaganza. I think that show starts at 2.30 on August 17th. There's still tickets available for that. That's going to be an interesting show, that one in particular, because we're going to be trying out some new bits only in that 2 p.m., that 2.30 show. If you're interested, just go to theskepticsguide.org homepage for the link. We have a new announcement, Steve, but before I do that, let me take things in order. So we go to Chicago and we have three shows that we're doing in Chicago. We're doing two extravaganzas and we're doing one and we're doing one 1000th show. Then after that, we are going to Las Vegas to go to SciCon, which is the last weekend in August. I mean, October. That's Bob's sacred weekend where he worships the moon.

B: Sacred.

J: And Bob is giving that up to skepticism yet again. And then after that, we will be doing yet another show. This time we're going to be in Washington, D.C., and this will be on the only show I have scheduled right now. There'll be another one because we're going to be doing a SGU private show, which will probably happen on December 6th, but for sure on December 7th we will be doing an extravaganza. This is in Washington DC. If you're interested, for those tickets you can go to theskepticsguide.org and check out the button on our homepage for more info on that and how to buy tickets. And I will announce probably within the next three weeks when and where the private show will be because I've got to focus on the Chicago show. And just to keep everyone up to date, it is very, very likely that I will be planning the next NOTACON in May of next year.

C: Yay!

E: So the event will take place in May.

J: Yes, I'm thinking May, but you know, everything depends on what hotel availability and all those details. And I have another thing to say to everybody. If you are an SGU patron at the $5 level or higher, you will be able to see the 1000th SGU show as a live stream day of real time. So if you want to see that, If you want to see that live five-hour show, all you got to do, if you're a patron, you got it. If you're not a patron, you got to become a $5 patron or higher to see that. Details will be emailed by me and Ian soon about how that's going to work. Right now, we're thinking that we will be doing it through the Patreon app itself, through their website and the app, but we'll let you know. Guys, do you have anything you want to say about the 1000th show?

S: It's coming on us fast.

C: Yes, it is.

J: Two weeks, guys. You know, today's the first as we record this and it's on the 18th, so we have 17 days.

C: Wow.

E: Our kilo show. I love it.

J: It always happens like this. It's like, I'm like, I got three months, I got two months, and then all of a sudden it's like, it's happening. It's fun. We love doing it. And we're really excited. I mean, this is a huge milestone. I got to tell you guys, I've been preparing for this 1000th show. It's extraordinary how much work it's taking to prepare for this. I had a lot of patrons and regular listeners go back and go through episodes for us to find us like cool moments and in previous shows and I have a spreadsheet for that right so I'm going through and me and Ian and Kelly are going through and we're trying to find like the best stuff and oh my god there are so many things that we've talked about and things that we did and moments that we've had but the thing that reoccurs to me is just how much fun we've had and how much time we spent laughing. Throughout all these tragedies. The pandemic and crazy political things happening, but we always try to maintain our positive attitude. We always can make you laugh, Cara.

C: That's true.

J: Especially Evan's, like, really, really, like joke bombs that he throws in the background.

C: It would definitely be interesting to see what percentage of the feed is just laughter. And how much does Steve cut out? Because he's like, that's too much.

J: Oh, he cuts out a lot. Yeah, because when we sit here and record this show, we go off on tangents like right now. You know what I mean? Anyway, guys, so I'm really looking forward to this 1000th show. I think it's going to be really awesome. I just want to make sure everyone knows we will be bringing swag there. We will be signing books. We're going to have a lot of time together because it is a five-hour show, but it's going to go by super fast. We've done these shows before. We have a ton of content. So we're going to make sure that we set time aside to take pictures with everybody and to sign books and sign swag or whatever you want us to do. We want to be there for you, but we do have a ton of stuff to get to. So we're going to start that show and we're going to hit the ground running. I'm thinking if it's possible, maybe we could meet before the show, before the show begins to sell swag and assign stuff to get some of that work out of the way for everybody. So I'll keep you updated on that. Either way, you should come to the hotel early, have lunch, get yourself ready for that five-hour show.

S: All right, thank you, Jay.

Emails (1:31:32)

S: We're going to do one quick email. This comes from Dave, and Dave writes, I'm a long-time listener and fan of the SGU. I came across this video about electric motor that propels the flagella of bacteria. The structure of this rotating motor made of proteins was amazing to me. Then he gives a link. The video provides a detailed explanation, but unfortunately concludes by hinting at the idea of intelligent design and irreducible complexity. Could you provide a better explanation of the evolution of such a structure rather than just saying it's God's work? Cheers, Dave. So actually, we talked about this on the live stream. But because we got an email, I thought we could also talk about a little bit here. The video is to a science communicator, Dustin, who does the Smarter Every Day videos. And they're very good. I think we've talked about them before.

C: Oh, yeah. Dustin's usually amazing. He talks about intelligent design in this video?

S: A bit, he does. And that's why it's garnered so much attention because it's a little bit out of step with the usual high quality science communication. And again, the bulk of the video is talking to scientists who have published some recent detailed models of how the bacterial flagella works, basically higher resolution, and it's very cool. But he does get into a little bit of irreducible complexity talk. He tries to come off as sounding neutral, but he kind of omits the standard scientific explanation. He gives a very short shrift. He doesn't mention, for example, the whole concept of coaptation. He talks about how could something as complicated as the flagella evolve? Does that mean that every piece of it had an evolutionary advantage? It's like, nobody thinks that. But the thinking is that it evolved from other things that did things other than work as a flagella, right? Just like bird wings evolved from proto wings that were not for flying until they got good enough that they could be used for flying, you know? And then they were tweaked for flying. But before that, they could have been used for a lot of other things, thermoregulation and mating, display, guiding, leaps, trapping prey, whatever. Similarly—and he did very quickly mention the secretin molecule, but again, gave it very short shrift—in that there's a lot of homology between the flagella and essentially a structure that's used to inject toxin into prey, right? So it doesn't move, but a lot of the pieces are there. And, of course, they're separated by many, many years of evolution, so it's not like in a literal stepping stone, but it's like, look, there are closely related proteins that do other things. So probably there was some pathway through these other functionality before it was a flagella, and it probably was a really crappy flagella before it was a good flagella. So, the other way to look at this is like the human eye, which is another one that is often proposed as irreducibly complex. Again, the idea of irreducible complexity is a structure that's so complicated it could not have evolved because there's no pathway, there's no evolutionary pathway to that complex structure because you need all the pieces in place before it functions at all. It's like, well, but it could have functioned simpler for something else.

C: Totally.

S: Or, like with the eye example, it could have just been a simpler version of that thing. So they say, look at the eye. You have a lens, and you have an iris, and a pupil, and a retina, and they're all structured a certain way. It's like, that's right. Or you could have a pinhole, and that's it. And it works. It doesn't work as well as a modern eye does, but you could have just a patch of light-sensitive tissue. That works too.

C: Yeah, you could have just like a floppy little appendage that doesn't have a motor at all at the beginning.

S: Yeah, or whatever, or just very crudely moves, you know? Absolutely. And then it gets fine-tuned over time to work better and better until you finally have some. And then, of course a lot of the intermediary steps are lost to evolutionary history because species go extinct. And then you think, imagine, like, this is a good example, I often get a tractor one. Well, the tractor one is a different one than I was going to get. But it's like, I use that for the eye thing. It's like saying, and I literally had a creationist say to me, were people walking around with half eyes hanging out of their face a million years ago? Were people dragging around half a Dear John tractor in the Middle Ages? No, they were using a plow, which works, but it's a lot simpler. So imagine if the only bird that survived, like all birds go extinct, except for the hummingbird, right? And then you look at a hummingbird and how it flies and you say, how could it possibly have evolved? You know, think of all the specialization you would need before a hummingbird could fly the way that it does. Because you're missing all the intermediary bird stages that were not quite as tricked out as the hummingbird. So it's the same thing. If all you're looking at is the bacterial flagella and you are missing 500 million years of intermediary stages or whatever.

C: Which, by the way, none of that stuff fossilizes.

S: Right, right.

C: We wouldn't know any stage before what we have right now of a bacterium.

S: Right. It's also, yeah, it's also you're focusing on something that does not fossilize well. So of course we're missing all the details. And you can't say, well, until and unless we can reverse engineer every step along the way, it's impossible. That's ridiculous. Of course it isn't. It's after many plausible pathways. And there's some evidence for some of those stepping stones, right? Not all of them. And so the whole irreducible complexity thing just completely fails from a logical and evidentiary point of view. But it was very-

C: But Destin didn't say anything else was impossible, right?

S: He didn't go full-

C: I didn't think he would.

S: -irreducible complexity. What he did was he kind of gave a biased summary of the situation.

C: Which makes sense, because Destin is a devout Christian and he's very open about that. And he does a lot of talks about, like, science and his faith and how he sort of finds, how he exists in a world where he's a faithful person who's also a scientist.

S: He desperately wants it all to be compatible and he stepped right up to the edge and basically laid it up without, like a lawyer, you just sort of lay it up and let the people make their own conclusions kind of thing. And he has plausible deniability. But he definitely gave way more attention to the irreducible complexity side and come very short treatment of the answer to that.

C: That's a bummer.

S: Yeah, it was just a little disappointing. But the 95% of the video was just good science communication about how cool the bacterial flagella is. Anyway, yeah, we talked about that on our Wednesday live stream as well.

B: Steve, I got my quick clarification.

S: Yes, Bob, you have a quick clarification from last week.

B: Yeah, a clarification about my atomic clock talk recently, a metaphor I used. In my talk, I compared the up and down transitions of the electrons moving between energy levels to the ticking, the ticks of a clock. And that it turns out was incorrect. This is actually a common misconception that was frustratingly common in my research for that topic and in the past as well. I often come across that the metaphor of a ticking clock in this context should have been related to the frequency of light itself. Instead, the electron absorbs this light and it moves to the next energetic state. It will then quickly release that energy and move back down and that radiation absorbed and emitted needs to be 9.192631770 billion hertz. Those are your atomic ticks of the clock and not the electron transitions. Thank you, Dr. Science, also known as my friend Leonard Tramiel, my favorite pedant.

E: I knew something was wrong with that item.

C: Totally. Yeah, I totally picked up on that.

E: I lost like two nights of sleep.

B: Yeah. Well, sorry about that.

S: You fail, Bob. All right. Let's move on with science or fiction.

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:40:00)

Theme: Olympics Item #1: The first modern Olympic games in 1896 involved only 14 nations, with only 241 male and 64 female athletes. Item #2: The ancient Olympic games were banned in 393 AD by the Roman Emperor because they were considered pagan and conflicted with Christian values. Item #3: The 1908 Olympic games featured pistol dueling in which competitors fired wax bullets at each other.

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

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of expert and very erudite skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake.

B: I love that word.

S: All right, it was a theme this week. You guys want to guess the theme?

E: The Olympics.

S: The Olympics is the Olympics. That is the theme.

C: Crap.

S: Here are three items about the Olympics. You ready? Item number one. The first modern Olympic Games in 1896 involved only 14 nations with only 241 male and 64 female athletes. Item number two. The ancient Olympic Games were banned in 393 AD by the Roman Emperor because they were considered pagan and conflicted with Christian values. And item number 3, the 1908 Olympic Games featured pistol dueling, in which competitors fired wax bullets at each other.

E: Okay, 1896 involved only 14 nations with 241 male and 64 female athletes. Why only 14 nations? There were certainly a lot more than that at the time. Why would it have been so restricted? Maybe those are the only countries who could establish teams or enough of a representation to be able to send an athlete. So that would have been maybe concentrated in some nations, maybe many nations didn't have those kinds of sports systems, sports programs within their society. So that's why that one could likely be the science. The second one about the Olympic Games banned in 393 AD by the Roman emperor because they were considered pagan. I don't know about this one. This one, I can't quite put my finger on it. It conflicted with Christian values. I suppose that would line up with what was happening in that time in history, but I don't know. That one leaves a lot of room for other reasons for it to have been banned other than it was considered pagan. The last one, about 1908, featured pistol dueling and wax bullets. That one sounds the most ridiculous of the three, and for that reason, it's likely science. So for no great reason, I'll go with 393 A.D. It was canceled, but not because of paganism, shall we say.

S: Okay, Cara.

C: Evan thinks that the ancient Olympic Games were canceled, but not because of Christians not liking paganism. I don't know. That seems reasonable to me. I don't know. Like, this doesn't suit my religious views of the time, and I am some sort of dictator, and you must believe what I want you to believe. Sure. Okay. 1908 pistol dueling, shooting wax bullets at each other. That would probably still hurt, you would think. Maybe they were some sort of like protective, or maybe that's why it was only featured in 1908. Who knows?

E: Didn't say only, but okay.

C: True. The one that sticks out to me is the first modern games. I can't fathom—I hope that I'm wrong here, I really do—but I cannot fathom that women competed in the first Olympic Games. In 1896, I think it took a long time for women to be able to do, quote, sport. Just in a public arena at all. We had like no rights. I mean, we're starting to get rights, but weren't looking good at that point. So that's going to be my guess is that there were no women in those games and maybe some of the other numbers are off as well.

S: OK, Jay.

J: You would think that a wax bullet just wouldn't work, right, Cara?

C: Like out of a gun, probably. If it was a special gun.

J: Or maybe a certain type of wax. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm going to go with Cara because back in 1896, it just I can't even visualize women competing in the sports. What they were wearing and all that stuff. I think I think it makes perfect sense that women were not involved with that sport. So I'm going to go with Cara.

S: And Bob.

B: So yeah, 1908 pistol dueling with wax bullets. It seems outrageous and probably true, but I felt the same way, Jay. I mean, what kind of wax would be strong enough to hold up to a gun and then be hard enough to survive, but then not too hard to kill you or put your eye out? It just sounds so bizarre that it's probably true. The banning of the Olympic Games in 393 AD, that for some reason, that's tickling a memory, probably a false memory. But the one that really struck me the most, as soon as I read it was this first one here in 1896. First off, I thought maybe, I thought it was 1889. But yeah, that's close enough. I probably misremembered that, because I think I actually heard it just a few days ago, when they actually said the year. But that's close enough. Yeah, my first thought was that, women? No, I don't think so. I just, yeah, I can't imagine that the first few had women or even more than that. Right? So yeah, so that's the killer for me, is that I don't think women would have been involved at all, except in some trivial way, then actually participating. I don't think they were, society was ready for that yet.

S: All right, so you all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. At the 1908 Olympic Games featured pistol dueling in which competitors fired wax bullets at each other. You all think this one is science, and this one is science.

B: What the hell is wax bullets?

C: Oh! No sweep!

S: Cara, you're correct, they wore protective equipment for the torso, face, and hands. The competitors included teams from France, the UK, and the USA. The gold was won in the 20 meter by the French athlete and the 30 meter by Greece. So, yeah, that was it. It was just one year and then they decided this was stupid.

E: They felt it was wack.

S: There were exhibitions, I think, before that in 1906, but then they just had the one official game, medal-giving competition in 1908. All right.

C: Did you see that, John Oliver, about like the, I can't remember what it's called, but like the training ground, like the big competition to decide which sports can make it to the Olympics?

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

C: There were some weird sports in that, too.

S: Lot of weird sports, really.

E: Very odd sports.

S: Number two, the ancient Olympic Games were banned in 393 AD by the Roman emperor because they were considered pagan and conflicted with Christian values. Evan, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science, and this one is science. Sorry, Evan.

C: Interesting. Is that the only time?

S: Well, yeah, it was just banned once. That was it. And then no Olympics for 1,500 years.

E: Yeah, right. That was the end. That was it.

B: That's a big banning right there.

S: Yeah, it was very effective.

E: I would have thought it had something to do with war or conflict.

S: Anyone want to take a stab at who the emperor was?

E: Caligula?

S: No. 393. Theodosius I. He sound familliar to any? He was basically the guy who made Christianity the official religion of Rome.

C: Cool.

B: Theo, huh?

S: Theodosius I, he thought the games were equivalent to paganism, wanted to ban them in order to promote Christianity, the newly minted official religion of Rome. So, yep, that was it. Banned. Which means that the first Olympic Games in 1896 involved only 14 nations with only 241 male and 64 female athletes is the fiction. You guys all seem to think that it's the fiction because you think there were no females in the 1896 Olympics, and you're correct. That's why it's the fiction. I tried to sneak that in there. I was hoping you wouldn't notice. You would focus on the other aspects now.

C: So predictible. Human being.

S: But what year do you think was the first Olympic Games with female athletes?

B: Oh, good question.

C: Maybe like...

E: 20?

C: Yeah, sometime around 1920. I don't know what the years they fall on. I don't want to do that math.

B: What about the 40s?

S: Bob says the 40s, Cara, I'd never say the 20s.

C: Yeah, not long after the turn of the century.

S: Jay?

C: Or the 10s even.

J: 1932.

C: Now, I think before that, probably the tens or the twenties.

S: Tens or twenties. It was the next games in 1900.

C: Oh, good. So enough women were pissed.

S: Yeah, it was the second Olympic Games.

B: I'm surprised.

S: There were 22 women competing in five sports, tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism, and golf. All the feminine sports.

B: No gymnastics?

C: But it was still probably like, how many women did you say?

S: 22.

C: And how many men?

S: A total of 997. So there was still a huge asymmetry, but yeah, they did start to introduce female athletes in the second Olympics in 1900. But the other numbers were correct, 1896, 14 nations, 241 male, but just zero female athletes made that the fiction. In the end, it was all of the countries that were involved were European except for the United States.

C: Oh, interesting.

S: And most of the athletes were Greek.

C: Was it in Greece?

S: Yes, it was in Athens.

C: Oh, okay.

S: Most of the gold medals went to the United States, but Greece won the most medals total because they had the most athletes there total. The 1900 Games. Guess what city they were in? The second Olympics. Were in?

B: Rome.

S: Paris. Just like this year.

C: Oh, nice.

B: Was that the last time?

S: No, there was in Paris.

B: It's been a while, though.

S: It's been a while.

B: It's been in Paris, like 80 years, I think.

S: Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff that happened. I had a pick of a lot of things I could have included in this. So maybe I might resurrect this theme at some point in the future. But I had to include the pistol dueling one.

B: Yeah, that was-

E: Crazy.

C: Bizarre.

S: I could do one just on crazy sports that were tried out at one time or another during the Olympics.

B: Yeah.

S: You know, we're like, one time, like, maybe we shouldn't do that.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:50:59)

"Scientists think that just regurgitating science is going to cut it. It's not going to cut it. You have to realize people are bringing their backgrounds, their experiences, their personal encounters, their fears, their hopes, their dreams, all of those things. Unless we factor those things in, we're going to fail and we'll just continue to get trampled by the misinformation space."  – - Jessica Steier, (description of author)

S: All right, well, Evan, even though you crashed and burned on Science or Fiction this week, you still get to give us a quote.

E: Oh, nice. That's very empathetic of you, Doctor. Love your bedside manner.

S: I wasn't shooting for empathy, but go ahead.

E: Clearly. "Scientists think that just regurgitating science is going to cut it. It's not going to cut it. You have to realize people are bringing their backgrounds, their experiences, their personal encounters, their fears, their hopes, their dreams, all of those things. Unless we factor those things in, we're going to fail and we'll just continue to get trampled by the misinformation space." Jessica Steyer, from an interview that they had with her, she of the Unbiased Science podcast. She is the host, and she has expertise in public health, specifically chronic and infectious disease prevention. She will be Joining us at SciCon 2024 in October, and we'll look forward to meeting Dr. Steyer there.

C: Nice.

S: Yep. I like that. I mean, that's a good description for why the Skeptic community has to exist, right? Because part of what we do is science communication in the context of all the crazy shit that people believe, and all of critical thinking, right? All the biases and heuristics and those hopes and fears that people bring to the table. We take all of that into consideration, right? That's sort of the context in which we communicate science. And I do think it's more effective than just the ivory tower approach, which is just here are the facts, just the facts, man. We don't get involved with anything else. Here's the here's some science. Take that and be a good little fellow. You know, sometimes it works. It usually doesn't, though.

C: You're usually not adding it to an empty vessel. You're adding it to a vessel that is full of all sorts of ideas.

E: Oh yes.

S: That's right. A lot of misconceptions, et cetera. Sometimes deliberate misconceptions. There's also not everybody out there is a fair broker or an honest player. So we're dealing with a lot of deliberate nonsense. All right, well thank you all for joining me this week.

C: Thanks Steve.

E: Thank you doctor.

J: Thanks Steve.

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

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

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