SGU Episode 349

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SGU Episode 349
24th March 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 348                      SGU 350
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.
Bernard Haisch
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Introduction

S: Hello and welcome to the skeptics guide to the universe. Today is Wednesday March 21st 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: (Jewish Accent) What is this? Pod-casting?

(laughter)

S: ...and Evan Bernstein

E: Good evening ladies and gentleman, how's everyone?

J: Hola Evan.

R: Super.

S: Good, Fine and dandy.

E: Now this was some winter huh?

J: Oh, crazy right?

S: This is my kind of winter.

E: We barely had any snow this year in New England, it was in the 50s for a large part of the winter in southern New England which is unheard of.

S: I love the vernal equinox because it means the next six months the sun is in the upper half of its course through the sky.

B: I hope all of you have released your white owls.

S: Well anyway Rebecca, what else is special about this day?

This day in skepticism (0:58)

• March 24, 1989: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

R: Well, this day marks the anniversary of a quite horrific event, March 24th 1989 was the day that the Exxon Valdez spilled oil into Prince William Sound.

S: You just can't let it go can you Rebecca?

R: No, no me and the otters...

S: (laughs) the otters.

R: ...are really pissed about it still.

E: One drunk sea captain, you know, guides the boat into the low into the shoals and he pays for it for the rest of his life.

R: I think, apparently that's a... apparently that's a bit of a myth, the captain apparently was drunk but was not at the helm. The third mate was, and on the list of things, what went wrong, the biggest ones seems to be that the radar for detecting possible collisions had been broken for nearly a year. Also...

E: And the captain was too drunk to know it. Apparently.

S: We'll get to that eventually.

R: And apparently all of the crew was severely overworked and exhausted and had been for quite some time. So those were identified as being the main causes of why it ended up striking a reef and spilling up to possibly seven hundred fifty thousand barrels of oil. It's not however...

E: Think of all the cars and furnaces that it would have provided heat and energy for. It's very sad.

R: Yeah, despite how devastating that oil spill was, it's not even in the top ten worst oil spills of all time. It was though the worst one in the US up until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. But yeah it's kinda crazy to think that there are oils spills happening all the time and some of them are much much worse than the Exxon Valdez. Yeah, there's a happy thought for you. The ship itself was recently auctioned off, actually. Just the tanker, just this week it was sold for scrap so apparently it was renamed the "Oriental Nicety".

S: Mmm hmm?

B: For real?

R: I guess as some way to trick people into to thinking it was err...

E: Oh my gosh, you might as well call it the "Happy Ending".

S: (laughing) The little nicety?! That's odd. I've a funny Exxon Valdez story, I was in Epcot Centre in Disney World shortly after that oil spill and the dinosaur exhibit was, I guess, funded by Exxon and before you get to see the dinosaurs, there's essentially a big commercial for Exxon. At one point they have this aerial shot of an oil tanker going through a harbor and they go: "The beautiful Exxon Valdez..." 'Course everyone starts laughing 'cause this is like right after the disaster they hadn't updated the ride yet.

S: (laughs)

E: Time to update the rides...

B: D'OH!

R: That's a little embarrassing. Here's my question; I've always heard people call it the Exxon Val-deeze but I don't understand why they pronounce it Val-deeze, when it's obviously Valdez.

S: I don't know I'm just slavishly following what I hear.

R: Yeah I don't know, I think it's weird.

S: But at least we can have our super hero magical bracelets to make it all better right jay?

B: Nice segue.

R: That was a good segue Steve.

S: You know it kinda takes away from it when you say it's a good segue.

R: I know that's why it's funny, and every single time, Steve, you will never be able to do a segue without us calling attention to it.

S: (laughs) OK.

R: This is your curse.

News Items (4:39)

Superhero Pseudoscience

Colantotte.com

J: Steve jumped right into it, I wanted to loosen up a little bit before we say bad things about Marvel, to say some good things about Marvel like, you know I think that for their super hero movies they've done a great job. You know for the most part I've liked all of them, and you know, the Avengers movie is coming out and I'm really psyched to see it, its totally right in my sweet spot. I mean I love super heroes I love like you know science fictiony stuff like that. So it really was disappointing to find out that Marvel, and probably even more involved is the production company that they're using, the marketing company that they've hired for the Avengers film, sadly has, is selling some crazy wacky merchandise. So they are selling a magic bracelet a real magic bracelet. A-la Powerband type BS.

E: As opposed to those fake magic bracelets?

S: They're not a toy, they're making actual claims for it.

J: Yeah they are, here I'll get into some of the details here, the limited edition Magtitan Neo Legend has a carbon fibre surface finished with a coat of transparent resin that yields an attractive stylish design.

S: Oh I thought you were going to say transparent aluminum. That would have been impressive.

J: A 100 mT 1000 Gauss ferrite permanent magnets arranged in Colantotte's unique alternating north-south polarity orientation which is

B: Oooh

E: (laughs) *Sarcastic* unique!

J: They've trademarked A-N-S-P-O. ANSPO trademark.

R: I'm holding out for the east-west polarity.

E: Yeah I'm there too.

S: They're saying because they have alternating strips of magnets with the north-south polarity alternating, and that's supposed to be unique to this, that's exactly how you make a refrigerator magnet.

E: Now wait a minute, what are you accusing them of?

S: That's how the refrigerator magnets have a very you know, narrow, of depth but relatively strong for the power of the magnets used, attraction right? That's why like when you pull a refrigerator magnet off of the refrigerator it's really strong over a very short distance but they're very quickly gives way

J: Right, drops off.

S: That's because they have alternating strips of north and south, you know of poles in the magnet.

R: Yeah but Steve is a refrigerator magnet made of adimantium, I don't think so?

J: I don't think so, Steve come on.

S: A really good refrigerator magnet.

J: Steve you can say what you will, and put it down, but each 'limited edition Magtite Neo Legend comes in a special limited edition package commemorating Marvel's The Avengers movie'. So of course it's works, it works Steve you gotta buy this thing.

S: Because the Avengers are real.

J: Now I saw something I'm perusing the ah, website and I have to admit the design of it is pretty cool, but you know go around the website and I was nosing around the SGU forums and they were chit chatting about it and they came up with a couple of interesting things. Somebody on our forums said that this is basically proven to work in Japan, like they have real medical benefit in Japan. I couldn’t find any proof of that so if anybody does I'd be interested to read it for myself but what they do have on the website is of course they have first hand comments by professional athletes.

S: Oh here we go.

J: "The Magtite Neo Legend is Colantotte's finest gear, the combination of pure titanium and carbon fibre is great, plus it's been created specifically to commemorate Marvel's Avengers movie". Two things! Two comments, ready? One: That guy did not write that, he did not say that.

E: Oh no!

J: If that guy walks around talking like that, he needs help

S: Don't you love it when anecdotes like that are written in ad-copy?

J: Right.

S: It's so obviously written by some sales guy, and it's supposed to be a spontaneous endorsement or anecdote from somebody. You know what I mean, it's so transparent.

J: Steve, pretend I'm Rory McIlroy and ask me about that bracelet I'm wearing?

S: Hey can you tell me about that bracelet you're wearing?

J: "The Magtight Neo Legend is Colantotte's finest gear, the combination of pure titanium and carbon fibre is great". Yeah, right.

R: That's really natural.

E: I think Rory has a Scottish accent actually...

J: Don't even...

E: ...if memory serves.

J: (attempting Scottish accent) "The Magtight Neo Legend is Colantotte's finest gear".

R: What? What was that?

(laughter)

E: I'll take (unintelligible) for four hundred.

B: I think you just invented a new accent that's never been heard of before.

R: Yeah it think it was just shouting. It was like a Klingon variant.

(laughter)

J: So anyway the second thing from that guy's endorsement that makes me shudder is he says, "I can't wait to go see this movie with my mates to watch Colantotte's Magtite Neo Legend in action". Does this mean it's in the movie? Is it in the movie, Marvel?

E: Clearly.

J: Seriously

B: Oh god.

S: I guess so.

E: Someone had to pay for this movie.

S: You gotta give it to 'em, I mean it's pretty brilliant, having a magic bracelet be on a super hero I mean, right?

R: Yeaaah?

E: OK, yeah.

J: The marketing is good, the marketing idea is good, especially because most people will probably buy into it, even if it's just because it looks good but you know, it's very...

R: It's probably still better than those Green Lantern rings.

S: (laughs)

B: Ha!

E: I've got two of those.

J: It's a sad state of affairs when a company like Marvel a company which produces fantasy, you know, they're actually...

E: Oh yeah.

B: They're still doing it.

J: ...morphing into reality here, you know let's cash in on the fact that we write about magic and sell magic.

E: Yep.

J: So, I'm a little twigged at Marvel right now.

S: What has this world come to.

E: Payin' the bills, it's payin' the bills.

B: Jay, on the website it shows a picture of the bracelet and underneath it says: "The superhero's secret"

J: Yeah.

B: Oh wow really that's the secret huh? Two little magnets on their wrist, that's what it does it.

R: I thought it was leaking radiation, we should try that.

E: Bob, that's a secret

S: So you're saying it doesn't work, Jay?

E: Can we agree that DC maybe is taken a notch up due to this? And maybe...

J: Yeah absolutely,

E: ...and maybe Marvel have suffered a hit.

J: It comes out April first, I couldn't find any pricing, I bet you it's going to be in the 60 to 100 dollar range. (note, $199 as of 29/5/2012

S: April first really?

E: April first? Hmmm.

J: Well what do you think do you think the whole thing is a hoax?

E: Something hoaxy this way comes, no.

J: I don't think so and I'll tell you why, the company that produces the bracelet, I researched them, they make a lot of other BS stuff, the negative ion crap and all that stuff.

S: Yeah.

E: Of course.

High Altitude Skydiving (10:54)

BBC: Skydiver Felix Baumgartner on track for super jump

S: All right well let's move on, we have a bit of a follow-up to a previous discussion, we had Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay on the show a few weeks ago, we talked about the up-coming attempted world-record-breaking high skydive, high altitude sky dive from Felix Baumgartner. And there's a discussion and bit of a news update, the news update is that he completed a test jump recently. He jumped from 71,500 ft or 22 Km above New Mexico, landing safely 8 minutes later. Although this is only a test jump, that puts him in the top three! In terms of the highest altitude skydives ever. This is a preparation for his planned jump later this year in which he will break the world record. He's planning to jump from 120,000 feet, so the current record stands at 102,800 ft in 1960 by Joe Kittinger who was a US Air Force colonel at the time, when we were talking about Baumgartner's planned jump on the last episode we mentioned the fact that it's inherently dangerous to jump from such a high altitude because of the velocities involved and that Kittinger during his jump in 1960 actually spun out of control, blacked out, and didn't regain consciousness until after his chute had automatically deployed. So when I was researching this for this piece, I found out that that's sorta true but one thing we didn't mention is that was, that occurred on the first of Kittinger's three jumps this was the excelsior mission, is what it was called, there was excelsior one two and three.

J: Excelsior!

S: Yeah the third one was the one where he you know, is the record still stands now at 102,800 feet, it was the first one, excelsior one where he spun out of control, the reason he spun out of control didn't have anything to do with the conditions of the jump, the aerodynamics or the thin atmosphere, or the velocity, it had to do with the fact that his pilot chute deployed too early. He, in releasing you know from the gondola he had to yank on you know the cord a few times before it came loose but he actually started the timer on the first yank so the timer was going before he jumped off the gondola and then his pilot chute deployed too early so he wasn't going fast enough. Normally it'll only deploy after you get up sufficient speed that the aerodynamics are such that it will be you know pulled back away from you, but he was going too slow when it deployed and then therefore it flopped around more than it should have and it actually wrapped around his neck and this started him spinning. He basically got tangled up in the pilot chute, he started spinning out of control, they estimate I think 80 RPMs, and he blacked out. Then he fell all the way to 10,000 feet when the barometric release triggered his reserve parachute and this didn't, this got tangled too, but they had installed a backup contingency where the original chute would break away and that worked allowing the reserve chute to inflate at about 6000 feet. And he survived obviously and landed safely. So the spinning out itself was more of an equipment thing and didn't have anything to do with just the difficulty of dropping from such a high altitude. But this whole discussion started an email discussion with the listener who essentially said that this is his point, he said, if you jump at a very high altitude, the airody... the experience for the skydiver is the same because you're going to reach terminal velocity and terminal velocity is, by definition is the wind resistance is going to equal the acceleration due to gravity and therefore it doesn't really matter if it's a thin atmosphere and a high velocity or a thicker atmosphere at a lower velocity. The net resistance against the sky diver is the same so it feels the same to the sky diver. So I totally get that, and I see no problems with that line of logic. But here was my counter point. The difference here is that when you jump from very high where the atmosphere is thin, terminal velocity is a lot faster you're going to be going a lot faster and then you have to lose all of that extra velocity so when you get down into the thicker atmosphere you're not just approaching terminal velocity you're already exceeding the terminal velocity of the lower-down denser atmosphere and therefore the wind resistance has to actually decelerate you, it has to slow you down.

E: Drag, yeah.

S: Yeah so therefore the drag is greater than if you jumped at the lower altitude and were just getting up to terminal velocity. But he didn't agree with that point he thought, yeah but it depends on how, what the curve of the change in atmospheric density is but, I just don't buy it. For example it's estimated that during Kittinger's record-breaking jump he reached a maximum speed of 625 miles per hour. Terminal velocity at lower down, the normal altitudes that people sky dive from is somewhere between 117 and 125 miles per hour depending on, you know, your position and your size and whatnot, and in like a head-down bullet position it's about 210 miles per hour. So you figure Kittinger had to loose about 500 miles per hour of velocity when he descended into the lower atmosphere that's gotta be a lot of extra force from wind resistance that you wouldn't have on you if you were jumping from, you know say, 10,000 feet right? I tried to find, that's just my reasoning, I don't know what the final answer is I kinda propose it as an interesting physics question but no one has given me like a real definitive answer, what do you guys think about all that?

J: Steve I agree with you I think you know, correct me where I'm wrong here, from what you're saying, if you're in a thinner atmosphere, terminal velocity is going to be faster.

S: right, that we all agree on yep.

J: then the idea is that you will eventually stop accelerating and maintain a speed when you hit enough air molecules basically get piled up underneath you that pretty much matches what it would be like say jumping at 10,000 feet, right?

S: Yeah so it's thinner air but it's rushing past you faster and the net wind resistance is the same, that's right.

J: Yeah ok,

S: but the difference I'm saying is, yeah but then you descend into denser atmosphere where you have to, you're not just maintaining a terminal velocity you're actually significantly slowing down because the terminal velocity is getting lower as you descend into the thicker atmosphere, the other point I raised which no one's given me a good answer to is, all right so I understand the wind resistance will be the same but you still are going faster your velocity is greater so if you do spin out at a higher velocity, would there be the potential for the RPMs to be greater? Will you spin out faster? And that's the real risk, that you'll spin out so fast that you'll black out, right?

J: Right yeah so, in other words, so if you do a spin out, at say, 70 or 80 thousand feet, you might actually be going so fast that, you know, your blood pressure goes totally crazy, whereas maybe...

S: If you're going 500 miles an hour, and you spin out, is that more dangerous than when you're going at 120 miles an hour, that's the question. It's interesting, I posed it on my blog, but nobody really gave me a good answer. You know, Jay and I have been chatting about this and we asked a physics friend of ours who really didn't add anything to what we just said. So I dunno, it's an interesting thought experiment and we'll put it out there to our listeners to further the conversation. I still, it still seems to me that it would be more difficult and more risky to do the high sky dive because, it's the deceleration and the absolute velocity, how that translates into spin, those are the two points that I'd like to hear discussed. But Baumgartner is going to be making his next jump later this year where he's going to try and break the record and his one observation, I mean all the equipment tested out and worked fine but he said the cold was like really hard to handle. So before he goes...

B: His hands were actually sort of numb he could't use them.

S: Yeah so before he goes up higher, so his test dive was from 71,500 feet, he's going to 120,000 feet, that's going to be a lot thinner, a lot colder, so yeah I think they're going to have to tweak the spacesuit there that he has, if he's going to be able to tolerate the cold at that height.

B: So put those heat packets in the gloves that's all.

J: Yeah.

R: or those mittens that you put in the microwave.

S: There are those people who like go into like the minus 120 degree refrigerators for like ten seconds, you guys hear about that?

B: Yeah.

R: Why would you do that?

E: Wow.

S: 'cause why do you think? Because it's supposed to have some magical health benefit.

R: Oh yeah.

B: I think I read it's supposed to be invigorating.

S: Invigorating!

(laughter)

E: Invigorating? OK.

R: Yeah you know what else is? Cold shower.

S: They used to throw cold, wet blankets on psychotic patients to calm them down.

J: Yeah. A real calming effect. It's a good...

S: It would shock them, you know, they would be having you know whatever, they would be out of control, and that would shock them into just shutting down. You know that just that real sudden extreme cold.

J: Steve aren't you really just supposed to slap someone silly when they freak out like that?

E: Oh you know, an electrode that real electricity to...

S: That's about as scientifically valid.

J: Yeah according to like the fifties movies you know, all you got to do when someone's having a hissy fit you just smack 'em one and go you know...

R: Get yourself together man!

J: Get a hold of yourself woman you know something like that right?

E: Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about

(laughter)

Quickie with Bob: Designer Electrons (21:33)

ScienceDaily: Molecular Graphene Heralds New Era of 'Designer Electrons'

E: You know what I just read? Rebecca wants a quickie with Bob

S: (knowingly) Oooh.

R: That's true, that's true I do.

B: Oh sure Rebecca but will you hold me afterwards..

R: (thinking) Mehh..

B: Don't answer that question.

R: I'm not into that cuddly shit.

B: Ok this week's quickie with Bob...

(laughter)

B: For this week's quickie with Bob I've got a new era of designer electrons. Researchers at Stanford and the S.L.A.C national accelerator lab have learned how to control the behavior of electrons in such a way that we may see whole new classes of materials which in turn could comprise new and amazing electrical devices. Hari Manoharan who is associate professor of physics at Stanford who lead the research said: "The behavior of electrons in materials is at the heart of essentially all of today's technologies. We are now able to tune the fundamental properties of electrons so they behave in ways rarely seen in ordinary materials." So what they did was to use an STM. A scanning tunneling microscope to precisely position carbon monoxide molecules on a very, very smooth copper surface. So they did it in such a way so that electrons flowing over the surface are repelled by these molecules and they're forced into these patterns of flows that are identical to what their behaviors would be if there were a magnetic or electrical field present. Even though there were no such fields present at the time. So one example that they pulled off was that they were able to produce a flow of electrons that acted as if they were under the influence of a magnetic field of 60 Tesla. This is incredible because this is 30 percent more power than any field ever sustained by science. So these electrons were behaving in ways that there's probably no other way to make them behave 'cause science isn't even up to the take of creating a field and sustaining it that long. So who knows what kind of materials and devices this may lead to? Perhaps video displays and mobile phones and a host of other devices that we would hardly believe today. Do a Google search for designer electrons if you wanna read more about this.

S: Thanks Bob.

R: That's very satisfying.

J: Thank-you Bob.

New Hampshire Abortion Bill (23:31)

Women's Right to Know Act - January 3 2012

S: Rebecca,

R: Yo.

S: Tell us about the lovely science based laws that are, bills that are being proposed up in our neighboring state New Hampshire, or nearby state I should say.

R: Well, it's very, very exciting time to be a lady, in that it states, our listeners may be aware that right now in state legislatures around the US there's been this on going war on behalf of the religious right attempting to limit women's access to contraception, sexual health education and abortion in any way possible. And they can't just come out and make all that illegal, so much like the creationist, they have employed a wedge strategy of making life as difficult as possible for women who want control of their own reproductive health. Some of the bills that have been passing in the US have included those mandating that women be unnecessarily penetrated with an ultrasound wand prior to getting an abortion, some are allowing pharmacists and doctors to refuse to provide contraception based on religious convictions. And there are even some politicians that are trying to mandate that women need a signed permission slip from a man before getting an abortion. So that's just to give you like a slight context for those of you who maybe aren't in the US or aren't paying attention. Last week the New Hampshire House of Representatives passed a bill that would require physicians to give certain materials to any woman seeking an abortion. Those materials are provided under the auspices of informed consent. You know we need to make sure women have as much information as possible before getting an abortion. The problem is that those materials include statements such as: "It is scientifically undisputed that full term pregnancy reduces a woman's lifetime risk of breast cancer. It is also undisputed that the earlier a woman has a first full-term pregnancy the lower her risk of breast cancer becomes because following a full term pregnancy the breast tissue exposed to estrogen through the menstrual cycle is more mature and cancer resistant. In fact for each year that a woman's first full-term pregnancy is delayed her risk of breast cancer rises three point five percent. The theory that there is a direct link between abortion and breast cancer builds upon this undisputed foundation."

E: Where do they pull that information from?

R: Their asses, actually.

(laughter)

E: (Sarcastically) Oh they're proctologists, I see.

(laughter)

R: Yeah ah, this particular bit of pseudoscience, the idea that abortion increases a woman's chance of breast cancer has been bandied about particularly in anti-choice circles for a number of years now. And In-fact up until into the mid 1990s there have only been a few small but heavily flawed studies that had been done on this particular topic, and a few of those studies did show that there might be a connection between breast cancer and abortions and miscarriages. However, in the past several decades we've seen several large-scale studies conducted that show absolutely no connection at all. The organizations like the National Institutes of Health, American Cancer Society, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and even the Susan G. Komen Foundation,which is run by anti-choice fundamentalists, all stand by the fact that there's absolutely no link between abortion and breast cancer.

S: Yeah I did my own literature research, just to see what it was, not reading political sites, just look at the literature and see what it shows, if you go back into the 1980s it looks like there was some, you know debate about it actually, you could find articles that come to either conclusion. But then when you look at reviews that are written in the last few years, they all agree that there is absolutely no link, between abortions and the risk of breast cancer.

R: Right those papers that were done in the 80's and early 90's were very small, very small sample sizes, and have a lot of flaws in them.

E: So a coordinated disinformation campaign is underway.

S: Exactly

R: Well yeah now this is one of those things, another one I may have mentioned before on the show, definitely on skepchick though is, the idea that, one is the idea that abortion leads to depression, which is another thing that is absolutely not supported by the scientific evidence. And the other is that, that fetus, a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks. This is a quote-unquote fact that is becoming commonplace in political discussions in the US these days and it's talked about as thought it's scientific fact, when in-fact it is not. The question of when a fetus can feel pain is actually still up for debate. And by no means is 20 weeks an actual medical diagnosis. you know, this is something that they've gone with that specific number because these politicians have an agenda, and that agenda is to outlaw abortion, and so they're using the idea of fetuses feeling pain at 20 weeks to convince courts to outlaw abortion at 20 weeks, despite the fact that it's unconstitutional.

S: Yeah and there's good reason to think that it's actually not possible for a fetus to perceive pain before 24 weeks of gestation just in terms of the development of the nervous system.

R: Right.

S: So that's probably, that's a better guess at this point. Getting back.. can I comment on the mental health aspect of it?

R: Yep.

S: 'Cause you guys, just again looking at the literature just to see what it says. There's a lot of complexities actually to the mental health issue, because as you might imagine, you could look at studies in a lot of different ways. Retrospectively vs prospectively, you know, you can pick out different sub-populations you know for example a correlation obviously, just saying that women who are getting abortions are more depressed for example; well, probably something to do with their life situation that lead them to the abortion that may have something to do with it, that's not the same thing as saying that abortion causes depression. And when you control for those factors, there really isn't any evidence that abortions are causally linked to any mental health problem at all. But again they're cherry picking and exploiting the complexities in that particular part of the research in order to make their case. And If you have your desired conclusion in mind, you get, you know there's enough studies out there, you can cherry pick, you could support almost any position you want. But the systematic reviews out there done by researchers who are trying to get to the bottom of it and know how to control for different variables, are all coming to the same conclusion that there is just no causal relationship between abortion and mental illness.

R: Right, and to get back to this particular bill in New Hampshire, the idea that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. So there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that's true. There is evidence to suggest that you, women who have children before the age of 30, do, they may have a decreased risk of breast cancer.

S: So there is a difference between the outcomes of prospective and retrospective studies. Retrospective basically means you take women who 'have' breast cancer and you ask them if they have had an abortion, and prospective means you follow women who have had an abortion and then you see what their risk of, is of developing breast cancer compared to other women you know in the same cohort or who didn't have an abortion. The retrospective studies did show a higher correlation with having had an abortion but the prospective studies didn't, and the likely interpretation there is that women who had breast cancer may have been more willing to disclose their prior history of abortion. We're relying upon women to disclose that information, when you follow them going forward, prospectively, there's no correlation. So prospective data is always better, it's always more reliable, because there isn't this recall bias, or maybe this willing to disclose bias that could alter the data. So the current consensus is that there's no correlation.

R: Right, and despite this fact this bill did pass through the house, and the way that the original bill passed was not just to declare that the doctors needed to give these particular pseudoscientific materials to women seeking abortions, but it also wrote down exactly how those doctors should be punished if they failed to follow through with that. And in the original bill they recommended class A felonies for any doctor who didn't abide by the law and that came with up to 15 years in prison for a doctor.

E: Ouch.

S: For telling the truth.

R: Yeah, yeah, basically for telling the truth, and luckily I guess that original bill that passed through the house was then reconsidered and went back through the house. The criminal Justice and public safety committee just barely voted in favor of recommending the removal of the class A felony part. Even if that happens though, the way this bill is written, doctors will still be open to malpractice law suits or disciplinary action by the New Hampshire state board of medicine if they do in fact tell women the truth about abortion and breast cancer.

S: Which means they can lose their license basically.

R: Yeah, so, you know, for those of you in New Hampshire you may want to contact your state representatives immediately. For those of you in the United States but not in New Hampshire you can't rest so easy because there are similar pseudoscientific bills exactly like this in several other states, and this is basically the religious right's standard operating procedure is to introduce the same or very similar bills simultaneously in many different states at once. So Kansas and Oklahoma, you have similar measures that have been proposed. So no matter where you are if you are in the US it might be a good idea to contact your local representatives and just let them know that you support science and reason.

S: You know the thing I hate you know I feel obligated to say; it's not like, we're not taking a political position on this show regarding the abortion debate, I mean this is, you know people have the right to come to different moral and ethical decisions, you know, obviously Rebecca you have a certain position on that.

R: I do have a certain position.

S: But the point is you can't lie about the science...

R: Yeah.

E: Yes right.

S: ... in order to make your political position, and not only lying about the science by trying to pass a law mandating that physicians make the same lie and and trying to punish them for not lying; That is such an abuse of not only professionalism but of science and reason, and that stands aside from the political debate about abortion.

R: Exactly yeah.

S: It's a completely separate issue yeah.

R: Yeah.

Nuclear Clock (34:53)

Phys.org: Researchers develop blueprint for nuclear clock accurate over billions of years

S: All right, well, let's move on. Bob, you got another item. Your full item to talk about has to do with nuclear clocks or atomic clocks.

B: Yeah, this one was...this one was pretty cool. Get ready for timekeeping that makes atomic clocks look like hourglasses. Scientists have demonstrated the potential of a nuclear clock that could gain or lose only a fraction of a second over – get this – fourteen billion years, the age of the universe.

E: Wow.

B: A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales, the University of Nevada, and Georgia Tech have thought up this...well, they didn't actually think this up, they actually...merely just demonstrated what it could actually do...of this super atomic clock of sorts that's based on the oscillations of neutrons instead of electrons. So to put this into perspective a bit, I think I'll just briefly go over some of the key clock technologies of the past few centuries that we're all familiar with, although you might not know some of the details. For example, pendulum clocks – the first appeared in the mid-1600s. Now, these clocks work because their consistent swing depends only on the length of the arm and not on the weight or the weight of the arm itself or the...or whatever weight there might be at the bottom of it or even the arc of its swing really doesn't really matter. They were revolutionary when they appeared because they improved the accuracy of timekeeping from about fifteen minutes a day to fifteen seconds, and that actually was probably the most dramatic improvement in clock technology for the average person that I think there ever was. I think it must have been very dramatic. The other thing that surprised me about pendulum clocks was the fact that they got so good, that they would only drift by about a hundredth of a second a day, which is a lot more accurate than I thought. And actually, it is more accurate than a quartz clock, which was a surprise because this technology came afterwards. Now, they...the quartz clocks are probably the most common of all clocks if you add...I mean, so, everyone's got...got wristwatches.

S: Yeah, I think their big appeal, Bob, was not that they were just more accurate; they're just...they're cheap, yeah, they're cheap and portable.

B: Cheap and portability, right; they were huge.

E: Mine says "The Avengers" on it.

B: And as it turns out, you know, they only lose ten to twenty seconds a year. I mean, that's nothing. That's really nothing. Who cares? So you're at the point where it's just, for the average person, that level of accuracy is perfectly fine. And yeah, like you said, Steve, it's...you know, portability is a huge factor. Now, just real quickly, the quartz clocks, of course, depends on the piezoelectric effect. Essentially, electricity passing through would cause the crystal to vibrate very consistently, which then you could use as a basis for your timekeeping. Then, of course, you've got atomic clocks that are the current gold standard of timekeeping. Now, they're...they keep incredibly accurate time using the orbits of electrons, kind of like a pendulum. Depending on your source, they can lose one second in an amazing twenty to sixty million years, which, of course, is amazingly accurate.

J: Wow! That's awesome, man.

B: Isn't that...yeah, isn't that amazing? One second in many millions of years is incredible. But as awesome as that is, it's nothing compared to what the potential of nuclear clocks may be.

J: Don't even, you're scaring me now.

B: Yeah, right.

(laughter)

B: This proposed method would use a UV laser to orient electrons of a thorium atom in a very specific way, and essentially what this does is it opens a door to tweak the energy state of the nucleus and use the resulting oscillations of a neutron to make a clock that's a hundred times more accurate than the best thing that we have today. Now, this potential revolution in accuracy is because the neutrons are denser and much more tightly packed than electrons. This makes them pretty much immune to electric fields and magnetic fields, which cause atomic clocks to drift by as much as they do over millions of years, and, I mean, they don't drift much, obviously, but they've even now figured out potentially a way to get rid of even that tiny drift. So while researching this, I found a lot of online commenters that...that they really didn't understand what the big deal was, and they thought that this...an accuracy at this level is just total overkill. You know, what's the point? What possible advantage could nuclear clocks have over atomic clocks? But clocks at that level of accuracy...it's definitely not, you know, a superfluous improvement. Professor Victor Flambaum, who's the head of theoretical physics at the UNSW school of physics, said that it would allow scientists to test fundamental physical theories at unprecedented levels of precision and provide an unmatched tool for applied physics research. We could also – this was interesting – we could also pair up an atomic and nuclear clock and potentially discover that some laws of physics are not constant in time. Now, that would be an incredible discovery. You know, finding out that some of these laws that we think are constant and unchanging...if we could find even a tiny bit of change over, you know, expanses of time, that truly would be revolutionary. And, of course, we could also greatly improve the accuracy of GPS satellites so that your navigator in your car wouldn't tell you to take a left turn at the next lake. And I'm not sure, I couldn't, I couldn't find any...so when do you think that we're going to see this? When's it going to be real? And my answer is who the hell knows? I don't know how long it's going to take. Although, they did have some surprising confidence in their ability to figure this out. The biggest hurdle apparently is finding the exact laser frequency. Now, these lasers, they're using petahertz frequencies. They're using petahertz frequency lasers to do this, at least that's what they envision. And one scientist described this not as a needle in a haystack, but a needle in a million haystacks, trying to find that precise frequency that can achieve this result. Apparently, it could take some time.

S: Maybe they can use this to measure how long it takes for neutrinos to go from their source to the detector.

B: (laughs) Yeah.

S: (laughs) Right.

NDE and Lucid Dreaming (40:44)

LiveScience.com: Near-Death Experiences are Lucid Dreams, Experiment Finds

S: So, Evan, tell us what you know about near-death experiences. We've chatted about these on the show before, but maybe we have some new information.

E: We have, and we've talked about the near-death experience and is it in fact a way of proving life after death? That's the...that's the main point.

S: I'm guessing no.

E: Well...(laughs)

S: (laughs)

E: Look, you can believe what you want to believe.

J: Come on, Steve, don't you have any faith? Come on, what are you talking about?

S: I'm guessing no.

E: (laughs) Well, there are folks that actually study lucid dreaming. You guys know what lucid dreaming is?

J: Absolutely.

R: Yeah.

B: Oh yeah, love it.

E: Love it too.

B: I love it!

E: A lucid dream is any dream in which, well, you are aware that you are dreaming. And in the lucid dream, you may be able to exert some degree of control over the participation within the dream, manipulate the images you see, manipulate—

S: The environment.

E: —manipulate the environment. And it's actually a scientifically well-established phenomenon that lucid dreaming does happen.

J: Sure!

E: Well, the folks who actually study lucid dreaming for a living rounded up some volunteers and conditioned them to dream about near-death experiences specifically, including the classic scenario of a near-death experience, which is the scenario in which you're flying or drifting towards a light at the end of a tunnel. And what the researchers are saying is that their experiments have demonstrated that these sorts of visions are likely the product of the human mind, rather than supernatural phenomenon, because they are able to condition these dreamers to dream about that very thing. These experiments were done at the Out-of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles, in which they had groups of people – they're saying four groups of ten-to-twenty volunteers; I'm saying that's probably roughly sixty people – were trained to perform a series of mental steps upon awakening during the night that might lead them to have that out-of-body experience that – or near-death experience – that so many people have described. And they were conditioned to try and dream about floating through the tunnel to the bright light that you typically hear about. Eighteen of these volunteers were able to dream that exact experience, as described.

J: Just by prepping themselves before they went to sleep, like, you know, saying, "I want to think about this."

E: Exactly, right. They were given essentially this target to go after, and they were able to achieve it. You know, near-death experiences have been widely reported. They often get big headlines, and...including famous people that have said they have had these sort of near-death experiences one way or the other, either from a tragic accident that they were involved with or undergoing a surgery – right? – in the hospital and they see themselves kind of floating up above the operating table, and they can talk about things that are in the room, and then, of course, the white light at the end of the tunnel. Eight million Americans are reported to have a near-death experience, and it could be even more than that; those are just the ones that have been reported. Neurologists believe that near-death experiences are generated by the same brain mechanisms that cause lucid dreams, so there is...there's overlap here (inaudible)

S: Yeah, that was the hypothesis they were testing, basically. So, I mean, you can look at this a few ways. You know, there's lots of evidence to suggest that the near-death experience is a brain experience. All the elements can be produced by different physiological conditions – lack of oxygen, for example, or drugs or sometimes during seizures – so there's lots of reasons to think that this is a brain experience. This is one more bit of evidence that these types of experiences can be generated by the brain – in this case, by techniques that induce lucid dreaming. The one thing I found most compelling about this were those individuals who not only reported going through the tunnel, but actually like got to the end of the tunnel and then had an experience where they were visiting with their dead relatives. So they actually confabulated the rest of, you know, the near-death experience, which just shows how easy it is for that to happen. But, of course, those who believe in...that that near-death experience is a spiritual experience and not a brain experience could always say that, "Well, okay, you're simulating a near-death experience by specifically training people to have a dream-like experience that just mimics the details or some of the features of a near-death experience," and that's a legitimate point.

J: Yeah, I agree with that.

S: I don't think this proves that it's not a brain experience.

E: Right.

S: I think you could say at best, it's consistent evidence to show that the brain can have these experiences, but it certainly doesn't prove that there aren't near-death experiences that are spiritual. I don't think there's any evidence that they are, but this...you know, that's the limitation in terms of the implications of this experiment. It could just be a simulation and not actually producing the same experience. You know what I mean?

E: The researchers were quick to point that out, Steve, that this is by no means conclusive; it is one study; there should be more research done, more replication; it needs to pass the peer-review process. So they certainly did this and presented it in the correct context, and that was very good to hear.

S: Right. Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see how far they can take this paradigm, you know, this lucid dreaming in order to investigate the near-death experience and see what else we can learn from it, but it's...I think it's always going to be this one piece to a more complicated puzzle, but an interesting one.

E: When I'm lucid dreaming, I'm always...the first thing I typically think about is restraining myself to not expand the dream so much that I'm going to break the dream and wake up. There's that fine line of doing things that'll pop you out of it.

S: Yeah, but it always happens, doesn't it? It always happens.

E: Eventually it does, but you try to stay in there as long as you can.

B: I have found in my lucid dreaming experiences and from what I've read that the more excited you become, the greater the odds that you're going to fall out of it and wake up or potentially segue into another dream where you're not lucid. And one method that I've used and also read about – if you find yourself kind of losing your grasp on your lucidity in your dream – is look at your hands. For some reason, if you look at your hand when you feel the dream slipping away, it actually can re-anchor you into the lucid dream and maintain your, you know, your lucidity, which was a pretty cool little trick.

E: Yeah, but then you can't concentrate on moving the planets and the stars in the sky and all (inaudible) cool stuff.

B: Yeah, well, just do that after you look at your hands a little bit.

(laughter)

J: I always try to fly. That's like the default thing I do when I become conscious or slightly conscious in a dream.

S: You know what Freud said about that, Jay?

J: No, what do you...what does it mean, that I'm...

R: Gay. (Mock humiliation)

(laughter)

J: Yeah, gay.

S: Dreaming that you're flying is an expression of latent homosexuality.

B: Oh my god.

J: Really.

R: Freud thought—

E: Latent?

R: —everything was (laughs) an expression of latent homosexuality.

S: Times when I've lucid dreamed, I've marveled at how realistic it is. But the problem is I'm marveling with my dream brain, you know, which is not...doesn't have as much reality testing as my waking brain. So you're much more easy to impress, you know, when you're dreaming, in other words. But nevertheless—

B: To a certain...to a certain extent.

S: Yeah, it's, well, again, when you're lucid, it's partway, you know. It's like halfway between being awake and dreaming. When you're full-on dreaming, you have like almost no reality testing, so...you know, you'll take almost anything as real. That's what keeps you asleep. It keeps you from waking up because of the unreality of your dreams. The lucidity is a breakdown of that. When you have a little bit of reality testing, you're saying, "Hey, this doesn't make sense. This isn't real. I must be dreaming." But it's not enough to fully wake you up, but that's an inherently unstable state, which is why you eventually either, you know, either wake up for real or dream you wake up, which is another way of losing the lucidity. Although, I'll point out that the same is true when you're awake, in that you're assessing the reality of things with your brain, you know? Things feel real to your brain, but that's flawed and artefactual and constructed and biased and subject to illusions. It's just that we don't know any better. It's just...that's the most lucid state that we have. So we can compare different states, and we can say, "Oh yeah, when I'm dreaming, I'm not making sense," et cetera. The same may be true when you're awake; you just have nothing better to compare it to. It's all we know. It's still...in every state, it's still your brain assessing your own brain, and not...you're not assessing it with something outside of your brain that's objective, so, you know, in a way it kind of makes sense that it always seems real to you at the time.

J: Right, so your brain can actually be fooling you into thinking that you are more lucid than you may actually be.

S: Right. That's another way of saying it. That's exactly right.

E: That's a good point.

Who's That Noisy (49:43)

Alright let's move on. Evan it's time for who's that's noisy.

It is time for who's that noisy, each week I play a clip of noises, at lead most weeks I do, and we ask the audience to guess exactly who or what was that noisy, and I'll play for you to remind you of last week's clip, and here he is.

He had a little checkolovaskan accent there, so i'll read that to folks who don't know exactly what he said. "The fuel suppy will be plentiful, and it could in this embodiment could be carried out we think in a very simple manner on march 23rd in 1989 pons and fleishman.

oh

yes

martin flyiesman along with his buddy stanley pons had their famous news conference announcing they have achieved cold fusion. That was the voice of martin fleishman and in an interview that took place a few week after that announcement which rocked the scientific ocmunity, did it not?

yeah for a very short peropd of time

fleishman, he was born checlivisantion and emigrated to brittan and is known for his work in electrochemistry and of course he came to public prominence through the you know announcement that he and his cohort had successfully made cold fusion using palladium.

bullshit!

cold fusion is a type of nuclear reaction which would occur at a relatively low temperatures as opposed to say the tens of millions of degrees in which fusion happens in the stars and the sun. Relativley very very low compared to that, and this new type of nuclear reaction was proposed to explain reports by experiments abnominlalsouly high energy generation under certain laboratory conditions but it has been rejected by the main stream scientific community because the original experiment results ; they coudlntlb e replicated consistently or reliably and there is no generally accepted model, there's no theoretical model for how cold fusion could possibly work.

Well evan do you think this is something that we shouldnt perue?

I don't, you know, with private funds if someone wants to go for it sure, but ah you know what happens is that these folks wind up asking for grants from governments, other pubic sources of money and so forth and I I really don't think we should be throwing our money ah - 'public' money down those rabbit holes. Private money; there's not you know not much you can do about that. Yeah i guess so if someone wants to blow millions of dollars on, on something that doesn't have a theoretical model to it.

Yeah this is playing the scientific lottery, it's a low probability but huge payoff, so how do we decide our reashearc priortites, you can emphasise the huge payoff if you ever did get cold fusion to work. or you can emphasise the astonishing low probability since it doesn't seem like it should work from what we know.

alright thanks evan and who got that correct?

ah we did have a winner this wee, the first person to answer correctly from the answer oars at sgu forums.com for thise of you who don't know, ah, clintusvud.

Heh

[laughter]

clintivusid

who is this guy [jewish accent]

Who is this guy? Who is this clint-ust-vud-yud-mis-ive-vist-ya-christian-fring-gensen?

ah first one to guess correctly that that was in fact martin fleishman, congratulations well done.

well what'd ya got for this week?

well this week we are announcing another little contest in which we would like the listeners of the skeptics guide to the universe to provide 'us' with next week's who's that noisy and what we want that who's that noisy to be next week? We want you the listener to find for us thus most skeptical starment ever uttered by a cartoon character, well good luck everyone.

ok, that sound's interesting, thanks evan.

Questions and Emails: Here Comes the Metric System (53:49)

One question this week. This one comes from liz in scotland; Liz sites;

Just a quick question. I often wondered why America kept the Imperial system for measurements, miles, inches etc. Do you think it would be better (for science teaching in particular), if you switched to the metric system, and what problems do you think it would create? Thanks for the great show. Liz. Scotland

We often get asked that question by our international listeners, those outside of the united states, why we talk in feet and miles and, and such, yeah

for a long , furlongs per fortnight, so, [laughter] so the short answer is, back in the seventies, you guys al remember this , this is before rebecca's time, but the rest of us there was the ah "Here comes the metric system." Right? we were all learning this was supposed to be totally switched over to the metric system by the end of the decade and I don't know what happened. The whole, just fizzled about, it never happened.

R:It's, the same thing that happened with the dollar coin, and the second dollar coin.

S:yeah and the third dollar coin.

Nice idea but,

thrid dollar coin

just didn't catch.

Culture's hard to chage I guess.

Yeah 'specially top down.

But we do technically do use both

we do

right, if you look at our containers of milk and juice and so forth yes you have ounces but

S: Well it's true but, milk comes in gallons but our soda comes in litres, we buy two litres of coke but we don't think anything about it. R: yeah

J:I never thought about that, you're right.

We have a hybrid system, we have a problem with you know 35 millimetre cameras or, ah lots of things, you know but there are certain things, some if it is industry, like retooling the dairy industry to deal in litres instead of gallons apparently would be a big deal. Others is just culture, you know we, you get, you think you're whole life in miles, you have a feel for it, it's hard to get people to convert you know? The ah, US would have to pass a law, "that's it people we're doing it" you know, as of this date no more english system, you know all roadsigns have gotta be changed, all cars that are sold in this country have to have only kilometres and i guess they're politically unwilling to impose that upon, upon our society so were still…

yeah i think people in this country wouldn't take too well

pulling off a bandage, just do it fast, get it out of the way and then one generation it'll be like it was always that way.

Yeah i mean if you make a half hearted effort to just sort of ask people please

yeah

start using metric and particularly if you teach it in terms of like; i remember when i was in grade school i was taught metric as um a formula, so you know there would be a very specific formulae you'd use to convert for instance farenheight to celcius or you know, this for that, when in fact you know that's not really how people learn to use things you know you learn things like that based on, ok, for instance temperature, you know in stead of learning that seventy degrees farenheight equals whatever it is, 18 degrees celcies is that right?

roughly

ah

something about that

you would learn that you know 'oh well, room temperature is 18 degrees celcius, you know and you would learn what the boiling point is, i think it's like more or less twenty degrees celcius, um

yeah you gotta live it in other words,

right you know people will learn a lot faster if you if you relate it to your everyday life, you're supposed to teaching people certain um formulas for translating.

yeah all kids are taught metric in school, but you're right it's sorta taught as ah,

just another thing they have to learn, it's not, they don't live it.

We just have ta bite the bullet, you know it's one of hose deals, lets do it, why are we waiting yeah it's rediculus we haven't done it and if we're gunna go that far lets make time metric while we're at it, lets get the whole thing done in one big fell swoop lets not go crazy. (laughter) that is a little crazy denton, just hold on a denton there even, frack that

alright so are we gunna make a commitment on the sgu to go all totally metric from now on? ah that's gunna be hard, habit to break. and the problem is that we're you know in the business of educating people and being understood and I think what's most important is that the majority of our audience understands what we are saying when we say it.

yeah

and i think that maybe sometimes that means we use imperial as well as metric,

we do try to use both

we try to use both a lot

we d..

yeah i do,

so i hope that answers your question liz,

Name That Logical Fallacy (58:32)

we have another logical falicy this week, this one comes from the comets to a blog post that i wrote. One of the commentors wrote the following:

From the comments to NeuroLogica

"natural selection (or selection in general) explains how two horses can become all the different breeds we have today- including zebras. This is also how the finches of Darwin fame have longer beaks some years and shorter beaks other years… Everyone knows this happens. The question is this– does that explain how a single celled life form could become an elephant? Some question that it does. (I would be one who questions- BTW) This is called micro-evolution vs. macro-evolution– aka the development of species or kinds vs. the development of breeds. To make an analogy– Everyone knows you can make a ladder to the roof of the house. Does that mean you can make a ladder to the sun?"

Natural selection, or selection in general explains how to horses can become all the different breeds we have today including zebras, it's also how the finches of darwin fame have longer beaks in some y ears, and shorter beaks other years. everyone knows it happens, the question is thos, does that explain how a single celled life form could become an elephant, some question that it does. this is called the micro evolution verses macro evolution, aka the development of species or kinds vs the development of breeds to make ian analogy, everyone knows you can make a ladder to the roof of the house, does that mean you could make a ladder to the sun.

Well it depends on your building maerial.

what's the major malfunction there

strawman

what's the straw man,

well just the way that evolution is characterised, ah you know, evelotion obviously isn't merely horses becomming different breeds, its so much bigger than that, there's so many interlocking theries that comprise elevoltion, that alre all consisten with each other wheather you look at it, you know,wheather , from the fossile evidence, or the genetic evidece or just the ah you know the biological evidence, even computer simulation, it's just such an unfair characterisation of what evolution is.

yeah, i agree but i think the, in terms of that, in terms of saying "Yeah horses can become other kinds of horses" ah even zebras are the horses to non evoled zebras but but not cross over liek one kind evolving into another kind. That's a fundamental misunderstanding that in my experience most people have and every single creationist i've ever spoken to has read has. ah eveolution does not, if you think about the process of evolution or the progress of evolution it's like going down branching down different channels, and once you've gone you know down a certain path you are constrained by that path now you can develop variations on the basic annotomical theme that you have so far but you can't go back. And make completly different devolpmental choices in order to look like something else right? so yes you're never gunna have a cat evolving into a crocodile, you know they are down seperate paths evolutionary paths, creationists don't get that. Ah but there's another massive logical falicy in here, what's that?

Ah false analagy,

yeah he says to make an analagy, yeah it's a total false analagy at the end there.

yeah you're comparing ah, you know building a ladder to the roof of your house and going, then going to the sun ah which is rediculous i mean that that kind of extrapoplation is kinda silly i mean you've got evolution which is supported by so much evidence ah you're not, you know you're not actualy breaking any laws of physics by evolving by having animals evolve

yeah

you know when you're building a ladder to the sun its just clearly silly

yeah i think that's the nub

its not gunna happen

its a fals analgy because building a ladder to the s un breaks the laws of physics and there's nothing in evolution that breaks the laws of physics ah or any you know scienctific law or principal or anything. so ah yeah it's immediate, the analagy breaks down immediatly.

lets go on to ah to Science or Fiction.

1:02:10

Science or Fiction (1:02:08)

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

S: So Rebecca you 'missed it' last week, Bob's record was broken, his streak was broken.

R: Oh I'm so sorry I wasn't there to rub it in his face.

J: Yeah don't worry Rebecca I, I did plenty for me and you.

R: Good good, I knew I could count on you.

B: No more quickies with you.

B: It would have been so cool if i'd lasted like six months to your four or fives months, that would have been so awesome.

S: That would have defied the odds.

E: You win some, you loose one or two.

J: Bob at least you had a streak, well actually I have a streak; I have a, a crap streak going on right now man.

S: Alright here we go.

• Item number 1: 'New measurements indicate that Venice continues to sink into the ocean, contradicting the prior conclusion that the city was stable'
• Item number 2: 'A new study finds that the whooping cough epidemic currently occurring in Australia is mostly due to a new strain of B. pertussis which is not well covered by the vaccine'
• Item number 3: 'A new survey finds that parents of children with cancer trust information they find on the internet as much or more than information from their health care provider'

S: Rebecca since you were off last week, i'll allow you to go first this week.

R: *sigh*, OK, so 'Venice is continuing to sink in the ocean, contradicting the prior conclusion that it was stable.' This is mostly surprising to me because I don't recall a report that it was stable. Like in my head Venice was always continuing to sink. So I dunno about that. Does that mean that's more likely to be science? Or does it mean it's more likely to be fiction? I don't know. 'A new strain of B. pertussis which is making a whooping cough outbreak in a Australia much worse...' yeah that makes sense... there are allot of difficult issues with whooping cough, it's not just the normal Jenny McCarthy you know anti-vaccine for babies thing you know we have a problem with getting adults to get their booster shots and also there is the fact that it can switch things up. 'Parents of children with cancer trust info they find on the internet much, as much or more than information from their health care provider. That is terrifying, the people that we most often see resorting to pseudoscience they find on the internet are people in desperate circumstances usually that they can't control, and what could be worse than having a child with cancer particularly if its something that's... that they're not going to live through. Those parents I think would be the most at risk for getting sucked into pseudoscience or 'all natural' cures or basically any sort of alternative to facing the truth. Um so that unfortunately I find very believable. So I guess that i'm just going to go with the Venice one. That one smells weird to me. Um, mostly because I didn't realize that it was stable, so I dunno maybe the finding is the opposite maybe it found that it's actually stable, so, i'm going to go with that one.

S: OK; Jay?

J: The one about Venice, actually sinking as opposed to not sinking;

S: What are you sinking?

J: What are you sinking about?

J: Yeah love that. We are sinking we are sinking what are you sinking about?

J: Anyhoo, ah so we got this situation here with Venice and the water and the sinking and all that stuff. I, I actually think it never stopped thinking that Venice was sinking, I mean I've, I had the pleasure of going on my honeymoon on October there with my wive and there was definite signs of water problems and stuff like that that from talking to people yeah they have, it is still a problem and they still get flooding and you know I guess it's happening more and more so I'm gonna really think, it it it seems to be that Venice is sinking. Ah study find that the whooping cough epidemic is from a new stain, I haven't ready anything about this but I wouldn't be surprised. Does that mean that a new, a new ah vaccine would have to be made and the old vaccine wouldn't work any more or is pertussis one of those things like the flu where they are constantly changing the vaccine. I don't know the answer to that, but OK, but I don't think it's that big of a deal that there is a new strain out there, and that seems to make sense on the surface. And then the last one a new study about the parents ah children trust information they find on the internet as much or more information as their health care provider. Yeah that's, I dunno about that that's interesting, I mean I would, i'd like to think that parents for the most part are very particular about the information that they find I mean, you know how many people are out there that actually think that every BS thing they read about cures for cancer and everything, are they trusting it verses are they really trying to get serious medical treatment for their child. I would tend to think that most parents don't go the route of the BS stuff especially early on in the treatment, maybe if their child is in trouble and is at the end of, where they don't have much time left they might dip into pseudoscience. But I dunno I think I don't believe that one, I think that one is the fake.

S: OK; Bob?

B: Yeah Sinking Venice. Yeah OK. Yeah I've always heard that it's sinking and I actually missed as well the fact that the prior conclusion that it was stable but that doesn't bother me too much. I'm not sure even how log ago it was, I could have easily missed that so ah that kinda strikes me as science. The second one, the whooping cough epidemic, Yeah I mean, I can go both ways with this, yeah I can see a new strain, I really don't know much pertussis and how it works, ah to really make an informed or a guess on this one. I think i'll tentatively say that that's science as well. Third one though the children with cancer I was actually kind of surprised I thin Jay totally nailed this one.

(Laughter)

B: Jay, I mean I..., Jay you nailed pretty much every point that I was going to say, that I could see parents being just so freaked out that their kids have cancer that they're just going to listen to whatever their doctor says. Ah so i'm gonna say, I'm gonna say that that one is fiction as well.

S: Aaaand... Evan.

E: OK; Venice continuing to sink into the ocean. Ah I hadn't hear that there was any stability to that I always thought that it was being measured as such and I dunno what is it, like its gotta be like and inch a year or something? I dunno..

B: Yeah It's private.

(Laughter)

E: Wait wait metric system, 1.5 centimeters a year. Ah so I don't know what to make of that I was thinking maybe the same as Rebecca regarding that one a little bit. Um, but the whooping cough epidemic the second one; Sure for the same reasons also Rebecca mentioned. Well I think that's the most believable of the three. ah the last one...

J: yeah.

E: Ah parents of children with cancer trust information on the internet "as much or 'more'", I think maybe the trick here is the "as much or more" ah I have a hard time believing that 50 percent of parents are , would lean in that direction over their health care provider? I can't see that being true. I'm gonna have to say that that one is fiction too.

S: So lets start with number two. A new study finds...

J: Sure.

S: ...that the whooping cough epidemic occurring in Australia mostly due to a new strain of B. pertussis, which is not well covered by the vaccine. You guys all think that one is science and that one is... Science.

Chorus: Science!

S?: Ah that is the boarder teller pertussis, for those of you who are interested. Australia is having...

J: So answer my questions Steve.

S: I'm...I will. Is having a ah problem with the whooping cough epidemic, and a recent study showed that of those people who are infected, 84 percent have a new strain, up from 31 percent 10 years ago. This strain is not well covered by the vaccine. It has some activity but the antibodies made by the current a-cellular vaccine doesn't create as much immunity as against this new strain and it wears off more quickly. Ah, A while ago the pertussis vaccine was changed the whole cell vaccine contained hundreds of antigens and actually broader coverage. That was switched to the a-cellular vaccine which only has a few antigens, and has a narrower coverage. So the medical experts are now thinking about what to do at this point. One solution is just to do more frequent boosters, ah in order to keep the immunity higher and therefore more effective even against the strain, or they have to engineer a new vaccine that covers antigens in this new strain. Estimates are that for ah infants that contract whooping cough, one in two hundred die, so this is not a benign disease as the anti-vaccination-ists would have you believe. This is a serious illness, ah it is something that we need to address as a serious health care issue and um the vaccine is sill the most effective treatment against it, prevention against it. But ah, we need to tweak it you know? The bug evolved, and we need to keep up with it. Damn evolution. Lets go back to number one. New measurements indicate that Venice continues to sink into the ocean, contradicting the prior conclusion that the city is stable. Rebecca you think that this one is fiction, the guys think that this one is science...

R: I'm becoming less sure.

E: Ah as you should.

S: Science... Sorry Rebecca

R: Bad for me bad for Venice.

E: Yeah.

S: So jay here's the thing, it's like one of those things where you're right for the wrong reason, and i'm like chomping at the bit to correct you but it would obviously give a way the game. The ocean levels have been rising, so some of the, of what you're seeing could easily be explained as ocean levels rising. So there's two things happening at the same time. Is Venice actually sinking 'into' the ocean versus the water level itself rising? Um, it 'was' believed that Venice was in fact stable. No longer sinking. But um, Recent more accurate measurements, with you know GPS satellites and what not we're able to do um more accurate measurements, they find that Venice is sinking by two millimeters per year.

E: Wow.

S: Which is about the same rate that the water levels are rising by about two millimeters per year. So it doesn't sound like allot but you think over ten years that's twenty millimeters over the next hundred years that's two hundred millimeters. So that, yeah it's significant, it adds up. And of course if the water levels continue to rise that adds to the problem as well. Yeah Venice is also 'tilting' a little big they found. It's not sinking symmetrically.

J: (Unintelligible)

E: It's like that island that's gonna capsize some day.

(Laughter)

S: Ah yeah that's the reason that island's gonna capsize.

E: Yeah (unintelligible)

B: Forgot about that one.

S: Yeah what to do about it? Who knows? That's an engineering issue I guess. I dunno if there is anything they can do about it with existing technology. All of this means that a new survey finds that parents of children with cancer trust information they find on the internet as much or more than information from their health care provider is fiction. Ah, this yeah is one of those articles that I read. I'm like "oh that's good." but we tend to be a little cynical I guess or pessimistic we encounter so much of the other side so often that it's easy to get pessimistic when you are a skeptic, so I think Rebecca you know fell into that trap that I was sorta expecting. Ah what this survey found, ah this is a survey by the university of Buffalo, so right in your neighborhood Rebecca. That um parents 'distrust' information they see they find on the internet and that distrust 'increases' with the severity of their child's cancer.

R: *Suprised* Heh!

S: So Jay and bob you pretty much hit it, as parents get more and more anxious for their kids, they get much more responsible and discriminating and skeptical of information that they see, they're less willing to trust information they find on the internet, and when they do go on the internet they go to trusted websites, like university or professional websites, they are much more likely to trust a personal information that they get from their health care provider. All good! I mean that's exactly what we would want. You know, I guess it brings into focus the fact that you know allot of what 'we' deal with in terms of alternative medicine in terms of pseudoscience is a vocal minority, but we have to remember that it 'is' actually still the minority. Um, as vocal and disturbing as it is. It also means that I think people are getting savvy, they know that there is allot of crap out there on the internet. You don't just trust anything you read on the internet. But, If the is one thing that's unfortunate in all of this is that parents, and this is kinda the take that the research were taking, they were looking at it more as; you know the internet can be a useful resource in educating patients and parents about their illness and its unfortunate that the useful information is so diluted with nonsense and crap that it because weakened as a resource, that parents cant trust the information they find on the internet. You know how you kind of lose the internet as a practical source of information because its just buried the good information is just buried in all the nonsense, um even though it is, you know a minority of people who are promoting that.

R: Even though I lost I am happy.

E: Yeah if you had to loose on one, that was the one do do it with.

S: Yeah there are definitely times where there are items that you want to be true or you want to be false and...

R: What's the opposite of a empiric victory?

E: Um...

S: Um...

S: Hmmm... That's a good question. The opposite of an empiric victory.

E: A...

R: Well whatever it is, that's what i'm experiencing.

S: (Unintelligible)

E: What are you sinking about?

R: That's just a word I think you wanted to say.

S: Its a... I dunno, other foreign words like en wei?

R: No! none of these words are correct.

S: Maybe there's a Latin phrase I can through out there?

R: Just stop just stop!

E: Luxus veritos?

S: Luxus veritos.

(Laughter)

S: OK, alright jay give us a quote.

E: We're geeking up the room here.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:17:26)

J: Sent in by a listner named ashley spolholla. Just so you know I love it when people send me in quotes. I get to read a bunch of different ones, and you know I get to pick the best one but I still get ot read alot of cool quotes that our listners have, so please do send me in those quotes they let me cherry pick the good ones so you guys can um, can enjoy those. Saves me time as well so thankyou.

J: This quote is from a scienctist named Bernhard Haisch. And the quote is:

Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.

Bernhard Haisch

J: And Bernhard Haisch is a german born american astrophsysics who has done reasearch in soloar,stellar astropohysics. And some other stuff about electrodynamics that I can't pronounce.

J: Bernhard Haisch!

S: Thanks Jay. Well thanks for joining me this week everyone.

E: Graceful ending, very nice.

R: Thank you steve.

J: Thanks steve.

B: (unintelligble)

S: And until next week, this is your...

J:*Muffled - due to having a mouth full of food* skeptics guide to the universe.

S: ...Skeptic's guide to the universe.

E: (Laughing)

B: (Laughing)

References