SGU Episode 885

This episode is in the middle of being transcribed by Hearmepurr (talk) as of 2022-09-27. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this episode while this message is displayed.

Template:Editing required (w/links) You can use this outline to help structure the transcription. Click "Edit" above to begin.

SGU Episode 885
June 25th 2022
Computer illustration shows NASA's Juno spacecraft over the Great Red Spot.
SGU 884                      SGU 886
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
If we're never wrong then we're never surprised. If we grow too protective of our existing beliefs, then we stagnate and stop learning. If we've reached any degree of competence within our field, it's because we got things wrong along the way. So why stop now? It's interesting, I think, for each of us to consider the following: What am I currently wrong about? It's an impossible question to answer, but a curio, though, to contemplate nonetheless.
Hector Chadwick, UK-based mentalist
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Stomach bugs, Heat waves

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 21^st 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone!

S: Jay is out because he has a tummy bug.

C: Jay has a tummy ache so he can't be here.

E: I've had I've known some other people right around this time who has also come down with this. I don't know they're calling it a foodborne illness. They think it's something they ate and it knocked them out for 24 hours or so.

C: It usually is. Like a norovirus or a rotavirus or a bacterial illness.

S: Could be an enterovirus. That's a summer virus and can give you a GI infection. So he's probably got one of those.

C: I had noro twice and it was the sickest I think I've ever felt in my entire life. It was horrible.

S: Do you feel worse when you have like a bad stomach bug or when you have a bad upper respiratory infection? What makes you feel worse?

C: Well it's it's interesting because I feel like a stomach virus is really acute. So you feel way worse but it's over faster. Whereas the upper respiratory is like stressful and lengthy and you're just like over it because it takes so long to clear. But when I have─

S: Cruddy.

C: ─yeah it is. It is. But when I had noro. Like I thought I was gonna die. Because you're tethered to the bathroom.

S: Yeah. It's more debilitating.

C: Yeah and I also it's kind of weird. I haven't vomited since I was a child. I have like a weird paranoia around puking. And so yes I've had noro twice and did not puke either time. So I was like I was green and like pressing my face against the tile and like oh it was bad it was really bad. For most people it comes out of both ends. For me it was only one end but I probably would have felt better if I had puked. I just refused. I refused.

E: So you suppress the urge?

C: Oh yeah because I had that thing you get where you start to salivate uncontrollably and you're burping. Oh it's terrible.

B: Wow.

C: I didn't throw up.

E: Yeah it's like it's almost like you have a blockage and you have to clear the blockage by vomiting.

C: Yeah but I just didn't. I was like keep it down just deep breathing. A lot of real kind of like focus.

E: I'd rather get it over with.

C: That's what a lot of people say and I probably should have actually looking back. But I couldn't eat for two days. It was I mean it was a whole thing. It was bad. So I'm hoping that Jay doesn't have that because I would not wish that on anyone.

E: But as Steve mentioned it could be a summer virus and that could be the case. Do you know why? Because today's June 21^st. First day of summer.

B: Yes that's right. Longest day of the year. And that means Cara what?

C: Shortest night?

B: Yes. The other side.

E: Beautiful thing.

C: So so explain me this solstice experts. Why is it the first day of summer and not the middle of summer?

S: Yeah it's arbitrary. Well I've wondered that since I was a child. Why is the summer begin halfway through the warmest section. And part of it I think is because the weather like the seasonal weather is delayed a little bit behind the position of the Earth and the Sun, you know what I mean? It's because it is true. The next couple of months are going to be warmer than the last couple of months. Not like we're in the─

B: Absolutely.

S: ─middle of the hot season. We're not. It is shifted a little bit later. But also you look at like the analemma. You have like the figure eight with the Sun at the top, the bottom and the two sides. So that's where they made the cutoffs for the seasons. But they could have made them in where like the top quarter was the summer and the lower quarter was the winter. Instead of making the topmost point the beginning of summer. But ultimately arbitrary it's fine. But I always thought that was a little weird too.

C: Agree, yeah. It just feels like─

B: It didn't.

C: ─it's been summer. Here in LA at least it feels like it's been summer for two months.

B: Yeah well for you.

E: Yeah that's the difference Cara.

B: Yes I agree but for in New England I mean we had just a couple days ago where I was wearing a jacket outside.

C: Really?

B: It was chillier than it had been a in a while and you would never get that in July and August. Never.

E: That's right because when you have we experience every flavor of season here in New England. We get the cold cold winters and we get some pretty darn hot summers and everything in between. But Cara in lovely southern California you don't have those kinds of extremes in your weather.

C: No no no. It's really temperate here. But I was on the phone with my mom earlier today and I thought it was brutally hot today so much so that I was trying to arrange going hiking with a friend and we decided we're not going to hike we're going to go on a swim instead. But I was talking to my mom on the phone who's of course in north Texas and I was like oh it's brutal here today it's like 88. What is it like for you? And she was like. Well my car says it's 106. I was oh gosh.

E: The south has been on fire. Some of the hottest temperatures on record in June in the south.

S: Yeah they're having a heat wave really bad heat wave.

E: That a song? (laughter)

S: So Elon Musk has acquired twitter. Did it did that happen?

B: Did that happened?

C: That just happened?

E: When? When? Today?

B: Check it out Steve because I heard that he was one step closer.

E: He passed some hurdle or the government [inaudible].

S: Okay. I just saw that he was like meeting with twitter employees and he's planning on cutting back on this. He's talking as if he's running Twitter. Like wait wait wait when did that happen?

C: Yeah I don't know.

E: Twitter board unanimously recommends Musk's takeover bid. That happened earlier today.

S: There we go.

E: That's gonna be it. Is he gonna pay the money though? He's trying to get a low, he's trying to get it now for less because he thinks that there's more bots than they reported and therefore it's not worth as much.

S: Yeah but of course that's all part of the negotiation, right?

E: Of course. Right. Yeah. But he's clearing hurdles that's for sure. Welp.

S: Welp.

B: Welp.

E: See we'll see where that goes. So yeah interesting happenings in the world of Musk.

S: Right. And crypto is tanking. It's chaos.

E: Oh gosh, are we gonna go there? Oh my gosh. Luna.

Special Segment: Secret of Skinwalker Ranch (6:37)

A friend asked me to watch secret of Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel. The name of the channel gets it off to a terrible start. I tried sticking to my guns that I don't want to waste my time with multiple sessions of a ghost hunting show where they run around collecting weird data results and only ask questions. But he said it's not like that. However I watched the clip on YouTube and that's exactly what it is. Does the SGU have even five minutes on an upcoming show to comment towards this? Thank you so much. Love all you do. Please keep it up.

S: Evan let's talk about the Skinwalker Ranch.

E. Yeah. We're going to talk about that as a little special segment here because we received an email from a listener. Ben in Michigan. And let me read to you what he wrote to us: "A friend asked me to watch secret of Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel. The name of the channel gets it off to a terrible start. I tried sticking to my guns that I don't want to waste my time with multiple sessions of a ghost hunting show where they run around collecting weird data results and only ask questions. But he said it's not like that. However I watched the clip on youtube and that's exactly what it is. Does the SGU have even five minutes on an upcoming show to comment towards this? Thank you so much. Love all you do. Please keep it up." Thank you Ben and yes we do have five minutes to cover Skinwalker Ranch. Because this is actually a subject that I have touched on before when talking about Luis Elizondo and he's that former official at the United States department of defense. He has the UAP/UFO fetish. A few years ago 2018 there was a New York Times story that revealed the formerly classified department of defense program that studied UAPs which is unidentified aerial phenomenon. And that was way back in 2007. It was all secret. And the fellow Luis Elizondo was part of that team and some of that money went to Bigelow Aerospace. Enter Robert Bigelow. Real estate billionaire and strong UFO and alien visitation proponent. I'll read you what some of my thoughts about back in 2018 when I first reported on this^{[link needed]}. So Robert Bigelow. Among his claims to extraterrestrial fame is the purchase of a supposedly haunted ranch in Utah which some describe as a hyper-dimensional portal area or stargate. The ranch is said to be infested by an alien or paranormal shape-shifting creature known as a Skinwalker taking its name from Native American legends similar to European legends about werewolves. Bigelow's approved team of paranormal researchers investigated the ranch starting in 1996. They compiled an impressive collection of what might be termed ghost stories but in spite of having access to sophisticated electronic equipment they failed to obtain any actual proof of anything that was unexplainable going on. So in the skeptical community we've known about Skinwalker ranch since the late 1990s. Bob you remember the late 1990s? You just installed Windows 98 on your PC. 512 MB jazz drive, right?

B: Ha-ha. Nice.

E: So let the horror of that historical context sink in. And like most fantastic stories of paranormal activity. And that's all they are. 100% of them. They are stories in one form of another. This UFO story refuses to quit. So fast forward from 1998 to 2020. Courtesy of the History Channel of course. You get the secret of Skinwalker Ranch the television series. Now, in a literal sense if Skinwalker Ranch is a secret it's one of the worst kept secrets on TV. We've known about it for more than 20 years. Obviously it's been reported on for even longer than that. So I don't know what's the secret behind this. I don't know. Interdimensional leprechauns that pop in and out or something. That must be the secret that the history channel--but in any case here's how they describe the show on their website. "The investigation of the world’s most mysterious hot spot for UFO and “High Strangeness” phenomena continues as astrophysicist Dr. Travis Taylor returns to" and this was written about the second season "join real estate tycoon Brandon Fugal, along with his team of scientists and researchers on Utah’s notorious Skinwalker Ranch. In this groundbreaking second season, the team goes deeper and higher than ever before, applying cutting edge technology to investigate the 512-acre property to uncover the possibly “otherworldly” perpetrators behind it all." Yeah. "With everything from mysterious animal deaths to hidden underground workings and possible gateways that open to other dimensions, witness the close encounters that go beyond conventional explanation, as the team risks everything to finally reveal the ultimate secret of Skinwalker Ranch." That's the write-up from History Channel. That's what you get.

B: Wow.

E: You're right. So this okay property in Utah 512 acres. Look in the 1960s and 70s there was a flurry of UFO sightings in this particular region as there was in lots of places. Especially out west in the 60s and the 70s among other places. It was just part of the culture. Part of the phenomenon. But then you get to the mid 90s and you get these stories about the strange going ons and the interdimensional creatures. And all these other stories kind of start to emerge including UFOs and cattle mutilations. Right Steve? We used to talk about cattle mutilations and early skeptic conferences that and get-togethers in meetings. It was one of our topics. And you kind of wonder okay we're the and you got Robert Bigelow. He's this billionaire. It might be and he's got this penchant and the sort of disposition towards the UFOs and things paranormal. Perhaps maybe you're talking more about these stories in order to sort of up the price on the ranch perhaps? Or get them to be more interested in actually purchasing it? But regardless Bigelow after he's done with his research 2016 he sold it to this real estate guy Brandon Fugle. And Brandon said in a recent interview that Skinwalker Ranch is the most scientifically studied paranormal hot spot on the planet. With the highest frequency of documented UFO sightings, bizarre cattle mutilations, electromagnetic anomalies and unexplained phenomenon. Wow. That's a lot. Well the hot spot on the planet. I not only watched the promotional clip. I actually watched the first episode of season one. And I did so that way Ben you don't have to watch it no one else out there has to watch it. I took the hit for everyone. So let me give you a very quick description of the opening sequence and I think we can kind of maybe draw this to a conclusion. You have a person running across a field heavily breathing towards a group of other people standing around something lying in the field. The looks on their faces is of horror and disbelief. That running person, his name's Travis, he reaches the group and we can see they're all standing around a dead cow. They roll the dead animal over on its side. One of the people checks it with a Geiger counter to see if it's radioactive. One of the other people mentions that they saw the cow earlier in the day was alive. But there's no trauma. No animal tracks. No animal marks. No sign of struggle. Travis suddenly whips out his meter, that's all he calls it: his meter, and he says look at the meter. It's making a static noise and the meter it gets louder in volume and he says it's going crazy. It's jumping all over the place. What happens next is that the whole team whips out all of their meters. And then they start holding their devices over the dead cow like McCoy taking a medical reading on a tricorder basically over a person. Handheld spectral analyzer is what these machines say. "What does that mean?" says one investigator. What's this spike? What is this? What are these readings? Travis says: "We do not know the answer. But something out of the ordinary could be happening right now. We've got to get out of here." That's your opening sequence and then it rolls the opening credits and so forth. That's the sequence. Right away the producer of the show in 60 seconds successfully trotted out over a half dozen paranormal tropes that we've been familiar with since we all became skeptical activists back in the 1990s. It is the same old tired product that the world of gullible paranormal investigators they live on it. They breathe it. It is their stock in trade. All this is something with a little bit of a different skin to it. That's all it is. And yes I did. I won't bother you with any more description of what the whole show was about but Ben you were correct it absolutely is 100% that. Total paranormal show just like any others in which they sit around they ask questions of each other. There's no true evidence to see. There's no science going on here.

S: But Evan they have more meters.

E: I know they had meters. Electromagnetic meters.

S: Well were they electromagnetic? They don't say it because they're not even bothering to pretend.

E: Oh they did later in the show.

S: I thought they were spectral analyzers.

E: Yeah well they did a spectral analysis as well. They have lots of meters and there's lots of sciencey things appear to be going on. They have cameras for surveillance. They have noise detection devices planted all over the over the ranch. They look for disturbance they have meters and things that can detect sort of disturbances. Ground vibrations that are going on. They've got aerial--they've taken aerial photography. They've got aerial monitoring cameras pointing every single direction. So yes it has all the trappings of what appears to be science. They even call it the control room that they have. It looks like a I don't know an air traffic control center almost. In a way. With all 50 screens up in front of you if you look that direction. And all the analyzers over to your right. They spent a lot of money, you can tell, on all of this stuff. But what's their evidence? What did they actually come up with? Not a darn thing.

S: Yeah because they're doing pure pseudoscience. Literally. That's the very definition of pseudoscience. Just they have the trappings. They have meters. Tou know they have no idea how to use them. They're not doing any actual hypothesis testing. It's just mystery mongering. That's it.

E: Yep. And then when there are some suggestions and the fellow Travis who is an astrophysicist and apparently has some and degrees in engineering and some other bonafides that are legitimate. He's brought in to help them figure out what's going on here. And unfortunately they're using him as a veil of being authentic.

S: Yeah but the scientist guy whatever should be ashamed of himself. I mean there's no excuse for what he's doing. He should know better. And like if he's telling, I mean I'm sure he's just enjoying the fame but you can't even tell yourself oh but I'm at least I'm going to introduce some actual science into this. No you're not. Because you quickly learn when you do these sort of things. Because back early in our career we would get asked to be on documentaries or whatever. And we did a bunch of stuff. And you very quickly figure out that whoever's doing it, like the director, they have a story to tell. They're going to tell their story no matter what you do or say. You are irrelevant. They're just quote-mining you. You're a prop.

E: Yep. You're prop, yes.

S: I would always like when there's a preliminary interview about before you do the actual on camera interview. I'm always interviewing them. Like what is your take on this. What story are you telling basically. And if it's a gullible pseudoscience promotion story don't do it. It's not worth it. You're just gonna lend credibility to nonsense.

E: Yep. That's all it is. And you're right I think─

S: So they're complicit─

E: ─yep yep.

S: 100%.

E: Yep. Absolutely. It's part of the problem.

S: All right let's move on.

News Items

Jupiter Ate Baby Planets (17:53)

• Scientists find remains of cannibalized baby planets in Jupiter's cloud-covered belly

S: Bob tell us how Jupiter ate your baby.

E: Oh no.

B: Yes. That's one way to put it Steve. Based on new insights into Jupiter's interior. Researchers conclude that our largest planet must have consumed baby planets left and right during the early days of the solar system billions of years ago. Now this was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Lead author Yamila Miguel an astronaut. Nope. Not an astronaut although I bet she could be. She's an assistant professor of astrophysics at the Leiden observatory in the Netherlands Institute for Space Research. So I love the title to the live science article that sucked me into this topic. The title was: "Scientists find remains of cannibalized baby planets in Jupiter's cloud-covered belly." Oh my god what a title. It did suck me in. It might not have if it was more of a boring title. But I can't help but think of the internal thoughts of the person. You got people that come up with the titles and he or she must have been thinking something like this. Like you know if I can get the words cannibal and baby in the same sentence and that's what they did. And wow okay all right so let's start on this one. So have you guys seen those crazy detailed images of Jupiter's clouds in the news? Like from the past year or two? If you've seen them then they're probably from the Juno cam on the Juno spacecraft which has done something like well over 40 flybys of close flybys of Jupiter and its moons. But Juno wasn't just looking at Jupiter's pretty face and all those awesomely detailed clouds. It can also see the interior of Jupiter using what they call the gravity science instrument. That name. The gravity science instrument. Totally uninspired. Right guys? Totally. It's really boring. So I think they should have called it the GDAS or the gravitometric dopplerized analytical surveyor, right? Am I right? Isn't that sound much cooler?

E: You're not wrong.

B: So they used the gravitometric dopplerized analytical surveyor (Evan laughs) to hopefully show which of the two competing rocky formation theories fit Jupiter, right? They got two primary theories that are kind of mutually exclusive. One theory says that Jupiter's initial rocky core formed from boulder-sized rocks kind of glomming together. So this theory for some reason is nicknamed not the boulder theory or the heavy rock theory but the pebble theory. It's called the pebble theory. But we're talking boulder-sized stuff. The other competing theory argues that baby planets called planetesimals a few miles across or so they smashed together to form the core. So one of them's right the other one's wrong. So what did the GDAS as I call it show. So the gravity data from Juno and even from Galileo. Remember Galileo? Oh my god.

E: Sure.

B: That was an amazing time. So Juno and Galilean data showed the distribution of heavy elements near the core of Jupiter. That was kind of the main goal here. Let's look at what kind of heavy elements are in there and what's their distribution and mass. So this was detected because those knots of heavy elements that they detected are denser. And if they're denser they've got a little bit of more of a extra gravitational pull and that pull will then can affect the atmosphere above it in ways that are detectable. Now the models that the researchers created to look into this concluded that there must be between, get this, 11 and 30 Earth masses worth of heavy elements within Jupiter. And that's 3-9% of Jupiter's mass. And that was a lot more. A lot more than they anticipated. Now Jupiter is gargantuan. It is the biggest planet in our solar system and you could fit what? What's the number? A thousand Earths inside. But for it to have potentially 30 Earth masses of these heavy elements was a real shocker but it did prove pretty much definitively proved which of those theories is most likely to be true. And that was the planetesimal accretion theory is overwhelmingly likely to be correct. So that's because it's not really obvious at all. But that's because there's just too many heavy minerals otherwise. There's so many heavy metal minerals there it had to be the planetesimal accretion. So imagine this. So imagine just to see just to visualize what was happening. Now imagine you've got a rocky core of Jupiter before the gaseous envelope kind of accreted on onto it to become the amazingly huge atmosphere of the gas giant Jupiter. So you've got the big rocky core. It starts pulling in even the super lightweight hydrogen and helium to build up the atmosphere. That inflow of gas causes a pressure barrier that's like a force field. And that force field won't let in any of the smaller boulder-sized chunks of rock and heavy metals. So but if you're a big three mile wide planetesimal you can plow right through that pressure barrier shield and then you can just keep doing it. So as the atmosphere is getting bigger and bigger you still have the planetesimals coming in and adding more and more and more of these heavy metals to the interior of Jupiter. Whereas the boulder-sized rocky masses and minerals could never continue. It would start and then it would stop and it would give you just a certain amount of the heavy minerals and you couldn't surpass it. And you couldn't get anywhere near what they're finding now. So it's got to be the planetesimal. So that theory is the one that seems to be absolutely correct. So lead author Yamila Miguel said that: "Jupiter was the most influential planet in the formation of the solar system. Its gravitational pull helped to shape the size and orbits of its cosmic neighbors, and so determining how it came to be has important knock-on effects for other planets." Knock-on effects. Have you?

E: No I don't know that one.

B: That's a new idiom for me.

C: Really?

B: But in context. Yeah knock-on?

C: Yeah in this context.

B: In this context it's obvious. So since Jupiter was the first guy on the block pretty much learning about the formation of Jupiter could really clue us in about the formation of all the other planets. Because Jupiter was such a big beast that it it really influenced absolutely the rest of the formation of the entire solar system. And imagine we may have had 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 planets in orbit around the Sun if Jupiter just didn't suck up all those poor little baby planets. And of course if you extrapolate a little bit Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, maybe they have planetesimal origins as well. I would think it would be kind of likely at this point. So this all means then that distant exoplanet gas giants they may be hiding more mineral mass in their interiors than maybe apparent by their atmospheres. So even when the mighty James Webb telescope, which is basically designed to measure the atmospheres of gas giants and their compositions, when James Webb calculates the heavy minerals that are likely to be in the planet they it could very well be quite wrong because there won't be another Juno in orbit with its own, say it with me, its own gravitometric dopplerized analytical surveyor in orbit around it telling us what's going on inside. Because from what I've read you had to get up and close to Jupiter to find this information out. We really were not ever going to find out about this for an observatory in orbit or on the Earth. You need to be pretty much up close and personal. And who knows? They may develop a technology to infer it accurately in the future. But I don't think anything's on the drawing board that could that could actually do the job of Juno from a distance. So cool. Interesting story. Kind of different. I liked it.

S: Yeah I mean it's interesting that we can infer that from looking at Jupiter today. That we can know something about its deep history like that.

B: Yeah.

S: Because it's really just a big giant ball of clouds.

E: Does this mean we now have to assume that gas giants have some sort of hard core in their centers?

S: Totally.

B: Well. (laughter) We're not sure. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean you start with the rocky core and then it gets so big and so dense that it starts pulling in the gases. Sure. You gotta bring in those glass somewhere. I mean you could potentially have a pocket of gas that just kind of rotates and collapses in on itself. Like a little star, right?

S: Yeah but Bob the other option is that Jupiter never ever ever got hit by an asteroid, you know what I mean? In its 4 billion year history. Why would that be the case? Anything rocky that ever got captured by Jupiter's gravity we're just sitting in the core.

B: Right right. And determining exactly you know what actually is the makeup. How many how much heavy metals, how much is rocky, how much is metallic. I always thought, remember Steve it wasn't too long ago when it was like oh yeah it's like metallic hydrogen in the core. But now that now I guess that's not the consensus anymore and it's definitely I mean there's definitely heavy metals and the density has got to be pretty damn wicked in the core for sure. But the exact composition is not quite what they thought.

The Risk of Sitting (27:10)

• An Enormous International Study Just Confirmed The Ugly Truth About Sitting Too Much

S: All right Cara. We've had this question a few times over the years. Is sitting in and of itself a health risk?

C: Ah.

B: This was depressing to read.

S: While we all sit here recording this podcast.

B: When I read it I stood up, I pushed my chair away, stood up and I was reading the news standing up and for 15 or 20 minutes I felt good. (Cara laughs)

E: I have a very desk at my office so sometimes I will lift it up and just stand and do my work.

C: Oh good for you.

B: Hey I want to get a stand-up desk I really am.

C: That's smart.

E: I like it.

C: So I mean clearly as with almost everything we ever talk about on the show the answer is it's complicated. (Evan laughs) But there is quite a bit of pretty high quality evidence that shows that sitting a lot or just sedentary behavior in general is highly correlated with all-cause mortality. It's highly correlated with cardiovascular disease. But the equal and opposite of sitting a lot is exercising, right? So there are we do see that there are some mitigations that can take place. But some studies show that even with mitigations like even with exercise being more sedentary is kind of more detrimental than not exercising is. Wait, does that make sense? No it doesn't. (laughs) That being sedentary is more predictive of mortality all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease than exercise is protective against it. If that makes sense. There we go.

B: Yeah.

C: So the new bit is a a study that was published just a few days ago in JAMA Cardiology. So that's the Journal of the American Medical Association and the lead author is Li Sidong. So this study is called the prospective urban rural epidemiology study. It's huge. It's a massive epidemiological cohort study and it's prospective in nature and so just as a quick kind of review. Prospective studies are a little bit stronger. So it's still an observational study design. It's not an experimental study design. So keep that in mind. But they're still a bit stronger than for example a retrospective cohort study where you're basically looking at a bunch of stuff that already happened and trying to make determinations based on the past. In a prospective study you're following people over a period of time and during the course of the study certain people develop illnesses for example or die. And you're able to kind of compare over time. So by definition it's longitudinal. Does that make sense? Okay. So in this study what they did is they looked at something like over a hundred thousand. 105 677 participants from across 21 different countries. And the countries are sort of broken up into high-income countries: Canada, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and UAE. Upper middle income countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa, Turkey. Lower middle income countries: China, Colombia, Iran, Palestine and the Philippines and then five lower income countries: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. And the idea here was to categorize these based on world bank categorizations and ask the question is sedentary behavior associated with mortality and cardiovascular disease even in low and middle income countries. Because the vast majority of the data that we have cited, that we've talked about and that you guys were talking about when you said when I read this I immediately stood up, has actually taken place in high-income countries. And so I feel like this would be one of those interesting science or fiction Steve where it could go both ways. When you think about okay a lower income country our individual is going to be more affected by sedentary behavior or less affected by sedentary behavior. Or are they going to be more sedentary or less sedentary for example. And I feel like I'm imagining myself being on the panel during science or fiction and like what do you guys think? What are some of the reasonings that you would kind of work through?

E: I'd like to use one of my lifelines.

C: (laughs) Well I guess I'll tell you what what sort of my reasoning was before I looked at the data. I was thinking okay if somebody's in a lower income country are they more likely or less likely to be sedentary first of all. Maybe they're more likely to work like labor-intensive jobs.

E: Yeah therefore less.

C: Right therefore less likely but then sadly what we find and really they weren't so much looking at the incidence rate of sedentary behavior but they were looking at the association of mortality with daily sitting time. And the association of cardiovascular disease with daily sitting time. They found that not only is again mortality or sitting for a long time sedentary behavior in general highly associated with all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease. But the association was even more pronounced in lower income and lower middle income countries.

E: Why is that?

B: I think they'd be more active that just doesn't.

C: But again remember that we're not necessarily looking at how many people are sedentary. We're looking at in sedentary behavior how highly associated is it with death.

B: So it's worse but it's more associated with death than more industrialized?

C: It seems to be worse. And so then we could start to say well why is that? Probably because of healthcare. I mean there are probably a lot of other variables here.

E: We have access to medicines and things that can counter it whereas right more poor people and poor nations do not have those.

C: We also potentially and it's a really complicated issue but the authors did cite a couple of studies showing that for example at least in Norway they actually looked at people of different kind of socioeconomic stratifications. And they found that the association was much more relevant when we talk about leisure time physical activity. So people who engaged more in physical activity during leisure time had more protection against all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease. But not necessarily occupational or transport or housing physical activity. But this is just one study so it's important to remember that like a lot of different studies show a lot of different things. But there are massive meta analyses and large prospective cohort studies like the one that I just cited that show that generally speaking sitting no bueno. And that sadly in poorer countries sitting even more no bueno. Specifically here's another study I think this was the, was this yeah this was the Finland study. That showed that they did see SES differences across stratifications as well. So not only do we see differences across different countries based on the country's economic strength. We also see within individual countries a difference across socioeconomic strata. Which again kind of makes sense if one of the variables that we're thinking about here is access to health care. But they also talk about things like opportunities for exercise. Opportunities for getting out of the house. Opportunities for engaging in physical activity and motivation to do so. Interestingly in the main study that I was citing, the one that was just published in JAMA, they said that and let's look at some of the numbers here. They said that once you hit about 6-8 hours a day your relative risk of heart disease and premature death is increased by about 12-13% when compared to a control group that sits for fewer than four hours a day. And then it gets significantly worse if we're talking about over eight hours. Then we're looking at like 20%. And there's actually a World Health Organization publication that I pulled up because it's referenced in the study. The WHO guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior was published in 2020. And you can actually look at your specific group. So children and adolescents age 5 to 17. Adults 18 to 64. Older adults 65 and older. Pregnant and postpartum women, adults and older adults, adults with chronic conditions and then children and adolescents and adults living with a disability. And there are evidence-based recommendations for how much physical activity you should get and for how much sedentary behavior you should have. Based on kind of compiling all of this information. So I know I'm skipping around a little bit from the core study that I'm citing but this is a massively researched area and it's important to see that one study is not going to give you a total picture. We've got to look at kind of all of this stuff combined. But here's a couple other takeaways from the report that was just published a few days ago. Exercise does have a strong mitigating effect on mortality. It does not completely reverse it but it has a strong mitigating effect on mortality and cardiovascular disease. So even if you do have to sit because of work if you exercise more this is good. So when we compared the low and lower middle income um countries to the high income countries specifically in this study they found that sitting for more than eight hours a day risks an increase of right around 30%. An increased risk of a right around 30%. So we're talking 12-13% across the board if you sit for 6-8 hours a day. Jumps up to 20% if you're sitting for 8 hours or more and then when you combine that risk with being from a low income or lower middle income country then we're jumping up to 30%. And so when we look at the the WHO guidelines I'm just going to say arbitrarily for adults because that's probably going to be the largest group listening but again like I said there are guidelines for adults living with disability for adults with chronic conditions. But for adults who are not living with a disability or a chronic condition they recommend 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic physical activity. Or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic physical activity or an equivalent combination throughout the week. They also recommend muscle strengthening activities at moderate or greater intensity on two or more days per week. And they say that you can increase it to more than 300 minutes or more than 150 minutes of vigorous activity for additional health benefits up to a point. And then of course they recommend really really reducing the amount of time spent sitting. And especially this is interesting and I've seen this across multiple studies especially sitting time that's associated with screen time. So lying around watching television seems to have a poor predictive outcome. And perhaps it's because you're even less likely to move when you're doing that. I'm not really sure what it specifically is about about television or computer use or screen time but a lot of studies cite that.

B: Well can I sit just sit in a chair and eat bon bons? Is that all right?

E: Yeah. That's perfect.

C: Probably also not good but even that would mean that you're moving around a little bit. You're counteracting it.

B: Yes. Thank you. Enough said. Thank you Cara.

E: I'm moving my jaw as I eat my chips.

C: Right. So I don't think that there's anything specific about the fact that there's images on a screen. But it's probably more that we are less likely to physically move when we're sitting in front of the television or lying in front of the television than when we're doing other activities like I don't know arts and crafts or cooking or I guess we don't usually sit to cook but other things that involve sitting.

E: I do.

S: You're saying the bottom line is VR games are better than non-VR games.

B: Yeah.

E: Right.

C: Absolutely. Especially if you're on your feet. Yeah that's definitely true. So there's a lot of takeaways. This is a really really complicated topic and the news peg this week had more to do with stratifying based on the kind of the economic strength of the country but bottom line is just to reinforce sitting is not great for you. And of course there are situations in which you have to sit. When you're recovering from surgery. When you're dealing with certain types of disabilities. But even in those situations it's important to move within your constraints and within your limits because any movement is better than no movement. You wanna try and hit these guideline standards of 150 to 300 minutes depending on if it's moderate or vigorous. But what what every study I've seen and especially the who says is that a little is better than nothing. And start slow, don't dive deep into it start to develop these slow and steady healthy habits to help you get staying power. Because if you dive in too fast you may just stop.

S: Yeah you'll burn yourself out. I know. It's what are you gonna do? (laughter)

C: What are you gonna do? You're gonna get off your ass that's what you're gonna do.

S: A lot of the work that I do involves sitting. There's no way around it.

C: Exactly. So I think the important thing there is that when you don't have to don't. So if you have to sit let's say just like I do when I'm doing therapy I'm sitting for the whole therapeutic hour. Not gonna walk around.

S: You should start a practice of like exercise therapy. Where you're on with you're on a bike while you're doing therapy.

C: (laughs) Well I have weirdly had like dreams of doing group therapy in the future that involves kind of like movement and yoga and just being somewhat more active during group. I think that would be awesome. But yeah let's say I'm seeing a patient for an hour or Steve let's say you're seeing a patient. In between patients do a lap around your house.

S: Yeah.

C: Get up move and then come back. Don't just sit there straight through.

E: And if you can speak to them through some sort of digital avatar or something they don't even have to see you exercising. You would still be your voice you would be able to hear them fine it would just be the face and everything you're moving all over the place.

C: Would you really want that from your therapist? A digital avatar therapist?

B: Or Steve get us get those stand up desks when you don't have a patient in the office. Just all you do is like you just lift it up and it you stand up and it's up at head height. I'm really gonna I'm seriously gonna consider getting one of those.

E: Press the button and it rises. It works well.

S: All right thanks Cara.

NASA Joins Study of UAPs (42:26)

• NASA Joins Study of UAPs

Galapagos Giant Tortoise Not Extinct (59:52)

• The Galapagos giant tortoise Chelonoidis phantasticus is not extinct

What's the Word? (1:08:16)

• Nostrum

_consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:12:48)

Followup #1: Testing AIs

_consider_using_block_quotes_for_emails_read_aloud_in_this_segment_
with_reduced_spacing_for_long_chunks –

Science or Fiction (1:23:43)

Theme: Geology Item #1: Geologists estimate that the next major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault would cause vastly more damage from the resulting tsunami than the quake itself. Item #2: The Pacific ocean is so large that it contains its own antipode. Item #3: Sapphires and rubies are actually the same mineral, corundum.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Tsunami more damaging
Science	...has its own antipode
Science	...are the same mineral

Host	Result
Steve	swept

Rogue	Guess
Cara	Tsunami more damaging
Bob	Tsunami more damaging
Evan	Tsunami more damaging

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:35:39)

If we're never wrong then we're never surprised. If we grow too protective of our existing beliefs, then we stagnate and stop learning. If we've reached any degree of competence within our field, it's because we got things wrong along the way. So why stop now? It's interesting, I think, for each of us to consider the following: What am I currently wrong about? It's an impossible question to answer, but a curio, though, to contemplate nonetheless.
– Hector Chadwick, UK-based mentalist

Signoff/Announcements

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

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

[top]                        

Today I Learned

• Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References

Vocabulary