SGU Episode 379

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SGU Episode 379
20th October 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 378                      SGU 380
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
JIS: Jamy Ian Swiss
Quote of the Week
You can do magic with science, but you can't do science with magic." -
Erika Dunning (Brian Dunning's daughter)
Links
Download Podcast
SGU Podcast archive
Forum Discussion

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, October 15th, 2012, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey, everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson.

R: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella.

J: Hey, guys.

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Oh, good evening, my friends. How are all of you?

J: Good, what's up?

R: Super!

S: Quite well.

This Day in Skepticism (0:31)

• October 20, 1970: Norman Borlaug wins Nobel Peace prize for Green Revolution

R: So, the day that this podcast goes out, October 20th, marks a very important date in science history. So in 1970, a scientist received the Nobel Peace Prize. Can any of you guess who it was?

E: A scientist received the Nobel 'Peace' Prize.

S: Was that Linus Pauling, right?

R: Nope.

S: He got the Peace Prize.

R: Any other guesses?

J: I have no idea.

E: 1970.

J: Isaac Newton.

R: (laughs) They don't award them posthumously, so... no.

E: Yeah, right.

R: Okay, time is up.

E: (disappointed) Aww!

R: On October 20th, 1970, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Norman Borlaug.

E: Yes!

B: Oh!

R: For his contribution to the 'green revolution'...

B: Norman!

R: Which increased grain production throughout the third world. Yeah, he is responsible for possibly saving millions of lives.

B: Oh, how awesome is that? What a legacy!

E: Borlaug?

J: Cool!

R: Yeah, just for coming up with ways to grow crops that was more efficient, that produced more yields, particularly in Pakistan and India, during times when they had severe shortages of food, and even drops from the US weren't enough to protect people from starvation, so, yeah, his research went into saving many, many people. So, yeah, he has the Nobel Peace Prize, he has the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honor, and he's in the United States National Wrestling Hall of Fame!

B: Wrestling!? (laughs) What!? Didn't see that coming!

R: Yeah.

E: Wrestling with tough ideas!

J: What has he got? What'd he do?

R: He was a wrestler.

B: Oh my god!

R: I don't know, he was really into it.

B: What a Renaissance Man.

R: Yeah, in high school, apparently, he played several sports, but he was particularly into wrestling, and he was on the team at University of Minnesota. He was in the Big Ten semifinals, he introduced the sport to Minnesota high schools by putting on exhibition matches around the state. So, Wrestling Hall of Fame, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Who knew?

J: That's awesome!

E: And the Peace Prize winner, cool!

R: Norman Borlaug.

S: And he lived to 95. It's a good run.

R: (agreeing) Mm-hm!

B: Oh, wow!

News Items

Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2:48)

• Nobel Prizes 2012

S: Well, we have one Nobel science prize left over from last week that we didn't talk about, the Nobel Prize for 2012 in Chemistry. This one goes to two scientists, Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka, for their discovery and description of G-protein-coupled receptors. You guys familiar with that?

E: It's a rap artist!

R: Nope!

S: So, I mean, they're huge. G-protein-coupled receptors - they're present on -

B: They're really small.

S: On many cells, and they are responsible for cell signaling, essentially how cells can sense their environment and react to things like hormones. It's estimated that half of the drugs that are on the market have their effect through G-protein-coupled receptors.

E: That's a lot.

B: Wow!

S: That's a lot. Definitely a breakthrough in our understanding of cell physiology and biochemistry, so it's hard - it's one of those things where it's fundamental, it's not really the kind of thing that penetrates to public consciousness, cause it's kind of technical and wonky, you know, G-protein-coupled receptors.

E: Obscure.

S: But they're really fundamental to cell function and just - was a tremendous breakthrough that gave us a lot of - had a lot of applications. Now you take it for granted, we hear about them all the time.

B: Yeah!

S: You just take it for granted. This is how different drugs work, etc., how different signals work.

E: But they figured it out.

B: So when was this breakthrough?

S: Definitely worthwhile. So Lefkowitz started the research in 1968, using radioactivity to trace cells' receptors, and then Kobilka joined the team later and discovered the genes, the first G-protein-coupled receptor gene. Now there's something like over a thousand different genes, it's a huge family of genes. They control - these receptors are involved with perception of light, flavor, odor, response to adrenaline, histamine, dopamine, serotonin.

B: Flavor?

S: Yeah, obviously very fundamental to neurological function as well.

E: Do you think they stumbled on this accidentally, Steve, or do you think they were looking -

S: Oh no! He was looking for it. This is a very specific program of research that paid off very, very well.

B: So, what took so long to give them the prize?

S: I don't know, this is pretty par for the course for the Nobel Prize. They definitely like to wait a while to see the implications of researches - they have the luxury of giving it 20 years or so to really see how scientific discovery pays off.

R: Whether or not it's debunked.

E: (laugh) Yeah.

S: Yeah.

E: Or, say, whoops, this discovery causes mutations in all sorts of people, we shouldn't be tooling with this stuff.

S: Some monsterism.

DNA Half Life (5:39)

• Dinos' DNA Demise: Genetic Material Has a 521-Year Half-Life

S: But there's one discovery, Rebecca, that probably will not be earning a Nobel prize: the discovery of the half-life of DNA.

R: Yeah, unfortunately, this discovery will only be earning the power generated by Michael Crichton's spinning corpse.

(laughter)

R: So, yes, paleogeneticists at University of Copenhagen and Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, looked into the DNA of leg bones belonging to three species of giant moas, which are those extinct birds that could disembowel you as soon as look at you, really awesome, impressive birds. And I think that the reason -

J: They're big?

R: Yeah, huge! Huge! Yeah, they reached about twelve feet in height, apparently, and they could weight up to about 500 pounds.

J: Wow, that's awesome!

B: Big, big boys!

R: Yeah, impressive birds. But the interesting thing about them is that they covered a decent swath of time that allowed researchers to collect 158 leg bones and examine the DNA to determine the half-life of DNA. And all of these bones had been found in identical conditions, so they were all at a temperature of 13.1 degrees Celsius for instance, they were all within five kilometres of one another. Everything was the same, pretty much, except for how long ago they actually died. So what the researchers found was that the DNA has a half-life of about 521 years. And that's more or less what it is. It's difficult to say for sure because even though they looked at a lot of different bones, they did only look at bones in a certain part of the world, so they don't really know for sure what bones would be like, say, covered in permafrost, or something like that. But they do have a pretty high degree of confidence that even in a bone at the ideal preservation temperature of -5 degrees Celcius, the DNA in it would be destroyed completely at a maximum of 6.8 million years.

B: Therefore...

R: And so, what journalists and other people have immediately jumped to realizing is that Jurassic Park could never happen, pretty much.

E: Except the creationists, they think it could.

R: (laughs) Right, right. Creationist Jurassic Park could still happen, but it'd be super-crappy, because the dinosaurs would all be vegetarians, blah blah blah. There's definitely no chance that any DNA would be left after 65 million years, considering that right now, they're estimating that it wouldn't make it 6.8 million years.

B: Even if we used lots of frog DNA to help out?

R: Yeah, I think... I think you would just end up with frogs, by the time you replaced... (laughs)

B: Ninety-nine point nine nine percent frogs!

R: Exactly, yeah. So it's sad news -

B: That sucks!

R: Yeah. And there are other factors that can make it even worse, apparently. Like how the bones are stored, after they've been excavated, the chemistry of the soil, and they say that even the time of year when the animal died might factor into how long it takes for their DNA to break down.

E: How come only now we're discovering what the half-life of DNA is? We weren't able to -

B: I think it was the - it was that moa find was key, right Rebecca? I mean, it was just the perfect find in terms of how consistent they were, how many there were, and the time frame - I think that was the big find, which -

R: Yeah, I would imagine that it's difficult to find a huge amount of bones that you can have such a spread of time. Six hundred years to eight thousand years, but still with the same soil conditions, within the same distance, so yeah, I guess it's a pretty important find, and it would be nice to find something else like that in a different part of the world, but I don't know what the chances of that are.

S: One thing I wondered when I was reading this is, does this - I know they said even under ideal preservation temperature of -5 degrees Celsius, every single bond would be broken in 6.8 million years. But does that include every possible condition, specifically, in amber, where there is no oxygen, no air?

R: The article does talk about in amber, and how that doesn't protect it because apparently a huge problem is reaction with water. But I don't know if amber perfectly protects it from that, because there's still water in the body that would damage it, you'd think. So I don't know. Oh, actually, there is a quote. Simon Ho, I computational evolutionary biologist at University of Sydney, said "This confirms the widely held suspicion that claims of DNA from dinosaurs and ancient insects trapped in amber are incorrect."

E: Too bad.

S: I wonder why it wouldn't though, since water seems to be so predictive of degredation rate.

R: Yeah, but there's water in the body, so maybe that would be enough, don't you think? Particularly if -

B: What's the water content of amber, too?

R: And if they - yeah -

S: So we have to mummify it, then encase it in amber.

R: Yeah. So what you need to do is go back in time, mummify a dinosaur, come on back.

S: Encase him in amber, and then put him in -5 degrees Celsius.

R: Yep.

E: Then, we'd have something.

J: (disappointed) Are we never going to be able to resurrect a dinosaur?

B: Not looking good, Jay.

S: It's hard to say never. What if we can take, say, a bird, and reverse -

B: De-evolve it.

S: Yeah, reverse all of the mutations that occurred - well, we got the dino-chicken, right?

E: Yep.

S: Remember that?

R: Wait, what was that? I don't remember that.

S: The dino-chicken!

R: Don't just say it again, like that's going to help!

(laughter)

R: (sarcasm) Oh, the dino-chicken, right!

S: Tyrannosaurus cluck!

B: The DC!

R: Oh!

J: Tyrannosaurus cluck!?

R: Tyrannosaurus cluck, I remember!

(laughter)

S: Research teams are doing that, they are doing mutations to reverse some of the changes that led from dinosaurs to birds, so you end up with birds with reptilian dinosaurian features.

J: That's pretty cool.

E: Well, that's something, it's not exactly recreating a dinosaur though.

S: No. It's something though.

R: I mean, you could make a theme park that could then go horribly wrong and result in terror, so...

S: You could.

E: Yeah, but after the slaughter it -

B: Aww, that's a stupid idea, Rebecca, it'll never sell.

Simulated Universe (12:15)

• The Measurement That Would Reveal The Universe As A Computer Simulation

S: Oh well, it doesn't really matter because the whole universe is a computer simulation anyway, right Jay? B: Oh, nice segway! Eh, someone tap the side of it, it's glitching again! E: Find the old program and run it. J: Well, Steve, this is actually freakishly interesting. Uhm, I was totally absorbed and blown away by learning about this and I actually even, uh, contacted our friend Brian Weck, ... S: Oh, cool! J: ... who, who lives in London now and he was helping me figure this stuff out, I got to ask him a couple of questions about it, so let me start by talking about a few things to give the background here. The universe at its most basic fundamental level is explained by quantum chromo-dynamics or QCD. This is a theory that describes the strong nuclear force and how it binds quarks and gluons into protons and neutrons and how these form a nucleus. So, that force actually is interacting on these particles in a very, very strong way and it overcomes the, uh, strong magnetic force because it's so powerful at that, at that very close range and it controls these particles. And the question is: .. the question is: what would we be able to learn if we could simulate these incredibly small interactions in a computer? And the scientists that are working on this wanted to see what kind of complexities arise out of that and if we're able to do that. They also think that a true simulation of physics on the level of .. on this level would, in essence, be equal to simulating the universe itself. Which, I find pretty mind-blowing. That thought, just thinking about the idea that we could create a simulation that's so accurate, that it would be, in essence, a small portion of the universe, all by itself.

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Supersonic Jump (27:41)

• Skydiver Felix Baumgartner breaks sound barrier

Russian Geoglyph (36:10)

• Mysterious elk-shaped structure discovered in Russia

Who's That Noisy? (41:38)

• Answer to last week: Hulda Clarke

Interview with Jamy Ian Swiss (44:37)

• Jamy Ian Swiss

Science or Fiction (1:02:15)

Voiceover: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is "The Nobel Prize".

R: Nooooo.

J: Yes. I'm good with this!

E: How Nobel of you.

R: Crap.

S: Three items about the Nobel Prize. I think I just heard Jay volunteer to go first.

J: I'm psyched, let's do it!

S: All right. Item number one. The 1926 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Johannes Fibiger for his discovery of "a cure for cancer." Item number two. The New York Times announced that the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics was to be shared by Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, but they never received the award, it is rumored because neither man would consent to share the award with the other. And item number three. The 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine was shared by Antonio Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz...

E: Fiction!

S: ...for the development of the frontal lobotomy.

E: Because of that name.

R: Rrrar.

S: Jay, go first.

J: I'm going to start with the last one first. And that was the one about the guy that got the Nobel Prize for the development of the frontal lobotomy and I'm gonig to absolutely say that that one is true, that is science. The second one about, the one that was supposed to be shared by Tesla and Edison but they didn't receive the award, something about that one is reminding me of truth, I know the two of them butted heads and this would be an interesting turn of events and I do think I remember something about this so that one's true, so therefore I don't beleive that the first one, the cure for cancer is the truth, that one is the fiction.

S: OK. Rebecca.

R: Well Jay sounded so confident but I'm not sure I agree, so a cure for cancer, yeah we were just talking about how they like to wait to give it out to make sure that the thing isn't debunked or whatever, however it could be a discover that ended up not being a cure for cancer but was still amazing in its own right or it could be something that was just called a cure for cancer in the papers at the time so I can buy that one and I can also buy the idea of a Nobel prize being given to someone for the development of the frontal lobotomy, that was all the rage for a while there, that makes sense. So that leaves us with Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison, who yeah did, obviously Tesla had a lot of resentment I'm sure towards Edison, Edison was kind of an asshole to him, however that one is weird to me because Nobel prizes, maybe they were different back then but these days I think that they are a surprise in general, I don't think anybody's quite sure that they're going to get them before they get them and so why would they refuse to consent to share the award before it's even been given to them? I don't think that that's true, so I'm going to go with that one being the fiction.

S: Alrightie, Bob?

B: Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything Rebecca said, she makes a lot of sense, the first one about the cure for cancer, that's a very interesting angle about yeah, maybe it still was dramatic in some way and initially hailed as a cure for cancer but not, obviously was not a cure for cancer, also I could justify this by saying that they just weren't as sophisticated and slick as they are now and waiting and maybe this is one of the reasons why they do that. The third one, the frontal lobotomy, yeah that was, in its time it was lauded to an extent that would be surprising to modern day people, it really seemed like an amazing treatment, you know so many studies done showing apparently that it really helped these people and I could see this guy winning a Nobel for it. The second one, to me, with Tesla and Edison seems to make too much sense, it's like yeah, that's obvious which I know is not a great reason to make something fiction, but it just kind of stands out for me, plus the fact that I really think I would have heard of this, if these two were awarded and they just didn't want to have a joint acceptance. So for that, and other reasons, I'm going to say that that one is fiction, Tesla and Edison.

S: And Evan.

E: Steve, what is the fallacy that essentially encompasses "I would have heard of that"? Isn't there a fallacy that...

(laughter)

E: Right, it's the argument from...

S: Argument ad Bobium.

B: Not always a fallacy though.

E: Hah! Congratulations Bob, you are now a fallacy.

B: We shall see.

E: Reverse order. '49 prize in medicine, Moniz, the frontal lobotomy. I know this one to be science because, if memory serves, we talked about this and we reviewed it as part of a This Day in Skepticism way back when.

R: Hmm.

B: Oh, yay.

E: So I'm saying that one is science, so it comes down to the other ones, now this 1915 one for the Nobel Prize in Physics, Tesla and Edison, Bob I've not heard of this either. I didn't even know they were up for these awards to tell you the truth, and you're right, that would have been something that you'd think they would have taught us in the history books in even the most basic science classes but I think that it's the other one that's the fiction. The cancer one. Jay, you went with that, '26 Nobel Prize. A cure for cancer, yeah he did something else if I'm not mistaken, it may have had something to do with a cure for something else, but I don't think it was cancer, I think he worked on some, on a different disease, and for the life of me I can't remember but I just don't remember the name cancer and his name going together, so I'm going to say that one's the fiction.

S: OK so we have an even split.

B: You all agree...

S: But you all agree that the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine was shared by Antonio Moniz for the development of the frontal lobotomy, and that one is... science.

(general agreement)

S: And yeah, interesting but that is, I do think that we talked about this before. Moniz shared the award with Walter Rudolph Hess. Hess for his discovery of the functional organization of the inter-brain as a coordinator of the activities of the internal organs, and Moniz for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses.

E: Leucotomy.

S: Leucotomy is the more technical term for a frontal lobotomy, and it was considered at the time to be revolutionary. It was partly stemming from his discovery that this part of the brain, that part of the frontal lobes had this effect, that it could dramatically, but poking a hole on the brain you could dramatically alter someone's personality, in this specific case take them from being psychotic to being very placid, apathetic one might say. A very interesting part of the insurmountable evidence that the brain causes consciousness in my opinion. So very interesting that we look back now at frontal lobotomy as something very barbaric but at the time it was given the Nobel Prize, for something very ahead of its time. So let's go to number two, the New York Times announced that the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics was to be shared by Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison, but they never received the award, it is rumoured because neither man would consent to share the award with the other. Rebecca and Bob think that this one is the fiction, Jay and Evan think that this one is science and this one is... science.

E: Aaaaaah.

B: Curses!

J: Thank you!

R: Ew.

J: Told you I knew this stuff.

E: Thanks for blazing the trail, Jay.

S: Interesting story, it took me a long time to try to figure out how to say this one, I was saved by finding that the New York Times announced it, because I needed something, I needed to be able to say something difinitive because I couldn't absolutely verify that this actually happened, but it absolutely did happen that the New York Times announced Edison and Tesla to get Nobel Prize and then it was given to Bragg and Bragg, a father son team, one of the family teams, and not Tesla and Edison, and then the rumour started, so again it was rumoured, I couldn't find any, the official Nobel website is silent on this issue, but there are many references, mostly leading back to the same couple of sources talking about the fact that in 1912, Tesla was apparently up for the Nobel Prize in Physics and he apparently expressed the notion that he would not accept it if Edison was also given the award and then in '15 there was this premature announcement by the New York Times that they both got it and they didn't get it and so the rumour mills started and it was conventional wisdom that the prize was going to be given to them but then it was withheld and given to the other physicists when essentially both men would refuse to share the stage with the other, or would refuse to accept the prize if the other was getting it. Their rivalry was so famous by that time that that rumour instantly took off. But the Nobel organisation, the Nobel committee as far as I could find, never absolutely confirmed that that was what happened. As you said Rebecca, it's a secret who's going to get the award. But after 50 years, nominations are made public and so we do know now that both Edison and Tesla were nominated in different years for the Nobel Prize, but they never received it, which is interesting.

R: Which means?

S: Which means that the 1926 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Johannes Fibiger, I'm probably butchering that name but, for his discovery of "a cure for cancer" is fiction, although that is a rumour you will see on different websites, which I always like when websites get it wrong. But when you look at the official quote, what he was given the award for, it was for his discovery of the Spiroptera carcinoma. So he did discover a parasite that caused infections that he said caused cancer, caused cells to become cancerous, so it was thought that he discovered the cause of cancer, not the cure for cancer, and then it turns out that that was wrong also, all he did was identify one possible irritation that can cause cells to become cancerous, but lots of other things can do the same thing, trauma and infection, etc. So it's the irritation and damage to the cell that then can make it predisposed to becoming cancerous, it's nothing specific about the infectious agent that he discovered, so the conclusions of his discovery were later reversed, although he still gets credit for making significant advances in the study of cancer, he didn't find the cause, the cause of cancer, and there was never any issue of him discovering the cure for cancer, but that was how the incident was misreported on various websites that I came across.

R: Well congrations and Jay.

S: Yes.

E: Thanks.

J: Thank you.

S: So yeah, this is a rare Jay, Evan victory on Science or Fiction.

E: Yeah Jay.

J: What the hell is that supposed to me.

E: Well it just means... yeah, what the hell is that supposed to mean, yeah?

S: You two guys winning and Bob and Rebecca losing is an uncommon event.

B: I'd agree with that.

J: Statistically we've done enough shows that it's bound to happen.

S: It's bound to happen, absolutely.

E: Nice job, Jay.

J: Nice job, Evan.

S: Mainly because I'm frankly surprised that Evan went with you over Bob and Rebecca (laughs).

B: Me too.

S: Good work Evan, good work.

E: Yeah thanks, I followed by gut and it worked.

S: Better than following the herd.

E: In this case.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:15:07)

S: Well Jay, do you have a quote for us this week?

B: Although it's a high-quality herd he could have followed.

S: True.

J: Yep, this was a quote sent in my many people so I'm not going to give credit to the people that sent it in, but I will say that this is a quote by someone called Erika Dunning, and the quote is:

You can do magic with science, but you can't do science with magic.

J: Anybody know who Erika is?

S: Yeah, Erika Dunning, she's that girl.

E: Yeah.

B: Well it's got to be...

J: It's Brian Dunning's daughter.

All: yay.

B: That's awesome.

S: How old is she?

J: Brian didn't tell me how old she is, but I'm assuming she's quite young. Brian sent it in and a lot of other listeners sent that quote in, I guess he said it on his show, I hadn't heard it, it must have been a very recent show, but I thought it was really cute and it was, I just love the minds of kids and how they just come up with things that seem so obvious but can be so...

S: Pithy.

J: ...profound and pithy, right.

B: Yeah, I like it.

J: So that's a quote by Erika Dunning!

E: Yay, Erika.

S: Good job, Erika.

B: Way to go, Erika.

E: Well done.

S: Well thanks for joining me this week, everyone.

J: Thank you Steve.

E: Good to be joined with you once again.

B: Thank you, you're welcome.

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

References